So I turned and re-turned.
How long could this visit be kept under cover?
Not long.
The servants knew, and from the servants to Mary Martin was only a step.
Then, when it was known, what?
How would the police argue?
That Jim had made a confession to Howard, and that the shock had killed him?
Certainly they could argue that this secret visit of Jim’s was not the act of a consciously innocent man.
But what did any of them know, after all?
That Howard had had a visitor, but not necessarily that visitor’s identity.
Or did Mary suspect who that visitor had been?
Moving in her mysterious way among us all, never of us but among us, unfathomable, shrewd, unscrupulous when she chose to be, she had her own methods, her own purposes.
Suppose then that she made inquiries, downstairs?
Suppose she had talked to the night watchman, got a description of the visitor, was proposing to give that description to Wallie?
And Wallie perhaps already suspicious, asking about a post-mortem, maybe about to demand one.
Still, she had broken the glass.
Why should she do that?
What picture had been in her mind?
Did she suspect or did she know of something—a powder perhaps—shaken into that glass beside the bed, and Howard drinking it?
Sitting there, talking maybe, and drinking it.
Where was the glass now?
She had broken it, but the pieces would be somewhere about.
Suppose they were, and Wallie was suspicious?
Suppose he had gone to the police that night, and early morning would find the trash-can examined, and Jim’s guilt proved beyond a doubt?
I thought that it would kill Katherine.
Outside it was raining, a heavy spring shower.
I got out of bed and paced the floor in my bare feet, to the accompaniment of heavy thunder and the beating of the rain on neighboring roofs.
Suppose I got those pieces of glass and disposed of them?
Hid them and then carried them off?
Dropped them in a river or out of the window of a railway carriage? Innocent or guilty, they would be gone.
Looking back, I know that I was not entirely normal that night, but I was on the verge of desperation.
I was ready to pay any price for peace.
It did not even seem to be important that Jim Blake might be a cold-blooded and deadly killer; what mattered was that it should not be known, that we be allowed to go back to our quiet lives once more, that no scandal break to involve us all.
So, thinking or not thinking, I put on a dressing gown and went quietly down the stairs.
As I have said, the dining room, kitchen, pantries and so on are at the rear of a long hall.
One passes from the dining room through a butler’s pantry into the kitchen, and beyond the kitchen, opening from a rear hallway, is a small cement-floored room in which is the dumb-waiter by which refuse cans and so on are lowered to the basement, there to be collected.
This room I knew well.
During the day it was there that the boxes had been taken as the flowers were unwrapped, and when last I saw it that day it had been waist deep in paper.
To this room, therefore, I went.
Save the dumb-waiter, there is no access to it other than by the one door, and I felt my way along in the darkness, fearful of rousing the servants.
But outside the door I stopped, almost paralyzed with amazement.
Some one was in the room.
There was the stealthy movement of paper, the sound of a lid being fitted cautiously onto a can.
It took all my courage to fling that door open, and for a moment, after the darkness, the blaze of light almost blinded me.
Then I saw, sitting calmly on the floor, Mary Martin.
She was looking at me with a half smile, and the light on her red hair was positively dazzling.
“Good heavens, how you scared me!” she said.
“What on earth are you doing here?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, “and I got to worrying about a card.
That bunch of orchids and lilies of the valley—the card’s been thrown away.”