It took encouragement to get her story, and it was secondhand at that, of course. But it appeared that a state of panic had seized the Beauregard servants. The alarm was all belowstairs and had been started by a cook who, coming in late and going to the basement to prepare herself a cup of tea, had found her kitchen door locked and a light going beyond. Suspecting another maid of violating the tea canister she had gone soft-footed to the outside of the house and had distinctly seen a gray figure crouching in a corner of the room. She had called the butler, and they had made an examination of the entire basement without result. Nothing was missing from the house.
“And that figure has been seen again and again, miss,” Nora finished. “McKenna’s butler Joseph saw it in this very spot, walking without a sound and the street light beyond there shining straight through it. Over in the Smythe house the laundress, coming in late and going down to the basement to soak her clothes for the morning, met the thing on the basement staircase and fainted dead away.”
I had listened intently.
“What do they think it is?” I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders and picked up her tray.
“I’m not trying to say and I guess nobody is. But if there’s been a murder it’s pretty well known that the ghost walks about until the burial service is read and it’s properly buried.”
She glanced at the Reed house.
“For instance,” she demanded, “where is Mademoiselle?”
“She is alive,” I said rather sharply. “And even if what you say were true, what in the world would make her wander about the basements? It seems so silly, Nora, a ghost haunting damp cellars and laundries with stationary tubs and all that.”
“Well,” she contended, “it seems silly for them to sit on cold tombstones—and yet that’s where they generally sit, isn’t it?”