Part 18

"I consider it very important information, Chief," said McGinity. "It confirms the intimation that Mr. Royce got on the phone, that Mrs. LaRauche is virtually a prisoner in her own home, and that her life is in danger. She was probably trying to attract the policeman's attention."

"If, in your inquiries, you find that to be the case," the Chief suggested, "all you've got to do is to get me word. If it's necessary, we'll get a search-warrant, and open the house and search it ourselves. I'll be at the station here for another hour, so you'll know where to find me, in case there's something I can do."

I thanked him for the suggestion, and in less than five minutes, McGinity and I were leaving the lights of the village behind, and were speeding over a winding, hilly road, along which I should have preferred to travel in daylight if I had been driving alone. As we neared the LaRauche place, the country became wilder and more solitary. I often wondered what could have brought LaRauche to these lonely, frowning hills.

Suddenly, I signaled a stop, and we halted a short ways from the gateway, taking care to dim our headlights. As we walked cautiously up the footpath, which led from the road to the house, I told McGinity about my encounter with the grizzly bear.

By that time, we could make out the outline of the old house quite clearly against the starlit sky. But there was not a gleam of light; the whole house looked black. For a few minutes, in order to get the lay of the land, we crouched behind some bushes directly in front of the residence.

Blinds were drawn; some of the windows were shuttered. There was an atmosphere of silence about the place that was uncanny; no sound, not even the distant bark of a dog one usually hears in the country at night. Certainly no sign of human life. I glanced over my shoulder, to the right, in the direction of the old brick farm-house, in the hollow, where the Italian animal trainer lived, but I might just as well have been staring at a brick wall. No light--no sound--in that direction.

Presently, we crept upon the front porch. I tiptoed along the porch in the hope of getting a peep in at the lower windows, but the blinds were drawn, and I could see nothing of the interior. I knew where to find the bell, and I rang it once, twice, thrice. It was an old-fashioned, jangling bell that echoed dismally in the silence of the night.

When there was no response, we retraced our steps as far as the friendly bushes, and continued to watch the house from that point until we were both equally certain that the place, after all, was unoccupied. We were about to turn away, feeling that we might as well return to the police station, when something happened. That something was the sudden lighting up of a window in the top-story.

Silhouetted against this light, we saw a figure, unmistakably that of a woman. A few seconds later, another figure appeared in the window-frame of light. What followed was like old-time shadowgraphs, which used to delight me when I was a child: black, shadowy figures in action against a dimly lighted background. We saw an arm upraised and then fall, as though a blow had been delivered, and then two arms thrusting the woman-like figure away from the window, by force. Then the window went dark again.

There was nothing to do but turn away, and return to the car. On the way, I suggested to McGinity that we drive back about a mile, where I recalled seeing a light gleaming among a dense growth of pine trees. If it was a human habitation, I figured that the occupants, living so near the LaRauche estate, might give us some much desired information.

We found a light burning in a small cabin, in a clearing in the woods, set well back from the road. Our knock was answered by an elderly, gray-haired man, with a laborer's stoop in his shoulders. He inspected us a moment over his spectacles, then invited us to enter.

He turned out to be a carpenter and wood-chopper. His wife and daughter, he explained, had gone to the movies, in the village, with his wife's sister, who evidently was better placed in life and owned a car.

"Now, can I be of any service?" he asked, showing us to chairs in front of a blazing log-fire, in a plain but cheerful room, modern enough to have electric lights and a telephone.

I made a polite reply, without giving ourselves away. I was a friend of Dr. LaRauche, and had been surprised, on calling, to find his house dark. There had been no answer to the bell.

The carpenter smiled grimly, and said: "I'm afraid, stranger, you'll never git eny response to the ringin' of that bell, if you ring till Judgment Day. Others have tried, unsuccessfully, myself included. Old Doc LaRauche owes me considerable fer some wood-choppin' I done fer 'im."

"How do you explain it?" I asked.

