Miss Sanderson smiled her childlike smile.
“It’s all the home I have,” she said.
“And Mrs. Bassett likes everything to be nice.
She’s very clean, really.”
Before she settled to her story she opened her door, looked out, closed it again.
“I’m only talking because you were friends of poor Florence,” she said.
“And I don’t know if what I have to tell you is important, or not. I won’t have to go to the police, will I?”
“Certainly not,” said Judy sturdily.
“You know I told them that I’d heard her moving things about, that night?
Well, I did.
I didn’t like to say what I really thought.”
She lowered her voice. “I thought she had a man up there.
That’s what I went up in the morning to speak to her about.”
“A man?” I asked.
“Could you hear him?”
“A man and a woman,” she said.
“I could hear them both.”
Her story amounted to this:
She was a light sleeper, and she was wakened some time after midnight by movements in the room above.
As Florence never stirred about in the night, this puzzled her.
Especially as the movements continued.
“Somebody seemed to be moving the furniture,” she said.
“Very carefully, but you can’t move a bureau in a house built like this without it making some noise.
Even then I might have gone to sleep again, but there were two people.
One walked heavier than the other.”
She was curious, rather than alarmed.
She got up and opened her door, and at last she crept up the stairs and—she seemed to apologize for this—put her ear to the door.
There was a man talking in a low tone in the room.
That scandalized her.
She went downstairs “with her head whirling,” and stood there, uncertain what to do.
She seems to have been in a state of shock and indignation, imagining all sorts of things.
And the sounds went on, only now she could hear a woman crying. She was outraged.
She thought Florence Gunther had a man in her room and that they were quarreling.
Finally she took her haircurler and rapped vigorously on the chandelier.
The noises ceased at once, but although she set her door open and waited inside in the dark, nobody came down.
Whoever they were, they must have escaped down the rear staircase.
But she could not sleep.
A sort of virtuous fury possessed her, and half an hour later she threw something on and went up valiantly to Florence’s room.
“I was going to give her a good talking to,” she said.
“It makes me sick now to think of it, but this is a respectable house, and—well, you know what I mean.
If she was carrying on with anybody—”
The door was closed but not locked, and she spoke to Florence and got no answer.
She turned on the switch inside the door, and there was the room; in chaos.
She seemed unable to describe it. She made a gesture.
“Even her shoes,” she said.
“Her poor shoes were on the floor.
But she hadn’t been robbed.
Her dime bank was still on her dresser, and she had an old-fashioned watch for a clock, beside the daybed on a table. It was still there.” She shot downstairs after that, trembling, and got into bed.
Even then she was not certain that Florence was not concerned in it somehow.
She knew that one of the two in that room had been a woman.