The Listening House Read online

  I went downtown that morning to proposition different companies, letting them know that I was a good experienced copywriter they might call in while regular people were on vacations. It was a surprise, though, when I bumped into something immediate. The third place I hit was Hibbard’s, and they were wild because their advertising man—they have just one—had obviously gone on a holiday bat; at any rate he hadn’t returned that morning, and they couldn’t reach him. Hibbard’s had a half-page sale ad all full of little items—a big ad for them—running Wednesday night. The ads were set up, but buyers were yipping for proofs and corrections, and no one knew anything. They hired me on the spot, and I waded in.

  That night I went home late, slept, left early; I saw no one in the house. The next day I did the same. It wasn’t until Thursday morning that the Hibbard advertising man stole sheepishly into his office. I stayed until closing time to show him what I’d done and help him get back in step, so I got paid for three whole days.

  That was Thursday, June third.

  7

  THAT WAS THE NIGHT.

  Even now, looking back, I get tense when I think of it.

  I went straight home from Hibbard’s, cooked dinner, ate.

  It must have been around seven o’clock that I opened my door after a gentle knock to see Mr. Grant standing in the hallway blinking.

  “I haven’t seen you around these last few days,” he said as mildly as always. “I thought I’d inquire.”

  “I’m awfully glad you did. Come in and sit down. I’ve been in luck; I had three days of temporary work again; eighteen fine lovely dollars’ worth.”

  “That’s fine. I’m very glad to hear it. Very glad to see you aren’t having more of your—er—experiences.” He cleared his throat, as if now the preliminaries were over. “I have also been wondering a little about Mrs. Garr. Wasn’t she going to come back soon?”

  I stared at him with my mouth open.

  “Isn’t she back? Why, she was supposed to be back Tuesday morning!”

  “I haven’t seen her.” He was as quietly positive as he had been about his statements Friday night.

  “Why, that’s right, I haven’t, either. But I’ve been gone until so late—I thought she’d be in her room sleeping.”

  “Well, I have been about a good deal in the daytime, and I haven’t seen her.” He said it still mildly, but with interest, too.

  “Oh, she must be back. She must be around here somewhere. Have you called her?”

  “No, I—not exactly. But I am positive she is not here.”

  “Well, we’ll soon find out. I’ll call.”

  As Mr. Kistler had on Friday night, I went out into the hall to cry toward her quarters, “Mrs. Garr! Mrs. Garr!”

  As on Friday, there was no answer. I went to the head of the basement stairs; the cellar was dark, but I called down there, too.

  Again no answer. I went back to Mr. Grant.

  “She’s certainly not in the house now. And that’s odd. You wouldn’t expect her to go away again when she had just been gone over the weekend. She may have decided to stay longer in Chicago, of course; we wouldn’t know. But in that case you’d think Mrs. Halloran might—”

  I stopped. Because I’d no sooner said Mrs. Halloran’s name aloud than the memory of having talked to her on Tuesday morning came to me.

  “Wait, let me think. Mrs. Halloran’s back! She came back from Chicago. She called up Tuesday morning just before I left for downtown. And she asked to talk to Mrs. Garr.”

  Mr. Grant glimmered at me for a long time, his eyes bewildered behind their glasses.

  “Then Mrs. Garr must have come back. You’d think she’d come here. But I haven’t seen her around at all, and I was looking for her. My rent was due. You know, it was queer, very queer, about my seeing her Friday night. After the train had left, you know. I could have sworn it was Mrs. Garr. After all, it’s light at eight thirty now. You don’t believe in—er—ghosts, do you?”

  I laughed. “No, and I don’t think you saw any. But I agree it’s queer. Perhaps she did go somewhere else after she came in on the train Tuesday morning. Or she might have been hurt, run over—be in a hospital somewhere.”

  “You think we should do nothing, then?”

  “Oh no, I think we should find out where she is, in case we should be doing something. But what could we do? Call the hospitals? I know; we could call Mrs. Halloran.”

  We decided to do that. There were plenty of Hallorans in the phone book, but none on South Dunlop, where Mrs. Garr had told me the Hallorans lived.

