The sinister mark
ONE CLUE
And this sort of thing was destined to be Peter's experience for
many days to come. Every waking hour, and many when he should have
been sleeping, was spent in following up clues unearthed by eager
detectives, spurred to incessant action by the large reward which
Donald Morris had privately offered for any news of either or both of
the sisters.
Morris had been inclined, at first, to limit the reward to news of Mary.
"I care nothing about the sister, Clancy," he said. "What does it
matter to me where she is, or what she does? It's Mary--Mary----"
The agonized appeal in his eyes was almost more than Peter could bear.
The two men, so unlike, but with the bond of one common interest,
had become, in those few days, fast friends. Peter could not bring
himself even to hint at the sinister possibility which had presented
itself to his mind and to Captain O'Malley's. Hardened as they were
to the terrible crimes which were committed in this great city every
day, the possibility of murder--a word which they had not whispered,
even to each other--was not one which Peter would willingly suggest to
the client who had become his friend. It was, therefore, with great
difficulty that he persuaded Morris to make the reward applicable to
news of either of the sisters.
"If we can only find Anne," he said to O'Malley, after Morris had
reluctantly consented, "I promise you I'll put the screws on her and
find out what happened to Mary Blake, if it's necessary to have her
arrested for murder to do it. You watch me! _I'm going to find Anne!_"
But for once, for all his confidence in himself, Peter seemed destined
to failure. Each day and all day long and far into the night, all over
the country, sharp-eyed men and women trained to the last keen edge of
observation and inquiry sought for the missing women.
And always there were clues. Their name was legion, and Peter did
not dare, in his own words, "to pass one up," for fear that it might
lead true, at last. It seemed impossible that there could be so many
unexplained women as were unearthed; so many women with birthmarks, so
many who were young and dark, and to the observer's eager eye (dazzled,
perhaps by the amount of the reward) so like the photograph which each
detective carried about with him.
In his investigations, Peter travelled the country over. A swift
journey to St. Louis--and failure. Returning, he had no more than
reached his office, when a report came in of a young woman, with a
conspicuous birthmark, who had recently taken obscure lodgings in a
back street in Philadelphia. The cases of those who were supposed to
be Anne Blake were the most difficult to cope with and took the most
time. A decision could only be reached, in some instances, by finding
out the antecedents of the suspects, and by determining that the person
in question was definitely in some other place on the twenty-eighth of
May, for there was nothing in Peter's possession with which to identify
her except a meagre description.
He had made time to amplify this to the fullest extent possible.
To this end, he had called again on the janitor, Angelo Russo, at
the apartment in Waverly Place, late in the afternoon following his
experience with the _soi-disant_ Mrs. Florence Smith.
He had gone quietly into the old apartment house and, unheralded, had
sought the janitor in his own domain. In the dark, stuffy basement, he
had interviewed Angelo and his invalid wife, who appeared almost too
ill to answer any questions.
"She not know noding 'bout noding," Angelo said, interposing his short
body, protectively, between Peter and his wife. "She sick long time.
Doc', she say mus' have fresh air--count-ree. How get him, me? Try
ev' way I know, Godalmighty! but no good--Angelo have no lucka--only
troub'--jus' troub'."
"Did your wife ever see Miss Anne Blake?" asked Peter, touched, in
spite of his preoccupation, by the poor, stupid Italian's sincere
distress. "That's all I want to know."
"Yes. Me seen her long time 'go," said the wife, in a thin, weak voice.
"Long time 'go," she repeated, sadly.
"Could you describe her to me? Tell me how she looked?" asked Peter,
kindly. "A woman sometimes sees more than a man."
But the poor woman's powers of description were little better than her
husband's. She insisted, however, that Anne Blake was not thin, "not
skinny," but--Peter supplied the word--slender. "Yes, she was slen',
but stronga. Me see her lif' biga heavy ting, carry 'em 'roun' lika
easy. No, not skinny--what you say, slen'? Yes." This was the only way
in which her description varied from Angelo's.
After leaving the Russos, Peter had found two or three tradesmen, in
the immediate vicinity, who knew Anne Blake by sight. He was able to
determine from them that her appearance was, in a general way, such as
before described. As to the birthmark, one or two thought it was on the
left, and the others thought it was on the right, cheek. One perhaps
fanciful lady, who owned a small bake shop, said she remembered it
well, and that it was certainly on the right cheek, extending down on
the neck. That it looked to her something like the mark of a hand, a
big spot below, and four--or was it only three--smaller ones, running
up on the cheek. "Dark it was, like blood, an' awful to have upon ye,
the poor thing!"
This was all that Peter had to go upon in his subsequent attempts to
trace Anne Blake, and only once, after investigation, had he been at
all assured that he had found a genuine clue. This happened on the
Wednesday following the disappearance.
