“I have never received a letter from her, then, or at any time.”
In this message, evidently sent after she had met Florence Gunther on the street and received the envelope, she had asked him to meet her that night on a very urgent matter.
The address she gave was a house on Halkett Street, and he determined to walk, going by way of the park.
On the way, however, he found that he had left the house number in his other clothing—he had changed to a walking suit—and he stopped at a drugstore to call her up.
She had started, however; he talked to Judy for a moment and then went on, taking the short cut through the corner of the Larimer lot.
He remembered that the house was in the seventeen hundred block on Halkett Street, and that he was to ask for a Miss Gunther.
When he reached the block in question he had walked along slowly, and at one of the houses a youngish woman was waiting on the steps.
He asked if she knew of a Miss Gunther in the vicinity, and she said that that was her name, and that Sarah had not yet arrived.
They went together into the house and waited in the parlor.
It was a boarding house, but although the door into the hall was open, he saw no one except a colored woman who passed by shortly before he left.
The Gunther woman had been silent and very nervous.
As time went on and Sarah did not arrive she seemed almost hysterical, and at twenty minutes to ten he had gone away, still in the dark as to why he had been there at all.
“Florence Gunther apparently refused to tell him,” Godfrey said.
“He came home by the same route, mystified over the whole business.
He reached the path up the hill at or about ten o’clock, stopped to rest halfway up and then went on.
He maintains that he knew nothing about Sarah until he got your word that she was missing, and that he never saw her that night at all.”
“And the sword-stick?” Judy asked. “What does he say about that?”
“That he hid it in the closet, but he did not bury it.”
Katherine spoke, after a long silence.
“When they found the stick, I suppose they had searched the house?”
“I understand that they did, and that they found certain things which they believe strengthen the case.”
“His letters? Everything?”
“He had burned his letters.
He had felt that this was coming, and yesterday he more or less got ready.
Nothing important, he says, but he didn’t care to have them going through his papers.”
I thought that Katherine looked relieved.
I have re-read that paragraph.
I know now that she was relieved.
But I do not know even now what she had thought of that frantic inquiry of his, and his warning to send the reply by hand.
It was burned, anyhow.
She must have found some comfort in that.
How could she know that after that scene in the District Attorney’s office Inspector Harrison had gone back to Jim’s house, armed with a small box and a delicate pair of tweezers, and had taken from the grate in that handsome room of Jim’s certain charred and blackened fragments of paper ash.
Some time, that day or the next, he must have spent a painful hour over them.
They had to be steamed and softened, and then they had to be laid out on a gummed paper and carefully pressed down.
But he had his reward in the end. He had one sentence of nine words. It must have puzzled him, however.
Late that evening the Inspector came in to see me, but he made no mention of his discovery in the fireplace.
He seemed indeed to be rather apologetic, and he broke numberless toothpicks into fragments and strewed the floor with them.
He had to tell me that Howard had been poisoned, and he plainly hated doing it.
“No need of telling Mrs. Somers or Miss Judy,” he said.
“After all, he may have done it himself, although that would be small comfort to them.”
He looked at me.
“Everything all right with them?” he asked.
“Happy married life, and so on?”
“Absolutely.
He never killed himself, Inspector.”
“Maybe not.
Cyanide of potassium,” he said reflectively.
“Quick and sure, but no imagination in it.
No real imagination in any of these murders, for that matter.
Now Walter has imagination; Blake hasn’t.”