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  Praise for

  THE LISTENING HOUSE

  “Miss Seeley is to be welcomed as a very promising author of detective fiction.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  “Miss Seeley, with a good story to tell, ingenious plot and counter-plot, characters diverse and clearly seen, lifts her book into the first class.”

  —The Observer

  “Bloodcurdling. . . . Especially good.”

  —Saturday Review of Literature

  “The Crime Club have discovered a genius in Mabel Seeley. The author’s style is unusual: she tells her story in natural everyday language, but she puts it ‘right over’—and what a climax!”

  —Manchester Evening News

  “So packed with weird thrills that it grips from first page to last. . . . Should take its place as one of the best thrillers of the season.”

  —National Newsagent

  “First-rate whodunit, with enough of romance to give it a Mary Roberts Rinehart appeal. . . . This is a newcomer in the field—a good ’un.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review, September 1938)

  Praise for the novels of Mabel Seeley

  “Beautifully told by a writer who is expert at finding horror in commonplace settings. Recommended for highest honors.”

  —The New Yorker

  “The Crying Sisters is the Crime Club selection for this month, and it is an excellent mystery novel of the ‘atmospheric’ type. . . . It holds its interest from the beginning as it rises in crescendo toward climax.”

  —The New York Times

  “Satin-smooth mystery novel in a family fracas which starts with acts of malignant mischief and leads to murder. . . . Ingenuous manner for some ingenious matter—expert timing and mechanics and pleasant romantic asides. Velvet.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred reviewed)

  “Another superior job of atmosphere, character, and suspense.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  TITLES BY MABEL SEELEY

  The Listening House

  The Chuckling Fingers

  The Crying Sisters

  The Whispering Cup

  Eleven Came Back

  The Beckoning Door

  The Whistling Shadow

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 1938 by Mabel Mysteries / Elsewhither Publishing, LLC

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks and BERKLEY PRIME CRIME is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Seeley, Mabel, 1903-1991, author.

  Title: The listening house / Mabel Seeley.

  Description: Berkley Prime Crime trade paperback edition. | New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021007363 (print) | LCCN 2021007364 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9780593334546 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593334553 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3537.E2826 L57 2021 (print) | LCC PS3537.E2826 (ebook) | DDC 813/.52—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007363

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007364

  Doubleday, Doran hardcover edition / January 1938

  Pyramid mass-market edition / January 1973

  Berkley Prime Crime trade paperback edition / June 2021

  Cover illustration by Kim Johnson

  Cover design by Rita Frangie

  Book design by Alison Cnockaert, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  To Gregory

  With Love

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for The Listening House

  Praise for Mabel Seeley

  Titles by Mabel Seeley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Dramatis Personae

  Sketches of Mrs. Garr’s House

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  About the Author

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  GWYNNE DACRES, copywriter out of a job, lodger.

  HARRIET LUELLA GARR, whose business is and has been the taking in of lodgers.

  HODGE KISTLER, ex-reporter but not retired, lodger.

  MR. JOSEPH WALLER, retired, lodger.

  AGNES WALLER, wife of Joseph Waller.

  MYRTLE SANDS, salesgirl, lodger.

  CHARLES BUFFINGHAM, soda jerker, lodger.

  JOHN GRANT, retired accountant, lodger.

  MRS. HALLORAN, Mrs. Garr’s niece, mother of seven.

  MR. HALLORAN, veteran of the World War.

  MRS. TEWMAN, maid, resident in Mrs. Garr’s basement.

  MR. TEWMAN, co-owner of a hamburger castle.

  SAMUEL ZEITMAN, whose time is short.

  ROVER, CECILIA, RICHARD, AND GEORGE, pets of Mrs. Garr.

  LIEUTENANT PETER STROM, in charge of the homicide squad, Gilling City police.

  RED AND JERRY, officers of patrol car 22, whose territory covers the state capitol section.

  Reporters, additional police officers, a coroner, a ticket seller, doctors, nurses, etc.

  Mrs. Dacres’ rough sketch of the basement in Mrs. Garr’s house

  Mrs. Dacres’ rough sketch of the ground floor in Mrs. Garr’s house

  Mrs. Dacres’ rough sketch of the first floor in Mrs. Garr’s house

  1

  I AM NOT SURE, myself, that I should open the door of Mrs. Garr’s house and let you in. I’m not at all sure that the truth about what happened there is tellable. People keep saying to me that the rumors going around are simply ghoulish, and ought to be laid to rest. But I’ve heard those rumors, some of them at least, and they’re not a bit more nightmarish than the truth. Finally, of course, I gave in to pressure.

  “Okay, I’ll do it,” I said.

