“Howard?
Not for months.”
“You’re sure of that, I suppose?”
“He hasn’t been able to get about, Jim. You know that.”
He looked at me with eyes that even then seemed sunken, and drew a long breath.
“I suppose that’s so,” he said, and lapsed into silence.
There was, at the time, only one result to that visit of Jim Blake’s. I called Dick in and told him and Judy Katherine’s desire for secrecy.
“Trust mother!” said Judy.
“Keep in the society columns and out of the news!”
But the story was suppressed.
Not until Sarah’s body was found, four days later, was there any publicity.
The discovery of the body was one of those sheer chances to which I have referred.
Without any possible motive for her killing, the police still believed it possible that she had deliberately disappeared. But, as Judy pointed out, there was as little known reason for such a disappearance as for her murder.
And then on the Saturday of that week she was found, poor soul.
I have no distinct memories of those four days of nightmare, save of the increasing certainty of disaster, of Katherine’s and Laura’s frenzied suggestions by telephone and wire, of Judy’s forced cheerfulness, and a queer sort of desperation in Wallie which I could not understand.
He had joined the police in the search, visited the Morgue, gone through her effects to find a photograph to be sent to other cities.
During those days he seemed neither to eat nor sleep, and he grew perceptibly thinner.
All his old nonchalance had left him, and at least once in that four-day interval he came in somewhat the worse for liquor.
It was that night—I do not remember which one—that he told me he had written me a letter and put it in his box at the bank.
“So you’ll understand,” he said, his tongue slightly thick. “So if anything happens to me you’ll understand.” Judy looked up at him.
“You’re lit,” she stated coldly. “Lit and mawkish.
What’s going to happen to you?”
“You’ll see,” he said somberly.
“Plenty may happen to me.
If you don’t believe it, look at me!”
“You’re not much to look at just now,” she told him.
“You’d better order him some black coffee, Elizabeth Jane.”
She told me later that she did not believe he had written me any letter.
But he had indeed.
Months later we found it where he said it would be, in his box at the bank. But by that time we needed no explanation.
The finding of Sarah’s body was as extraordinary as was everything else in this strange case.
Judy had taken the dogs for their usual walk in the park, and somewhere there she met Dick, certainly not by chance.
It appears that for purposes of their own they had left the main park and walked through that narrow ravine which is behind my own property, and through which a bridle path follows the wanderings of a small stream.
As this ravine lies close to the lot where the dogs had been found, there had been a search of sorts.
The two young people, then, were not searching.
They were walking along, intent on their own affairs.
In front of them a man on a gray horse was ambling quietly along.
Suddenly and without warning the horse shied violently, and the rider went off.
He was not hurt, and Dick caught the horse and led it back to him.
“Not hurt, are you?” Judy asked.
“Only surprised,” he told her.
“Surprised and irritated!
That’s the second time this beast has shied at that sewer, or whatever it is.
Twice this week. Yet he’s seen it a hundred times.”
Well, he got on again, having led the animal past the obstacle, and Judy and Dick looked at it.
At some time it had evidently been intended to raise the road level there, and what they saw was a brick sewer entrance, circular, and standing about seven feet above the ground.
“Funny,” said Judy.
“What’s happened to that thing this week?”
Dick laughed at her.
Neither of them, I am sure, was thinking of poor Sarah.