  The Hallorans had no telephone, then. But the more names I looked through the less I thought I could let the matter drop.

  “Just the same, I don’t want to go out all that way to see the Hallorans,” I admitted. “Who else is home?”

  “The Wallers, I think. Miss Sands.”

  “Let’s go up to see the Wallers. We’ll ask them what should be done.”

  We both went up.

  Mr. Waller, with his shoes comfortably off, was reading; Mrs. Waller was busy with paste, sheets of paper, and cut-out newspaper photographs of children, matching twins for the Comet contest. They weren’t much interested at first in our worries over Mrs. Garr.

  “That old bitch,” Mr. Waller interrupted testily. “The longer she stops away the better I like it.”

  “She might have got hit by a hit-run driver, though,” Mrs. Waller speculated with the indecent hope people seem to have that some other person will have come to harm.

  Mr. Waller grew more alert.

  “That’s so, that’s so. Might even be dead. Where did you say this Halloran fella lived?”

  “It’s on South Dunlop Street. The city directory’s probably the only place you could find the number. It isn’t in the phone book. You don’t think we should call the hospitals first? Or maybe the police?”

  Mr. Waller turned that over slowly.

  “Oh, she’d have had this address on her somewhere if the hospitals or the police had her. We’d of heard. You’re sure nobody ain’t heard? Mrs. Tewman might of—”

  “Mrs. Tewman’s been gone ever since Monday,” Mrs. Waller put in thoughtfully. “I been lookin’ for her. The bathroom’s a mess. I cleaned it up once myself. I been lookin’ for her.”

  Mrs. Tewman gone, too! It quickened Mr. Waller’s interest, as it did mine.

  “Okay, I’ll go huntin’ the old so-and-so.” There was a gleam in his eye as he turned to his wife. “Never thought I’d go huntin’ her, did you, Agnes?”

  “No, I never did.” Mrs. Waller was increasingly excited. “I can’t think what can have happened to her, now I think about it. I’ve never known her to go off like this before.”

  “Before we start off on any wild-goose chase, though”—Mr. Waller turned back—“we ought to look through the house for sure. You say you called her?”

  “Yes, I did. Thoroughly.”

  “Well, we can soon look.”

  The looking was quickly done. Upstairs rooms, parlor, stair room, cellar. The Tewmans’ rooms in the front were again unlocked and vacant, the furnace room empty.

  Mr. Waller bellowed, “Mrs. Garr!” before the basement kitchen, but except for an answering bark from the dog, all was quiet.

  “She ain’t here, that’s a cinch,” he concluded.

  He left with Mr. Grant. I invited Mrs. Waller to stay downstairs with me until they came back. We stopped at Miss Sands’ door to ask her to come, too; she came with alacrity when she heard what was afoot.

  There were only the three of us in the house.

  Our wonder grew as we talked, hashing over Mrs. Garr’s nonappearance from every angle.

  “Perhaps she’s lost her mind and is wandering around somewhere, not knowing who she is,” was my best solution. “She’s old, you know. She’s been acting queerly all along; I
’ve thought she was queer ever since I moved here. Did she ever tell you she thought people went snooping around the house at night? People who live here, I mean?”

  “No, she never said to me.” Miss Sands shot a furtive look from me to Mrs. Waller.

  Both the women were anxious to speculate about Mrs. Garr’s peculiar behavior in this one instance of not coming home; they were avid to talk about it. But every time I switched to Mrs. Garr’s general peculiarities and to her life in the past, they were both queerly reluctant. I couldn’t get any gossip out of them at all, in spite of an admission wrung from Miss Sands that she had lived in that house with Mrs. Garr for twelve years.

  “It’s handy,” she excused herself. “You know, walking distance and all.”

  “Has Mrs. Garr always been like she is now?”

  “Well, she was different when I first knew her.”

  That was all I could get.

  A thought hit me.

