He finishes your job in the cellar and burns the carpet, and later on he gets knocked on the head for his trouble.
How far can the police go, in a case like that?”
They had not found Mary Martin.
That is strange, when I think back over it.
She was not trying to hide; not then, at least.
She was indeed, as the Inspector was to admit disgustedly later on, “under their noses.”
Nor were any of us seeing much of Wallie.
Judy suggested that he was trying, like the police, to locate Mary.
“But why?”
“Because he’s crazy about her.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Don’t you?
I found her in his arms the day he came to New York, after father died.
He had gone out, but he came back.”
“Judy!”
“Well, I did.
She was crying, and he was smoothing her hair and whispering to her.
I just backed out and let them be miserable.”
“She may have broken down, and he was trying to quiet her.”
But she only smiled, as from the depths of some secret knowledge which she knew well enough I did not possess.
I thought over that after Judy had gone.
I thought back to the night of Sarah’s death, and Mary’s sudden pause in the drive when she learned that Sarah was still out.
Wallie had been nervous too, I seemed to remember. At some time in the evening he had asked about Sarah.
“And where was Sarah, while all this was going on?”
“She was out.”
“And she’s still out?”
“Yes.”
It seemed to me now that he had looked slightly surprised and rather thoughtful; but how much of this impression was due to what had followed I was not certain.
But what did Mary Martin know?
What possible business could she have had with Howard?
A business so furtive that she must wait until Sarah was out, and so urgent that she had gone as white as a sheet when she was stopped.
She had not gone to Walter.
Her errand—providing there was an errand—was one she was apparently concealing from Walter.
It was a part of that same motive which had lain behind that strange procedure of hers when she had walked into Katherine’s New York apartment and by sheer audacity superseded poor Maude Palmer.
According to Katherine she had not wanted me to know that she was there.
“Why?” Katherine had asked.
“She would think I had used what I know, to my own advantage.”
Frightened, beyond a doubt; pale, as she had been pale that day at the hotel.
But quietly determined.
Hiding herself away in a little room downtown, going out at night to throw something into the river, and then—going to bed and “sleeping well.”
As though some weight was off her mind, as though now at last all was well, and safe.
Poor Mary!
I had had my talk with the Inspector on Monday morning, and on Tuesday he asked permission to go over the house once more.
Never have I seen a more exhausting search, or less result from it, unless I except the bewildered indignation of the servants.
But at the last I did a thing I shall regret to the end of my life.
I locked the ormolu cabinet and put the key away.
Simmons was in charge, and he came to me about it.
But I explained that it had been examined, and that my mother’s Chelsea figures inside were very precious and not to be handled.
He was satisfied, and so it was not opened.
Nothing else escaped them; the chair and sofa cushions, the mattresses, even the kitchen utensils and the washing machine in the laundry were closely examined; and the unfortunate Simmons spent some warm hours in the wood cellar, carefully moving the wood.