“You can be thankful for one thing, Anne, Joe’s not being here.”
“Joe?”
“Oh, I’m not saying he had anything to do with it. But these cases—you read about them in the papers. Every little thing traced up. And she and Joe having been at loggerheads they’d be pouncing on that—not telling you anything, sending up your blood pressure with their questions. You’re spared that and it’s worth keeping your mind on. Nothing so bad but what it might be worse.”
She went on down the hall. Anne, on the stairs, waited till she heard the sound of the opening door and Miss Pinkney’s welcoming voice, then she stole upward very softly. She did not go to her room as Mrs. Cornell had advised, but tiptoed to the end of the hall where the staircase led to the top story.
She ascended with delicate carefulness letting her weight come gradually on each step. Despite her precautions the boards creaked. The sounds seemed portentously loud in the deep quiet and she stopped for the silence to absorb them, and then, with chary foot, went on. At the top she stood, subduing her deep-drawn breaths, looking, listening.
The middle of the floor was occupied by a spacious central hall furnished as a parlor and lit by a skylight. Giving on it were numerous small bedrooms, the doors open. They were like rows of neat little cells, all the same, bed, dresser, rocking-chair, with a white curtained window in the outer wall. The windows were open, the sashes raised half-way, and the fresh sweet air passing through fanned the muslin curtains back and forth in curved transparencies. Anne remembered Miss Pinkney saying something about opening the top-floor windows to air the servants’ quarters before the house was closed for the season.
The stirrings of the curtains, billowing out and drooping, were the only movements in the place. She moved to the middle of the room and sent her voice out in a whisper:
“Joe, Joe—are you here? It’s Anne.”
Her ears were strained for an answering whisper, her eyes swept about for a shape creeping into view, but the silence was unbroken, the emptiness undisturbed. She entered the rooms, peered about, opened cupboards, looked for signs of occupation. Again nothing—vacancy, dust in a film on the bureau tops, beds untouched in meticulous smoothness.
One door was closed, near the stair-head. Opening this she looked into a store-room, a large, dark interior lit by two small windows. They were dust grimed, and the light came in dimly, showing upturned trunks and boxes, pieces of furniture, lines of clothes hanging on the walls.