  “I’ll bet it will turn out she went somewhere. She must have known she was going to be away for a long time because—think of those animals in the basement. They’d be crazy for food by this time if she hadn’t left a lot. And the dog hasn’t been barking much—I’ve just heard a growl once in a while. By this time, though . . . Do you think we should go down and let them out?”

  “They’d be awful hard to get back in,” Mrs. Waller objected.

  We decided to wait to see what the men found out.

  Mr. Waller and Mr. Grant did not return to the house until nearly ten o’clock. They both looked stirred up and alert when they walked into my living room, and they were not alone. Mrs. Halloran was with them.

  Mrs. Halloran was drunk with excitement.

  “Oh, Aunt Harriet! Oh, Aunt Hattie! Oh, she must have been killed! I can’t think whatever happened! There I was, thinking she did it a-purpose, and getting mad, and going on about how I’d show her I could have a good time anyway, and she may be kidnapped!”

  “It’s funny, it’s pretty funny, all right.” Mr. Waller looked quickly from one to the other of us. “I guess we better call the hospitals, all right.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked Mrs. Halloran. “She was all right when she came home with you from Chicago on Tuesday, wasn’t she?”

  “That’s it! That’s it! She never went to Chicago!” Mrs. Halloran screamed at me, twisting her hands. “Right up at the gate we was, Aunt Hattie and me, and I kep’ a-saying, ‘Better get out your ticket, Auntie, better get out your ticket, Auntie’—I had mine all ready in my hand—but she kep’ a-saying, ‘I got plen’y o’ time,’ until right when the man says, ‘See your ticket, lady,’ and she opened her purse and hunted, couldn’t find it. She says to me, ‘You go ahead save me a seat,’ she says to me, so I go ahead on down to the train; I get on and pick a good seat right in the middle of the car, and she never come! I kep’ lookin’ out the window and up the aisle, and there was lots of other people wanted to sit by me, sayin’, ‘This half took, lady?’ And I kep’ sayin’, ‘Yes, I got a friend comin’,’ but she never come. So then the train started, and I thought she must-a been lookin’ for me in some of the other coaches. The conductor come and took my ticket, and I says, ‘You see a lady lookin’ for a lady?’ I says to him, but he says, ‘There’s a awful lot of ladies on this train, madam,’ so after a while, I got another lady across the aisle to keep my seat for me while I went through all the train lookin’, and she wasn’t there. So the other lady, she stayed, and she said maybe they run two trains. So then in Chicago I went to the Clinton Hotel. I went in a taxi where she said we was goin’ to stop in that hotel, but she never come there, neither. So I was mad and said nobody was goin’ to leave me like that, so I went to four movies and saw the house where the girl killed her boyfriend and all—she shot him in the back—and here maybe all the time poor Aunt Hattie lost her ticket and got murdered!”

  Mrs. Halloran stopped there because she had to blow her nose.

  Her narrative style was the kind that needs close following. She’d had it. She rolled her eyes around at us as a finale, thrilled horror added to her excitement.

  “You don’t think somebody could-a murdered her for her ticket and stuck her dead body someplace in that station, do you?”

  “We better get in touch with the hospitals, we better get in touch with the hospitals, all right.” Mr. Waller was all action. “They do it from the Missing Persons.”

  For the third time since I had moved there a call to the police department was put in from Mrs. Garr’s house.

  * * *

  —

  FROM MR. WALLER’S EFFORTS at our end of the line I gathered that the police department wasn’t much interested in the unexplained absence of Mrs. Garr.

  “Yes, she is a missing person,” Mr. Waller reiterated. “She’s been missin’ since last Friday night . . . No, she ain’t a young lady. She’s a old lady. Maybe sixty, sixty-five . . . No, she didn’t go visitin’ relatives. She ain’t got but one relative, and she’s right here havin’ fits now. This Mrs. Garr was goin’ to Chicago on Friday, see, but she never got on the train . . . No, she didn’t get lost in Chicago. She never got on the train . . . No, I don’t know how many trains there was.”

  He wiped perspiration from his face when he was done.

  “Dumbheads. What do they think, I think it’s fun to report missing persons? Maybe there was two trains run on that excursion, though.”

