I just don’t remember seeing him again.
But there is a service staircase near the suite.
He could have walked down.
I remember him,” she added, “because it was a rainy day and he was soaking wet.
He seemed old and feeble to be out and working.”
She remembered nothing else of value.
The messenger with the flowers she had seen only once; a shabby man, elderly and with longish white hair, and considerably stooped.
Several times, during the illness, a squat heavy-set woman had come to give Howard a massage.
She had reported at the desk the first time.
After that she had merely nodded and passed by.
Visitors were forbidden.
Walter came and went, getting little sleep at the beginning but later on in better spirits.
It was evident that Miss Todd had liked Walter.
Sarah Gittings had gone her efficient way.
“Very particular about his food she was, too!”
As Howard improved he had insisted that Sarah take a walk in the afternoons, and she did so.
At such times Walter often stayed with his father and read to him.
Sarah would wait until Walter would come, after office hours, and then dutifully go out.
There was no fuel there for Katherine’s jealousy and suspicion to feed on; the record of a normal illness, with no women visitors save a muscular masseuse.
No men, even, save Walter and the doctors, this messenger from a florist, the elderly man with stooped shoulders and a box of flowers, and Mr. Waite himself, sole survivor now of that little group of three which had stood by a bed in that hotel suite and watched a wavering hand sign a will which was to send four people to their deaths and three others into danger and injury.
Before we left Miss Todd asked if we would care to see the suite.
Katherine refused, but I agreed.
It seemed to me that the secret, whatever it was, might lie there; that if the florist’s messenger could depart by a rear staircase, it would be possible for others who wished to avoid scrutiny to arrive by the same method.
Something had happened to Howard Somers in those rooms, I felt; something which had altered his attitude toward his family and toward Walter, and which Jim had indicated in his defense.
And—strange how things will come to one at the most unusual times!—it was while walking down that corridor, with its Chinese vases on pedestals, its gilt mirrors here and there over console tables, that I thought of Margaret Somers.
Suppose Margaret were still alive?
And suppose that Walter knew this, had secured that fund of fifty thousand dollars for her?
No wonder, in that case, that he had refused to explain it!
He had shown a real fondness for Judy, and detest Katherine as he certainly did, he would certainly never willingly invalidate his father’s second marriage at the cost of exposure of Margaret’s deception.
So perfectly did this theory fit the facts that I found myself stopping in the hall and turning to look back at Katherine, secure in the dignity of her grief, handsome and immobile in her chair.
The suite was a four-roomed one. Each of the rooms opened onto the hall, and the sitting room occupied a corner.
To the right was the room which Howard had occupied, and beyond it a small one for maid or valet.
Opening from the sitting room on the left was another bedroom, and just beyond it lay the service staircase.
Miss Todd was explaining.
“The small bedroom was used by the nurses, as it connected with the sickroom.
The one beyond was kept for Mr. Walter, and for several nights he slept there.”
But whatever their secret, the rooms yielded nothing.
I was still thinking of Margaret, and I wondered then if Katherine suspected what I did; if behind her strangeness during these last weeks there had been such a suspicion; a terror in which she saw her wifehood not only stultified but destroyed, and Judy nameless.
And I know now that she had suspected, had feared just that.
Why had Howard come, almost stealthily, to the city, light of luggage and without his valet, prearranging to meet Walter and dining upstairs so that they might talk undisturbed, unless it was that Walter had some shocking and terrible thing to tell him?
Something which Howard refused to believe, and later had believed.
When I went out into the hall again she had not moved in her chair.
Miss Todd glanced toward her.
“She looks very sad.”
“She is in great grief, naturally.”
She was locking the door. Now she turned to me swiftly, and lowered her voice.
“He was a fine man, Mr. Somers,” she said.
“No nonsense about him; you know what I mean.
If you sat where I do—!
So you’ll understand me when I tell you this: there was a young woman who tried to see him, after he began to improve.