ANNA KATHERINE GREEN Ultimate Collection: Amelia Butterworth Series, Detective Ebenezer Gryce Mysteries, The Cases of Violet Strange, Caleb Sweetwater Trilogy & Other Mysteries E-Book
Anna Katharine Green
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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
In her comprehensive anthology, "ANNA KATHERINE GREEN Ultimate Collection," Anna Katharine Green masterfully weaves together the intricate plots and compelling characters of her most celebrated works, including the Amelia Butterworth series and the Detective Ebenezer Gryce mysteries. Renowned for her pioneering contributions to the mystery genre, Green employs a keen eye for detail and a sophisticated narrative style that blends deductive reasoning with rich character development. The collection not only showcases her procedural acumen in crime fiction but also reflects the evolving societal norms of Victorian America, exploring themes of justice, morality, and the complexities of human nature across diverse narratives. Anna Katharine Green, often hailed as the Mother of the Detective Novel, emerged in a literary landscape dominated by male writers. Her groundbreaking integration of female protagonists and her emphasis on psychological depth in crime-solving can be traced to her own experiences as a New York socialite who sought to navigate a male-dominated world. Green's innovative approach influenced many future writers in the genre and established her as a catalyst for the representation of women in literature. This ultimate collection is essential for any reader who appreciates the foundations of detective fiction or seeks to understand the transformative role of women in literature. Green's masterful storytelling not only entertains but also invites readers to engage with the moral intricacies of her characters' lives, making this anthology a timeless treasure for mystery enthusiasts. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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ANNA KATHERINE GREEN Ultimate Collection: Amelia Butterworth Series, Detective Ebenezer Gryce Mysteries, The Cases of Violet Strange, Caleb Sweetwater Trilogy & Other Mysteries
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume assembles a far-reaching survey of Anna Katharine Green’s detective and mystery fiction, bringing together her celebrated cycles and notable stand-alone works in a single, accessible collection. It presents the Amelia Butterworth novels alongside the broader sequence of cases involving professional investigators and gifted amateurs, the Violet Strange stories, and the Caleb Sweetwater trilogy, as well as other mysteries and novellas. By gathering these works under one cover, the collection invites readers to follow Green’s sustained exploration of crime, motive, and justice, and to appreciate her range—from society-set investigations to courtroom-centered narratives—across multiple decades of innovative storytelling.
The contents span full-length detective and mystery novels and several collections of short stories. Readers will find intricately plotted narratives such as The Leavenworth Case, Hand and Ring, The Forsaken Inn, The Filigree Ball, The House of the Whispering Pines, Initials Only, Dark Hollow, and The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow, complemented by shorter casebooks. The story collections—The Old Stone House and Other Stories, A Difficult Problem and Other Stories, Room Number 3, and Other Detective Stories, and The Golden Slipper, and Other Problems for Violet Strange—show Green working at a brisker scale. The inclusion of The Sword of Damocles highlights her engagement with sensation and domestic suspense within a broader mystery frame.
A defining feature of this collection is the presence of recurring investigators whose methods and temperaments shape the tone of their cases. Amelia Butterworth, introduced in That Affair Next Door and continued in Lost Man’s Lane and The Circular Study, offers a discerning society observer’s perspective. Ebenezer Gryce, a seasoned police detective, anchors several novels, including early and later investigations that chart shifting techniques and expectations. The Violet Strange stories present a young woman navigating social spaces while solving discreet problems. Caleb Sweetwater appears across a cohesive trilogy gathered here, often intersecting with established investigative circles and illuminating Green’s interest in continuity across novels.
Viewed together, these works reveal enduring preoccupations with the intersection of private lives and public consequence. Green repeatedly probes households, neighborhoods, and institutions where reputation, inheritance, and secrecy exert powerful pressure. Her investigations highlight witness testimony, physical traces, and the slow accretion of circumstantial detail, situating crime within recognizable urban and domestic settings. Moral questions surface not only in legal outcomes but also in the negotiations of class, gender, and social expectation. Throughout, the narratives balance sensation and restraint: shocks are grounded in everyday spaces, and dramatic turns follow logical foundations, emphasizing accountability and the human costs surrounding violent acts.
Green’s stylistic signatures include meticulous plotting, careful distribution of clues, and a strong sense of procedural patience. She favors structured interrogations, pivotal inquests, and the reexamination of scenes where apparently minor details accrue major significance. Multiple viewpoints—amateurs, officials, and interested bystanders—allow the reader to triangulate evidence and motive. Settings range from city streets and boardinghouses to inns and suburban lanes, underscoring how mystery permeates both public and private domains. Shifts in tempo—from steady deduction to sudden revelation—preserve narrative tension while affirming that solutions arise from attentive reading, consistent characterization, and a disciplined regard for cause and effect.
Collectively, these texts document an early and influential American approach to detective fiction, illustrating how recurring sleuths, the interplay of professional and amateur inquiry, and the centrality of evidence could sustain long-form narratives and linked sequences. Green’s novels and stories helped define expectations for puzzle construction, investigative procedure, and the integration of social observation within crime fiction. Her women investigators—whether leading inquiries or reshaping them—broaden the field of detection and anticipate later developments in the genre. The result is a body of work that remains instructive for its craft and resonant for its nuanced attention to motives within their cultural setting.
Readers may choose multiple pathways through this collection: follow the Amelia Butterworth sequence from That Affair Next Door to its subsequent installments, trace a selection of Ebenezer Gryce investigations across different periods, explore the cohesive arc of the Caleb Sweetwater trilogy, or sample the short stories to encounter Green’s compressed puzzles and character sketches. The stand-alone novels reward attention to shifting tones—from sensation to courtroom drama—while the story collections offer swift studies in motive and method. However one proceeds, the volume provides a comprehensive context for appreciating Green’s versatility, inviting both discovery and reconsideration of foundational works in American mystery fiction.
