Then he asked for it again and he took a revolver out of it.
He tried to slip it out so I wouldn’t see it. But I saw it all right.
He put it in the pocket of the car.”
To me that night that revolver meant only one thing.
Wallie had killed himself.
Somewhere he had stopped his car on a lonely road and ended a life which had ceased to be endurable.
But why?
What did he know?
What had he done?
Was it possible after all that those three alibis of his were wrong?
Had he slipped out of my house that night of the eighteenth of April and killed poor Sarah?
I went over that night once more, and I was certain that he had not.
Late as it was by that time, almost midnight, I called up Inspector Harrison.
I had evidently wakened him from a sound sleep, but he said he would come as soon as he could, and while I sat there waiting my mind fairly seethed.
If Wallie was innocent, then what did he know that he would rather die than tell, and for which he would let Jim suffer?
And once more I harked back to Judy and that strange suspicion of hers about her father.
Were we all wrong, after all?
Was Howard being blackmailed, and that will with its ambiguous clause his final price for silence?
Was Katherine right and was Margaret living?
And were Sarah and Florence Howard’s desperate last attempt to keep that secret under cover?
Wallie and Jim both silent, the one ready to go to the chair if necessary before he would speak, and the other perhaps dead by his own hand; what did that look like?
And when the Inspector came I told him all that was in my mind, my fears for Wallie, my suspicions about Howard.
He listened attentively, biting hard on the end of a toothpick and silent for some time after I had finished.
“It’s ingenious,” he said at last.
“It’s even possible.
Funny thing Miss Judy would think of that, isn’t it, and the rest of us would miss it?
Sure he might have recognized this fellow if he was there; especially if he knew him.
There’s more to recognition than features. There’s the outline and the clothes and the way a person moves.
And here’s a thing that struck me at the trial.
If he was inventing that man, why put him in evening clothes?
It was plausible enough up to that minute.
Then the jury just sat back and yawned.
Now, Mr. Somers had white hair, I think, and he wore it fairly long?”
“Yes.”
“Queer case, isn’t it?” he said.
“Unless Blake invented the evening coat to fit the black fibers on that log.
Well, let’s get to this other matter.”
When he left it was to go to the garage and secure a description of Wallie’s car, and I believe it was almost morning before he got to his bed again.
He had started the entire machinery of the city and county on the search by that time, and the only reason he did not extend that search over the country was because he felt certain, as he confessed later, that Wallie was dead by his own hand, and not too far away.
That was on Tuesday, and on Wednesday morning the papers were filled with his disappearance.
“Young Millionaire Missing.”
“Police Hunting Walter Somers.” And on Thursday afternoon, the last day of June, we had some news.
Wallie’s car had been found on the Warrenville road, not far from the end of the street car line, and about two miles nearer the city than the Hawkins farm.
Some boy scouts, out for a hike, had selected for lunch a gully with a small stream flowing through it, and a half dozen had wandered up this ravine for a half mile or so.
The car had been driven over the hill, and was upside down and badly demolished.
A local deputy constable had notified the police and kept the boys away.
They had been anxious to turn it over.
When Inspector Harrison arrived on the scene with Simmons and four or five others, the ground had not been disturbed.
They found no footprints, however, save the smaller and unmistakable ones of the boys, and they were forced to the conclusion either that the car had been empty when it started on its wild journey, or that Wallie had been thrown out somewhere on the hill.
But they found no Wallie, and nothing further to help them.