The Listening House

by Mabel Seeley

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Historical Mysteries; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Down and out in the Depression, Gwynne Dacres moves into a seedy and sinister boarding house, where she exposes deadly secrets in this classic mystery by Mabel Seeley

After losing her copywriting job, young Gwynne Dacres seeks a place to live when she stumbles upon Mrs. Garr's old boarding house. Despite the gruff landlady and an assortment of shifty tenants, Gwynne rents a room for herself. She spends her first few nights at 593 Trent Street tensely awake, the house creaking and groaning as if listening to everything that happens behind its closed doors.

A chain of chilling events leads to the gruesome discovery of a mutilated body in the basement kitchen, dead of unknown circumstances. Was it an accident or murder? Under the red-black brick façade of the old house on Trent Street, Gwynne uncovers a myriad of secrets, blackmail, corruption, and clues of a wicked past. As she closes in on the truth, the cold, pale hands of death reach for Gwynne in the night…

Release date: June 8, 2021

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 368

Sample

1

 

I am not sure, myself, that I should open the door of Mrs. Garr's house and let you in. I'm not at all sure that the truth about what happened there is tellable. People keep saying to me that the rumors going around are simply ghoulish, and ought to be laid to rest. But I've heard those rumors, some of them at least, and they're not a bit more nightmarish than the truth. Finally, of course, I gave in to pressure.

 

"Okay, I'll do it," I said.

 

Because, after all, I'm the one that not only knows almost everything that went on in Mrs. Garr's house in April, May, and June of this year, but also why a lot of it went on. And, unless Hodge Kistler wrote it, no one else could get the ending anywhere near right.

 

Since agreeing, I have made seventeen entirely separate and different beginnings.

 

I have begun with the cat's swift sneak and hunch under the bookcase of that dark hall. I have begun with my first sight of Hodge Kistler chinning himself on the bar. I have begun with those terrifying hands reaching for my throat. I have begun with the opening of a door that led to an unimaginable hell.

 

But with any of those I have to stop too often for explanations. Mrs. Garr's house, I've found, isn't a house into which I can just plump you down. You need introductions. And so, at last, I have come around to begin at the beginning, giving you all the detail first, telling you, first, the little incidents which were to grow into such heart-shaking happenings. For the seeds of the mystery lay either in happenings which seemed at the time to bear no relationship to each other or to life in Mrs. Garr's house, or else in very small things, in incidents which might easily have meant nothing at all; incidents which, at the time, I considered myself silly for noting and wondering over.

 

First of all, as long as I'm telling this, and the only way you can go back in time and get into Mrs. Garr's house during those event-crammed weeks is by living there through me, I'm afraid you'll have to know, first, who and what I am and how I got to Mrs. Garr's house.

 

The whole thing began, for me, with a lost job.

 

I'm Gwynne Dacres, Mrs. Dacres. I'm twenty-six and divorced; I was married for six months when I was twenty-two-it took only that long for Carl Dacres to decide I was more of a wife and less of a nurse than he wanted. The last I heard of him, he was blissfully coddling his hypochondriac's soul with a day nurse and a night nurse, hired, down in South Carolina somewhere. The only thing I got out of my marriage was a bunch of complexes; I didn't ask alimony.

 

At Easter, this spring, I had been working in the advertising department at Tellier's for three years. Then, suddenly, I wasn't working at all.

 

There was drama, if you like that kind.

 

People as unimportant as advertising copywriters in a store as big as Tellier's aren't invited into the office of Mr. William Tellier, the president, very often. But I was bidden there at three o'clock of the Monday after Easter. I walked in to face Mr. Gangan, the advertising manager who was my boss, five vice presidents, and Mr. Tellier himself, all standing, all steel. On Mr. Tellier's desk was spread my own check sheet-I read the proofs of fashion ads-for that day's ad. Mr. Tellier bent toward it silkily.

 

"You recognize this proof, Mrs. Dacres?"

 

"Yes, it's my noon check sheet."

 

"You see this?"

 

The ad was a full-page ad for the big after-Easter sales, and across the top ran a big headline in 60 point caps and lower case:

 

Tellier's-

 

Where People Save!

 

What he was pointing at was my own scribbled notation at the side: "Change to 60 point caps."

 

"Certainly," I said. "The order to change the type came out on Mr. Gangan's revised proof this morning."

 

"Exactly. Then perhaps," he said, and his voice was awful, "perhaps you also recognize this?"

