I think myself that she had waited below in the lobby until she saw Miss Gittings go for her walk, and then came up.
She didn’t come to the desk. She got out of the elevator somewhere below and came up the service stairs.
I happened to see her, or she’d have been inside.
She had tried the bedroom door, but it was locked, and I caught her before she got to the sitting room door.”
“What excuse did she give?”
“She said she must be on the wrong floor. She was looking for a Mrs. Stewart, from St. Louis.
But I took the trouble to find that there was no Mrs. Stewart from St. Louis or anywhere else, in the house.”
We were close to Katherine now, so she lowered her voice still further.
“She was a pretty girl,” she added hurriedly, “with bright red hair.
And she went as white as a sheet when I spoke to her.”
Chapter Twenty-one
I HAD PLENTY TO think of that day, and plenty of time in which to think.
It is a strange fact that death or sickness brings friends in numbers.
They call, send flowers, telephone.
But real trouble, a trouble like ours with its accompaniment of tragedy and shame, embarrasses them.
The kindest thing apparently is to stay away.
I did not miss them, but I did miss the Inspector.
I had grown fond of him, and his visits had been breaks in what were long and not too cheerful days.
But he too, perhaps out of some mistaken sense of delicacy, was absenting himself, and I was much alone.
I needed him badly that day.
Elise’s discovery of a “ghost” in the trunk room, the possibility that Mary Martin as long ago as last summer had tried to see Howard, and that angry statement of Howard’s to Wallie, “if you think you are going to hold that over me you can think again”; all these must have some bearing on our mystery.
And he was friendly to us.
I knew that.
Friendly and not too certain of Jim’s guilt.
I was resolved that from now on there would be no reservations on my part.
I would show him the clock dial paper and tell him of that quarrel in the hotel.
But before I did that I would go over Sarah’s record of Howard’s illness.
She had a habit of scrawling on them odd facts, not always relating to the patient.
“Set mouse trap,” I recall seeing on one of them long ago.
It was with a certain amount of hope then that I went up to Sarah’s room that afternoon.
The records I had placed in the lower drawer of her wardrobe trunk, and I got them out and laid them on the bed.
They were all there; Judy’s diphtheria, the measles among Laura’s children, the time I fell downstairs and broke my collar bone, and Katherine’s periodic quinsy.
At last I found what I wanted. I sat back and went over it carefully.
The early days of that sickness at the hotel had been active ones; the records showed treatments, hypodermics, careful comments on the patient’s pulse, his weakness, his depression.
It was clear that he had been depressed.
Then came improvement.
“Patient more cheerful.”
“Appetite better.”
“Sitting up in bed today.”
On the eighth day came an entry at four o’clock.
“Mr. Walter with patient from four to six while I took walk.
Reports him more cheerful.”
After that, not regularly, but often, came the entry,
“Out for walk.
Patient comfortable.”
It was not until I reached the date when Mr. Waite had made the rough draft of the will, August 12th, that I found anything of importance.
The page for that date, and the one for the day following, were missing!
I could not believe it at first.
I went over the record again and again; I even searched the other records, neatly clamped together and docketed.
But it was not until I reexamined the page dated August 11th that I found anything, and what I found was more surprising than helpful.