Historical Context
Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935), born in Brooklyn and later long resident in Buffalo, wrote American detective fiction across the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Trained informally by her father, the New York lawyer James Wilson Green, she grounded mysteries in procedure and statute. Her debut, The Leavenworth Case (1878), introduced Detective Ebenezer Gryce and made a sensation with G. P. Putnam’s Sons, years before Sherlock Holmes (1887). Subsequent cycles—Amelia Butterworth’s amateur investigations, the energetic Caleb Sweetwater’s cases, and Violet Strange’s assignments—trace changing urban manners from parlors to precincts. Marrying actor-turned–Arts and Crafts designer Charles Rohlfs in 1884, she balanced theatrical pacing with meticulous legalism.
Her New York is the capital of the Gilded Age: Fifth Avenue brownstones, hotel suites, boardinghouses, and downtown offices connected by ferries, streetcars, and the elevated railway, later by the subway (1904). The period’s volatile fortunes—trusts, speculative booms, and panics in 1873, 1893, and 1907—animate motives of inheritance, embezzlement, and social climbing that recur across her novels. Tammany Hall’s patronage culture and the city’s expanding bureaucracy shadow police work and municipal politics. Sensational newspapers under Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst amplify scandal, making trials public theater. In such a milieu, wills, codicils, and secret marriages become credible engines of plot and evidence.
Green wrote amid the professionalization of American policing and forensic science. The NYPD modernized in the 1890s; Bertillon anthropometry and, by the first decade of the twentieth century, fingerprint files supplemented rogues’ galleries and mug shots. Coroners’ inquests, expert toxicologists, and handwriting examiners moved from eccentric novelties to courtroom mainstays. Gryce’s methodical note-taking, Sweetwater’s legwork, and the careful recovery of footprints, stains, and threads mirror real reforms codified in New York’s 1881 Code of Criminal Procedure and refined through appellate decisions. Courtroom climaxes, whether in city chambers or upstate courthouses, reflect the era’s faith that material traces could decisively speak.
Gender and authority form a second historical frame. The married women’s property reforms in New York (1848, 1860) and the clubwomen’s movement opened paths for female agency well before national woman suffrage in 1920. Amelia Butterworth’s debut in That Affair Next Door (1897) and the society-girl detective Violet Strange in The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange (1915) embody the 1890s–1910s New Woman: educated, observant, and mobile within genteel spaces from drawing rooms to museums. Her fiction tests the boundaries of propriety, showing women as witnesses, defendants, and investigators whose social intelligence accesses corridors closed to uniformed men.
Green’s craft evolved within transatlantic literary debates about the detective story’s rules. She learned from Edgar Allan Poe and Émile Gaboriau, conversed implicitly with Wilkie Collins’s sensation fiction, and then watched Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes redefine detection after 1887. Unlike magazine serials built around a single superstar sleuth, her cycles interlock: Gryce mentors younger operatives; amateurs cross paths with professionals. Putnam’s New York lists carried her into libraries and circulating clubs as cheap editions multiplied, especially after the 1891 International Copyright Act stabilized American publishing. The result is a body of work that weds puzzle-plot ingenuity to American municipal realism.
Although Manhattan dominates, Green’s geography ranges across New York State and New England, mapping commuter suburbs, river towns, and isolated inns accessible by railroad timetable. The architecture of American prosperity—brownstones with back staircases, hotels with concealed corridors, country houses set amid whispering groves—functions as machinery for secrecy. Urban innovation reshapes movement and alibis: elevated platforms, the new Grand Central (opened 1871; rebuilt 1913), and the subway’s local–express patterns complicate timelines. Economic dislocation after 1893 and again in 1907 makes debt, insurance, and speculation believable motives, while reform campaigns against gambling and vice tighten the moral atmosphere of her plots.
Immigration and social diversity texture her cast lists. Irish and German domestics, new Italian street sellers, and clerks from immigrant neighborhoods appear as witnesses or suspects, observed through the upstairs–downstairs lens of late nineteenth-century service households. Philanthropy and social work, from the Charity Organization Society to settlement houses such as Lillian Wald’s Henry Street (1893), offer both settings and motives, as benefactors and beneficiaries collide. Temperance advocacy and Sabbath reform supply background conflicts. Green’s handling of class-coded speech, forged respectability, and the circulation of gossip acknowledges how reputations were made and unmade in a city where anonymity and notoriety coexisted.
In the 1910s her fiction intersects Progressive Era institutions and World War I anxieties: museum culture expanding at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (major additions 1902–1910), new corporate trusts, and a public newly attuned to scientific certainty yet haunted by spiritualism. Titles from Initials Only (1911) to The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow (1917) show the shift from gaslight to electric light, from parlor to public gallery. By sustaining Ebenezer Gryce while elevating Amelia Butterworth, Caleb Sweetwater, and Violet Strange, Green bridged Reconstruction to the jazz age, shaping conventions—fair clueing, series continuity, and legal exactitude—that nourished the later Golden Age.
Synopsis (Selection)
That Affair Next Door
Spinster sleuth Amelia Butterworth witnesses suspicious activity at a neighbor’s New York townhouse and, in a wary partnership with Detective Ebenezer Gryce, untangles a society murder through footprints, alibis, and hidden ties.
Lost Man's Lane: A Second Episode in the Life of Amelia Butterworth
While visiting friends, Amelia probes a series of disappearances along a quiet suburban lane where propriety conceals predatory danger.
The Circular Study
A corpse found in a strangely arranged study and cryptic papers draw Amelia and Gryce into a case rooted in coded clues and family estrangement.
The Leavenworth Case
The patriarch of a wealthy household is murdered in his library, and conflicting testimony, a contested will, and a secret attachment drive a landmark Gilded Age whodunit.
A Strange Disappearance
The vanishing of a maid from a millionaire’s home leads Gryce into an inquiry that crosses class lines and exposes a concealed crime.
X Y Z: A Detective Story
Anonymous letters signed 'X Y Z' pull investigators into a tangle of veiled identities and a high‑stakes scheme that turns on deciphered correspondence.
Hand and Ring
A sensational murder and the clues of a ring and distinctive handwriting draw Gryce through a web of ambition, jealousy, and long‑buried resentment.
The Mill Mystery
A suspicious death tied to a prosperous mill sparks questions of inheritance and motive in a tightly knit community, where small details prove decisive.
