The new will made no provision whatever, either for Sarah or for Jim.
“He may be lying,” said Jim, still apparently confused.
But Alex Davis snapped his fingers with excitement, and said that if so it was fairly circumstantial lying.
“He’s even got the names of the witnesses,” he said, and drawing a slip of paper from his pocket he read them aloud.
“Sarah Gittings and Florence Gunther.”
I believe it was then that Jim collapsed.
Naturally I knew nothing of this at the time, nor did Judy.
Both Katherine and Jim were still shut in their rooms when I left early the next morning.
But I was sufficiently dismayed and confused.
If we were to believe Jim—and I did—then the possibility of a third murder was very real.
And once more, sitting in the train, I endeavored to fit together the fragments of that puzzle.
I saw Howard, that night, waiting in his room, settled in his bed, the highball beside him, a book in his hand.
Getting up to admit his visitor, finding it was not Jim, but making no outcry.
Still calm, putting on his dressing gown and slippers, talking.
Judy had heard them talking.
Some one he knew, then; knew and trusted.
Was it Wallie?
Wallie was not unlike Jim in build, although taller and slimmer.
Might not that be the answer, and no poison, no third murder.
A talk between father and son, and then Wallie going and the heart attack after he had gone.
I admit that this comforted me.
I sat back and tried to read.
Shortly before the train drew in to the station Dick Carter came through the car.
He looked depressed, but he forced a smile when he saw me.
“Well,” he said,
“I’m back on the job!
Even funerals can’t last forever.”
He sat down in the empty chair next to mine, and said that Judy had telephoned him of Jim’s denial.
“She believes him,” he said.
“In that case—this Martin girl seems to be fairly vital.
It begins to look as though she’s the key, doesn’t it?
Take that glass, for instance.
She thought fast that morning and she was still thinking that night.
It’s not coincidence, all that glass stuff.
Get why she did that, and we’ve got somewhere.
Where does she come in in all this, anyhow?”
“I wish I knew.”
“Tell me something about her,” he said, leaning forward.
“Who is she?
What do you know about her?”
“Nothing, really.
She answered an advertisement last fall.
I tried her out, and she was efficient.
Very.
She had no local references.”
“And on that you took her into the house? To live?”
“Not at first.
But she was really very capable, and sometimes I work at night.
I rather drifted into it.”
He was silent for some time.