"A lot of mysterious goin's on in that 'er house, of late," the carpenter answered, wagging his head, "which I, for one, can't answer fer. A very mysterious family!"

"From which I gather that Mrs. LaRauche is there, with her husband?" I said. "It's very urgent that I see her at once."

"No one 'ereabouts knows exactly what's happened to the poor lady," replied the carpenter. "It's common report that the old man keeps 'er locked up. Only yisterday, my wife went over with a paper bag of fruit, oranges and the like, which she intended leavin' fer the poor soul, but nary an answer to the bell."

"It's very lonely over there," I remarked. "No neighbors--"

"Ah, but they did have a close neighbor," the carpenter interrupted, "till the law stepped in and took 'im away. That old brick house, in the hollow. Maybe, now, you remember seein' it?"

"That's so--I'd forgotten," I said. "But tell me, what happened?"

"Last Spring, an Eytalian by the name of Antonio Ranzetti moved into the farm-house, vacant it was fer the last five years, and gone to ruin, like. He made a business of trainin' animals fer the circus, but he was cruel to 'em, awful cruel, so I 'eerd. So Doc LaRauche, wantin' to git rid of an undesirable neighbor, reported 'im to some society that protects animals--"

"Probably the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals," I interjected.

"Anyhow," the carpenter continued, "the Eytalian was arrested, tried, and sent to the hoose-gow fer ninety days."

"Oh, indeed!" I murmured.

"Yes; and he oughta be gittin' out, now, one of these fine days," said the carpenter. Then he added: "Now, is there anythin' else you'd like to know, stranger?"

I shook my head, as I realized at once that we were not likely to get any more valuable information than this. As we rose to leave, a bright idea struck McGinity. Why not get in touch with Chief of Police Meigs while we had a telephone handy?

I did what he suggested, and spent a few minutes talking to the Chief, while McGinity collared the carpenter and engaged him in conversation until I had finished. Outside, I gripped the reporter by the arm, and exclaimed: "Things are still breaking. As sure as fate, LaRauche and Orkins are at the bottom of all this."

"What's happened?" asked McGinity.

"Chief Meigs says that five minutes after we'd left the station, a local garage owner called, and reported that he had rented a small, light truck to Orkins, night before last, who had explained that he was moving some of LaRauche's household belongings into the city. The description of the truck that carried off the rocket from the Museum of Science, in New York, as given over the air, and in the newspapers, he said, tallied with his own vehicle, which he found parked in front of his garage when he opened up this morning."

"Good!" the reporter exclaimed. "What else did he tell you?"

"This. He's getting a search warrant, and says he'll join us in about half an hour. We're to wait for him, at the side of the road, about a quarter of a mile beyond this cabin."

XXVII

The time of waiting came to an end, and as soon as Chief Meigs arrived in his car, armed with a search warrant and a short-handled axe, we drove straight on to the LaRauche estate, parking our cars about a hundred yards from the gate. As we strode along the high road, three abreast, the Chief imparted some more startling information, so particularly important that instinctively we quickened our steps.

"Listen," he began. "I had just hung up on you, Mr. Royce, when the phone rang. I answered. It was a man's voice, with an English-like accent, and low and trembly, if you know what I mean."

"Orkins, without a doubt," I said. "But he's not English. That accent is only a cultivated one."

"Well, he wanted to consult with the Chief of Police," the officer went on, "about the $5,000 reward. When I informed him the Chief was speaking, he wanted to know if he came to the police station, and disclosed the name of the man who had stolen the rocket, would he stand a good chance in getting the reward. I told him I thought he would, and to come right along."

"Didn't he say who he was?" McGinity asked.

"No. And he was very particular that I promise not to reveal his identity after he had given me the necessary information. Finally, when I agreed to this, he said: 'I'll be with you inside an hour.'"

"Then what?" I inquired, agitatedly.