The Forsaken Inn
A decades‑old secret from a wedding night at an old inn resurfaces when human remains are discovered, revealing a marriage built on deception.
Cynthia Wakeham’s Money
A sudden inheritance in a New England village breeds envy and calculation, culminating in a crime unraveled through domestic observation and motive.
Agatha Webb
Beloved matron Agatha Webb and her servant are found slain, and the investigation exposes hidden sins among outwardly respectable citizens.
One of My Sons
A dying man’s accusation points to his own sons, forcing a probe of family loyalties, rivalries, and the pressures of wealth and expectation.
The Filigree Ball
A lavish society wedding in a historic mansion ends in tragedy, and a delicate ornament and puzzling architecture become keys to the mystery.
The Millionaire Baby
The infant child of a wealthy couple disappears from a public park, pitting maternal intuition and neighborhood secrets against public scrutiny.
The Chief Legatee’
A contested will names a chief legatee and ignites intrigue, impersonation, and a fatal struggle over fortune and identity.
The Woman in the Alcove
During a grand wedding, a young nurse discovers a dead woman and missing diamonds in an alcove, drawing her into a case of jealousy and theft.
The Mayor’s Wife
In a politically charged small city, a new mayor’s marriage conceals private scandal, and careful observation uncovers blackmail and betrayal.
The House of the Whispering Pines
A murder in a shuttered lodge infamous for eerie whispers leads to a courtroom battle and patient detection that separates rumor from fact.
Three Thousand Dollars
The appearance and disappearance of a $3,000 sum set off suspicion and moral testing, revealing a quiet crime hidden in plain sight.
Initials Only
A sudden death in a public place leaves only monogrammed clues and a pattern of obsession for the detectives to trace to its source.
Dark Hollow
A rural community guards a secreted hollow and darker histories, culminating in a puzzling death that demands both psychological and physical clues.
The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow
In a museum gallery, a young woman is killed by an arrow apparently shot from nowhere; methodical scrutiny of space, opportunity, and motive breaks the case.
The Sword of Damocles: A Story of New York Life
A tale of inheritance, identity, and moral choice in Gilded Age New York, where an ominous foreboding hangs over a young woman’s future.
The Old Stone House and Other Stories
Early tales that blend domestic drama with eerie or moral puzzles, often hinging on a single telling clue or late confession.
A Difficult Problem and Other Stories
Compact mysteries built around paradoxical setups and ethical dilemmas, showcasing twist‑driven plots and crisp deduction.
Room Number 3, and Other Detective Stories
Case‑book style detective stories featuring enigmatic rooms, anonymous notes, and everyday settings that conceal calculated crimes.
The Golden Slipper, and Other Problems for Violet Strange
Society debutante Violet Strange discreetly solves cases among New York’s elite, using charm and insight to expose blackmail, theft, and hidden wrongdoing.
ANNA KATHERINE GREEN Ultimate Collection: Amelia Butterworth Series, Detective Ebenezer Gryce Mysteries, The Cases of Violet Strange, Caleb Sweetwater Trilogy & Other Mysteries
Amelia Butterworth Series:
That Affair Next Door
Book I. Miss Butterworth’s Window
Chapter I. A Discovery
I am not an inquisitive woman, but when, in the middle of a certain warm night in September, I heard a carriage draw up at the adjoining house and stop, I could not resist the temptation of leaving my bed and taking a peep through the curtains of my window.
First: because the house was empty, or supposed to be so, the family still being, as I had every reason to believe, in Europe; and secondly: because, not being inquisitive, I often miss in my lonely and single life much that it would be both interesting and profitable for me to know.
Luckily I made no such mistake this evening. I rose and looked out, and though I was far from realizing it at the time, took, by so doing, my first step in a course of inquiry which has ended——
But it is too soon to speak of the end. Rather let me tell you what I saw when I parted the curtains of my window in Gramercy Park, on the night of September 17, 1895.
Not much at first glance, only a common hack drawn up at the neighboring curb-stone. The lamp which is supposed to light our part of the block is some rods away on the opposite side of the street, so that I obtained but a shadowy glimpse of a young man and woman standing below me on the pavement. I could see, however, that the woman—and not the man—was putting money into the driver’s hand. The next moment they were on the stoop of this long-closed house, and the coach rolled off.
It was dark, as I have said, and I did not recognize the young people,—at least their figures were not familiar to me; but when, in another instant, I heard the click of a night-key, and saw them, after a rather tedious fumbling at the lock, disappear from the stoop, I took it for granted that the gentleman was Mr. Van Burnam’s eldest son Franklin, and the lady some relative of the family; though why this, its most punctilious member, should bring a guest at so late an hour into a house devoid of everything necessary to make the least exacting visitor comfortable, was a mystery that I retired to bed to meditate upon.
I did not succeed in solving it, however, and after some ten minutes had elapsed, I was settling myself again to sleep when I was re-aroused by a fresh sound from the quarter mentioned. The door I had so lately heard shut, opened again, and though I had to rush for it, I succeeded in getting to my window in time to catch a glimpse of the departing figure of the young man hurrying away towards Broadway. The young woman was not with him, and as I realized that he had left her behind him in the great, empty house, without apparent light and certainly without any companion, I began to question if this was like Franklin Van Burnam. Was it not more in keeping with the recklessness of his more easy-natured and less reliable brother, Howard, who, some two or three years back, had married a young wife of no very satisfactory antecedents, and who, as I had heard, had been ostracized by the family in consequence?
Whichever of the two it was, he had certainly shown but little consideration for his companion, and thus thinking, I fell off to sleep just as the clock struck the half hour after midnight.
Next morning as soon as modesty would permit me to approach the window, I surveyed the neighboring house minutely. Not a blind was open, nor a shutter displaced. As I am an early riser, this did not disturb me at the time, but when after breakfast I looked again and still failed to detect any evidences of life in the great barren front beside me, I began to feel uneasy. But I did nothing till noon, when going into my rear garden and observing that the back windows of the Van Burnam house were as closely shuttered as the front, I became so anxious that I stopped the next policeman I saw going by, and telling him my suspicions, urged him to ring the bell.