He had sent a woman detective to interview the matron of the women's
waiting room in the Pennsylvania Station. This detective found that the
neat coloured woman, in charge of the pay dressing rooms, remembered
seeing a veiled lady come in there on Sunday evening. She couldn't be
sure, but she thought it was after five. It was not very long before
the time when she went off duty, and that was at six. She recollected,
too, that the lady had some sort of disfigurement on her face. She had
received the fee and opened one of the pay dressing rooms for her, but
whether it was because the lady stayed in there till after her time was
up, or for whatever reason, the coloured woman had no recollection of
seeing her again.
And after three weeks of almost incessant toil this was the one
thing Peter had learned. Porters and conductors of every train which
left the Pennsylvania Station on that fateful Sunday night had been
personally interviewed. Not one remembered seeing any such lady as
Peter described. As far as he was able to learn, Anne Blake might have
vanished into thin air.
The search for a cab which Mary Blake might have taken on that Sunday
evening had proved equally fruitless. The city, as Peter had promised
Donald Morris, had been gone over with a fine-tooth comb. All the big
taxi companies, the smaller garages, and all the "free lances," from
the Bronx to the Battery, had been investigated, to no purpose. No one
had seen Mary Blake leave Waverly Place and every trace of her was
utterly lost. Like her sister, she had slipped out of sight, leaving no
ripple to betray her passage.
"It looks as if the only chance of getting results would be to let
the story leak out to the papers," said Peter to O'Malley, late one
afternoon toward the end of June. "Mr. Morris is dead against it.
Thinks that Miss Mary would hate the publicity worse than anything in
the world. And even if we could persuade him to let us go ahead and
practically advertise, even then I'm not any too hopeful." He sighed,
wearily. "I don't see, in any case, why Anne should come out of the
woods. Dammit! If she'd only draw some of that money that's lying
up there at the Scoville Bank, it might give us a look-in. But they
haven't heard a word. I'm sure she's got plenty of funds in hand, all
right, and is lying low. Wonder how she figures to pull out that money
without any one getting wise as to where she is."
"I've been puzzling about that, too," said O'Malley. "Seems as if she'd
have to take somebody into her confidence to put it across, but if what
we've doped out is true, and Mary Blake never turns up, for the simple
reason that----" He made an expressive gesture.
"That letter keeps coming back to my mind, O'Malley," said Peter,
reflectively, "the one Mary wrote to Donald Morris. And one phrase
sticks in my crop--'There will be no one left but Anne, if I fail----'
It looks like what we thought--and yet--somehow I can't get it out of
my head----" Suddenly he banged his fist down on the desk and jumped to
his feet. "I'm going through that apartment again, O'Malley," he said.
"I've been trying to ever since--but some damned bright-eyes thought
he had the whole thing cinched, and I've had to beat it somewhere on a
wild-goose chase. But I'm through with that for the present. I don't
care who has a pipe dream, induced by too big a reward, I'm going to
see if there isn't something in that apartment that'll give us a lead.
If we could only find out where they came from, and who they knew,
it might give us a line on where they'd be likely to go. The way it
is, we've just about come to a standstill, as I see it. There must be
something left in the place where they've lived for several years that
would be a hint to the guy who was able to take it. That key's been
burning in my pocket all these weeks, and to-night I'm going to use
it, see! I don't want any gallery, so I'm going late, just before the
street door's closed for the night. That's at twelve o'clock. I'll try
to fix it so that I don't run into the janitor."
"Oh, I guess you needn't be much afraid of that, from what Rawlins
says. He's been pretty well fed up with just watching the house when
there's been absolutely nothing stirring, and he's sort of made
friends with Angelo to keep from being bored stiff. And the poor old
devil, Angelo, I mean, is just about crazy on account of his wife. She
won't go to a hospital, and there he is, taking care of her and trying
to hold down his job at the same time. With the result that he's only
upstairs when he can't get out of it. So----"
"So you think there's no fear of my running into him," concluded Peter.
"Well, I don't suppose he'd beef about it much, but you never can
tell with these ignorant foreigners. They sometimes have an attack of
conscience in the most unexpected places. I won't take any chances.
I'll get Rawlins to give me the tip when he's out of the way----"
"I guess it would be as well, at that," said O'Malley. "But what do you
expect to find, Pete? You went over the apartment pretty thoroughly the
first day, didn't you?"
"I did take a good look," answered Peter. "It was as thorough as I
could make it at the time, and with Morris champing at the bit. But I'm
not entirely satisfied--haven't been all along. There's a queer feel
about the place, O'Malley. You may think I'm getting fanciful in my old
age, and I can't explain to you just what it is that seems----The place
is shut in--airy enough, and all that, you know, but cut off from the
rest of the world.... You have the sort of feeling that almost anything
might happen there--and no one the wiser.... The windows are all
covered with curtains that are thin enough to let in the light and air
but thick enough so you couldn't see a thing from the outside. They're
not the usual sash curtains, but run from the top to the bottom of the
windows, and there's a rod through them at the bottom so they can't
blow--and there are thick, dark shades.... Of course it might be that
way in any apartment where the outlook wasn't very attractive--and it
may be just that.... You may think I'm a nut, O'Malley, but I've got it