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  “It’s in the tool room, Miss Judy. Shall I bring it in?”

  “Never mind,” she said, and went out again.

  At half past ten I heard him making his round of the windows and doors, before going to bed. At the front door he stopped, and then came to me in the library.

  “I suppose Miss Judy came in by the front door, madam?”

  “Miss Judy! Has she been out?”

  “She went out through the kitchen, a little after ten. She said she wanted the ladder; she didn’t say why.”

  I was uneasy rather than alarmed, until I saw that the garage was dark.

  “She’s not there, Joseph!”

  “Maybe she took the car and went out, madam.”

  “She’d have told me, I’m sure.”

  I was starting out at once, but he held me back.

  “I’d better get my revolver,” he said. “If there’s anything wrong—”

  That sent a shiver of fear down my spine.

  “Judy!” I called. “Judy!”

  There was no answer, and together Joseph and I started out, he slightly in the lead and his revolver in his hand. It was a black night and starless; just such a night as when poor Sarah met her death, and the very silence was terrifying. Halfway along the path Joseph wheeled suddenly.

  “Who’s there?” he said sharply.

  “What did you hear, Joseph?”

  “I thought somebody moved in the bushes.”

  We listened, but everything was quiet, and we went on.

  In the garage itself, when we switched on the lights, everything was in order, and the key Judy had used was still in the small door which gave entrance from the side. This door was closed but not locked. The first ominous thing was when we discovered that the door into the tool room was locked and that the key was missing from its nail. I rattled the knob and called Judy, but received no reply, and Joseph in the meantime was searching for the key.

  “She’s in here, Joseph.”

  “Not necessarily, madam. Robert hides the key sometimes. He says that Abner takes his tools.”

  But Judy was in there. Not until Joseph had broken a window and crawled in did we find her, poor child, senseless and bleeding from a cut on the head.

  Joseph carried her into the house, and into the library. She was already stirring when he placed her on the couch there, and she was quite conscious, although dizzy and nauseated, in a short time. Enough indeed to protest against my calling a doctor.

  “We don’t want any more fuss,” she said, and tried to smile. “Remember mother, Elizabeth Jane! Always in the society columns but never in the news.”

  But as she was violently nauseated almost immediately I got Joseph to telephone to Doctor Simonds, and he came very soon afterwards.

  She had, he said, been struck on the head, and Joseph suggested that the ladder itself had fallen on her. As a matter of fact, later investigation showed the ladder lying on the floor, and as Judy said it was against the wall when she saw it, there was a possibility of truth in this. But one thing was certain; however she was hurt, she had been definitely locked in the tool room. She had used the key and left it in the door. Some one had locked her in and taken the key. It was nowhere to be found.

  We got her up to bed, and the diagnosis was a mild concussion and a lucky escape. The doctor was inclined to be humorous about it.

  “You have a hard head, Judy. A hard head but a soft heart, eh?”

  Well, he ordered ice to what she called her bump and heat to her feet, and while Joseph was cracking the ice below she told her story. But although Joseph maintained that she had asked him about the ladder, she gave an entirely different reason herself.

  “Abner has a foot rule in the tool room,” was her story to me. “I wanted to measure the cabinet. Sometimes you find a secret drawer that way. So I got the key to the garage and went out. I thought I heard something in the shrubbery behind me once, but it might have been a rabbit, I don’t know.

  “The tool room light had burned out, so I lighted a match when I went in. The door was not locked, but the key was in it. There was nobody in the tool room, unless they were behind the door when I opened it. I lighted a fresh match, and just then the door slammed behind me and blew out the match. I said ‘damn,’ and—that’s all I remember.”

  To add to our bewilderment and my own secret anxiety, Joseph brought forth something when he carried up the ice; something which was odd, to say the least. This was that just before ten o’clock, when he let the dogs out the back door, he heard them barking in the shrubbery. This barking, however, ceased abruptly.

