If he’s overlooked one now—”
He was carefully turning over dead leaves with a stick he carried, and now he stooped suddenly and picked up something.
“Look at this!” he said.
“The key to the tool room, isn’t it?
I thought so.
Threw it here as he ran.”
He was examining the key, which is the flat key of the usual Yale lock, and now he gave an exclamation of disgust.
“Clean as a whistle,” he said.
“Pretty cagey, this chap.
Must have been in a devil of a hurry, but he wiped it first; or he wore gloves.”
He stood there for some time, staring at the key.
“Well,” he said finally, “we have just two guesses, Miss Bell. Either he wanted to do away with Miss Judy, which is unlikely; or he did not like her going into that tool room.”
“But he let her go in, and he locked her there.”
“Not in shape to do much looking about, however,” he said grimly.
“Now which was it?”
He glared at me as though he expected an answer.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” I said meekly.
Later on I stood by while his men measured the distance between the footprints and made molds of them.
They sprayed the marks with something first, and then poured in plaster of Paris which the Inspector reinforced with the inevitable toothpicks.
The result was a pair of rather ghastly white shoes, which he surveyed with satisfaction.
“How do I know they were planted?” he said.
“Well, the stride was too long for the foot, for one thing.
Here’s a small foot and a long stride.
Then the ground’s soft; they weren’t deep enough.
And there’s another point.
When a man walks there’s a back thrust to his foot, and the weight’s likely to be more on the outside and back of the heel.
Look at me; I walk in this earth.
What happens?
I break the earth at the rear as I lift my foot.”
“You might try that, Simmons,” he called.
“Maybe the next time you won’t let somebody put something over on you.”
He left soon after that, greatly pleased with himself but considerably puzzled, and carrying the two molds carefully wrapped in a newspaper.
His examination of the garage and of the ladder had yielded nothing whatever.
Chapter Seven
JUDY HAD BEEN HURT on Wednesday, the twenty-seventh of April, and Florence Gunther was not killed until the first of May, which was the Sunday following.
On either Tuesday or Friday of that week, then, Wallie came in to see me.
I remember being shocked at his appearance, and still more shocked at the way he received the news that Judy had been hurt.
“Good God!” he said.
“I’ll stop this thing if I have to—” He hesitated. “If I have to kill somebody with my own hands.”
But he would not explain that.
He called Joseph and went out to the garage, leaving me to make what I could out of that speech of his, and of his conduct generally since Sarah had been killed.
He had searched far more assiduously than had the police, had shown more anxiety than any of us.
His gaiety had gone, and he had a hollow-eyed and somber look during those days which I could not account for.
Nor did the discovery of the body afford him any apparent relief.
To the rest of us, grieved as we were, it at least ended that tragic search.
After all, it was over.
We could not help Sarah, and the rest was for the police.
But Wallie had not appeared to share this relief.
Yet Wallie had not liked Sarah.
She was not a part of that early regime of which Joseph was the lone survival; of Margaret and the noisy, gay, extravagant days before she left Howard and a young son both of whom had passionately loved her, to run away with a man who abandoned her within six months.