"Yes'm," she said at last. "I thought I locked them all, but there was
one open this morning."
I went out of the room and down the hall, followed by Mary Anne. The
door into the clothes chute was securely bolted, and when I opened it I
saw the evidence of the woman's story. A pruning-ladder had been
brought from where it had lain against the stable and now stood upright
in the clothes shaft, its end resting against the wall between the
first and second floors.
I turned to Mary.
"This is due to your carelessness," I said. "If we had all been
murdered in our beds it would have been your fault." She shivered.
"Now, not a word of this through the house, and send Alex to me."
The effect on Alex was to make him apoplectic with rage, and with it
all I fancied there was an element of satisfaction. As I look back, so
many things are plain to me that I wonder I could not see at the time.
It is all known now, and yet the whole thing was so remarkable that
perhaps my stupidity was excusable.
Alex leaned down the chute and examined the ladder carefully.
"It is caught," he said with a grim smile. "The fools, to have left a
warning like that! The only trouble is, Miss Innes, they won't be apt
to come back for a while."
"I shouldn't regard that in the light of a calamity," I replied.
Until late that evening Halsey and Alex worked at the chute. They
forced down the ladder at last, and put a new bolt on the door. As for
myself, I sat and wondered if I had a deadly enemy, intent on my
destruction.
I was growing more and more nervous. Liddy had given up all pretense
at bravery, and slept regularly in my dressing-room on the couch, with
a prayer-book and a game knife from the kitchen under her pillow, thus
preparing for both the natural and the supernatural. That was the way
things stood that Thursday night, when I myself took a hand in the
struggle.