Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

Stillman laid a restraining hand on his arm. “No, you don’t; that’s breaking and entering. And I’m out of jurisdiction up here to begin with. We’ll have to go back and dig up the local law; maybe I can talk him into putting the seal of official approval on it. Let’s see if we can tell anything from the outside, first. I may be able to shine my torch in through one of the windows.”

He clicked it on, made a white puddle against the front of the house, walked slowly in the wake of that as it moved along until it leaped in through one of the black window embrasures. They both edged up until their noses were nearly pressed flat against the glass, trying to peer through. It wouldn’t work. The blinds were not down, but the closely webbed net curtains that hung down inside of the panes effectively parried its rays. They coursed slowly along the side of the house, trying it at window after window, each time with the same results.

Stillman turned away finally, but left his torch on. He splashed it up and down the short length of private dirt lane that ran beside the house, from the corrugated tin shack at the back that served Alden as a garage to the public highway in front. He motioned Bliss back as the latter started to step out onto it. “Stay off here a minute. I want to see if I can find out something from these tire prints their car left. See ’em?”

It would have been hard not to. The road past the house was macadamized, but there was a border of soft, powdery dust along the side of it, as with most rural roads. “I want to see if I can make out which way they turned,” Stillman explained, strewing his beam of light along them and following offside. “If they went in to the city, to offer their cooperation to us down there, that would take them off to the right; no other way they could turn from here. If they turned to the left, up that way, it was definitely a lam, and it changes the looks of things all around.”

The beam of his light, coursing along the prints like quicksilver in a channel, started to curve around toward the right as it followed them up out of sight on the hard-surfaced road. There was his answer.

He turned aimlessly back along them, light still on. He stopped parallel to the corner of the house, strengthened the beam’s focus by bringing the torch down closer to the ground. “Here’s something else,” Bliss heard him say. “Funny how you can notice every little thing in this fine floury dust. His front left tire had a patch on it, and a bad one, too. See it? You can tell just what they did. Alden evidently ran the car out of the shed alone, ahead of his wife. She got in here at the side of the house, to save time, instead of going out the front way; they were going down the road the other way, anyway. His wheel came to rest with the patch squarely under it. That’s why it shows so plain in this one place. Then he took his brake off and the car coasted back a little with the tilt of the ground. When he came forward again, the position of his wheel diverged a little, missed erasing its own former imprint. Bet they have trouble with that before the night’s over.”

He spoke as though it were just a trivial detail. But is anything, Bliss was to ask himself later, a trivial detail?

“Come on,” Stillman concluded, pocketing his light, “let’s go get the law and see what it looks like on the inside.”

The constable’s name was Cochrane, and they finally located him at his own home. “Evening,” Stillman introduced himself, “I’m Stillman of the city police. I was wondering if there’s some way we could get a look inside that Alden house. Their — er — stepdaughter has disappeared down in the city; she was supposed to have started for here, and this is just a routine check. Nothing against them. They seem to be out, and we have to make the next bus back.”

Cochrane plucked at his throat judiciously. “Well, now, I guess I can accommodate you, as long as it’s done in my presence. I’m the law around here, and if they’ve got nothing to hide, there’s no reason why they should object. I’ll drive ye back in my car. This feller here your subordinate, I s’pose?”

Stillman said, “Um,” noncommittally, favored Bliss with a nudge. The constable would have probably balked at letting a man already wanted by the police into these people’s house, they both knew, even if he was accompanied by a bona fide detective.

He stopped off at his office first to get a master key, came back with the remark: “This ought to do the trick.” They were back at the Alden place once more inside of ten minutes, all told, from the time they had first left it.

Cochrane favored them with a sly grimace as they got out and went up to the house. “I’m sort of glad you fellers asked me to do this, at that. Fact is, we’ve all been curious about them folks ourselves hereabouts for a long time past. Kind of unsociable; keep to themselves a lot. This is as good a time as any to see if they got any skeletons in the closet.”

Bliss shuddered involuntarily at the expression.

The constable’s master key opened the door without any great difficulty, and the three of them went in.

They looked in every room in the place from top to bottom, and in every closet of every room, and not one of the “skeletons” the constable had spoken of turned up, either allegorical or literal. There wasn’t anything out of the way, and nothing to show that anything had ever been out of the way, in this house.

In the basement, when they reached it, were a couple of sagging, half-empty bags of cement in one corner, and pinkish traces of brick dust and brick grit on the floor, but that was easily accounted for. “Left over from when he was putting up that wall along the roadside a while back, I guess,” murmured Cochrane.

They turned and went upstairs again. The only other discovery of any sort they made was not of a guilty nature, but simply an indication of how long ago the occupants had left. Stillman happened to knuckle a coffeepot standing on the kitchen range, and it was still faintly warm from the residue of liquid left in it.

“They must have only just left before we got here,” he said to Bliss. “Missed them just by minutes.”

“Funny; why did they wait until after dark to start on a long trip like that? Why didn’t they leave sooner?”

“That don’t convict them of anything, just the same,” Stillman maintained obdurately. “We haven’t turned up a shred of evidence that your wife ever saw the inside of this house. Don’t try to get around that.”

The local officer, meanwhile, had gone outside to put some water in his car. “Close the door good after you as you come out,” he called out to them.

They were already at the door, but Bliss unaccountably turned and went back inside again. When Stillman followed him a moment later, he was sitting there in the living-room raking his fingers perplexedly through his hair.

“Come on,” the detective said, as considerately as he could, “let’s get going. He’s waiting for us.”

Bliss looked up at him helplessly. “Don’t you get it? Doesn’t this room bother you?”

Stillman looked around vaguely. “No. In what way? What’s wrong with it? To me it seems clean, well kept, and comfortable. All you could ask for.”

“There’s something about it annoys me. I feel ill at ease in it. It’s not restful, for some reason. And I have a peculiar feeling that if I could figure out why it isn’t restful, it would help to partly clear up this mystery about Smiles.”

Stillman sliced the edge of his hand at him scornfully. “Now you’re beginning to talk plain crazy, Bliss. You say this room isn’t restful. The room has nothing to do with it. It’s you. You’re all tense, jittery, about your wife. Your nerves are on edge, frayed to the breaking point. That’s why the room don’t seem restful to you. Naturally it don’t. No room would.”