Very muscular.
Even now she isn’t as weak as you’d expect.”
I sat up.
Was it possible that Mrs. Bassett was the heavy-set woman who had given Howard Somers massage at the hotel?
And if so, what would that mean?
What did she know?
What had she learned in those rooms, during those mysterious days of the illness, that might be valuable now?
That, it seemed to me, was the important thing, and not Lily Sanderson’s guess that she had been in Florence’s room the night she was killed.
One could imagine her, her sleeves showing her strong arms as she bent over the bed, working mechanically.
And then, something being said, some quarrel going on or some name being mentioned which had registered in her mind.
Then, lying in her bed, the impulse to tell what she knew, and the second impulse, more profound, to be allowed to die in peace.
“Did she ever mention any of her patients?”
“I think not.
She isn’t what you would call talkative.”
“I wondered.
We know that a woman answering that description gave massage a few times to Mr. Howard Somers here last year.
But I daresay Doctor Simonds would know.”
That, however, did not interest Miss Sanderson.
What she wanted, and finally brought out, was that I should myself see Mrs. Bassett and talk to her.
That night if possible.
“Her heart’s bad, and she may go any time like that.”
She snapped her fingers.
“If you could work on her she might talk.
Tell her all the trouble and sorrow that’s going on.
She’s kind enough.
I could have yelped myself when I saw that picture of Mr. Blake with the handcuffs.”
Here the feeling that she had committed an indelicacy caused her to get up suddenly and prepare to go.
“That’s fixed, is it?
You’ll come?
Say about nine o’clock?
I’ll be watching for you.
She’ll have had her hypo at eight, and the daughter’s going out.
I’ve promised to relieve her early.
I can smuggle you in.”
But she seemed loath to go.
“I don’t know why,” she said, “but I get a funny feeling in that house at night.
She thinks she hears things, and she lies and listens.”
I let her out myself, and watched her go down the drive to the street.
It occurred to me then that she was frightened, that she had been frightened all along; that she knew that to meddle in this matter might be deadly; that the same fear which had turned Mrs. Bassett stubbornly silent was in her.
There was pathos in that.
These two women, one worn with watching, one dying, and no peace for either of them.
Shut in those two upper rooms, awake in the long night, and the sick woman “hearing things.”
Doctor Simonds did not remember the Bassett woman.
He had suggested massage, and either Sarah or Wallie had found some one.
He himself had never seen her.
He had two or three masseuses on his list, but they were all Danes or Swedes, there was no one named Bassett.
Chapter Twenty-four
I DID NOT TAKE the car that night.
I had no desire to let Robert know of that visit.
But I took Joseph, out of sheer panic, to see me safely down the hill and into the lighted portion of the park. There he turned back, and I went on alone.