“I suppose Miss Judy came in by the front door, madam?”
“Miss Judy!
Has she been out?”
“She went out through the kitchen, a little after ten.
She said she wanted the ladder; she didn’t say why.”
I was uneasy rather than alarmed, until I saw that the garage was dark.
“She’s not there, Joseph!”
“Maybe she took the car and went out, madam.”
“She’d have told me, I’m sure.”
I was starting out at once, but he held me back.
“I’d better get my revolver,” he said.
“If there’s anything wrong—”
That sent a shiver of fear down my spine.
“Judy!” I called.
“Judy!”
There was no answer, and together Joseph and I started out, he slightly in the lead and his revolver in his hand.
It was a black night and starless; just such a night as when poor Sarah met her death, and the very silence was terrifying.
Halfway along the path Joseph wheeled suddenly.
“Who’s there?” he said sharply.
“What did you hear, Joseph?”
“I thought somebody moved in the bushes.”
We listened, but everything was quiet, and we went on.
In the garage itself, when we switched on the lights, everything was in order, and the key Judy had used was still in the small door which gave entrance from the side.
This door was closed but not locked.
The first ominous thing was when we discovered that the door into the tool room was locked and that the key was missing from its nail.
I rattled the knob and called Judy, but received no reply, and Joseph in the meantime was searching for the key.
“She’s in here, Joseph.”
“Not necessarily, madam.
Robert hides the key sometimes.
He says that Abner takes his tools.”
But Judy was in there.
Not until Joseph had broken a window and crawled in did we find her, poor child, senseless and bleeding from a cut on the head.
Joseph carried her into the house, and into the library. She was already stirring when he placed her on the couch there, and she was quite conscious, although dizzy and nauseated, in a short time. Enough indeed to protest against my calling a doctor.
“We don’t want any more fuss,” she said, and tried to smile.
“Remember mother, Elizabeth Jane!
Always in the society columns but never in the news.”
But as she was violently nauseated almost immediately I got Joseph to telephone to Doctor Simonds, and he came very soon afterwards.
She had, he said, been struck on the head, and Joseph suggested that the ladder itself had fallen on her.
As a matter of fact, later investigation showed the ladder lying on the floor, and as Judy said it was against the wall when she saw it, there was a possibility of truth in this.
But one thing was certain; however she was hurt, she had been definitely locked in the tool room. She had used the key and left it in the door.
Some one had locked her in and taken the key. It was nowhere to be found.
We got her up to bed, and the diagnosis was a mild concussion and a lucky escape.
The doctor was inclined to be humorous about it.
“You have a hard head, Judy.
A hard head but a soft heart, eh?”
Well, he ordered ice to what she called her bump and heat to her feet, and while Joseph was cracking the ice below she told her story.
But although Joseph maintained that she had asked him about the ladder, she gave an entirely different reason herself.
“Abner has a foot rule in the tool room,” was her story to me.
“I wanted to measure the cabinet.
Sometimes you find a secret drawer that way.