No answer followed the summons.
“There is no one here,” said he.
“Ring again!” I begged.
And he rang again but with no better result.
“Don’t you see that the house is shut up?” he grumbled. “We have had orders to watch the place, but none to take the watch off.”
“There is a young woman inside,” I insisted. “The more I think over last night’s occurrence, the more I am convinced that the matter should be looked into.”
He shrugged his shoulders and was moving away when we both observed a common-looking woman standing in front looking at us. She had a bundle in her hand, and her face, unnaturally ruddy though it was, had a scared look which was all the more remarkable from the fact that it was one of those wooden-like countenances which under ordinary circumstances are capable of but little expression. She was not a stranger to me; that is, I had seen her before in or about the house in which we were at that moment so interested; and not stopping to put any curb on my excitement, I rushed down to the pavement and accosted her.
“Who are you?” I asked. “Do you work for the Van Burnams, and do you know who the lady was who came here last night?”
The poor woman, either startled by my sudden address or by my manner which may have been a little sharp, gave a quick bound backward, and was only deterred by the near presence of the policeman from attempting flight. As it was, she stood her ground, though the fiery flush, which made her face so noticeable, deepened till her cheeks and brow were scarlet.
“I am the scrub-woman,” she protested. “I have come to open the windows and air the house,”—ignoring my last question.
“Is the family coming home?” the policeman asked.
“I don’t know; I think so,” was her weak reply.
“Have you the keys?” I now demanded, seeing her fumbling in her pocket.
She did not answer; a sly look displaced the anxious one she had hitherto displayed, and she turned away.
“I don’t see what business it is of the neighbors,” she muttered, throwing me a dissatisfied scowl over her shoulder.
“If you’ve got the keys, we will go in and see that things are all right,” said the policeman, stopping her with a light touch.
She trembled; I saw that she trembled, and naturally became excited. Something was wrong in the Van Burnam mansion, and I was going to be present at its discovery. But her next words cut my hopes short.
“I have no objection to your going in,” she said to the policeman, “but I will not give up my keys to her. What right has she in our house any way.” And I thought I heard her murmur something about a meddlesome old maid.
The look which I received from the policeman convinced me that my ears had not played me false.
“The lady’s right,” he declared; and pushing by me quite disrespectfully, he led the way to the basement door, into which he and the so-called cleaner presently disappeared.
I waited in front. I felt it to be my duty to do so. The various passers-by stopped an instant to stare at me before proceeding on their way, but I did not flinch from my post. Not till I had heard that the young woman whom I had seen enter these doors at midnight was well, and that her delay in opening the windows was entirely due to fashionable laziness, would I feel justified in returning to my own home and its affairs. But it took patience and some courage to remain there. Several minutes elapsed before I perceived the shutters in the third story open, and a still longer time before a window on the second floor flew up and the policeman looked out, only to meet my inquiring gaze and rapidly disappear again.
Meantime three or four persons had stopped on the walk near me, the nucleus of a crowd which would not be long in collecting, and I was beginning to feel I was paying dearly for my virtuous resolution, when the front door burst violently open and we caught sight of the trembling form and shocked face of the scrub-woman.
“She’s dead!” she cried, “she’s dead! Murder!” and would have said more had not the policeman pulled her back, with a growl which sounded very much like a suppressed oath.
He would have shut the door upon me had I not been quicker than lightning. As it was, I got in before it slammed, and happily too; for just at that moment the house-cleaner, who had grown paler every instant, fell in a heap in the entry, and the policeman, who was not the man I would want about me in any trouble, seemed somewhat embarrassed by this new emergency, and let me lift the poor thing up and drag her farther into the hall.
She had fainted, and should have had something done for her, but anxious though I always am to be of help where help is needed, I had no sooner got within range of the parlor door with my burden, than I beheld a sight so terrifying that I involuntarily let the poor woman slip from my arms to the floor.
In the darkness of a dim corner (for the room had no light save that which came through the doorway where I stood) lay the form of a woman under a fallen piece of furniture. Her skirts and distended arms alone were visible; but no one who saw the rigid outlines of her limbs could doubt for a moment that she was dead.
At a sight so dreadful, and, in spite of all my apprehensions, so unexpected, I felt a sensation of sickness which in another moment might have ended in my fainting also, if I had not realized that it would never do for me to lose my wits in the presence of a man who had none too many of his own. So I shook off my momentary weakness, and turning to the policeman, who was hesitating between the unconscious figure of the woman outside the door and the dead form of the one within I cried sharply:
“Come, man, to business! The woman inside there is dead, but this one is living. Fetch me a pitcher of water from below if you can, and then go for whatever assistance you need. I’ll wait here and bring this woman to. She is a strong one, and it won’t take long.”
“You’ll stay here alone with that——” he began.
But I stopped him with a look of disdain.
“Of course I will stay here; why not? Is there anything in the dead to be afraid of? Save me from the living, and I undertake to save myself from the dead.”
But his face had grown very suspicious.
“You go for the water,” he cried. “And see here! Just call out for some one to telephone to Police Headquarters for the Coroner and a detective. I don’t quit this room till one or the other of them comes.”
Smiling at a caution so very ill-timed, but abiding by my invariable rule of never arguing with a man unless I see some way of getting the better of him, I did what he bade me, though I hated dreadfully to leave the spot and its woful mystery, even for so short a time as was required.
“Run up to the second story,” he called out, as I passed by the prostrate figure of the cleaner. “Tell them what you want from the window, or we will have the whole street in here.”
So I ran up-stairs,—I had always wished to visit this house, but had never been encouraged to do so by the Misses Van Burnam,—and making my way into the front room, the door of which stood wide open, I rushed to the window and hailed the crowd, which by this time extended far out beyond the curb-stone.
“An officer!” I called out, “a police officer! An accident has occurred and the man in charge here wants the Coroner and a detective from Police Headquarters.”
“Who’s hurt?” “Is it a man?” “Is it a woman?” shouted up one or two; and “Let us in!” shouted others; but the sight of a boy rushing off to meet an advancing policeman satisfied me that help would soon be forthcoming, so I drew in my head and looked about me for the next necessity—water.
