Out of the Air Part 5

Then she wrote a note to her landlady. It read: "Dear Mrs. Ray: I have been suddenly called away from the city. Will you keep my trunk until I send for it? Yours in great haste and some trouble, Susannah Ayer." She put it with her board money in an envelope, addressed to Mrs. Ray, and placed it on the trunk.

At three o'clock, her suitcase in one hand, her bag and her umbrella in the other, her long cape over her arm, she ventured into the hall.

It was vacant and silent.

She stole silently down the stairs. She met n.o.body. She noiselessly opened the front door. Apparently n.o.body noticed her. She walked briskly down the steps; turned toward the Avenue. At the corner something impelled her to look back.

Byan, his look directed downward, two fingers fumbling in his side pocket for his key, was briskly ascending the steps.

III

Lindsay drove directly from the Quinanog station to the Quinanog Arms.

The Arms proved to be a tiny mid-Victorian hotel, not an inexact replica--and by no means a discreditable one--of many small rustic hotels that he had seen in England and France. Indeed Quinanog, as he caught it in glimpses, might have been one part of France or one part of England--that region which only the English Channel prevents from being the same country. The motor, which conducted him from the station to the Arms, drove on roads in which high wine-gla.s.s elms made Gothic arches; between wide meadowy stretches, brilliant with b.u.t.tercups, daisies, iris; una.s.sertive, well-proportioned houses with roomy vegetable plots and tiny patches here and there of flower garden. He arrived at so early an hour that the best of the long friendly day stretched before him. He felt disposed to spend it merely in reading and smoking. He had plenty to smoke; he had seen to that himself in New York. And he had plenty to read; Spink Sparrel had seen to that in Boston. The bottom of one of his trunks was covered with Lutetia Murray's works.

But although he smoked a great deal, he did not read at all. Until luncheon he merely followed his impulses. Those impulses took him a little way down the main street, which ran between comfortable, white colonial houses, set back from the road. He walked through the tiny triangular Common. He visited the little, poster-hung post-office; looked into the big neatly arranged general store; strolled back again.

His impulses then led him to explore the grounds of the Arms and deposited him finally in the hammock on the side porch. After a simple and very well-cooked luncheon, his languor broke into a sudden restlessness. "Where is the Murray place?" he asked of the proprietor of the Arms, whose name, the letterhead of the Arms stationery stated, was Hyde.

"The Murray place!" Hyde repeated inquiringly. He was a long, noncommittal-looking person with big pale blue eyes illuminating a sandy baldness. "Oh, the _Murray_ place! You mean the old Murray place."

"I mean the house, whichever and wherever it is, that Lutetia Murray, the author, used to live in."

"Oh, sure! I get you. You see it's been empty for such a long spell that we forget all about it. The old Murray place is on the road to West Quinanog."

"It isn't occupied, you say?"

"Lord, no! Hasn't been lived in since--well, since Lutetia Murray died.

And that was--let me see--" Hyde cast a reflective eye upward. "Ten, eleven, twelve--oh, fifteen or twenty, I should say. Yes, all of fifteen years."

"Does it still belong in the Murray family?"

"Lord bless your soul, no. There hasn't been a Murray around these parts since--well, since Lutetia Murray died."

"Who owns it now?"

"The Turners. They bought it when it came up for sale after Miss Murray's death."

"Well, weren't there any heirs?"

"There was a niece--her brother's little girl. They had to sell the place and everything in it. There never _was_ a sale in Quinanog like that. Why, folks say that the mahogany would bring fancy prices in New York nowadays."

"Didn't they get as much as they should have?" Lindsay asked idly.

"Oh Lord, no! And they found her estate was awful involved, and the debts et up about all the auction brought in."

"What became of the little girl?"

"Some cousins took her."

"Where is she now?"

"Never heard tell."

"Has anybody ever lived in the Murray place since the family left?"

"No, I believe not."

"Is it to let?"

"Yes, and for sale."

"Well, why hasn't it let or sold?"

"Oh, I dunno exactly. It's a great big barn of a place. Kinda ramshackle, and of course it's off the main-traveled road. You'd need a flivver, at least, to live there nowadays. And there ain't a single modern improvement in it. No bathroom, nor electric lights, not set tubs, nor any of the things that women like. No garage neither."

"Every disability you quote makes it sound all the better to me,"

Lindsay commented. He meditated a moment. "I'd like to go over and look at it this afternoon. Is there anyone here to drive me?"

"Yes, d.i.c.k'll take you in the runabout." Hyde appeared to meditate in his turn, and he c.o.c.ked an inquiring eye in Lindsay's direction. "You wasn't thinking of hiring the place, was you?"

Lindsay laughed. "I should say I wasn't. No, I just wanted to look at it."

"I was going to say," Hyde went on, "that it's a very pleasant location.

City folks always think it's a lovely spot. If you was thinking of hiring it, my brother's the agent."

Lindsay laughed again. "Hiring a house is about as far from my plans at present as returning to France."

"Well," Hyde commented dryly, "judging from the way the Quinanog boys feel, I guess I know just about how much you want to do that."

"How soon can we go to the Murray place?" Lindsay inquired.

"Now--as far as d.i.c.k's concerned."

"By the way," Hyde dropped, as he turned toward the garage, "the Murrays called the place Blue Medders."

"Blue Meadows," Lindsay repeated aloud. And to himself, "Blue Meadows."

And again, though wordlessly, "Blue Meadows." It was apparent that he liked the sound and the image the sound evoked.

The runabout chugged to Blue Meadows in less than ten minutes. The road branched off from the State highway at the least frequented place in its ample stretch; ran for a long way to West Quinanog. On this side road, houses were few and they grew fewer and fewer until they left Blue Meadows quite by itself. Its situation, though solitary, was not lonely.

It sat near the road. Perhaps, Lindsay decided, it would have been too near if stately wine-gla.s.s elms, feathered with leaves all along their lissom trunks, in collaboration with a high lilac hedge now past its blooming, had not helped to sequester it. From the street, the house showed only a roof with two capacious chimneys, the upper story of its gray clapboarded facade.

d.i.c.k, a gangling freckled youth, slowed down the machine as if in preparation for a stop. "I've got the key," he volunteered, "if you want to go in."

Until that moment Lindsay had entertained no idea of going in. But d.i.c.k's words fired his imagination. "Thanks, I think I will."

d.i.c.k handed over the long, delicately wrought key. He made no move to follow Lindsay out of the car. "If you don't mind," he said, "I'll run down the road to see a cousin of mine. How soon before you'll want to start back?"