The Haunted Lady Book

"The Haunted Lady" is a novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart written in 1942. It is the fourth novel in the Hilda Adams series and the fourth one I've read, I think there is one more but I don't have it, and Rinehart novels don't show up in any of my bookstores very often, so I might never get it. But for now I'll get back to this one.

This one was probably the most fun for me in a, I can't believe I like this way. Right from the beginning there wasn't a person in the novel who would have been responding the way I would have. In the first chapter we have Inspector Patton (yes, he's there again) sending Miss Adams to the home of Eliza Fairbanks. The Fairbanks family had at one time dominated the social life of the city, I think every family Miss Adams works for dominated the city at one time. Anyway, now the neighborhood has changed, it is filled with boardinghouses and a market, but the big square Fairbanks house still stands on its grounds surrounded by an iron fence, defiant of a changing world.

Now this is where it gets strange for me already. Mrs. Fairbanks has been to the police because bats and rats have been getting into her bedroom, even a sparrow or two. Eliza Fairbanks is still at home in her bed and there are bats and rats running around the room? And the one thing she does about it is go to the police? Not me, I would have been out of that room and that house in a matter of minutes, and instead of calling the police I would have called every exterminator in the yellow pages and then gone and bought all the mouse and rat killer I could find at Walmart. I hate rats and mice and bats and lots of other rodents, they hate me too but that's fine with me. But it doesn't seem like a police matter. Stranger still, once Hilda arrives they manage to catch one of the bats alive and she carries it down the hall into the storeroom and puts it into a shoebox that she ties with a string. No amount of money will get me to carry a live bat anywhere or a dead one for that matter. Then when a rat is killed she takes the body of the rat, puts it in her suitcase and takes the rat and bat to the Inspector. Remember that no amount of money line? Double it for the rat.

Another very strange thing, a few months before the dreaded creatures started showing up Mrs. Fairbanks had been poisoned and nearly died. Someone had put arsenic in the powdered sugar on her breakfast tray and the only thing that had saved her was the quick actions of the doctor living across the street. When Miss Adams asks her if she contacted the police Mrs. Fairbanks tells her no, she has spent her life keeping this family out of the newspaper she wouldn't let that tarnish the family name. So she wouldn't go to the police when someone poisoned her but she will go because rats and bats are in her room? That doesn't make sense to me.

It was fun trying to figure out where the horrible creatures are coming from, if someone is actually touching the things to sneak them into her room in the first place. There are lots of suspects, the son who wants money to buy a farm, his wife who doesn't like anyone in the family, the daughter who hates her mother, the ex-husband of the daughter, the granddaughter, the doctor, the servants, it is quite a list. Whether they actually manage to murder Mrs. Fairbanks by scaring her to death by rodents you will have to read the book and find out, it seems like an unusual and complicated way to kill someone, but it would probably work on me. There are all kinds of strange things, a safe in the closet that Mrs. Fairbanks only opens at night with her door locked, a radio that plays by itself, again in the middle of the night of course. Window screens that keep coming loose, fresh paint, all kinds of things, read the book. I liked this part, I'll end with it:

"You're a highly useful person, Miss Pinkerton," he said, smiling down at her. "If I didn't think you'd slap me, I'd kiss you."
"It wouldn't be the first time."
"Which?" he said quizzically. "Slap or kiss?"
"Both," she said, and went out.