"Apparently we were cut off," the Chief replied; "and yet we weren't exactly disconnected, as I will explain. Something must have happened that caused him to drop the receiver, and get away from the phone in a hurry. I could hear two voices, now--muffled-like, and growing more distinct. Then came a sound like heavy and hurried footfalls would make on a bare floor, followed by two distinct crashes, like some furniture had been overturned. All of a sudden, there was a report, like the crack of a whip. It might have been a pistol shot, but that's only a guess."

"I think you've guessed right, Chief," I said. "It's my belief that LaRauche overheard Orkins, while he was phoning to you, and attacked him. There was a scuffle, and one of them got shot."

"Double-crossing the old man, no doubt," McGinity suggested.

"Just that," I approved. "Orkins is as double-faced and treacherous as he's avaricious."

"Looks like we're going to have an interesting night," the reporter remarked. "Things seem to be getting a bit hot."

"Yes; and they're going to get still hotter, if I know my business," the Chief muttered.

We entered the estate, and went along the path to the dark, lonely house where there was so much mystery; and where there's mystery, there's always danger. Blinds were still drawn, and windows shuttered. After I had jangled the bell, several times, and there was no response, Chief Meigs began to hammer on the door. We waited outside for five minutes, ringing and hammering at intervals. Presently, the police officer took out his axe, and smashed a panel in the door, and thrust his arm through. I heard the snap of the lock as he pushed the door open.

I followed him into the entrance hall, and then I did something very foolish. I blew my police whistle. McGinity chuckled. "What are you scared about, Mr. Royce?" he asked. "Calling the police?"

"I'm scared," I admitted, in an embarrassed undertone. "I have a feeling that the man we're after--LaRauche--is not going to worry very much about your life or mine."

At that I turned, to give vent to an exclamation of horror. My flesh crept. The Chief's flashlight was trained on the stairs. The beam of light disclosed a body, spread-eagled halfway down the uncarpeted steps, head down, arms outflung, as though it had plunged backwards from the first landing which was rather spacious, and ornamented by an old grandfather's clock.

After a brief inspection, I identified the gruesome thing as Orkins, our former butler. "Is it not suicide?" I asked.

The Chief shook his head. "Looks like plain murder," he answered. "Shot through the back, by LaRauche, from the bottom of the stairs, probably, just as he reached the first landing, in a futile attempt to escape."

I stood looking down at the dead man. "So passes poor old Orkins," I thought. "Too bad he got the worst of it." But there was no time for sentimentalizing over the crafty, avaricious butler, who, apparently, had paid with his life for attempting to betray his employer.

Already Chief Meigs had found a switch, and he and McGinity were inspecting the library, where the dial telephone was, in the faint glow of an overhead light. The telephone receiver was dangling at the end of its cord; two chairs were overturned; all mute and unmistakable evidence of the grisly encounter the Chief had heard on the telephone, climaxed by the pistol shot.

Everything looked dingy and untidy; there was a musty smell about the room. After a quick search there, we passed through several other rooms on the ground floor, including the kitchen, where there were many greasy plates and plenty of unwashed china and cooking utensils. A door, under a back stairway in the kitchen, evidently led to the basement; it was fastened with a patent lock.

As none of the rooms on the ground floor, except the library and kitchen, bore evidence of recent occupation, Chief Meigs suggested that we make a quick search of the upper floors. "LaRauche, no doubt," he said, "is in hiding somewhere about the house, and I think we're going to have some trouble before we get him."

"That is, if he hasn't already escaped us," McGinity ventured.

"There's some doubt about that," the Chief answered. "All the doors and windows on this floor are locked, and fastened on the inside, and he couldn't possibly have snapped that patent lock on the door in the kitchen, from the inside, if he had wanted to hide in the basement."

"But Mrs. LaRauche!" I said. "Where is she? We've got to find her!"

In reply, the Chief signaled to McGinity and me, to follow him up the dark, back stairway to the second floor. Feeling along the wall in the hall, on this floor, I found a switch, and snapped on the lights. But they were very dim, of low candle-power, and in searching the bedrooms and closets, we had to again resort to the use of the flashlight. Two of the bedrooms seemed to have been recently tenanted, with beds unmade, and men's clothing and soiled linen lying about in great disorder. One of these, apparently Orkins' room, contained a small radio, over which he had undoubtedly heard the announcement of the $5,000 reward. The whole interior of the house showed the absence of a domesticated hand. At the end of the corridor, we looked into a large double room, which LaRauche had equipped as a laboratory.

