Why hadn’t he stunned Sarah with that piece of wood, and then come here to get whatever it was, the records or the will?
She may have lain unconscious for those three hours.
Then later on he could have gone back to her.”
Well, that too was possible, although Dick thought the question of time entered into it.
“He’d have had to work pretty fast,” he said.
“It takes time to get old putty out of a window.
When I was a housebreaker—”
“He didn’t finish.
He broke the pane.”
I recall that they wrangled about it, and that finally they decided to go out and experiment a bit.
Dick’s idea I think was to get Judy’s mind away from Jim’s tragic situation, and as I needed the same thing myself rather badly, I trailed along.
It was a steaming July night, for it had rained during the day.
Somewhere in the grounds next door the ex-bootlegger’s children were exploding a few premature firecrackers, and on the street a steady procession of cars was passing, the riders not so much seeking a breeze as producing one.
We went out by the pantry and kitchen.
Joseph was reading the paper in the pantry, and I remember that as we passed through the pantry Judy asked him the time.
“Ten o’clock, Miss.”
“Aren’t you hot in here, Joseph?” I asked.
All the windows were down and the shades drawn.
“It’s safer like this, madam.”
I remember too that when we went outside, Dick carrying a flashlight, the dogs went with us; and that Jock saw a rabbit or something of the sort in the shrubbery by the garage and made a dash for it.
I whistled him back, and he came reluctantly.
We made our way slowly about.
Dick turning the flash alternately on the trees, one or two of which grow close to the house, and onto windows and doors.
At last we reached the back drawing room door and Dick turned the light full on it.
“Now for the knife,” he said.
“Durn you, I’ll learn you, Miss Judy.”
“Knife?
What knife?”
“I gave you a pocket knife, oh love of my life.
What the hell did you do with it?
I put it on the desk for you.”
Judy maintained that he had done nothing of the sort, and after a momentary squabble Dick went back by the kitchen to get it.
As I have said somewhere, it is exactly fifty feet around the corner from this door to the kitchen porch, and as he was running he made it very quickly.
It could not have been more than three minutes from the time he left us until he rejoined us.
Jock, I recall, was restless, and Judy was obliged, to hold him. She was slightly querulous.
In his excitement Dick had carried the flashlight with him, and she grumbled.
“He might have left us the light, anyhow.
I feel creepy.”
And indeed she did, for when Dick unexpectedly turned the corner, having left the house by the front door and emerging from behind us, she jumped and screamed.
As I sit here, recalling that night, I am again obsessed with that peculiar fatality which seemed to attend all our actions during those months of terror.
Here again was an instance of it.
Dick goes into the house by the kitchen door and departs by the front door, leaving both wide open, and as a result we have not only another crime, but no clue whatever to the identity of its perpetrator.
And in that night’s tragedy lay the whole story.
A matter of deadly reasoning; deadly inevitable, and as coldly and recklessly carried out.
Dick came back, as I say, and began working with the knife on the hard putty around one of the panes.
“It’s hard,” he said.
“Look at this. Like cement.
No, lady love, Wallie hadn’t time to meet Sarah and knock her senseless, get here, dig out as much of this as he did dig, and then be seen on the stairs apparently on his way out, when he was seen.
All those little things took time.”
They wrangled about it, Judy sticking to her point. Wallie had taken the pencil up the ladder with him, because he had dropped something of his own down the shaft.