  “I wonder if that could be it. It would be more likely for her to get lost in Chicago than in Gilling City.”

  “Except that I saw her on the corner after train time Friday,” put in Mr. Grant obstinately.

  If ever a situation was well talked over, that one was. We were still at it when Mr. Kistler came home at midnight. Mr. Buffingham came home around one. They both added themselves to the party, but we couldn’t rouse them to our pitch of interest. They just weren’t worried.

  The two policemen came almost on Mr. Buffingham’s heels. They were the same two men we’d had the Friday before: Jerry and Red; I felt we were practically friends, but they tramped into my living room sourly.

  “Now what’ve you got going on around here? More monkey business?”

  Mrs. Halloran appointed herself spokesman.

  By that time, she had worked herself close to hysterics. I didn’t see how the policemen could make much sense out of her recital, but they’d probably had the outline of the story from the officer Mr. Waller had talked to on the telephone. They were definitely bored.

  “Aw, she’ll turn up. Maybe she does miss the train, but she’s all set for a visit, so she goes somewheres else, see? She’s of age, ain’t she? She’s on her own, ain’t she? There isn’t any reason why she should report to you where she goes, is there?”

  Mr. Grant trained his blinks on the policemen.

  “I have lived in this house for four years, and I have never known her to leave it overnight before.”

  “Well, she did now. She said she was goin’ to Chicago, didn’t she? I bet she went. Her excursion ticket wasn’t any good because she missed the train, so she gets another and takes a reg’lar train.”

  “Then there wasn’t a second section?” Mr. Kistler had arrived at the thoughtful-interest stage.

  “Naw, there was only one section. These excursions ain’t as popular as they was.”

  Miss Sands had a word to put in. “Then she never went. She was awful close.”

  “Okay, lady, then you tell us where she is.” Jerry was still bored. “She ain’t in a hospital; there ain’t been an unknown lady in a hospital this week. She ain’t in the morgue. She ain’t in jail.”

  “She may have been hit by a car, picked up by the driver, and cared for in his home,” contributed Mr. Kistler with quickening eyes, “or else dumped, dead, out in the country somewhere.”

  Mrs. Halloran shrieked and fell over backward in her c
hair. She came to very quickly, though. She hadn’t had any attention for almost two minutes, but on the other hand she didn’t want to miss anything.

  “Well, we’ll keep an eye out,” Jerry promised us largely as he rose to go.

  “Wait a minute, Jerry,” asked Mr. Kistler, still contemplative. “There doesn’t seem much use in going over the house again; that’s been done since she left, thanks to Mrs. Dacres. But there’s one place we didn’t look, remember? That kitchen downstairs.”

  “Aw nuts.”

  “But the key is gone,” I said, picking up Mr. Kistler’s idea. “Suppose she’d left her ticket there, come back for it, and fallen or become ill—she might be lying there sick—or dead, even!”

  “Then how did it get locked again?” asked Jerry reasonably.

  “Did you try to see if it was locked?” asked Mr. Kistler quickly.

  “Hell, sure I did. Sure. Anyhow, I think I did.” Jerry’s voice, certain at first, grew a trifle less certain. “Okay, I’ll take another look.”

  Once more nine people trailed down the cellar stairs in disorder, the policeman, ahead, switching on the cellar light from the head of the stairs.

  The coldness of the basement, in contrast to the June warmth above, struck our flesh with chill. The far reaches of the furnace room, with only one bulb to light them, were shadowed. The place smelled worse than ever. Mrs. Tewman, I thought, had certainly been doing as little cleaning as Mrs. Waller said she had. And then, of course, those animals.

  Jerry’s hand closed on the knob of the kitchen door.

  Inside the room, the dog growled.

  The door didn’t open.

  Jerry turned triumphantly to us.

  “Okay? It’s locked, all right. Satisfied now?”

  “No. No, I’m not satisfied.” Mr. Kistler had the nose-to-the-trail look he’d worn the morning Mr. Buffingham’s son was taken. “I think you should break that door in.”