Somewhere in the House by Elizabeth Daly Page B

them used it.”
    â€œIt belongs up there in the sitting-room?”
    â€œYes. When Garth came in he looked for it on another table, where there’s a lamp and smoking materials.”
    â€œNone of them knew you were coming. Did they know who you were—that you’d be likely to know about a book of that kind?”
    â€œYes, in a general way.”
    â€œOne of them knew—the one that knew there was a strangled corpse upstairs, and that you’d be in on the discovery. That party hoped you hadn’t noticed the Cribb book, didn’t want you seeing it again and noticing it. So it was brought down here and put among all these other books, best place in the world to hide it.”
    â€œThe leaf in the forest?”
    â€œThat’s right. No questions asked at a time like this if it got mislaid for a few days. But if it had been got rid of after the Fitch murder—when was it made, do you know?”
    â€œYears before the room was sealed, before Mrs. Leeder was married.”
    â€œExactly. It had been sitting around the house for years, and if it had disappeared then it would have been missed and questions asked. This party had applied the Thug methods described in the book; didn’t know but that somebody else in the family might have read it. Better to leave it around as usual, no questions raised about it, nothing done to fix it in anybody’s mind. People like these Clayborns would forget all about it.
    â€œBut you were different. If you noticed it, good-night. You’d be pretty likely to know all about this Cribb, and these Thugs, and put two and two together, and draw the conclusions we’re drawing now. Your best friend couldn’t have been sure you’d see the Cribb book in this library today.”
    â€œNo.”
    Nordhall slapped his hand on the table. “By gum, Gamadge, you’re always useful.”
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œWho but you would have noticed the title of the thing in the first place, or known what Cribb wrote about, or seen it just now in that bookcase?”
    â€œLots of people.”
    â€œDon’t be meek, when you’re meek it always means you’re pleased with yourself.”
    â€œYou seem to be pleased with me.”
    â€œBecause you’ve placed the Fitch murder definitely in this house, and definitely in this family, and included Leeder.”
    â€œWhy should you ever have imagined that the Fitch murderer wasn’t inside the circle?”
    Nordhall laughed. “Ever hear of some people called Nagle?”
    â€œI have, yes.”
    â€œThey’re connections of the Clayborns. Fitch was related to Mrs. Clayborn, and Mrs. Nagle is Fitch’s own niece. Clayborn and Seward and Miss Clayborn have all had me aside to tell me all about these terrible no-good Nagles. They knew the house, they may have known that Fitch had her savings on her in negotiable form that day, she may have let them in by the back stairs.
    â€œI got hold of the Nagles.”
    â€œGood. How?”
    â€œClayborn got his full name for me out of his mother’s papers, Elbert T. Nagle. Being Sunday made it a little harder, but not much. Having his office address, we could send down and find the janitor of the building—it’s an old rat-hole of a place. He opened up, and we got Nagle’s home address, Jersey City. Nagle’s a kind of a theatrical agent in a small way, his office is a den in a suite. The Nagles will be along any time now.
    â€œI talked to him on the telephone. Sounds a wise kind of guy in a cheap-sport way. He’s going to identify the body, if you can call it identification—we got most of what we needed in that line from Miss Clayborn; clothes, so on. The interesting thing is that the Nagles didn’t make much of a fuss over Fitch’s disappearance. But they don’t interest me so much now, because they weren’t here yesterday and didn’t hide Cribb.
    â€œNow about