  Because, after all, I’m the one that not only knows almost everything that went on in Mrs. Garr’s house in April, May, and June of this year, but also why a lot of it went on
. And, unless Hodge Kistler wrote it, no one else could get the ending anywhere near right.

  Since agreeing, I have made seventeen entirely separate and different beginnings.

  I have begun with the cat’s swift sneak and hunch under the bookcase of that dark hall. I have begun with my first sight of Hodge Kistler chinning himself on the bar. I have begun with those terrifying hands reaching for my throat. I have begun with the opening of a door that led to an unimaginable hell.

  But with any of those I have to stop too often for explanations. Mrs. Garr’s house, I’ve found, isn’t a house into which I can just plump you down. You need introductions. And so, at last, I have come around to begin at the beginning, giving you all the detail first, telling you, first, the little incidents which were to grow into such heart-shaking happenings. For the seeds of the mystery lay either in happenings which seemed at the time to bear no relationship to each other or to life in Mrs. Garr’s house, or else in very small things, in incidents which might easily have meant nothing at all; incidents which, at the time, I considered myself silly for noting and wondering over.

  First of all, as long as I’m telling this, and the only way you can go back in time and get into Mrs. Garr’s house during those event-crammed weeks is by living there through me, I’m afraid you’ll have to know, first, who and what I am and how I got to Mrs. Garr’s house.

  The whole thing began, for me, with a lost job.

  I’m Gwynne Dacres, Mrs. Dacres. I’m twenty-six and divorced; I was married for six months when I was twenty-two—it took only that long for Carl Dacres to decide I was more of a wife and less of a nurse than he wanted. The last I heard of him, he was blissfully coddling his hypochondriac’s soul with a day nurse and a night nurse, hired, down in South Carolina somewhere. The only thing I got out of my marriage was a bunch of complexes; I didn’t ask alimony.

  At Easter, this spring, I had been working in the advertising department at Tellier’s for three years. Then, suddenly, I wasn’t working at all.

  There was drama, if you like that kind.

  People as unimportant as advertising copywriters in a store as big as Tellier’s aren’t invited into the office of Mr. William Tellier, the president, very often. But I was bidden there at three o’clock of the Monday after Easter. I walked in to face Mr. Gangan, the advertising manager who was my boss, five vice presidents, and Mr. Tellier himself, all standing, all steel. On Mr. Tellier’s desk was spread my own check sheet—I read the proofs of fashion ads—for that day’s ad. Mr. Tellier bent toward it silkily.

  “You recognize this proof, Mrs. Dacres?”

  “Yes, it’s my noon check sheet.”

  “You see this?”

  The ad was a full-page ad for the big after-Easter sales, and across the top ran a big headline in 60 point caps and lower case:

  Tellier’s—

  Where People Save!

  What he was pointing at was my own scribbled notation at the side: “Change to 60 point caps.”

  “Certainly,” I said. “The order to change the type came out on Mr. Gangan’s revised proof this morning.”

  “Exactly. Then perhaps,” he said, and his voice was awful, “perhaps you also recognize this?”

  He picked up the check sheet, and under it was spread the first edition of that night’s Gilling City Comet, opened to our ad, with the proof the paper had sent that noon right beside it. And on them both, on them both, blaring in 60 point capitals, was:

  TELLIER’S—

  WHERE PEOPLE SLAVE!

  It didn’t take even a split second to get it. I raised my eyes to Mr. Gangan’s, opened my mouth to say what my instinct for self-preservation shouted to me to say.

  But I shut my mouth again.

  Only ruthlessness can raise a man to executive power at Tellier’s. If I said what I had to say, I’d never again get a job in advertising in any department store in the United States. Mr. Gangan would see to that.

  When I walked out of Tellier’s big swinging doors, jobless, I fastened my mind, to keep its balance, on the laughter that must be rocking the town. For once a Tellier’s ad had told the truth whole.

  At the Comet offices, I knew that a printer and a proofreader were losing their jobs, too.

  What I hadn’t said in my defense was that Mr. Gangan had ordered me to shop a rival store’s showing of new fabrics that noon, saying that he would have someone else check the noon proofs.

  He’d forgotten, of course. Easy to forget. But he’d have taken hell if I’d told, and he’d have made it hell for me, and I’d have lost my job anyway. Now, at least, he’d recommend me—secretly.

  Well, I knew, going through those swinging doors, exactly where I stood. It was almost April. The slow summer season was right ahead. The other stores would be suspicious of a recently fired Tellier’s copywriter after this riot—even if they didn’t want one to read proof. I had no earthly chance of getting another steady job before heavy advertising began again in August and September; perhaps not then.