 

He picked up the check sheet, and under it was spread the first edition of that night's Gilling City Comet, opened to our ad, with the proof the paper had sent that noon right beside it. And on them both, on them both, blaring in 60 point capitals, was:

 

TELLIER'S-

 

WHERE PEOPLE SLAVE!

 

It didn't take even a split second to get it. I raised my eyes to Mr. Gangan's, opened my mouth to say what my instinct for self-preservation shouted to me to say.

 

But I shut my mouth again.

 

Only ruthlessness can raise a man to executive power at Tellier's. If I said what I had to say, I'd never again get a job in advertising in any department store in the United States. Mr. Gangan would see to that.

 

When I walked out of Tellier's big swinging doors, jobless, I fastened my mind, to keep its balance, on the laughter that must be rocking the town. For once a Tellier's ad had told the truth whole.

 

At the Comet offices, I knew that a printer and a proofreader were losing their jobs, too.

 

What I hadn't said in my defense was that Mr. Gangan had ordered me to shop a rival store's showing of new fabrics that noon, saying that he would have someone else check the noon proofs.

 

He'd forgotten, of course. Easy to forget. But he'd have taken hell if I'd told, and he'd have made it hell for me, and I'd have lost my job anyway. Now, at least, he'd recommend me-secretly.

 

Well, I knew, going through those swinging doors, exactly where I stood. It was almost April. The slow summer season was right ahead. The other stores would be suspicious of a recently fired Tellier's copywriter after this riot-even if they didn't want one to read proof. I had no earthly chance of getting another steady job before heavy advertising began again in August and September; perhaps not then.

 

I had exactly $278.32 in the bank.

 

 

No job. Two hundred and seventy-eight dollars and thirty-two cents in the bank. I supposed I should be glad I had that much.

 

But if you've ever been on your own and out of a job-it's an experience plenty of people have shared with me-you'll know how I did feel, and glad wasn't any part of it.

 

I tried to shake it off, going home in the streetcar; tried to think instead of things I could do: look over the Help Wanteds, apply at all the other stores in town, do something about the way I lived. How could I afford thirty-five dollars a month for an apartment, on nothing a week?

 

But when I stood in my living room with the door locked behind me, I didn't think I could give the apartment up. It had been my harbor and refuge for two years; I'd created it myself; I loved it. I looked at my blue rug, my blue window hangings, my white lamps; looked at the sofa I'd had reupholstered gorgeously in blue satin on the strength of a raise the year before, looked at my clear, light salmon walls, so delectably lovely; looked at my grandmother's old rug on the wall, handwoven of dark blue wool as faded as smoke.

 

I didn't think I could give it up. But I had to. Firmly I sat down on the sofa and opened the Comet I'd abstracted from the advertising file on my way out of the office.

 

There weren't many Help Wanteds. They ran, mostly, "Girl wanting good home more than wages, help mother with 6 chil., $2 wk." Or, "Sell on sight, knitted sports frocks."

 

Nothing there.

 

I did the Unfurnished Apartments next, went on through Unfurnished Rooms, and started on Housekeeping Rooms.

 

There, on the third ad, my eyes stopped.

 

It seems queer, looking back, to think how casually I came across that ad. Queer, how inevitable that sequence of events was, that led from that lost job to Mrs. Garr's house.

 

Clean, lt, airy dng rm and kit of old mansion, gas, lt, and ht furn. $4.50 wk, 593 Trent.

 

That was what the ad said. Words, I suppose, can't carry an aura. What I thought was, Glory, that's cheap. If I can't get a job by November, I'll go and be a mother's help, wants home more than wages. What awful hooey-could anyone? About twenty dollars a month for rent, gas, light, and heat. Two hundred and seventy-eight dollars and thirty-two cents divided by-well, divided by eight. Eight into $278.32 is about thirty-five dollars. Thirty-five dollars a month. Thirty-five dollars minus twenty dollars leaves fifteen dollars a month to eat on. Baby, you'll eat oatmeal and like it. But can you do it? Absolutely!

 

 

I knew just about where 593 Trent Street would be. Gilling City is the state capital; the capitol building is on the side of our biggest hill, and Trent Street runs along one side of the capitol. Five ninety-three should be pretty close to the top of Capitol Hill.

