Howard might have had reason in his own mind for desperate measures to prevent Katherine learning of that will.
And then, unable to bear that weight of guilt, or confronted with Jim the night of his death, he had resorted to suicide.
I was, however, profoundly shocked at the time, so much so that Judy rang for some sherry for me.
“I know,” she said,
“I feel like that too.
But if Uncle Jim’s innocent he’s not going to the chair.
And it will be the chair unless something is done, and done soon.”
Apparently there was something to be done, simple enough on the face of it.
We were to go, the three of us, to the path into the park, and there conduct an experiment as to the possibility of recognizing each other.
“It’s the same sort of night,” Dick said.
“Stars but no moon.
You two can go down to where Uncle Jim said he rested”—even then I noted the Uncle Jim—“and I’ll cut across the hillside.
I’ll stop when you can see me enough to recognize me.”
And this we did.
That end of the park was deserted, and we saw no one.
Dick left us at the Larimer lot, and cut across directly to the hillside.
We could hear him working his way through the brush for some time, then we lost him.
Judy and I followed the street to the path, and then down the hill.
Halfway down we stopped and Judy lighted a cigarette.
She had not spoken at all until then.
An unusual thing for her, and by the light of the match I thought she was crying.
“It’s a crazy idea,” she said.
“We’re all crazy.
And why the devil doesn’t he come?”
It did seem to be taking Dick a long time.
Judy sat down finally, her hands clasped about her knees.
“There’s more light than I thought,” she said.
“That street lamp up there helps. I can see you plainly, Elizabeth Jane.”
But stare as we might we could not see Dick, and at last Judy got up.
“I’d better go over,” she said.
“He may have fallen.”
I had a queer feeling even then that something was not right.
The silence was appalling, and I remember wishing we had brought the dogs.
Judy was ahead, hard to follow in her black dress, and so we progressed for some two hundred feet along the steep hillside.
But we did not find Dick at all.
Judy was frantically calling him by that time, and I remember looking up to see my own garage towering above me, and so excited was I that I hardly recognized it.
And then hearing Judy’s voice Joseph came on the run, and in no time at all we had the police there.
They found Dick unconscious in a deep wash beneath the Larimer lot.
Whether he had fallen or had been struck we did not know, but he had a deep wound on the back of his head.
They took him to the hospital at once, and up to the operating room.
There was no fracture, however, but a bad concussion of the brain, and both Judy and I spent the night in his room.
Some time during that endless night, with Judy sitting beside the bed where Dick’s long figure never moved and nurses came and went in that silence which is as ominous as death, a thought came to me, who seemed not to be thinking at all. This thought was that here was a crime which could not be laid to Jim; which might even help him.
Whether Dick lived or died—and I prayed God that he live—the unknown killer was still at large.
And, now that Dick was to live, something of that relief, and more, was in Judy’s mind.
Toward morning she got stiffly out of her chair and coming over to me put her hand on my shoulder.
“You see, we were wrong,” she said, rather childishly.
“We were both wrong, Elizabeth.”
At dawn Dick became conscious and reached out for Judy’s hand.
But it was not until evening of that day that he told his story.
He had reached the edge of the lot, and was climbing down the hillside.