I was in a lady’s bed-chamber, probably that of the eldest Miss Van Burnam; but it was a bed-chamber which had not been occupied for some months, and naturally it lacked the very articles which would have been of assistance to me in the present emergency. No eau de Cologne on the bureau, no camphor on the mantel-shelf. But there was water in the pipes (something I had hardly hoped for), and a mug on the wash-stand; so I filled the mug and ran with it to the door, stumbling, as I did so, over some small object which I presently perceived to be a little round pin-cushion. Picking it up, for I hate anything like disorder, I placed it on a table near by, and continued on my way.
The woman was still lying at the foot of the stairs. I dashed the water in her face and she immediately came to.
Sitting up, she was about to open her lips when she checked herself; a fact which struck me as odd, though I did not allow my surprise to become apparent.
Meantime I stole a glance into the parlor. The officer was standing where I had left him, looking down on the prostrate figure before him.
There was no sign of feeling in his heavy countenance, and he had not opened a shutter, nor, so far as I could see, disarranged an object in the room.
The mysterious character of the whole affair fascinated me in spite of myself, and leaving the now fully aroused woman in the hall, I was half-way across the parlor floor when the latter stopped me with a shrill cry:
“Don’t leave me! I have never seen anything before so horrible. The poor dear! The poor dear! Why don’t he take those dreadful things off her?”
She alluded not only to the piece of furniture which had fallen upon the prostrate woman, and which can best be described as a cabinet with closets below and shelves above, but to the various articles of bric-à-brac which had tumbled from the shelves, and which now lay in broken pieces about her.
“He will do so; they will do so very soon,” I replied. “He is waiting for some one with more authority than himself; for the Coroner, if you know what that means.”
“But what if she’s alive! Those things will crush her. Let us take them off. I’ll help. I’m not too weak to help.”
“Do you know who this person is?” I asked, for her voice had more feeling in it than I thought natural to the occasion, dreadful as it was.
“I?” she repeated, her weak eyelids quivering for a moment as she tried to sustain my scrutiny. “How should I know? I came in with the policeman and haven’t been any nearer than I now be. What makes you think I know anything about her? I’m only the scrub-woman, and don’t even know the names of the family.”
“I thought you seemed so very anxious,” I explained, suspicious of her suspiciousness, which was of so sly and emphatic a character that it changed her whole bearing from one of fear to one of cunning in a moment.
“And who wouldn’t feel the like of that for a poor creature lying crushed under a heap of broken crockery!”
Crockery! those Japanese vases worth hundreds of dollars! that ormulu clock and those Dresden figures which must have been more than a couple of centuries old!
“It’s a poor sense of duty that keeps a man standing dumb and staring like that, when with a lift of his hand he could show us the like of her pretty face, and if it’s dead she be or alive.”
As this burst of indignation was natural enough and not altogether uncalled for from the standpoint of humanity, I gave the woman a nod of approval, and wished I were a man myself that I might lift the heavy cabinet or whatever it was that lay upon the poor creature before us. But not being a man, and not judging it wise to irritate the one representative of that sex then present, I made no remark, but only took a few steps farther into the room, followed, as it afterwards appeared, by the scrub-woman.
The Van Burnam parlors are separated by an open arch. It was to the right of this arch and in the corner opposite the doorway that the dead woman lay. Using my eyes, now that I was somewhat accustomed to the semi-darkness enveloping us, I noticed two or three facts which had hitherto escaped me. One was, that she lay on her back with her feet pointing towards the hall door, and another, that nowhere in the room, save in her immediate vicinity, were there to be seen any signs of struggle or disorder. All was as set and proper as in my own parlor when it has been undisturbed for any length of time by guests; and though I could not see far into the rooms beyond, they were to all appearance in an equally orderly condition.
Meanwhile the cleaner was trying to account for the overturned cabinet.
“Poor dear! poor dear! she must have pulled it over on herself! But however did she get into the house? And what was she doing in this great empty place?”
The policeman, to whom these remarks had evidently been addressed, growled out some unintelligible reply, and in her perplexity the woman turned towards me.
But what could I say to her? I had my own private knowledge of the matter, but she was not one to confide in, so I stoically shook my head. Doubly disappointed, the poor thing shrank back, after looking first at the policeman and then at me in an odd, appealing way, difficult to understand. Then her eyes fell again on the dead girl at her feet, and being nearer now than before, she evidently saw something that startled her, for she sank on her knees with a little cry and began examining the girl’s skirts.
“What are you looking at there?” growled the policeman. “Get up, can’t you! No one but the Coroner has right to lay hand on anything here.”
“I’m doing no harm,” the woman protested, in an odd, shaking voice. “I only wanted to see what the poor thing had on. Some blue stuff, isn’t it?” she asked me.
“Blue serge,” I answered; “store-made, but very good; must have come from Altman’s or Stern’s.”
“I—I’m not used to sights like this,” stammered the scrub-woman, stumbling awkwardly to her feet, and looking as if her few remaining wits had followed the rest on an endless vacation. “I—I think I shall have to go home.” But she did not move.
“The poor dear’s young, isn’t she?” she presently insinuated, with an odd catch in her voice that gave to the question an air of hesitation and doubt.
“I think she is younger than either you or myself,” I deigned to reply. “Her narrow pointed shoes show she has not reached the years of discretion.”
“Yes, yes, so they do!” ejaculated the cleaner, eagerly—too eagerly for perfect ingenuousness. “That’s why I said ‘Poor dear!’ and spoke of her pretty face. I am sorry for young folks when they get into trouble, aint you? You and me might lie here and no one be much the worse for it, but a sweet lady like this——”
This was not very flattering to me, but I was prevented from rebuking her by a prolonged shout from the stoop without, as a rush was made against the front door, followed by a shrill peal of the bell.
“Man from Headquarters,” stolidly announced the policeman. “Open the door, ma’am; or step back into the further hall if you want me to do it.”
Such rudeness was uncalled for; but considering myself too important a witness to show feeling, I swallowed my indignation and proceeded with all my native dignity to the front door.
