I had slept very little, and I rang for my breakfast tray at eight o’clock.
Any hope that Sarah had slipped in early in the morning was dashed by Joseph’s sober face.
I drank a little coffee, and at eight-thirty Judy came in yawning, in a luxurious negligee over very gaudy pajamas.
“Well, what explanation does she give?” she said.
“May I have my tray here?
I hate eating alone.”
“Did who give?”
“Sarah.”
“She hasn’t come back, Judy.”
“What?
I heard her.
From two until three she walked about over my head until I was almost crazy.” Sarah’s room was over Judy’s.
I sat up in bed and stared at her. Then I rang the bell again.
“Joseph,” I said, “have you been into Sarah’s room this morning?”
“No madam.
I overslept, and I hurried right down.”
“Then how do you know she has not come back?”
“She hasn’t been down for her breakfast. She’s very early, always.”
And just then we heard Mary Martin talking excitedly to Clara in the hall overhead, and then come running down the stairs.
She burst into my room hysterically, to say that Sarah was not in her room and that it was all torn up.
Judy was gone like a flash, and while I threw something about me I questioned Mary.
She had, it seems, knocked at Sarah’s door to borrow the morning paper.
The morning paper, by the way, always reached me fourth hand; Joseph took it in and looked it over, Sarah got it from him, Mary Martin borrowed it from Sarah, and when I rang for it, usually at nine o’clock, it was apt to bear certain unmistakable scars; a bit of butter, a smudge of egg, or a squirt of grapefruit juice.
Anyhow, receiving no answer, Mary had opened the door, and what she saw I saw when I had hurried upstairs.
Sarah’s room was in complete confusion.
Some one had jerked aside her mattress and pillows, thrown down the clothes in her neat closet, looked at her shoes, and turned out her bureau.
Even her trunk had been broken open, and its contents lay scattered about.
Those records of family illnesses, which she carted about with her as a veteran might carry his medals, had been thrown out onto the bed and apparently examined.
There was something ruthless and shameless about the room now. It had no secrets, no privacies. It was, in a way, as though some one had stripped Sarah, had bared her stout spinster body to the world.
Judy, rather white, was in the doorway.
“I wouldn’t go in,” she said.
“Or at least I wouldn’t touch anything. Not until you get the police.”
Clara, the housemaid, was staring in over my shoulder. “She’ll have a fit over this,” she said.
“She’s that tidy!”
But I had a dreadful feeling that poor Sarah would never again have a fit over anything in this world.
It was nine-fifteen when I telephoned to headquarters, and at a quarter to ten a policeman in uniform and the Assistant Superintendent of Police, Inspector Harrison, reached the house.
The two of them examined the room, and then leaving the uniformed man in charge of Sarah’s room, Inspector Harrison listened to my story in the library.
He was a short stocky man, very bald and with the bluest eyes I have ever seen in an adult human being.
As he talked he drew a wooden toothpick from his pocket and bit on the end of it.
Later on I was to find that he had an apparently limitless supply of the things, and that they served a variety of purposes and moods.
He had given up smoking, he said, and they gave him “something to think with.”
He was disinclined to place any serious interpretation on Sarah’s absence until it was necessary, but he was interested in the housebreaking episode; especially in Wallie’s theory that the intruder on his first visit had swung himself into the light shaft, and he carefully examined it from above and below.
There were, however, many scratches on the sill of Clara’s pantry and little to be learned from any of them.
The Inspector stood for some time looking down into the shaft. “He could get in all right,” he decided, “but I’d hate to undertake to get myself out, once I was in.
Still, it’s possible.”
After that he wandered around the house, sometimes alone, sometimes with Joseph.
Wallie had arrived, and he and Judy and I sat there waiting, Judy very quiet, Wallie clearly anxious and for the first time alarmed.
He moved about the room, picking things up and putting them down until Judy turned on him angrily.
“For heaven’s sake, Wallie!
Can’t you keep still?”