Finally, we reached the narrow corridor in the top story, where we were faced by four doors. Three of them were unlocked. Pushing them open, we looked into two unfurnished rooms, and another used for storage. The fourth door, at the end of the passageway, was locked. Repeated knocking brought no answer.

This was the last unexplored room in the house. The room particularly interested me because it was there that McGinity and I had witnessed the dramatic shadowgraph episode in the window. So far we had failed to trace LaRauche's movements in the house, or gain the slightest clue to his hiding-place. Was he hiding in this attic room? And where was Mrs. LaRauche?

Chief Meigs was a man of infinite resources. He had either anticipated this, or had become expert in unlocking doors. He produced a heavy bunch of keys, from which he selected three. His first two attempts failed to open the door. The third time, proverbially the charm, the key turned in the lock, and the door swung open.

I would have been the first to step through, but the Chief stopped me. "Stay where you are," he whispered; "it's a little dangerous."

Standing in the doorway, the Chief trained the beam of his electric torch on various objects in the room. Finally it rested on an arm-chair beside an iron bedstead. Something was in that chair, and it was covered with a sheet. He strode over, and pulled back the sheet, and then we began to understand the secret which the old house held.

I gasped and stared. Huddled in the chair was Mrs. LaRauche, deadly pale and hollow cheeked, and apparently unconscious, her emaciated form showing under the folds of a quilted silk dressing-gown which had once been lavender in hue. Adhesive tape had been placed over her mouth, and her arms were bound to the side-rests of the chair by picture wire.

"Thank God, she's alive!" Chief Meigs murmured, as he stooped over her. "Looks like nothing very much wrong with her, except that she's had a pretty bad shock."

As he finished speaking, the woman's head moved; her eyelids fluttered, and then she opened her eyes. We saw at once that she was in a panic of fear. I could hardly realize that this pitiful, ghostly shadow was the same woman I had met several months ago.

Swiftly we released her from the tape and wire that silenced and bound her; then, to our astonishment, we found that she was chained by the ankle to an iron post of the bed. The Chief immediately set to work to unfasten the chain, which looked like an ordinary dog-chain.

By this time, McGinity had discovered a light fixture in the wall, near the front window, containing one bulb, which he turned on. Mrs. LaRauche stared dazedly from one to the other of us, giving me no sign of recognition, although I addressed her by name. But she appeared to comprehend what we were up to. Still unable to speak, she raised one hand weakly, and pointed towards the window in the back of the room, behind the bed.

In doing this, she furnished us with an important clue. LaRauche had escaped through this window, which was set in the Mansard roof, and gave on to a broadish ledge, sufficient wide for a person to walk on. This ledge extended clear around the house.

"We've got to get LaRauche!" Chief Meigs exclaimed, but he couldn't get through the window because of his rather portly physique. Nor could I. McGinity, slim in figure, managed it nicely. He had such good eye-sight that he could distinguish objects which were beyond the view of normal-sighted people. And he was hardly outside, on the ledge, and debating whether he should turn to the left or the right, when he espied a figure, crouching in the dark, at the far end of the roof extension.

"You see it?" he asked Chief Meigs, who was leaning out of the window.

"I can't see a damn thing," the Chief replied.

"Next time, you'd better bring your opera-glasses," the reporter suggested, ironically.

"I wonder if it is LaRauche?" said the Chief, thoughtfully.

"It's a man, at any rate," said McGinity. "Looks like he's wearing black trousers and a white shirt. No coat or hat at all. He's got bushy white hair."

"Then it's LaRauche," the Chief exclaimed. "Call to him, and tell him to come back into the house. Say it's no use trying to escape."