Chapter II. Questions
As I did so, I could catch the murmur of the crowd outside as it seethed forward at the first intimation of the door being opened; but my attention was not so distracted by it, loud as it sounded after the quiet of the shut-up house, that I failed to notice that the door had not been locked by the gentleman leaving the night before, and that, consequently, only the night latch was on. With a turn of the knob it opened, showing me the mob of shouting boys and the forms of two gentlemen awaiting admittance on the door-step. I frowned at the mob and smiled on the gentlemen, one of whom was portly and easy-going in appearance, and the other spare, with a touch of severity in his aspect. But for some reason these gentlemen did not seem to appreciate the honor I had done them, for they both gave me a displeased glance, which was so odd and unsympathetic in its character that I bridled a little, though I soon returned to my natural manner. Did they realize at the first glance that I was destined to prove a thorn in the sides of every one connected with this matter, for days to come?
“Are you the woman who called from the window?” asked the larger of the two, whose business here I found it difficult at first to determine.
“I am,” was my perfectly self-possessed reply. “I live next door and my presence here is due to the anxious interest I always take in my neighbors. I had reason to think that all was not as it should be in this house, and I was right. Look in the parlor, sirs.”
They were already as far as the threshold of that room and needed no further encouragement to enter. The heavier man went first and the other followed, and you may be sure I was not far behind. The sight meeting our eyes was ghastly enough, as you know; but these men were evidently accustomed to ghastly sights, for they showed but little emotion.
“I thought this house was empty,” observed the second gentleman, who was evidently a doctor.
“So it was till last night,” I put in; and was about to tell my story, when I felt my skirts jerked.
Turning, I found that this warning had come from the cleaner who stood close beside me.
“What do you want?” I asked, not understanding her and having nothing to conceal.
“I?” she faltered, with a frightened air. “Nothing, ma’am, nothing.”
“Then don’t interrupt me,” I harshly admonished her, annoyed at an interference that tended to throw suspicion upon my candor. “This woman came here to scrub and clean,” I now explained; “it was by means of the key she carried that we were enabled to get into the house. I never spoke to her till a half hour ago.”
At which, with a display of subtlety I was far from expecting in one of her appearance, she let her emotions take a fresh direction, and pointing towards the dead woman, she impetuously cried:
“But the poor child there! Aint you going to take those things off of her? It’s wicked to leave her under all that stuff. Suppose there was life in her!”
“Oh! there’s no hope of that,” muttered the doctor, lifting one of the hands, and letting it fall again.
“Still—” he cast a side look at his companion, who gave him a meaning nod—“it might be well enough to lift this cabinet sufficiently for me to lay my hand on her heart.”
They accordingly did this; and the doctor, leaning down, placed his hand over the poor bruised breast.
“No life,” he murmured. “She has been dead some hours. Do you think we had better release the head?” he went on, glancing up at the portly man at his side.
But the latter, who was rapidly growing serious, made a slight protest with his finger, and turning to me, inquired, with sudden authority:
“What did you mean when you said that the house had been empty till last night?”
“Just what I said, sir. It was empty till about midnight, when two persons——” Again I felt my dress twitched, this time very cautiously. What did the woman want? Not daring to give her a look, for these men were only too ready to detect harm in everything I did, I gently drew my skirt away and took a step aside, going on as if no interruption had occurred. “Did I say persons? I should have said a man and a woman drove up to the house and entered. I saw them from my window.”
“You did?” murmured my interlocutor, whom I had by this time decided to be a detective. “And this is the woman, I suppose?” he proceeded, pointing to the poor creature lying before us.
“Why, yes, of course. Who else can she be? I did not see the lady’s face last night, but she was young and light on her feet, and ran up the stoop gaily.”
“And the man? Where is the man? I don’t see him here.”
“I am not surprised at that. He went very soon after he came, not ten minutes after, I should say. That is what alarmed me and caused me to have the house investigated. It did not seem natural or like any of the Van Burnams to leave a woman to spend the night in so large a house alone.”
“You know the Van Burnams?”
“Not well. But that don’t signify. I know what report says of them; they are gentlemen.”
“But Mr. Van Burnam is in Europe.”
“He has two sons.”
“Living here?”
“No; the unmarried one spends his nights at Long Branch, and the other is with his wife somewhere in Connecticut.”
“How did the young couple you saw get in last night? Was there any one here to admit them?”
“No; the gentleman had a key.”
“Ah, he had a key.”
The tone in which this was said recurred to me afterwards, but at the moment I was much more impressed by a peculiar sound I heard behind me, something between a gasp and a click in the throat, which came I knew from the scrub-woman, and which, odd and contradictory as it may appear, struck me as an expression of satisfaction, though what there was in my admission to give satisfaction to this poor creature I could not conjecture. Moving so as to get a glimpse of her face, I went on with the grim self-possession natural to my character:
“And when he came out he walked briskly away. The carriage had not waited for him.”
“Ah!” again muttered the gentleman, picking up one of the broken pieces of china which lay haphazard about the floor, while I studied the cleaner’s face, which, to my amazement, gave evidences of a confusion of emotions most unaccountable to me.
Mr. Gryce may have noticed this too, for he immediately addressed her, though he continued to look at the broken piece of china in his hand.
“And how come you to be cleaning the house?” he asked. “Is the family coming home?”
“They are, sir,” she answered, hiding her emotion with great skill the moment she perceived attention directed to herself, and speaking with a sudden volubility that made us all stare. “They are expected any day. I didn’t know it till yesterday—was it yesterday? No, the day before—when young Mr. Franklin—he is the oldest son, sir, and a very nice man, a very nice man—sent me word by letter that I was to get the house ready. It isn’t the first time I have done it for them, sir, and as soon as I could get the basement key from the agent, I came here, and worked all day yesterday, washing up the floors and dusting. I should have been at them again this morning if my husband hadn’t been sick. But I had to go to the infirmary for medicine, and it was noon when I got here, and then I found this lady standing outside with a policeman, a very nice lady, a very nice lady indeed, sir, I pay my respects to her”—and she actually dropped me a curtsey like a peasant woman in a play—“and they took my key from me, and the policeman opens the door, and he and me go upstairs and into all the rooms, and when we come to this one——”
She was getting so excited as to be hardly intelligible. Stopping herself with a jerk, she fumbled nervously with her apron, while I asked myself how she could have been at work in this house the day before without my knowing it. Suddenly I remembered that I was ill in the morning and busy in the afternoon at the Orphan Asylum, and somewhat relieved at finding so excellent an excuse for my ignorance, I looked up to see if the detective had noticed anything odd in this woman’s behavior. Presumably he had, but having more experience than myself with the susceptibility of ignorant persons in the presence of danger and distress, he attached less importance to it than I did, for which I was secretly glad, without exactly knowing my reasons for being so.