 

It was misting a little when I got off the streetcar at Sixteenth and Buller, to walk the three blocks up Sixteenth to Trent. Cold, too; just cold enough for the sleety mist to stick to the brown fuzz of my sports coat and make me look like a walking fog. My face prickled with the mist; when I stuck my tongue out at it, it bit like a hundred needles, and my ears were filled with the soft spit, spit it made everywhere it hit. Sixteenth is steep; the fourplexes lining it are all built on the bias, with one long side showing most of the basement wall, and one short side hitting the hill too soon.

 

As I walked the last block up Sixteenth I had, on my right, the old Elliott House that was built by one of the state's early governors; it's a huge square of red stone, boxlike except for the porte cochere on the Trent Street side, and with a red brick wall circling its grounds. Across Sixteenth was a pink ice-cream fourplex, brand new. Across Trent was a gray wooden monstrosity dripping wood lace. Kitty-corner, on the one remaining corner, was a big red brick shoebox broken by three-window bays. Even across the corner, I could see the scrolled gold numbers on the old-fashioned fanlight above the door.

 

Five ninety-three.

 

That, then, was my first look at 593 Trent Street. At Mrs. Garr's house.

 

I crossed over. I often like old houses; this one was dignified, not too ornate, not bad at all if it hadn't been so dirty.

 

Mist was sticking to its red-black brick, but instead of looking foggy and clean, it looked foggy and dirty, grimy with a dirt unbelievable in a city as young as ours. Against its sniffling background of air indistinguishable from sky, all one thick, damp, even gray, it was drenched but still dirty, with black soot washing in little runnels down the walls, runnels that were still red-black after the soot had washed.

 

I walked along Sixteenth Street, down the side of the house, until I got to the railing. Sixteenth Street ends there, not ten feet behind the house, because the hill there drops sixty feet, straight down, to the huddled gray houses on Water Street, below. The drop has been cemented, smooth and straight, the entire dizzy height.

 

Right then, standing there, I had a moment of doubt. I'd read Les MisŽrables once, and laughed at the frequency with which its characters hung on the brink of an abyss. But 593 Trent Street hovered too closely to an abyss for comfort. Who could say, if a wind should come, that its bricks wouldn't waver like cards in a card house, clatter and rattle down that concrete cliff, shatter and stun and kill and heap in a gigantic trash pile on that huddle of houses below, so far below?

 

Mr. Gangan once said I had "too God damn much imagination."

 

I shook myself, walked around to the front of the house, up the steps, and twisted the decorated iron triangle that stood out from the door casing.

 

A jangle sounded inside, but almost before it had begun the door opened.

 

 

I used to think, afterward, that IÕd never depend on my judgment of people again.

 

Because my first impression of Mrs. Garr, as she stood there blocking her open door, was pleasant.

 

It was her hair.

 

Her hair was white, and the first time I saw her I saw nothing beyond it. It was beautiful hair. She talked, I answered, but instead of watching mouth and eyes as I usually do, I looked at her hair.

 

White.

 

If you've seen cleaned white goose feathers, sleek and shining, you know something of the color and the texture, too; it looked that soft. Her way of wearing it was old-fashioned: a curled pompadour in front, like a fluff of soap bubbles, and a soft knot of the back hair on top of her head.

 

"Didn't I just see you walking around the house, miss?" was what she said.

 

I didn't pick up on the suspicion, or the fact that she must have been watching me through a window. I was looking at her hair.

 

"Yes," I said in my pleasantest voice. "I walked back to see the drop. It's steep, isn't it?"

 

"Did you ring my bell to say it was steep?"

 

"Oh no." I laughed and hurried to say it. "I rang your bell because I saw your ad in the paper. About the rooms. Could I see them?"

 

"Oh, cer'n'y, cer'n'y, you can see the rooms." She stepped back. Her voice was slurred; not a Southern speech, more a careless speech, eliding sounds.

 

I stepped into the hall. And thought I should step out again.

 

The hall wasn't inviting. It smelled of old gas. It smelled of animals confined to cellars. The ghosts of long-fried dinners, the acridity of long-burned cigarettes haunted the air, which was a thicker, foggier dark than the gray day outside; a murk that might have been the grime of the outside walls floated loose and suspended in the hall.

 

Ahead a rectangle of lighter gray outlined the door of a room on the right; farther ahead on the right glowered a doorway into pitch-blackness. The only window, shrouded in musty red curtains, was far ahead on the left.

 

"Oh," I gasped, turning. "I'm afraid I made a mistake. I-"

 

"No, no, miss." The woman took the sleeve of my coat in a light grasp. "This is the house. And the rooms are right down the hall. First-floor rooms. Very fine rooms. Very clean rooms."