She had emptied one of the trash-cans onto a paper before her. Now she ran her fingers through the debris, the flotsam and jetsam of the day; a chipped cup, bits of string, old envelopes, even sweepings from the floors.
And suddenly she picked something up and waved it before me.
“Here it is,” she said. “Now I can sleep in peace.”
I do not know why I felt that she was acting.
Perhaps the open window had something to do with it; the rain driving in and blowing over her, and that assumption of hers that this was as it should be; that she liked sitting in that chaos and allowing the rain to wet one of those alluring negligees which she affected.
“Why don’t you close that window?”
She drew her kimono about her, and got up.
“I will,” she said.
“Not that I suppose it matters here.”
And then, at the window with her back to me, I saw her release her clutch on the kimono, so that it blew out into the room, and I saw her lower the window with one hand.
I knew then that she had dropped something over the sill.
And I saw another thing.
There were no bits of glass among the trash on that paper.
If she had thrown them out, as I suspected, the rain would wash them clean of evidence.
They were gone.
But lying in bed later on I was bewildered beyond thought.
Had this unfathomable girl lain awake as I had, reached the same conclusion, acted on the same impulse?
Or was there something more sinister there, some knowledge I did not possess which she did?
And once again I was back in my house at home, hearing that desperate weeping of hers.
“It’s nothing.
I was low in my mind.
That’s all.” I have rather a confused memory of the next two days.
I recall that early the next morning I made an excursion into the courtyard of the building, but without much result.
It was still raining, and although here and there I could see very small pieces of glass, there was nothing large enough to be worth salvage.
Which was not surprising, considering that if I was right they had had a sheer drop of twelve stories.
Dick Carter appeared on Thursday.
I did not know he had come until I saw him in the library with Judy.
I happened to walk in on them, and I saw at once that things were not well between them.
He was standing at a window, staring out, and Judy was huddled in a chair.
“I don’t see what difference it makes,” she was saying.
“Don’t you?
Well, I do.”
Nevertheless, it was from Dick that I got the first intimation that some one besides myself was suspicious of Howard’s death.
Judy had disappeared, but the boy stayed around after she had gone, uncomfortable but apparently determined.
“I suppose it’s all right?” he said to me. “No chance of anything queer, eh?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.
Suppose Blake told him something and the shock killed him; that’s not murder.
That is, supposing it was Blake.”
“Good heavens!
Do you think it was some one else?”
“Well, figure it out for yourself.
Blake’s sick, or he says he is.
But he comes here in the middle of the night, driving his own car for ninety-odd miles, sees Mr. Somers and gets back, presumably, at daylight or thereabouts.
That’s some drive for a sick man.
Then all this secrecy.
Why?
The police couldn’t have stopped him if he’d wanted to take a train and come here.
They’ve got nothing on him yet.
All he had to do was to pack a bag and come.