Suspense

Suspense by Isabel Ostrander (1918)

Suspense follows Betty Shaw, a scarred young woman who answers a want-ad from the wealthy, ice-composed widow Marcia Atterbury and moves into her cedar-shrouded North Drive mansion as companion and secretary. From her first night Betty discovers the household is no ordinary refuge: the balcony outside her room is barred like a cage, a watchdog patrols the grounds, a terrified seamstress spells out "Go away" in pinheads, and Betty herself stumbles upon the body of a murdered man in the dining room — only to find the room immaculate and the corpse vanished by morning. Mrs. Atterbury's circle of house guests, the volatile pianist Jack Wolvert, the jealous Madame Cimmino, the urbane Doctor Bayard, and others, speak in guarded half-sentences about someone who has "broken," about a woman called "the Comet" whose disloyalty met swift, unspoken punishment, and about business affairs of a scale and secrecy that don't match Mrs. Atterbury's ostensibly quiet widowhood. Betty, far from the guileless innocent she plays, is herself running a deception. Behind her ingenuous manner and her disfiguring birthmark she conceals a hard, watchful cunning, conducting a secret nightly search of the house and puzzling over her employer's business correspondence until she cracks a cipher hidden in seemingly banal dictated letters — a code that reveals a criminal organization's operations disguised as talk of sheep prices, horses, and family news. Sent out on cryptic errands, she carries sealed envelopes to and from strangers at a raucous café, a decorous hotel writing room, and finally a fashionable church, each contact marked by fear: a golden-haired woman threatens suicide rather than serve as messenger again, a stranger nearly forces a packet on her, and a portly church usher passes her an envelope marked with a sketch of her own scar. She also barely evades detection when Wolvert catches her at the open safe at midnight, talking her way free with a fabricated story that Mrs. Atterbury accepts, though Wolvert's jealousy and Madame Cimmino's animosity mark her as a target. Parallel to Betty's infiltration runs the story of Herbert Ross, a genially disarming operative for the McCormick Detective Agency, hired by the imperious, tight-lipped Madame Dumois to locate a young woman she refuses to fully describe or explain her interest in — omitting, tellingly, any mention of a scar. Ross poses as a museum official seeking an Egyptian translator to draw Betty (a gifted linguist trained under a real Egyptologist) into contact under a false name and address, using the museum's genuine need for translation of ancient papyri as cover. He becomes increasingly certain Betty is his quarry, especially after glimpsing Wolvert lurking near the Atterbury gates, but his growing personal sympathy for her — and Madame Dumois's evasiveness about her true motives (justice? vengeance? something else?) — makes him stall his own chief and dodge handing her over, even as he begins tailing her and his agency independently starts investigating the Atterbury house as a suspected criminal nexus. Threaded through both plots is the shadow of the murdered financier George Breckinridge, whose inquest remains open on a hint of new evidence, and a widening web of victims and confederates: the diphtheria-stricken Dana, the fading Professor Blythe, a ruined businessman named Cote, all invoked obliquely as casualties of whatever criminal enterprise Mrs. Atterbury commands. As the novel's introduced section closes, Betty is more entangled and more endangered — spied upon by Ross, resented by Wolvert and Cimmino, and drawn ever deeper into a covert organization whose code, hierarchy, and purpose she is only beginning to decipher, while nursing a private, unrevealed motive of her own for having sought out Mrs. Atterbury in the first place.

By Isabel Ostrander · First published 1918 · Genre: Mystery, Crime Fiction, Suspense · 20 chapters · 90,810 words

First lines

"Young woman, well-bred, educated, stranger in city, and without relatives, desires situation as companion or social secretary with lady of established reputation and position. Good oral reader, pianist, quick and accurate household accountant, intelligent amanuensis, willing and obliging. Amount of salary optional. Address Miss Betty Shaw, 160 Wakefield Avenue."

The girl read the advertisement for the twentieth time, then dropped the newspaper upon the shabbily ornate center table with a shrug of impatience, a frown gathering between her level brows.

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Suspense is listed on Textopian as a novel by Isabel Ostrander, dated 1918 CE.

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Genres

Tags

mystery · detective fiction · crime fiction · murder investigation · criminal investigation · psychological tension · thriller · whodunit · clues · secrets · danger · intrigue

Contents

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