And in addition she herself had something to hide, a small matter but vital to her.
How could she tell her story and not reveal that?
She must have thought of all those things, sitting alone at night in that none too comfortable room of hers with its daybed covered with an imitation Navajo rug, its dull curtains and duller carpet, its book from the circulating library, and perhaps on the dresser when she went to bed at night, the gold bridge with its two teeth which was later to identify her.
Yet in the end she reached a decision and came to me.
And Joseph, who was to identify her as my visitor later on by a photograph, answered the bell and turned her away!
I was asleep, he said, and could not be disturbed.
So she went off, poor creature, walking down my path to the pavement and to her doom; a thin colorless girl in a dark blue coat and a checked dress.
She had left no name, and Joseph did not tell me until I went down to dinner.
Even then it meant nothing to me.
“What was she like, Joseph?
A reporter?”
“I think not, madam.
A thinnish person, very quiet.”
Dick was having an early Sunday night supper with me, early so that the servants might go out.
That, too, is a custom of my mother’s, the original purpose having been that they might go to church.
Now, I believe, they go to the movies.
But I thought no more of the matter.
Mary Martin had rather upset me.
She had come in from a walk to tell me that she was leaving as soon as I could spare her, and had suddenly burst into tears.
“I just want to get away,” she said, through her handkerchief.
“I’m nervous here. I’m—I guess I’m frightened.”
“That’s silly, Mary.
Where would you go?”
“I may go to New York.
Mrs. Somers has said she may find something for me.”
Judy’s comment on that conversation, when I stopped in her room to tell her, was characteristic.
“Mother’s idea of keeping Mary’s mouth shut,” she said.
“And polite blackmail on the part of the lady!”
So Mary had not come down to dinner, and Dick and I were alone.
He talked, I remember, about crime; that Scotland Yard seized on one dominant clue and followed it through, but that the expert American detective used the Continental method and followed every possible clue.
And he stated as a corollary to this that the experts connected with the homicide squad had some clues in connection with Sarah’s murder that they were not giving out.
“They’ve got something, and I think it puzzles them.”
“You don’t know what it is?”
But he only shook his head, and proceeded to eat a substantial meal.
I remember wondering if that clue involved Jim, and harking back again, as I had ever since, to Wallie’s suspicion of him.
Why had he telephoned to Sarah that night?
Could it be that he was, in case of emergency, registering the fact that, at seven-fifteen or thereabouts, he was safely at home?
But we had the word of Amos that he was not at home at that time; that, God help us, he was out somewhere, with a deadly weapon in his hand and who knew what was in his heart.
He was still shut away, in bed.
What did he think about as he lay in that bed?
“Dick,” I said. “You and Judy have something in your minds about this awful thing, haven’t you?”
“We’ve been talking about it. Who hasn’t?”
“But something concrete,” I insisted.
“Why on earth did Judy want that ladder?”
He hesitated.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly.
“I don’t think she wanted the ladder; I think she must have intended to look at it.
Upon this cryptic speech, which he refused to elaborate, I took him upstairs.
That evening is marked in my memory by two things.
One was, about nine o’clock, a hysterical crying fit by Mary Martin.