Rex Stout - Her Forbidden Knight

She realized the thousand dangers of her position. What if a detective had been sent up to guard the roof and should return and find her? What if some tenant of the house, entering or leaving, should question her? What if one of the detectives below should happen to ascend the stairs?

And yet, what could she do? Nothing. She must remain where she was and wait. To go either up or down might be fatal.

She tried to think of some way to get rid of the parcel, which weighed on her arm with all the heaviness of fear. She hated it as though it were a human being. Fantastic schemes raced into her brain.

Should she ring the bell of one of the apartments and hand in the parcel as though it were a delivery from some tradesman? Should she place it on the floor of the hall and set it afire?

Suddenly the street door opened two flights below, and she heard footsteps entering and ascending the stairs. She quivered with terror, and felt a wild impulse to rush madly down and hurl the parcel into the street.

Then, just in time to prevent her crying out, the footsteps halted on the landing below, and there came the sound of a key turning in a lock and a door opening and closing. Evidently the person who had entered had been the tenant on the same floor with Knowlton, across the hall. She sighed with unutterable relief.

Many minutes passed, and each seemed to Lila an hour. What could the detectives be doing? Why did they not go, since they could have found nothing? For she thought, in her ignorance, that by her removal of the counterfeit money she had saved Knowlton from arrest. Her ideas of the manner of procedure of the law and its minions were extremely hazy, as those of a young girl should be. She was soon to be undeceived.

She waited, it seemed to her, for years. She felt faint and dizzy from fatigue and anxiety, her body was limp and nerveless, and she was telling herself that she must soon succumb, when she heard a door open in the hall below. At last!

There were footsteps, and Knowlton’s voice came up to her:

“Is it necessary — must I wear these on the street?”

Then came the reply of the detective, and the sound of clinking steel, and steps descending the stairs, and the opening and closing of the street door.

Lila stood dumb with amazement. The meaning of what she had heard was clear to her: they had arrested him and were taking him to prison! But why? Was there something else of which she did not know? But she tossed that thought aside impatiently.

Knowlton had told her his story in detail, and she trusted him. But — prison! She shuddered with horror, and felt herself unable to stand, grasping at the baluster for support.

It was the necessity for action alone that sustained and roused her. To meet this new crisis she forgot her weakness of a moment before, and became again the courageous and daring woman she had been at the arrival of the detectives. She no longer hesitated or feared. She had something to do that must be done.

Holding the parcel tightly under her arm, she descended the stairs. As she passed through the hall in front of Knowlton’s rooms the detective who had been left behind to complete the search for evidence looked out at her through the open door. Her heart beat madly, but she forced herself not to hasten her step as she descended the first flight of stairs to the outer door.

Another moment and she was in the street — free.

She glanced to the right and left, uncertain which way to turn. What should she do with the parcel? She wondered why it seemed so difficult to get rid of the thing. Surely nothing could be simpler than to dispose of an ordinary-looking parcel, a foot square.

One could drop it in an ash can, or leave it on a bench in the park, or merely place it on a stoop — any stoop — anywhere. But somehow to do any of these things seemed fraught with horrible danger. She could have cried with exasperation at her hesitation over a difficulty apparently so simple.

Suddenly she remembered what Knowlton had said: “It is best to be safe, and I shall take it to the river.” Of course! Why had she not thought of it before?

She turned sharply, and as she turned noticed a man standing directly across the street gazing curiously at the house she had just left. At sight of him she started violently, and looked again. It was Sherman. There could be no doubt of it; the light from a streetlamp shone full on his face.

The spot where Lila was standing was comparatively dark, and as Sherman remained motionless she was convinced that she had not been recognized. But she was seized with terror, and, fearing every moment to hear his footsteps behind her, but not daring to look round, she turned and moved rapidly in the direction of the Hudson.

Ten minutes later she entered the ferry-house at the foot of West Twenty-third Street. A boat was in the slip and she boarded it and walked to the farther end.

She leaned on the rail, gazing toward the bay, as the boat glided away from the shore, and almost forgot her anxiety and her errand in contemplating the fairyland before her eyes.

The myriads of tiny twinkling lights with their background of mysterious half darkness, the skeletonlike forms of the massive buildings, barely revealed, and farther south, the towering outlines of the palaces of industry, were combined in a fantastic dream-picture of a modern monster.

Lila looked up, startled to find that the ferryboat had already reached the middle of the river. She glanced round to make sure she was not observed — there were few passengers on the boat — then quickly lifted the parcel over the rail and let it fall into the dark water below.

She could hardly realize that it was gone. Her arm was numb where it had been tightly pressed against the parcel, and it felt as though it still held its burden. She felt tired, and faint, and walked inside and seated herself.

When the boat arrived at the Jersey City slip she did not land. A half hour later she left it at Twenty-third Street. Another half hour and she was ascending the stairs to her room uptown.

Entering, she removed her hat and coat and threw them on a chair. She was tired, dead tired, in brain and body. She wanted to think: she told herself she had so much to think about.

The face of her world had changed utterly in the past few hours. But thought was impossible. She felt only a dull, listless sense of despair.

She had gained love, but what had she lost? Everything else had been given up in exchange for it. But how she loved him!

But even that thought was torture. Her head seemed ready to burst. Tears would have been a relief, but they would not come.

She dropped into a chair by the window, and, pressing her hands tightly against her throbbing temples, gazed out unseeing at the night.

When the dawn came, eight hours later, she had not moved.

When Billy Sherman had visited detective Barrett — the red-faced man with carroty hair — and had heard him say, “We will get Mr. Knowlton tonight,” he knew that the thing was as good as done. Detective Barrett was a man to be depended upon.

But Billy Sherman never depended upon anybody. He made the rather common mistake of judging humanity from the inside — of himself — and the result was that he had acquired a distorted opinion of human nature. His topsyturvy logic went something like this, though not exactly in this form: “I am a man. I am bad. Therefore, all men are bad.”

And there is more of that sort of reasoning in the world than we are willing to admit.

Sherman did not go so far as to distrust Detective Barrett, but he had an idea that he wanted to see the thing for himself. Accordingly, shortly after six o’clock in the evening he posted himself in a doorway opposite Knowlton’s rooms on Thirtieth Street.

He had been there but a few minutes when he was startled by the sight of Lila approaching and entering the house. This led to a long consideration of probabilities which ended in a grim smile. He thought: “If they get her, too, all the better. Barrett’s a good fellow, and I can do whatever I want with her.”

Soon a light appeared in the windows of Knowlton’s rooms. The shades were drawn, but the man in the street could see two shadows thrown on them as the occupants moved about inside.

Suddenly the two shadows melted into one, and Sherman found the thing no longer amusing. Cursing the detectives for their tardiness, he repaired to the corner for a bracer.

He soon returned and resumed his position in the doorway.

After another interminable wait he saw Detective Barrett arrive with his men, and with fierce exultation watched them enter.

Another wait — this time nearly an hour — before two of the detectives emerged with Knowlton. This puzzled Sherman. “Where the deuce is Lila?” he muttered. Then he reflected that the other detective was probably waiting with her for a conveyance.

And then, to his astonishment, he beheld Lila descending the stoop alone.

She was half a block away before he recovered his wits sufficiently to follow her.

On the ferryboat he mounted to the upper deck to escape observation, completely at a loss to account for Lila’s freedom, or for this night trip across the Hudson. Looking cautiously over the upper railing, he had observed her every movement as she stood almost directly beneath him.

And then, as he saw her lift the parcel and drop it in the river, he had comprehended all in a flash. Stifling the exclamation that rose to his lips, he shrank back from the rail, muttering an imprecation.