“You will be wanted as a witness by the Coroner’s jury,” he now remarked to her, looking as if he were addressing the piece of china he was turning over in his hand. “Now, no nonsense!” he protested, as she commenced to tremble and plead. “You were the first one to see this dead woman, and you must be on hand to say so. As I cannot tell you when the inquest will be held, you had better stay around till the Coroner comes. He’ll be here soon. You, and this other woman too.”
By other woman he meant me, Miss Butterworth, of Colonial ancestry and no inconsiderable importance in the social world. But though I did not relish this careless association of myself with this poor scrub-woman, I was careful to show no displeasure, for I reasoned that as witnesses we were equal before the law, and that it was solely in this light he regarded us.
There was something in the manner of both these gentlemen which convinced me that while my presence was considered desirable in the house, it was not especially wanted in the room. I was therefore moving reluctantly away, when I felt a slight but peremptory touch on the arm, and turning, saw the detective at my side, still studying his piece of china.
He was, as I have said, of portly build and benevolent aspect; a fatherly-looking man, and not at all the person one would be likely to associate with the police. Yet he could take the lead very naturally, and when he spoke, I felt bound to answer him.
“Will you be so good, madam, as to relate over again, what you saw from your window last night? I am likely to have charge of this matter, and would be pleased to hear all you may have to say concerning it.”
“My name is Butterworth,” I politely intimated.
“And my name is Gryce.”
“A detective?”
“The same.”
“You must think this matter very serious,” I ventured.
“Death by violence is always serious.”
“You must regard this death as something more than an accident, I mean.”
His smile seemed to say: “You will not know to-day how I regard it.”
“And you will not know to-day what I think of it either,” was my inward rejoinder, but I said nothing aloud, for the man was seventy-five if he was a day, and I have been taught respect for age, and have practised the same for fifty years and more.
I must have shown what was passing in my mind, and he must have seen it reflected on the polished surface of the porcelain he was contemplating, for his lips showed the shadow of a smile sufficiently sarcastic for me to see that he was far from being as easy-natured as his countenance indicated.
“Come, come,” said he, “there is the Coroner now. Say what you have to say, like the straightforward, honest woman you appear.”
“I don’t like compliments,” I snapped out. Indeed, they have always been obnoxious to me. As if there was any merit in being honest and straightforward, or any distinction in being told so!
“I am Miss Butterworth, and not in the habit of being spoken to as if I were a simple countrywoman,” I objected. “But I will repeat what I saw last night, as it is no secret, and the telling of it won’t hurt me and may help you.”
Accordingly I went over the whole story, and was much more loquacious than I had intended to be, his manner was so insinuating and his inquiries so pertinent. But one topic we both failed to broach, and that was the peculiar manner of the scrub-woman. Perhaps it had not struck him as peculiar and perhaps it should not have struck me so, but in the silence which was preserved on the subject I felt I had acquired an advantage over him, which might lead to consequences of no small importance. Would I have felt thus or congratulated myself quite so much upon my fancied superiority, if I had known he was the man who managed the Leavenworth case, and who in his early years had experienced that very wonderful adventure on the staircase of the Heart’s Delight? Perhaps I would; for though I have had no adventures, I feel capable of them, and as for any peculiar acumen he may have shown in his long and eventful career, why that is a quality which others may share with him, as I hope to be able to prove before finishing these pages.
Chapter III. Amelia Discovers Herself
There is a small room at the extremity of the Van Burnam mansion. In this I took refuge after my interview with Mr. Gryce. As I picked out the chair which best suited me and settled myself for a comfortable communion with my own thoughts, I was astonished to find how much I was enjoying myself, notwithstanding the thousand and one duties awaiting me on the other side of the party-wall.
Even this very solitude was welcome, for it gave me an opportunity to consider matters. I had not known up to this very hour that I had any special gifts. My father, who was a shrewd man of the old New England type, said more times than I am years old (which was not saying it as often as some may think) that Araminta (the name I was christened by, and the name you will find in the Bible record, though I sign myself Amelia, and insist upon being addressed as Amelia, being, as I hope, a sensible woman and not the piece of antiquated sentimentality suggested by the former cognomen)—that Araminta would live to make her mark; though in what capacity he never informed me, being, as I have observed, a shrewd man, and thus not likely to thoughtlessly commit himself.
I now know he was right; my pretensions dating from the moment I found that this affair, at first glance so simple, and at the next so complicated, had aroused in me a fever of investigation which no reasoning could allay. Though I had other and more personal matters on my mind, my thoughts would rest nowhere but on the details of this tragedy; and having, as I thought, noticed some few facts in connection with it, from which conclusions might be drawn, I amused myself with jotting them down on the back of a disputed grocer’s bill I happened to find in my pocket.
Valueless as explaining this tragedy, being founded upon insufficient evidence, they may be interesting as showing the workings of my mind even at this early stage of the matter. They were drawn up under three heads.
First, was the death of this young woman an accident?
Second, was it a suicide?
Third, was it a murder?
Under the first head I wrote:
My reasons for not thinking it an accident.
1. If it had been an accident and she had pulled the cabinet over upon herself, she would have been found with her feet pointing towards the wall where the cabinet had stood.
(But her feet were towards the door and her head under the cabinet.)
2. The decent, even precise, arrangement of the clothing about her feet, which precludes any theory involving accident.
Under the second:
Reason for not thinking it suicide.
