Judy looked at her wrist watch and told her.
“And do behave yourself, Sarah!” she called.
But Sarah did not answer.
She snapped the leashes on the dogs and went out.
That was at five minutes after seven.
She went out and never came back.
Judy and I loitered over the meal, or rather I loitered; Judy ate and answered the telephone.
One call was from a youth named Dick, and there was a subtle change in Judy’s voice which made me suspicious.
Another, however, she answered coldly.
“I don’t see why,” she said.
“She knew quite well where I was going … Well, I’m all right.
If I want to go wrong I don’t need to come here to do it … No, she’s gone out.”
I have recorded this conversation because it became highly important later on.
To the best of my knowledge it came soon after Sarah left; at seven-fifteen or thereabouts.
Judy came back to the table with her head in the air.
“Uncle Jim,” she said.
“Wouldn’t you know mother would sic him on me?
The old goose!”
By which she referred not to Katherine, but to Katherine’s brother, Jim Blake. Judy had chosen to affect a dislike for him, not because of any inherent qualities in Jim himself, but because Katherine was apt to make him her agent when Judy visited me.
Personally I was fond of Jim, perhaps because he paid me the small attentions a woman of my age finds gratifying, and certainly Katherine adored him.
“He asked for Sarah, but I told him she had gone out.
What in the world does he want with Sarah?”
“He may have had some message from your mother for her.”
“Probably to keep an eye on me,” said Judy, drily.
I think all this is accurate.
So many things happened that evening that I find it difficult to go back to that quiet meal. Quiet, that is, up to the time when Joseph brought in our coffee.
I know we discussed Jim, Judy and I, and Judy with the contempt of her youth for the man in his late forties who takes no active part in the world.
Yet Jim had organized his life as best he could.
He was a bachelor, who went everywhere for a reason which I surmised but Judy could not understand; the fear of the lonely of being alone.
“Uncle Jim and his parties!” said Judy.
“How in the world does he pay for them?”
“He has a little from his mother.”
“And more probably from my mother!”
Well, that might have been, so I said nothing, and as money meant nothing in Judy’s lavish young life she was immediately cheerful again.
It is hard to remember Jim as he was in those days; as he must have been when he left his house that night.
A tall man, still very erect, and with graying hair carefully brushed to hide its thinness, he was always urbane and well dressed.
He was popular too.
He had never let business, which in his case was a dilettante interest in real estate, interfere with a golf game or bridge, and by way of keeping up his social end he gave innumerable little tea parties and dinners.
He had a colored servant named Amos who was a quick change artist, and so people dined with Jim on food cooked by Amos, to be served by Amos in a dinner jacket, and then went outside to find Amos in a uniform and puttees, standing by the car with the rug neatly folded over his arm.
There are some people to whom all colored men look alike, and to these no doubt Jim Blake appeared to be served by a retinue of servants.
“The Deb’s delight!” was Judy’s closing and scathing comment, and then Joseph brought in the coffee.
That was, according to Joseph’s statement to the police and later before the Grand Jury, at seven-thirty or seven-thirty-five.
Judy had lighted a cigarette.
I remember thinking how pretty she looked in the candle light, and how the house brightened when she was there.
Joseph was moving about the pantry, and in the silence I could hear distant voices from the servants’ hall beyond the kitchen.
Judy had lapsed into silence.
The initial excitement of her arrival was over, and I thought now that she looked dispirited and rather tired.
Then I happened to raise my eyes, and they fell on the mirror.
There was a man on the staircase.
Chapter Three