  “As though they’d recognized the party,” said Joseph, who now and then lapsed into colloquial English. “Jock now, he’d never let up if it was a stranger.”

  But there was something horrible in that thought; that any one who knew us would attack Judy, and the situation was not improved by Norah’s declaration the next day that, at two o’clock in the morning, four hours after the attack on Judy, she had seen some one with a flashlight in the shrubbery near the garage. The night had been cool and she had got out of bed to close her window. Then she saw the light, and because it was rather ghostly and the morale of the household none too good, she had simply got back into bed and drawn the covers over her head.

  Inspector Harrison had come early at my request, and Norah repeated the story to him.

  The flashlight, she said, was close to the ground, and almost as soon as she saw it, it went out.

  Up to that moment I think he had been inclined to lay Judy’s condition to accident, the more so as she refused to explain why she had been in the garage.

  “Come now, Miss Judy. You had a reason, hadn’t you?”

  “I’ve told you. I wanted to get the foot rule.”

  “Did you tell Joseph you wanted to see the ladder?”

  “I may have,” she said airily. “Just to make conversation.”

  “This ladder,” he persisted. “It is the one Walter Somers used in the lavatory?”

  Judy yawned.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I lost some sleep last night. Is it the same ladder, Elizabeth Jane? You tell him.”

  “It is,” I said flatly, “and you know it perfectly well, Judy. You’re being silly.”

  But she had no more to say, and the Inspector stamped down the stairs in no pleasant mood and inclined to discredit her whole story. For which I did not blame him.

  He did however believe Norah. She was looking pale and demoralized, and she said something about witch lights and then crossed herself. The result was that he at once commenced an investigation of the shrubbery, and that his men almost immediately discovered footprints in the soft ground to the right of the path and where Norah had seen the light.

  There were four, two rights and two lefts, and when I went out to look at them the Inspector was standing near them, surveying them with his head on one side.

  “Very neat,” he said. “Very pretty. See anything queer about them, Simmons?”

  “They’re kind of small, if that’s it.”

  “What about the heels?”

  “Very good, sir. Clear as a bell.”

  The Inspector drew a long breath.

  “And that’s all you see, is it?” he demanded violently. “What the hell’s the use of my trying to teach you fellows anything? Look at those heels! A kangaroo couldn’t have left those prints. They’ve been planted.”

  He left the discomfited Simmons to mount guard over the prints and to keep the dogs away from them, and not unlike a terrier himself, set to work to examine the nearby ground and bushes.

  “The fellow, whoever he was, stepped off the path there when Miss Judy came along. But he left footprints, and later on he remembered them. He came back, smoothed them over and planted false ones. If he’s overlooked one now—”

  He was carefully turning over dead leaves with a stick he carried, and now he stooped suddenly and picked up something.

  “Look at this!” he said. “The key to
the tool room, isn’t it? I thought so. Threw it here as he ran.”

  He was examining the key, which is the flat key of the usual Yale lock, and now he gave an exclamation of disgust.

  “Clean as a whistle,” he said. “Pretty cagey, this chap. Must have been in a devil of a hurry, but he wiped it first; or he wore gloves.”

  He stood there for some time, staring at the key.

  “Well,” he said finally, “we have just two guesses, Miss Bell. Either he wanted to do away with Miss Judy, which is unlikely; or he did not like her going into that tool room.”

  “But he let her go in, and he locked her there.”

  “Not in shape to do much looking about, however,” he said grimly. “Now which was it?”

  He glared at me as though he expected an answer.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” I said meekly.

  Later on I stood by while his men measured the distance between the footprints and made molds of them. They sprayed the marks with something first, and then poured in plaster of Paris which the Inspector reinforced with the inevitable toothpicks. The result was a pair of rather ghastly white shoes, which he surveyed with satisfaction.

