He carried with him that sword-stick you gave him.”
“Even then—”
“Let me finish, Elizabeth Jane.
That cane or stick or whatever you call it, has disappeared.
It’s not in the house.
It stood in the hall with his other sticks until Sarah’s body was found. Then it went.”
He was looking at me with his tired sunken eyes, but there was no doubting his earnestness or his conviction.
“What does that look like?” he demanded.
“He has an appointment with Sarah. He goes to meet her, armed.
And then—”
“Wallie, I implore you not to give that to the police.”
“No,” he said somberly.
“Not yet.
But some day I may have to.”
This then was our situation, during the few days which remained before the first of May.
Sarah was dead; dead of two stab wounds four and a quarter inches deep, inflicted after she had been stunned by a blow on the back of the head.
Judy had been attacked by the same method, a blow on the head from the rear, but no further attempt on her life had been made.
Wallie suspected Jim Blake, apparently only because the sword-cane was missing, and my household was in a state of nerves so extreme that the back-firing of automobiles as they coasted down the long hill which terminates at my drive was enough to make the women turn pale.
Of clues we had none whatever.
Because of the sensational nature of the crime the press was clamoring for an arrest, and the Inspector was annoyed and irritated.
“What do they want, anyhow?” he said.
“I can’t make clues, can I?
And if you’d listen to the District Attorney’s office you’d think all I had to do was to walk out and arrest the first man I met on the street.
Lot of old women, getting nervous the minute the papers begin to yap at them!”
He must have broken up hundreds of toothpicks that week. We would find small scattered bits of wood all over the place.
By Sunday, the first of May, Judy was still in bed, but fully convalescent.
She had ordered a number of books on crime to read, and flanked by those on one side and her cigarettes on the other, managed to put in the days comfortably enough.
The evenings were reserved for Dick.
Their first meeting after Judy’s injury had defined the situation between them with entire clarity.
He was on his knees beside the bed in an instant.
“My darling!
My poor little darling!” he said.
She lay there, looking perfectly happy, with one hand on his head.
“Your poor little darling has made a damned fool of herself,” she said sweetly.
“And you’ll give me hell when you hear about it.
Go on out, Elizabeth Jane; he wants to kiss me.”
Which, Katherine or no Katherine, I promptly did.
It was then on Sunday afternoon that there occurred another of those apparently small matters on which later such grave events were to depend.
Already there were a number of them: Sarah’s poor body found by the coincidence of Judy being near when a horse shied; the coolness of an April night so that Norah must go to her window to close it; Mary Martin happening to open Sarah’s door while she was writing a letter, so that Sarah had made that damning record on her white sleeve; Jim Blake’s deviation from his custom of dressing for dinner and its results; Judy’s sudden and still mysterious desire to visit the garage at night; even my own impulsive gift to Jim Blake of my grandfather’s sword-stick.
On that Sunday afternoon, at five o’clock, Florence Gunther came to see me and was turned away.
I had gone upstairs to rest, and she was turned away.
Why had she not come sooner?
She was frightened, of course.
We know that now.
Afraid for her very life.
The nights must have been pure terror, locked away in there in the upper room of that shabby house on Halkett Street.
But she knew she held the key to the mystery.
One can figure her reading the papers, searching for some news, and all the time holding the key and wondering what she ought to do.
If she had gone to the police with her story, she might have saved her life.
But if all of us behaved rationally under stress there would be no mysteries, and the dread of the police and of publicity is very strong in many people.