The Bat: Difference between revisions

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The place is the country house of Courtleigh Fleming, the late President of the Union Bank. When his nephew Dick rented it to Cornelia Van Gorder, a spinster of 60, she expected her stay there to be a restful four months, enlivened by the occasional guest and some homemade elderberry wine. Instead, intruders and anonymous threatening letters left her hardly able to sleep at night, and newspaper stories about a mysterious nocturnal criminal known as "The Bat" only added to her worries. These disturbances were already too much for the weak nerves of Lizzie Allen, maid to Miss Van Gorder for twenty years, who would have packed up and left if Cornelia had allowed her. The cook, parlormaid, and housemaid had nothing stopping them from being frightened away from the house; each offered an unbelievable excuse for leaving. Besides Lizzie, the only servants left in the house were Billy, Courtleigh Fleming's Japanese butler, and Brooks, allegedly a new gardener but obviously no gardener at all.