The room was alight with blazing banknotes.
He went after them like a lunatic — you wouldn’t have thought a man that fat could have moved so fast.
It was the one that laddered my stocking which gave the game away. A spark burned the nylon and as I felt it, I looked down and snatched the charred note, holding it up to the light. We all saw the flaw in it at the same moment. The ink had run and there was a great streak through the middle, like the veining in a marble slab.
There was a long silence and the first sound came not from us but from the service door. It opened and the new waiter, looking quite different now that he’d changed his coat for one with a policeman’s badge on it, came down the room followed by Inspector Cumberland.
They went up to Adelbert and the younger, heavier man put a hand on his shoulder. Cumberland ignored everything but the money. He stamped out the smoldering flames and gathered up the remains and the four untouched wads on the table. Then he smiled briefly.
“Got you, Adelbert. With it on you. We’ve been wondering who was passing slush in this street and when it came to our ears that someone was burning cash we thought we ought to look into it.”
I was still only half comprehending and I held out the note we’d been staring at.
“There’s something wrong with this one,” I said stupidly.
He took it from me and grunted.
“There’s something wrong with all these, my dear. Miss Frosne’s money is safe in his pocket where you saw him put it. These are some of the gang’s failures. Every maker of counterfeit money has them — as a rule they never leave the printing room. This one in particular is a shocker. I wonder he risked it even for burning. You didn’t like wasting it, I suppose, Adelbert. What a careful soul you are.”
“How did you find out?” Louise looked from them to me.
Cumberland saved me.
“A policeman, too, Madam,” he said, laughing, “can be a psychologist.”
NEDRA TYRE
Nedra (pronounced NEE-dra) Tyre (1912-90), a native of Georgia, was the author of a half-dozen mystery novels between 1952 and 1971 and about forty short stories for
Tyre was living in Richmond, Virginia, when she told
“For the last four years I have been totally deaf. It’s amazingly interesting to be deaf, although it’s awkward socially. Politically I am what would be called a liberal and religiously I am a protestant with a small p. Almost everything defeats me and everything amazes me.”
Tyre’s social work background as well as the world view expressed above informs “A Nice Place to Stay,” with its deep understanding of the psychology of poverty.
All my life I’ve wanted a nice place to stay. I don’t mean anything grand, just a small room with the walls freshly painted and a few neat pieces of furniture and a window to catch the sun so that two or three pot plants could grow. That’s what I’ve always dreamed of. I didn’t yearn for love or money or nice clothes, though I was a pretty enough girl and pretty clothes would have made me prettier — not that I mean to brag.
Things fell on my shoulders when I was fifteen. That was when Mama took sick, and keeping house and looking after Papa and my two older brothers — and of course nursing Mama — became my responsibility. Not long after that Papa lost the farm and we moved to town. I don’t like to think of the house we lived in near the C & R railroad tracks, though I guess we were lucky to have a roof over our heads — it was the worst days of the Depression and a lot of people didn’t even have a roof, even one that leaked, plink, plonk; in a heavy rain there weren’t enough pots and pans and vegetable bowls to set around to catch all the water.
Mama was the sick one but it was Papa who died first — living in town didn’t suit him. By then my brothers had married and Mama and I moved into two back rooms that looked onto an alley and everybody’s garbage cans and dump heaps. My brothers pitched in and gave me enough every month for Mama’s and my barest expenses even though their wives grumbled and complained.
I tried to make Mama comfortable. I catered to her every whim and fancy. I loved her. All the same I had another reason to keep her alive as long as possible. While she breathed I knew I had a place to stay. I was terrified of what would happen to me when Mama died. I had no high school diploma and no experience at outside work and I knew my sisters-in-law wouldn’t take me in or let my brothers support me once Mama was gone.
Then Mama drew her last breath with a smile of thanks on her face for what I had done.
Sure enough, Norine and Thelma, my brothers’ wives, put their feet down. I was on my own from then on. So that scared feeling of wondering where I could lay my head took over in my mind and never left me.
I had some respite when Mr. Williams, a widower twenty-four years older than me, asked me to marry him. I took my vows seriously. I meant to cherish him and I did. But that house we lived in!
Those walls couldn’t have been dirtier if they’d been smeared with soot and the plumbing was stubborn as a mule. My left foot stayed sore from having to kick the pipe underneath the kitchen sink to get the water to run through.
Then Mr. Williams got sick and had to give up his shoe repair shop that he ran all by himself. He had a small savings account and a few of those twenty-five-dollar government bonds and drew some disability insurance until the policy ran out in something like six months.
I did everything I could to make him comfortable and keep him cheerful. Though I did all the laundry I gave him clean sheets and clean pajamas every third day and I think it was by my will power alone that I made a begonia bloom in that dark back room Mr. Williams stayed in. I even pestered his two daughters and told them they ought to send their father some get-well cards and they did once or twice. Every now and then when there were a few pennies extra I’d buy cards and scrawl signatures nobody could have read and mailed them to Mr. Williams to make him think some of his former customers were remembering him and wishing him well.
Of course when Mr. Williams died his daughters were johnny-on-the-spot to see that they got their share of the little bit that tumbledown house brought. I didn’t begrudge them — I’m not one to argue with human nature.
I hate to think about all those hardships I had after Mr. Williams died. The worst of it was finding somewhere to sleep; it all boiled down to having a place to stay. Because somehow you can manage not to starve. There are garbage cans to dip into — you’d be surprised how wasteful some people are and how much good food they throw away. Or if it was right after the garbage trucks had made their collections and the cans were empty I’d go into a supermarket and pick, say, at the cherries pretending I was selecting some to buy. I didn’t slip their best ones into my mouth. I’d take either those so ripe that they should have been thrown away or those that weren’t ripe enough and shouldn’t have been put out for people to buy. I might snitch a withered cabbage leaf or a few pieces of watercress or a few of those small round tomatoes about the size of hickory nuts — I never can remember their right name. I wouldn’t make a pig of myself, just eat enough to ease my hunger. So I managed. As I say, you don’t have to starve.
The only work I could get hardly ever paid me anything beyond room and board. I wasn’t a practical nurse, though I knew how to take care of sick folks, and the people hiring me would say that since I didn’t have the training and qualifications I couldn’t expect much.
