We were grinning now.
“Humph! I only hope, if Miss Ruth does inherit the bulk of the estate, as she has a right to do, that she gives that impudent-acting lawyer his walking papers. It rather surprised him, I think,” and by a warmer look in her eyes, and a wag of her head, the talker showed satisfaction now, “to learn that the granddaughter had sent me here to open up the house for her. He hadn’t much to say after I told him that. Maybe, though, I shouldn’t have mentioned it. For Miss Ruth said I was to come here quietly. Yet how was I going to explain my presence here except by telling him the truth?”
“Say, Mrs. Doane,” Poppy jumped in, when the long-distance talker put on the air brakes and stopped. “Jerry and I think we know what made that door slam.”
The woman’s jaw dropped, showing her false teeth, and for an instant she looked blank.
“The door!” she cried. Then she was herself again. “Laws-a-me!” and she started off at her usual snappy pace. “With Lawyer Chew trying to chase me out of here, I had forgotten all about the door.”
“Had you thought of tramps, Mrs. Doane?”
“Tramps? I’d sooner think it was spooks,” came bluntly.
“Atta-boy!” I yipped. “That’s exactly what I thought, too.”
“But, Mrs. Doane,” argued old material mind, “there is no such thing as a real spook.”
“No?” came quietly, and the peculiar dry smile that jumped into the woman’s face, and out again, showed that she was holding something back. “Maybe,” she added, unable, I guess, to longer keep her secret, “if you knew everything that has happened in this house since Pa and I came here you’d change your mind about spooks. I know I have. Doors slamming, footfalls in the dead of night, windows creaking in their slides, and every night that queer smell in the upper hall.”