McGinity did as the Chief requested, and there came in reply a cackling laugh.

"I heard that," said the Chief. "It's the laugh of a maniac." Then he added quickly: "What's he doing now?"

McGinity did not reply immediately. He had seen something very strange happen. LaRauche had mysteriously disappeared--vanished into the air.

"He's gone!" the reporter cried at last. "Escaped! He just flew off the roof."

The Chief gave a groan of disappointment. "Oh, come back in!" he ordered gruffly. "Don't be funny!"

McGinity came back through the window, his knees a little unsteady. Then he explained what he had seen. LaRauche had floated off the roof, into the air, lightly but swiftly, taking a downward course, and had been swallowed up in the darkness below.

"You don't expect me to believe a fairy story like that?" Chief Meigs growled. "Here, let's get downstairs. We're wasting time."

"It's the gospel truth, officer," McGinity declared, vehemently; "but how he did it is a puzzle to me."

It was no puzzle to me. I had always considered LaRauche mad, and mad scientists work in a strange, mysterious way. His vanishing into the air, from the roof, might have a perfectly natural explanation. Having my own views, which I was not inclined at the moment to expose, for fear of further disgruntling the Chief, I said nothing.

Five minutes after the Chief and McGinity had gone downstairs, the reporter to search for LaRauche in the back-yard, while Chief Meigs reported the mysterious death of Orkins, and summoned medical aid for Mrs. LaRauche, by telephone, my attention was again attracted to the back window. This time it was by a bright glare of light.

Hurrying to the window, I was made speedily conscious of what was happening. LaRauche had, indeed, escaped from the house by way of the roof, in a manner yet to be revealed, and was now, apparently, making a quick getaway in his plane.

He had set off a magnesium flare. The small hangar and flying field were bathed in a weird and eerie silver-colored haze. His plane was in sight. Even at this distance, I caught the glint of its wings in the silver-colored light as it taxied across the field. With a roar, it shot upward, and was lost in the blackness of the night.

McGinity had heard the noise of the take-off, and came running up, to learn from me, and make sure his speculations, that LaRauche had really vanished from the roof, as if by magic, and was now escaping in his plane. I assured him on these two points very firmly and quickly.

And while he hurriedly retraced his steps downstairs, to report to Meigs, I again turned my attention to Mrs. LaRauche, whose mind, although still in confusion, was slowly clearing.

Later, we were to hear some very remarkable things from her.

XXVIII

My intuitive feeling that we had a night's work before us, which I had voiced prophetically to McGinity earlier in the evening, as we started for the LaRauche place, with only the faint clue of a woman's voice on the telephone to go on, proved conformable to fact. Dawn was breaking when we returned to the castle, weary and heavy at heart. The place was silent; the only sound that came to us was the swish-swish of the incoming tide, as it broke against the rocks at the foot of the cliff.

We were both so saddened and unstrung over our unpleasant and tragic experiences during the past twenty-four hours, and so physically dog-tired, that we were averse to talking them over.

The three tragedies, occurring so closely together, first, Niki, then Mr. Zzyx, and now, Orkins, after all, seemed to have been so unnecessary; or, as Henry had voiced his opinion about Mr. Zzyx's fearful death, so senseless. And while there was a logical connection between them and the perpetration of the Martian hoax, so far they had contributed little or nothing in clearing up the mystery which was still baffling us both.

It was here that Mrs. LaRauche came into the picture. My conviction, from the time I recognized her voice on the telephone, was that she knew more than any one else did. I had been shocked rather than distressed at the death of Orkins. A providential death, perhaps, with LaRauche gone now, and his wife holding the secret.

But where was LaRauche going? Evidently, after the systematic manner of his escape, he had a set goal. He was an experienced pilot, and a very expert one, considering his age, and probably knew of many places where a man could land safely in the dark.

Word of his escape by plane had been broadcast; the machinery of police watchfulness set in motion along the entire eastern seaboard, and far inland, as well. Somewhere in the air, a man was flying--wanted by the police.