  I had exactly $278.32 in the bank.

  * * *

  —

  NO JOB. TWO HUNDRED and seventy-eight dollars and thirty-two cents in the bank. I supposed I should be glad I had that much.

  But if you’ve ever been on your own and out of a job—it’s an experience plenty of people have shared with me—you’ll know how I did feel, and glad wasn’t any part of it.

  I tried to shake it off, going home in the streetcar; tried to think instead of things I could do: look over the Help Wanteds, apply at all the other stores in town, do something about the way I lived. How could I afford thirty-five dollars a month for an apartment, on nothing a week?

  But when I stood in my living room with the door locked behind me, I didn’t think I could give the apartment up. It had been my harbor and refuge for two years; I’d created it myself; I loved it. I looked at my blue rug, my blue window hangings, my white lamps; looked at the sofa I’d had reupholstered gorgeously in blue satin on the strength of a raise the year before, looked at my clear, light salmon walls, so delectably lovely; looked at my grandmother’s old rug on the wall, handwoven of dark blue wool as faded as smoke.

  I didn’t think I could give it up. But I had to. Firmly I sat down on the sofa and opened the Comet I’d abstracted from the advertising file on my way out of the office.

  There weren’t many Help Wanteds. They ran, mostly, “Girl wanting good home more than wages, help mother with 6 chil., $2 wk.” Or, “Sell on sight, knitted sports frocks.”

  Nothing there.

  I did the Unfurnished Apartments next, went on through Unfurnished Rooms, and started on Housekeeping Rooms.

  There, on the third ad, my eyes stopped.

  It seems queer, looking back, to think how casually I came across that ad. Queer, how inevitable that sequence of events was, that led from that lost job to Mrs. Garr’s house.

  Clean, lt, airy dng rm and kit of old mansion, gas, lt, and ht furn. $4.50 wk, 593 Trent.

  That was what the ad said. Words, I suppose, can’t carry an aura. What I thought was, Glory, that’s cheap. If I can’t get a job by November, I’ll go and be a mother’s help, wants home more than wages. What awful hooey—could anyone? About twenty dollars a month for rent, gas, light, and heat. Two hundred and seventy-eight dollars and thirty-two cents divided by—well, divided by eight. Eight into $278.32 is about thirty-five dollars. Thirty-five dollars a month. Thirty-five dollars minus twenty dollars leaves fifteen dollars a month to eat on. Baby, you’ll eat oatmeal and like it. But can you do it? Absolutely!

  * * *

  —

  I KNEW JUST ABOUT where 593 Trent Street would be. Gilling City is the state capital; the capitol building is on the side of our biggest hill, and Trent Street runs along one side of the capitol. Five ninety-three should be pretty close to the top of Capitol Hill.

&
nbsp; It was misting a little when I got off the streetcar at Sixteenth and Buller, to walk the three blocks up Sixteenth to Trent. Cold, too; just cold enough for the sleety mist to stick to the brown fuzz of my sports coat and make me look like a walking fog. My face prickled with the mist; when I stuck my tongue out at it, it bit like a hundred needles, and my ears were filled with the soft spit, spit it made everywhere it hit. Sixteenth is steep; the fourplexes lining it are all built on the bias, with one long side showing most of the basement wall, and one short side hitting the hill too soon.

  As I walked the last block up Sixteenth I had, on my right, the old Elliott House that was built by one of the state’s early governors; it’s a huge square of red stone, boxlike except for the porte cochere on the Trent Street side, and with a red brick wall circling its grounds. Across Sixteenth was a pink ice-cream fourplex, brand new. Across Trent was a gray wooden monstrosity dripping wood lace. Kitty-corner, on the one remaining corner, was a big red brick shoebox broken by three-window bays. Even across the corner, I could see the scrolled gold numbers on the old-fashioned fanlight above the door.

  Five ninety-three.

  That, then, was my first look at 593 Trent Street. At Mrs. Garr’s house.

  I crossed over. I often like old houses; this one was dignified, not too ornate, not bad at all if it hadn’t been so dirty.

  Mist was sticking to its red-black brick, but instead of looking foggy and clean, it looked foggy and dirty, grimy with a dirt unbelievable in a city as young as ours. Against its sniffling background of air indistinguishable from sky, all one thick, damp, even gray, it was drenched but still dirty, with black soot washing in little runnels down the walls, runnels that were still red-black after the soot had washed.

  I walked along Sixteenth Street, down the side of the house, until I got to the railing. Sixteenth Street ends there, not ten feet behind the house, because the hill there drops sixty feet, straight down, to the huddled gray houses on Water Street, below. The drop has been cemented, smooth and straight, the entire dizzy height.