The Listening House - Softcover

Seeley, Mabel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 059333454X ISBN 13: 9780593334546

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

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…

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

One of the most popular American crime writers of the 20th century, Mabel Seeley was known as “The Mistress of Mystery.” Critically acclaimed titles like The Listening House (1938), The Crying Sisters (1939), and the Mystery of the Year awarded The Chuckling Fingers (1941) have placed her stories and characters alongside those of Agatha Christie, Dorthy Sayers, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Amongst her many accolades and awards, Seeley was most proud of her service as the first director of the Mystery Writers of America. Born on March 25, 1903 in Herman, Minnesota, Mabel Seeley is best known for crime novels featuring female detectives who defied the stereotypes of the time as self-reliant and strong-willed Midwestern heroines.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059333454X
• ISBN 13: 9780593334546
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar