All this stuff about expressions of horror on murdered people is pure nonsense.
I’ve seen a fellow beaten to death, and he looked as peaceful as though he’d died in his bed.”
Judy called for help, and the servants flocked in.
Katherine’s maid, a hysterical Frenchwoman was entirely helpless, and it was Mary Martin who threw up the windows and ran into Howard’s bedroom for water.
“But she dropped the glass,” said Judy, gazing at me with reddened eyes.
“She took the highball glass from beside the bed and dropped it on the bathroom floor.
It broke into bits.
I want to know why she did that.
There were glasses in the bathroom.”
I tried to reassure her.
After all, her father had been a dying man for some time.
And any one might drop a glass.
But she was not satisfied.
“How did she get there so quickly?” she demanded.
“It’s as though she was waiting for it.”
I advised her to say nothing, especially to Katherine in her grief.
But she only made a small gesture.
“She’ll know soon enough that Uncle Jim was here,” she said.
“The night watchman saw him.
And he told Evans this morning when he heard that father was—gone.
All the servants know it, probably.”
“He recognized your Uncle Jim?”
“I don’t know.
He knows somebody was here.”
“And the doctors?
They think everything is all right?
I mean, that it was his heart?”
“Why would they think anything else?” she said drearily.
“If it was poison—”
“Hush, Judy.”
I got through the remainder of the day somehow; not for years had we faced an emergency without Sarah, and I missed her now.
Sarah would have taken hold; would have put Katherine to bed matter-of-factly and with authority, have driven out that hysterical Frenchwoman who was wringing her hands in the servants’ hall, have given us all sedatives or got the doctor to order them, and then flat-footedly and as if death were as normal as living, have read a book until we were all safely asleep.
But Sarah was gone.
Florence Gunther was gone.
And now Howard.
Chapter Fourteen
WALLIE ARRIVED THAT EVENING.
Katherine was still shut in her room.
Now and then Judy would wander in, but Katherine was absorbed in her grief, alone with it.
She would kiss Judy and then forget she was there.
But she made a ghastly mistake when she refused to see Wallie.
One gesture from her then, one bit of recognition of their common grief, their common loss, and things would have been different.
Whatever might be his weaknesses, Wallie had cared about his father, and he looked stricken when I went in to see him.
His face was blank and expressionless, and he had little to say.
He sat slumped in his chair, and for the first time I saw a hint of gray in his hair.
He was only in his middle thirties, but he might have been fifty as he sat there.
“It was the heart, of course?”
“Yes.
It was bound to come before long, anyhow, Wallie.”
He seemed to hesitate, to bring his next question out with an effort.