“I know. Don’t you love the way it sways?”
“No,” I said. “But there’s still never been a Mr. Cuttleford, bridge or no bridge, and…what are you laughing about?”
“I made it all up!”
“You did?”
“Oh, not about the ghost,” she said. “I know there’s a ghost, but nobody knows who it is or what he’s doing here. I made up all that part.”
“You got the initials right. Frederick Cuttleford and Ferdinand Cathcart.”
“I got that from Carolyn.”
“Huh?”
“I met her in the hall earlier,” she said, “and I guess she’s scared of ghosts, so I told her the ghost at this house was a friendly ghost.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t say his name was Casper.”
“I said his name was Colin,” she said, “because I like the name, and it goes nicely with Cuttleford, don’t you think? And she said she thought the man who built Cuttleford House was named Frederick, so when I told you the story-”
“You improved it.”
“Just to make it a better story. Anyway, that’s why I’m awake. How about you?”
“I was reading,” I said, “and I lost track of the time.”
“I bet you were looking for something to steal.”
Time to nip this in the bud. “You know,” I said, “it made a nice joke, Millicent, but it’s beginning to get a little tiresome. I was just kidding about being a burglar.”
“You were?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What are you really?”
“Well, I’m out of work at the moment,” I said. “I’m hoping something will turn up soon. In the meantime, I’ve sort of been helping Carolyn out at the Poodle Factory. What’s so funny?”
She had both hands over her mouth, smothering a laugh. “The Poodle Factory,” she sputtered. “A factory where they make poodles!”
“It’s just the name of her salon.”
“And you work there.”
“That’s right.”
“Just to help her out.”
Kids. Why on earth do people have them? “And to pass the time,” I said.
“And you’re not really a burglar.”
“Of course not.”
“And you don’t break into houses and steal things.”
“Gosh, no,” I said. “I’d be scared, for one thing. And it wouldn’t be right to take things that didn’t belong to me.”
She thought this over. Then she said, “You know how I made up the part about Frederick Cuttleford? Well, I think you made that up.”
“About being a burglar.”
“About not being a burglar,” she said. “You know what? I don’t believe you. I think you’re a burglar after all, no matter what you say.” And she flashed me a demonic smile and darted around the corner.
CHAPTER Eleven
The library, when I finally got to it, was dark. Someone had drawn the curtains and switched off the lights. I stood at the threshold, trying to determine the most natural way to go in there and get the book. I had packed a narrowbeam pocket flashlight, but I’d left it in my room (or our room, or Aunt Augusta’s, as you prefer). I could have gone upstairs to fetch it, but I’d had enough trouble already trying to find my way back to the library. I didn’t want to have to look for it again.
Besides, there was something impossibly furtive about skulking around with a flashlight. One transformed oneself into a bumbling burglar out of the Sunday comics, the sort always portrayed wearing a domino mask and carrying a burlap sack of swag over his shoulder.
Why bother? I was a paying guest at Cuttleford House, fully entitled to be there. In the absence of a posted curfew, I had every right to make use of the Great Library at any hour of the day. There was, in short, no need to skulk. I could stride manfully in, bold as any base metal, switch on all the lamps I wanted, mount the library steps, fetch the book I wanted, and take it back to my room. Moreover, I could do all of that without committing the merest infraction of the house rules, let alone the criminal code. I wouldn’t even risk arousing suspicion. I was a guest, I wanted something to read before going to sleep, and where better to find the book of my choice than the library?
I would have to be on my way back to New York with the book tucked away in my luggage before I’d have done anything that could provoke so much as a raised eyebrow.
Still, there were precautions to be taken. Somewhere down the line, when the book went under the hammer at Christie’s or Sotheby’s, say, the volume’s provenance would best be established by citing the Lester Harding Ross memoir, and anyone else could do as I had done, walking back the cat (as the counterspies call it) all the way to Ferdinand Cathcart’s little pleasure dome in the Berkshires. It would be just as well if no one was in a position to remember seeing one Bernard Rhodenbarr striding through the halls of Cuttleford House with The Big Sleep clutched to his bosom.
First things first. Get the book, in an unobtrusive fashion, and tuck it away for safekeeping. Then get it off the premises and get it home. Sit on it for a while, thrilling in its possession, and then figure out a good cover story-how it had been at the bottom of a sack of book club editions and Grosset reprints that someone walked in off the street with, how I’d grabbed it up along with a dozen other old books in a thrift shop in Staten Island, how it was part of a nondescript collection of volumes acquired at a garage sale somewhere in Nassau County. It wouldn’t be hard to tailor a story to fit the circumstances.
First, get the book.
And I was on my way. I was all set to enter the room, had in fact already extended one foot across the threshold, when I heard somebody talking.
I leaned forward and turned my head to aim an ear in the direction the sound had come from. It was impossible to make out, but someone was saying something, speaking in a hushed whisper at the far corner of the library from where I was standing. The very corner, in point of fact, where Raymond Chandler’s first novel reposed (or had when last I looked) on the uppermost shelf.
Rufus Quilp, muttering in his sleep? Not unless he’d moved from the site of his earlier slumber. I slipped a little deeper into the shadows and stopped trying to see in the darkness, which was plainly impossible. I closed my eyes entirely, with the thought that it might sharpen my hearing. It’s supposed to work for blind newsdealers, but I guess it takes years, because it had no immediate effect as far as I could tell. Just silence and murmuring and more silence and more murmuring.
More than one person. I was suddenly sure of that, because it seemed to me that one hushed whisper was responding to another hushed whisper. It remained impossible, though, to identify either whisperer, or to make out a word of what was being whispered.
Who could it be? The missing Miss Hardesty, two-timing poor Miss Dinmont and cuddling on the sofa with the upstairs maid? That rotter Dakin Littlefield, out from under the goosedown coverlet of his marriage bed and getting some sauce for the gander? Were these two even lovers at all, or were they conspirators planning…planning what? The overthrow of a Balkan government? It seemed to me that was what conspirators used to plan in English-country-house mysteries, and, now that there are once again Balkan governments begging to be overthrown, perhaps those people are back to their old tricks.
But what difference did it make what was being said or who was saying it? I’d already decided that I didn’t want to call attention to myself, and that meant I couldn’t barge in on their hush-hush conversation, switching on lamps and dashing up ladders. In fact it probably meant I shouldn’t be lurking in the doorway, just waiting to be found out and exposed for what I so obviously was, a despicable eavesdropper manqué.
I was frozen there, wanting to leave but wishing I could see who they were and hear what they were saying. Then, from out of nowhere, something came and brushed against my ankle.