Out of the Air

by Inez Haynes Gillmore

“Sure,” he answered uncertainly after a while.

“I’m expecting a gentleman to call on me,” Susannah went on steadily. “Tell him I’ll be on the fifth floor at No. 9. My friend is out,” she ended in glib explanation, “but she’s left her key with me. There’s a little work that I wanted to do on her typewriter.” The janitor—she had worked this out in advance—must know that Room 9, fifth floor—was occupied by a woman who owned a typewriter. Susannah established that when, a few days before, she had restored to its owner a letter shoved by mistake under her own door.

Susannah deposited her bag on the floor in the janitor’s office. She walked steadily up the stairs to the second floor. She felt the janitor’s gaze on the first flight of her progress. She stopped just before she reached her own room, glanced back. She was alone there. The janitor had not followed her. Perhaps Byan’s instructions to him were only to watch the door. With a swift pounce, she ran to Byan’s door, turned the knob.

It opened.

She ran to the closet; opened that. As she suspected, it was empty. Indeed, her swift glance had discovered no signs of occupancy in the room. Even the bed was undisturbed. Byan had hired it, of course, just for the purpose of being there that one night. Susannah closed the closet door after her, so that the merest crack let in the air she should demand—and waited. In that desperate hour when she lay thinking, the idea had suddenly flashed into her mind that there was only one place in the house where Byan would not look for her. That place was his own room. But it would not have occurred to her to take refuge there if she had not noted, even in her taut terror of the night before, that when Byan entered his own room he had omitted to lock the door after him. As indeed, why should he? There was nothing to steal in it but Byan. Moreover, of course Byan had sat up all night—his door unlocked—ready to forestall any effort of hers to escape.

An hour later Susannah heard a padded, rather brisk step ascending the stairs, coming along the hall. It was Byan, of course—no one could mistake his pace. He knocked on the door of her room; at first gently, then insistently. A pause. Then he tried the knob, again at first gently, then insistently. His steps retreated down the hall and the stairs. He must have got a pass-key from the janitor, for when, a long minute later, she heard his steps return, the scraping of a lock sounded from across the hall. She heard her somewhat rusty door-hinges creak. There followed a low whistle as of surprise, then an irregular succession of steps and creaks proving that he was looking under the bed, was inspecting the closet. She heard him retreat again down the stairs, and braced herself to endure a longer wait. At last, two pairs of feet sounded on the stairs. Had her ruse fully succeeded—would they mount at once to Room 9, fifth floor? No—they were coming again along the second-floor corridor. With a tingle of nerves in her temples and cheeks, she realized that she had reached the supreme moment of peril. They began knocking at every door on the second-floor corridors. Once she heard a muffled colloquy—the impatient tones of some strange man, the apologetic voice of the janitor. At other doors she heard, shortly after the knock, the scraping of the pass-key. Now they were in the room just beyond the wall of the closet where she was crouching. She heard them enter and emerge—the moment had come! But their footsteps passed her door; an instant later, she heard the pass-key grate in the door of the room on the other side. Then—one hand shaking convulsively on the knob of Byan’s closet door—she heard them go flying up the stairs to the third story—the fourth—

Before noon of that haunted, hunted morning, Susannah found a room in a curious way. When she escaped from the house in the West Twenties, she had walked westward almost to the river. In a little den of a restaurant just off the docks, she ordered breakfast and the morning newspapers. But when she tried to look over the advertising columns with a view to finding a room, she had a violent fit of trembling. The members of the Carbonado Mining Company, she recalled to herself, were studying those advertisements just as closely as she; and perhaps at that very moment.

Hiding in a great city! Why, she thought to herself, it’s the only place where you can’t hide!

Susannah dawdled over breakfast as long as she dared. She found herself wincing as she emerged onto the busy dingy street of docks. She stopped under the shade of an awning and controlled the abnormal fluttering of her heart while she thought out her situation. She dared no longer walk the streets. She dared not go to a real-estate agent. How, then, might she find a room and a hiding-place?

Then a Salvation Army girl came picking her way across the crowded, cluttered dock-pavement toward her awning. And Susannah had a sudden impulse which she afterwards described to Glorious Lutie as a stroke of genius. She came out to the edge of the pavement and accosted the Blue Bonnet.