  “How do I know they were planted?” he said. “Well, the stride was too long for the foot, for one thing. Here’s a small foot and a long stride. Then the ground’s soft; they weren’t deep enough. And there’s another point. When a man walks there’s a back thrust to his foot, and the weight’s likely to be more on the outside and back of the heel. Look at me; I walk in this earth. What happens? I break the earth at the rear as I lift my foot.”

  “You might try that, Simmons,” he called. “Maybe the next time you won’t let somebody put something over on you.”

  He left soon after that, greatly pleased with himself but considerably puzzled, and carrying the two molds carefully wrapped in a newspaper.

  His examination of the garage and of the ladder had yielded nothing whatever.

  Chapter Seven

  JUDY HAD BEEN HURT on Wednesday, the twenty-seventh of April, and Florence Gunther was not killed until the first of May, which was the Sunday following.

  On either Tuesday or Friday of that week, then, Wallie came in to see me.

  I remember being shocked at his appearance, and still more shocked at the way he received the news that Judy had been hurt.

  “Good God!” he said. “I’ll stop this thing if I have to—” He hesitated. “If I have to kill somebody with my own hands.”

  But he would not explain that. He called Joseph and went out to the garage, leaving me to make what I could out of that speech of his, and of his conduct generally since Sarah had been killed.

  He had searched far more assiduously than had the police, had shown more anxiety than any of us. His gaiety had gone, and he had a hollow-eyed and somber look during those days which I could not account for.

  Nor did the discovery of the body afford him any apparent relief. To the rest of us, grieved as we were, it at least ended that tragic search. After all, it was over. We could not help Sarah, and the rest was for the police. But Wallie had not appeared to share this relief.

  Yet Wallie had not liked Sarah. She was not a part of that early régime of which Joseph was the lone survival; of Margaret and the noisy, gay, extravagant days before she left Howard and a young son both of whom had passionately loved her, to run away with a man who abandoned her within six months.

  I found myself thinking of those days. I had known Howard even then. Indeed, it was through me that he met Katherine. Margaret had had a brief unhappy year somewhere in Europe; then she died. And Wallie had needed a mother. But Katherine had not proved to be a mother to him.

  He had resented her, and she had resented him. She had never liked him, and after Judy was born this dislike greatly increased.

  It accentuated her jealousy of Margaret that Margaret had borne Howard a son, and that she had not; for Katherine was passionately in love with her husband. And she had kept nothing of Margaret’s that she could avoid. Even Joseph had had to go, and so I took him. Not unusual, I daresay, this jealousy of second wives for the women they have followed, even when that woman is dead. But it worked badly for Wallie.

  Certainly Wallie was not blameless for his alienation from his father, but also certainly Katherine never raised a finger to restore the peace between them. Wallie was too reminiscent of his mother, fiery, passionate, undisciplined, handsome. When he had learned that Margaret was dying in Biarritz, abandoned by the man for whom she had left Howard, he had demanded permission to go to her. But he was refused on the score of his age—he was only fourteen at the time—and in desperation he had taken out of Howard’s wallet the money for a second-class passage there.

  He was too late, at that, but Howard never forgave him the theft, and he had made the mistake of telling Katherine.

  After her marriage, when Wallie was in the house, she kept her purse locked away. And he knew it and hated her for it. But he was not there very often. First at school and later at college, Katherine kept him away as much as possible. And after that had come the war.

  Naturally then the relationship between Judy and Wallie was almost as remote as the relationship between Wallie and Sarah. To have him grow morose and exhausted when Sarah disappeared was surprising enough, but to see him grow pale and furious over the attack on Judy was actually startling.

  He was quieter, however, when he came back from the garage. He planted himself in front of me, like a man who had made a resolution.

  “See here,” he said. “How fond are you of Jim Blake?”

  “I like him. I don’t know that it’s any more than that.”

  “What time was it when he telephoned here that night?”

  “About a quarter past seven.”

  “And he asked for Sarah?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did he do that? Was he in the habit of calling Sarah? Of course he wasn’t. How do you know that when she left the house that night it wasn’t to see Jim Blake? To meet him somewhere?”

  “I don’t believe it,” I said sharply. “Why would she meet him? I don’t believe they’ve exchanged two dozen words in twenty years.”

  “She went out to meet him,” he insisted. “I know that. I’ve made it my business to know it. I’ve been talking to that darky of his. You know his habits; you know he dines late and dresses for dinner. Well, that night he didn’t. He dined early and he put on a golf suit. And he left the house at seven o’clock.”

  “Good heavens, Wallie! If a man may not eat when he’s hungry and dress as he likes—”

  “Listen,” he said doggedly. “That’s not all. He carried with him that sword-stick you gave him.”

  “Even then—”

  “Let me finish, Elizabeth Jane. That cane or stick or whatever you call it, has disappeared. It’s not in the house. It stood in the hall with his other sticks until Sarah’s body was found. Then it went.”

  He was looking at me with his tired sunken eyes, but there was no doubting his earnestness or his conviction.

  “What does that look like?” he demanded. “He has an appointment with Sarah. He goes to meet her, armed. And then—”

  “Wallie, I implore you not to give that to the police.”

  “No,” he said somberly. “Not yet. But some day I may have to.”

  This then was our situation, during the few days which remained before the first of May. Sarah was dead; dead of two stab wounds four and a quarter inches deep, inflicted after she had been stunned by a blow on the back of the head. Judy had been attacked by the same method, a blow on the head from the rear, but no further attempt on her life had been made. Wallie suspected Jim Blake, apparently only because the sword-cane was missing, and my household was in a state of nerves so extreme that the back-firing of automobiles as they coasted down the long hill which terminates at my drive was enough to make the women turn pale.

  Of clues we had none whatever.

  Because of the sensational n
ature of the crime the press was clamoring for an arrest, and the Inspector was annoyed and irritated.

  “What do they want, anyhow?” he said. “I can’t make clues, can I? And if you’d listen to the District Attorney’s office you’d think all I had to do was to walk out and arrest the first man I met on the street. Lot of old women, getting nervous the minute the papers begin to yap at them!”

  He must have broken up hundreds of toothpicks that week. We would find small scattered bits of wood all over the place.

  By Sunday, the first of May, Judy was still in bed, but fully convalescent. She had ordered a number of books on crime to read, and flanked by those on one side and her cigarettes on the other, managed to put in the days comfortably enough.

  The evenings were reserved for Dick. Their first meeting after Judy’s injury had defined the situation between them with entire clarity. He was on his knees beside the bed in an instant.

  “My darling! My poor little darling!” he said.

  She lay there, looking perfectly happy, with one hand on his head.

  “Your poor little darling has made a damned fool of herself,” she said sweetly. “And you’ll give me hell when you hear about it. Go on out, Elizabeth Jane; he wants to kiss me.”

  Which, Katherine or no Katherine, I promptly did.

  It was then on Sunday afternoon that there occurred another of those apparently small matters on which later such grave events were to depend. Already there were a number of them: Sarah’s poor body found by the coincidence of Judy being near when a horse shied; the coolness of an April night so that Norah must go to her window to close it; Mary Martin happening to open Sarah’s door while she was writing a letter, so that Sarah had made that damning record on her white sleeve; Jim Blake’s deviation from his custom of dressing for dinner and its results; Judy’s sudden and still mysterious desire to visit the garage at night; even my own impulsive gift to Jim Blake of my grandfather’s sword-stick.

  On that Sunday afternoon, at five o’clock, Florence Gunther came to see me and was turned away. I had gone upstairs to rest, and she was turned away.

  Why had she not come sooner? She was frightened, of course. We know that now. Afraid for her very life. The nights must have been pure terror, locked away in there in the upper room of that shabby house on Halkett Street. But she knew she held the key to the mystery. One can figure her reading the papers, searching for some news, and all the time holding the key and wondering what she ought to do.