Adams first appeared in “The Buckled Bag,” published in the January 10 and January 17, 1914, issues of The Saturday Evening Post. After “Locked Doors” was published in 1925, the character was the eager detective in Miss Pinkerton (1932), The Haunted Lady (1942), and Episode of the Wandering Knife (1950).

“Locked Doors” was originally published in the omnibus Mary Roberts Rinehart Mystery Book (New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1925).

Locked Doors

By Mary Roberts Rinehart

Chapter I: Dangerous Assignment

“YOU PROMISED,” I reminded Mr. Patton, “to play with cards on the table.”

“My dear young lady,” he replied, “I have no cards! I suspect a game, that’s all.”

“Then—do you need me?”

The detective bent forward, his arms on his desk, and looked me over carefully.

“What sort of shape are you in? Tired?”

“No.”

“Nervous?”

“Not enough to hurt.”

“I want you to take another case, following a nurse who has gone to pieces,” he said, selecting his words carefully. “I don’t want to tell you a lot—I want you to go in with a fresh mind. It promises to be an extraordinary case.”

“How long was the other nurse there?”

“Four days.”

“She went to pieces in four days!”

“Well, she’s pretty much unstrung. The worst is, she hasn’t any real reason. A family chooses to live in an unusual manner, because they like it, or perhaps they’re afraid of something. The girl was, that’s sure. I had never seen her until this morning, a big, healthy-looking young woman; but she came in looking back over her shoulder as if she expected a knife in her back. She said she was a nurse from St. Luke’s and that she’d been on a case for four days. She’d left that morning after about three hours’ sleep in that time, being locked in a room most of the time, and having little but crackers and milk for food. She thought it was a case for the police.”

“Who is ill in the house? Who was her patient?”

“There is no illness, I believe. The French governess had gone, and they wished the children competently cared for until they replaced her. That was the reason given her when she went. Afterward she—well, she was puzzled.”

“How are you going to get me there?”

He gathered acquiescence from my question and smiled approval.

“Good girl!” he said. “Never mind how I’ll get you there. You are the most dependable woman I know.”

“The most curious, perhaps?” I retorted. “Four days on the case, three hours’ sleep, locked in and yelling ‘Police!’ Is it out of town?”

“No, in the heart of the city, on Beauregard Square. Can you get some St. Luke’s uniforms? They want another St. Luke’s nurse.”

I said I could get the uniforms, and he wrote the address on a card.

“Better arrive about five,” he said.

“But—if they are not expecting me?”

“They will be expecting you,” he replied enigmatically.