She could not have been found in the position observed without having lain down on the floor while living and then pulled the shelves down upon herself.
(A theory obviously too improbable to be considered.)
Under the third:
Reason for not thinking it murder.
She would need to have been held down on the floor while the cabinet was being pulled over on her; something which the quiet aspect of the hands and feet made appear impossible.
To this I added:
Reasons for accepting the theory of murder.
1. The fact that she did not go into the house alone; that a man entered with her, remained ten minutes, and then came out again and disappeared up the street with every appearance of haste and an anxious desire to leave the spot.
2. The front door, which he had unlocked on entering, was not locked by him on his departure, the catch doing the locking. Yet, though he could have re-entered so easily, he had shown no disposition to return.
3. The arrangement of the skirts, which show the touch of a careful hand after death.
Nothing clear, you see. I was doubtful of all; and yet my suspicions tended most toward murder.
I had eaten my luncheon before interfering in this matter, which was fortunate for me, as it was three o’clock before I was summoned to meet the Coroner, of whose arrival I had been conscious some time before.
He was in the front parlor where the dead girl lay, and as I took my way thither I felt the same sensations of faintness which had so nearly overcome me on the previous occasion. But I mastered them, and was quite myself before I crossed the threshold.
There were several gentlemen present, but of them all I only noticed two, one of whom I took to be the Coroner, while the other was my late interlocutor, Mr. Gryce. From the animation observable in the latter, I gathered that the case was growing in interest from the detective standpoint.
“Ah, and is this the witness?” asked the Coroner, as I stepped into the room.
“I am Miss Butterworth,” was my calm reply. “Amelia Butterworth. Living next door and present at the discovery of this poor murdered body.”
“Murdered,” he repeated. “Why do you say murdered?”
For reply I drew from my pocket the bill on which I had scribbled my conclusions in regard to this matter.
“Read this,” said I.
Evidently astonished, he took the paper from my hand, and, after some curious glances in my direction, condescended to do as I requested. The result was an odd but grudging look of admiration directed towards myself and a quick passing over of the paper to the detective.
The latter, who had exchanged his bit of broken china for a very much used and tooth-marked lead-pencil, frowned with a whimsical air at the latter before he put it in his pocket. Then he read my hurried scrawl.
“Two Richmonds in the field!” commented the Coroner, with a sly chuckle. “I am afraid I shall have to yield to their allied forces. Miss Butterworth, the cabinet is about to be raised; do you feel as if you could endure the sight?”
“I can stand anything where the cause of justice is involved,” I replied.
“Very well, then, sit down, if you please. When the whole body is visible I will call you.”
And stepping forward he gave orders to have the clock and broken china removed from about the body.
As the former was laid away on one end of the mantel some one observed:
“What a valuable witness that clock might have been had it been running when the shelves fell!”
But the fact was so patent that it had not been in motion for months that no one even answered; and Mr. Gryce did not so much as look towards it. But then we had all seen that the hands stood at three minutes to five.
I had been asked to sit down, but I found this impossible. Side by side with the detective, I viewed the replacing of that heavy piece of furniture against the wall, and the slow disclosure of the upper part of the body which had so long lain hidden.
That I did not give way is a proof that my father’s prophecy was not without some reasonable foundation; for the sight was one to try the stoutest nerves, as well as to awaken the compassion of the hardest heart.
The Coroner, meeting my eye, pointed at the poor creature inquiringly.
“Is this the woman you saw enter here last night?”
I glanced down at her dress, noted the short summer cape tied to the neck with an elaborate bow of ribbon, and nodded my head.
“I remember the cape,” said I. “But where is her hat? She wore one. Let me see if I can describe it.” Closing my eyes I endeavored to recall the dim silhouette of her figure as she stood passing up the change to the driver; and was so far successful that I was ready to announce at the next moment that her hat presented the effect of a soft felt with one feather or one bow of ribbon standing upright from the side of the crown.
“Then the identity of this woman with the one you saw enter here last night is established,” remarked the detective, stooping down and drawing from under the poor girl’s body a hat, sufficiently like the one I had just described, to satisfy everybody that it was the same.
“As if there could be any doubt,” I began.
But the Coroner, explaining that it was a mere formality, motioned me to stand aside in favor of the doctor, who seemed anxious to approach nearer the spot where the dead woman lay. This I was about to do when a sudden thought struck me, and I reached out my hand for the hat.
“Let me look at it for a moment,” said I.
Mr. Gryce at once handed it over, and I took a good look at it inside and out.
“It is pretty badly crushed,” I observed, “and does not present a very fresh appearance, but for all that it has been worn but once.”
“How do you know?” questioned the Coroner.
“Let the other Richmond inform you,” was my grimly uttered reply, as I gave it again into the detective’s hand.
There was a murmur about me, whether of amusement or displeasure, I made no effort to decide. I was finding out something for myself, and I did not care what they thought of me.
“Neither has she worn this dress long,” I continued; “but that is not true of the shoes. They are not old, but they have been acquainted with the pavement, and that is more than can be said of the hem of this gown. There are no gloves on her hands; a few minutes elapsed then before the assault; long enough for her to take them off.”
“Smart woman!” whispered a voice in my ear; a half-admiring, half-sarcastic voice that I had no difficulty in ascribing to Mr. Gryce. “But are you sure she wore any? Did you notice that her hand was gloved when she came into the house?”
“No,” I answered, frankly; “but so well-dressed a woman would not enter a house like this, without gloves.”
“It was a warm night,” some one suggested.
“I don’t care. You will find her gloves as you have her hat; and you will find them with the fingers turned inside out, just as she drew them from her hand. So much I will concede to the warmth of the weather.”
“Like these, for instance,” broke in a quiet voice.
Startled, for a hand had appeared over my shoulder dangling a pair of gloves before my eyes, I cried out, somewhat too triumphantly I own:
“Yes, yes, just like those! Did you pick them up here? Are they hers?”
“You say that this is the way hers should look.”
“And I repeat it.”
“Then allow me to pay you my compliments. These were picked up here.”
“But where?” I cried. “I thought I had looked this carpet well over.”
