In the end I had to get my own penknife from my desk, and Laura inserted the blade along the metal binding of the door.
It sprang open, revealing between the inner lining and the front of the door a flat space, the size of the door in area but hardly more than half inch in depth.
But that space was empty.
We stared at each other.
My disappointment was more than I could bear, and Laura was almost in tears.
What Wallie felt I can only surmise.
He bent over and examined it, and I saw then that there the lining was badly scratched.
Laura saw it too.
“Those weren’t there when you got it, were they?”
“I don’t think so.”
Wallie spoke then, for the first time.
“Why should anything be there?” he said.
“Somebody was quicker than we were, that’s all.”
“You mean that this has been done recently.”
“Since those directions were read out in court,” he replied grimly.
“You’ll find a window broken somewhere, or a door left unlocked.”
He was right.
With all of us out of the house there had been no one to put in place the chain which now supplemented the lock of the kitchen door.
The key of that door lay on the floor, as though it had been pushed out from outside and a duplicate or skeleton key had been used.
And the door now stood open.
It was that night that Wallie disappeared.
I was less surprised than I should have been, perhaps, when he was not in the courtroom the next morning.
On the evening before, at seven o’clock, he had telephoned Judy and told her not to worry.
“I’m going on the stand tomorrow,” he said, “and everything will be all right, Judy.”
“What do you mean, all right?
If everything isn’t as wrong as it can be, I don’t know what it is.”
But he said that he was going to testify, and that he had plenty to say.
That she was to be ready for a shock, but not to think badly of him.
He had got himself into this mess, and he would “take his medicine.”
“Go to bed and get a decent sleep,” he said.
“Let me do the staying awake.
And don’t worry.
Jim Blake isn’t going to the chair.”
She said later that he was not drunk, she was certain, but that his voice sounded queer.
“I’ve made up my mind,” he finished, “and I feel better for it.
It’s a clean slate and to hell with what happens, for me.”
But he did not appear.
I was bitterly disappointed, and Judy looked puzzled and anxious.
“He lost his nerve,” she said.
“He’ll never tell now, whatever it is that he knows.”
But the trial went on, although the papers commented unpleasantly on his absence, and Godfrey Lowell was upset.
Still, on the surface at least, Wallie’s testimony could neither damn Jim nor save him.
Whatever the true story of that pencil in the shaft, the fact remained that Wallie was in my house at ten o’clock, and Jim was in the park.
Things went badly for Jim that day.
Amos had not been located, but there was his damaging testimony before the Grand Jury; and now read into the record, over protest, that the cane had been in the hall until Sarah’s body was found and then disappeared; and that further and damning fact that he had found a bloody handkerchief of Jim’s the morning after Sarah’s murder and placed it with the soiled clothes; that on listing the laundry the following Monday he had found this handkerchief, but that in the interval it had been washed clean and dried.
The accumulated mass of testimony was overwhelming.
Nothing could shake the opinion of the experts that Sarah’s letter to Jim was in her own hand, or that the drops of blood here and there on his clothing and inside the sword-stick were human blood.
“How do you know they are human blood?”
“By the shape and size of the corpuscles.
Also by their numbers and groupings.”