Free Arrow Pointing Nowhere by Elizabeth Daly Page B

dog, we were all fond of him; he did no senseless barking. Had the run of the yard and lawn all day, but was kept indoors at night; his bed was in a lobby off the basement hall. One morning he was found with his head crushed, in the gutter opposite the service door; you know it? Door in the wall.”
    Gamadge nodded.
    â€œEverybody said he’d been struck by a car, and everybody thought that old Phillips had forgotten to lock him in the night before, and had also left the service door open. He’s as likely, by the way, to leave the front door open; but there seemed no other explanation, and Phillips didn’t defend himself from the imputation with any great violence; he’d scorn to. He denied it, and that was the end of that.
    â€œI must now explain that my room is a northwest one, on the top floor. Craddock has the northeast corner, and there are a bath and a long clothes closet between us. I’m in the habit of sitting up late to read, and one night, about a year ago, I sat up unconscionably late over a good book. When I opened my west window—it overlooks the yard, and I seldom do open it at night, I don’t like to be waked by milkmen and the rest of it—I saw an exodus. Don’t ask me who it was that flitted through the service door; the yard is as dark as pitch in the dim-out.
    â€œWell; I’ve already said that I mind my own business, and I’m not the man to lose sleep spying out of a window. I made a few eliminations, of course; the servants? You should see them; their midnight excursions—after-midnight excursions, it was two o’clock—have long ceased. Burglar? We have an alarm, which must have been switched off indoors. The possibilities reduced themselves to young Craddock and Mrs. Grove.
    â€œI dismissed Mrs. Grove as unlikely in the highest degree. I did not knock on the communicating door to Craddock’s room; first because he was not then—is not yet, in fact—a well man, and I didn’t care to risk waking him; next, because I rather sympathized with him. His must be a dull, a deadly life; I didn’t find it in my heart to grudge him a little irregular amusement.
    â€œNext morning I thought of the dog; ugly, very ugly, but a conjecture. Should I, on the strength of the conjecture, talk to Blake, upset him fearfully, upset Belle Fenway and Mrs. Grove, enrage Craddock to the point of making him throw up the job?
    â€œWe know nothing about him, of course, except what Mrs. Grove has told us—that he comes of decent people and had a newspaper job in China. He’s fond of Hilda, but Blake rather quashed that; the boy is in no position to support a wife, Hilda Grove isn’t trained to support herself, and even Blake didn’t see his way to supporting a war bride; Craddock will be in one or other of the services, of course, as soon as he’s able. Blake suggested that a recognized affair would be, as things were and are, no advantage to the girl; and I must say that she herself seems quite passive in the matter.
    â€œCraddock has been a godsend to those two women—Mrs. Grove and Belle Fenway; he got them home—with Belle injured and Alden a dead weight, got them through all the hardships of a frightful voyage, and is now supposedly the person best qualified to look after Alden as Belle wants him looked after—tactfully, discreetly, and so on. He’s a treasure. They’d fight me tooth and nail if I made trouble for him. I didn’t do anything about it, and no doubt that fact is enough to explain my present circumstances and myself.”
    Mott sat back in his chair and got out a cigarette. “But now the case is altered. Whether or not Craddock killed the dog, his excursions at night (I suppose there were more than one) prove that he’s not to be trusted; they also indicate that he’s capable of neglecting his job in other ways. Caroline and I think that the view of Fenbrook was torn out of