It was eight o’clock in the morning before they could rouse Eileen enough to be interviewed. Carlton, unshaven and still only partially dressed, was at the telephone trying to locate his sister. Susie had brought him a cup of coffee, but it sat untouched beside him.
“Hello. That you, Blanche? Sorry to bother you. Did Marian happen to tell you where she was going to stop while she’s away? It’s rather urgent.”
He would hang up after a minute or two, feverishly thumb the telephone book and commence all over again.
In the morning room Courtney Brooke was trying to comfort Jan, a Jan who lay face down on a long davenport and refused to be comforted. One of the curlers on the end of her long bob had come loose, and he sat turning the soft curl over a finger.
“Believe me, darling, it’s all right. You mustn’t go on like this. You break my heart, sweet.”
“Granny’s dead.” Her voice was smothered. “Nothing can change that.”
“It’s a bad business, Jan. I know that. Only try to face it as it is, not as you’re afraid it is. You’re not being fair. Even the police don’t condemn people until they have the facts.”
“I saw him. I spoke to him.” She turned over and sat up, her eyes wide with fear. “Now it will all come out, Court. She had it in the safe. She told me so. They’ll open it, and—then they’ll know.”
“Whoever did it didn’t open the safe. It’s still there, sweet.”
She got up, and as he steadied her he thought how thin she was, how badly life had treated her. His arm tightened around her.
“If it’s still there,” she said excitedly. “Do you think we could get it? Oh, Court, can’t we get it? She must have had the combination somewhere. She never trusted her memory.”
“We can make a try anyhow. Able to get upstairs?”
“I could fly, if I thought it would help.”
They were a sorry-looking pair as they went up the long staircase, Jan’s eyes still swollen, her rumpled nightgown under her bathrobe, her feet still bare. Young Brooke was not much better, a disreputable figure in a suit which had been soaked with rain, his hair standing wildly in all directions, and his collar melted around his neck. They did not notice the uniformed man in the lower hall, standing stolidly on guard, and there was hope in both of them until they reached the upper hall, to confront a policeman parked outside Mrs. Fairbanks’s door, smoking a surreptitious cigarette.
He put it out quickly, so he did not see the dismay in their faces.
Brooke left soon after that. Eileen was still sleeping. The house was quiet. But outside in the grounds one or two men were quietly examining the pillars and roof of the porte-cochere, and a detective in plain clothes and bent double was going carefully over the ground around the stable and near the fence.
He looked up as the doctor neared him.
“Got permission to leave the place?”
“I’m the doctor,” Brooke said stiffly. “My office is across the street. Anything to say about that?”
He was in a fighting mood, but the detective only grinned.
“Not a word, brother. Not a word. Might like a look at your feet. That’s all.”
“What the hell are my feet to you?”
“Not a thing. You could lose ’em both and I wouldn’t shed a tear. Lemme look at those shoes, doc.”
Brooke was seething, but after a glance at the shoes, especially the soles, the detective only shrugged.
“Went out of here after the rain started, didn’t you?” he said. “All right. That checks. I’ll see you later. Those shoes could stand some work on them.”
Brooke was still furious as he started across the street. For the first time he realized the excitement in the neighborhood. There was a large crowd around the entrance to the driveway on Grove Avenue, and the windows on both streets were filled with men in their shirt sleeves, and women hastily or only partially dressed. To add to his rage the slovenly girl from the house where he had his offices was on the steps, surrounded by a group of laughing boys.
He caught one of them and shook him.
“Get out of here,” he said. “Get out and stay out, all of you.” He jerked the girl to her feet. “Go inside and do some work, for once,” he ordered. “If I catch you out here again—”
He knew it was useless. It was the ugly side of all tragedy, this morbid curiosity and avid interest which deprived even grief of privacy. But he could not fight it. He went upstairs and took a bath, as though to wash it away.
In the dining-room at the Fairbanks house the inspector was eating a substantial Sunday morning breakfast of sausages and pancakes, and a long rangy captain of the homicide squad was trying to keep up with him. Hilda, unable to eat, eyed them resentfully. Men were like that, she thought. They did not project themselves into other people’s troubles as women did. All this was just a case, a case and a job. It did not matter that a family was being torn apart, or that some one member of it was probably headed for the chair.
William had brought in a fresh supply of pancakes when Amos came in. His small, sly eyes were gleaming.
“Fellow out in the yard says to tell you he’s got a footprint,” he said. “It’s under the big oak, and he’s got a soapbox over it.”
The captain got up, eyeing his last pancake ruefully.
“I guess you win, inspector,” he said. “Thirteen to my eleven. I suppose you’ll want a cast.”
He went out, and the inspector took a final sip of coffee and put down his napkin.
“I’m feeling stronger,” he announced. “Nothing like food to take the place of sleep.”
“I should think you could stay awake for the next month,” said Hilda tartly.
He got up and lit a cigarette.
“Don’t be crabbed,” he said. “It doesn’t suit you. You are the ministering angel, the lady who knits while people pour out their troubles to her. Which reminds me, how about the Garrison woman? I’ll have to see her. What do you think of her?”
“As a suspect? All I can say is that women don’t usually murder when they’re threatened with a miscarriage and under the influence of morphia.”
“Don’t they?” He eyed her with interest. “How much you know! But you’d be surprised, my Hilda. You’d be surprised at what some women can do.”
Eileen was still in her drugged sleep when Hilda, leaving him outside, went into her room. It was not easy to rouse her, and when she did waken she seemed not to know where she was. She sat up in bed, looking dazedly around her.
“How on earth did I get here?” she demanded, blinking in the light.
“You came last night. Don’t you remember?”
She stretched and yawned. Then she smiled maliciously.
“My God, do I remember!” she said. “Did you see their faces?”
But she was not smiling when the inspector came in. She sat up and drawing the bedclothing around her stared at him suspiciously.
“Who are you?” she said. “I don’t know you, do I?”
He looked down at her. A neurotic, he thought, and scared to death. Heaven keep him from neurotic women.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Garrison. I am a police officer. I want to ask you a few questions.”
But he did not ask her any questions just then. She seemed profoundly shocked as full recollection came back to her. She looked indeed as though she might faint again, and when at last she lay back, shivering under the bedclothes, she could tell him nothing at all.
“I remember Susie screaming. I got up and went to the door. Somebody said Mrs. Fairbanks was dead—murdered. I guess I fainted after that.”
“Did you hear anyone in this room last night? Before it happened.”
“I don’t know when it happened,” she said petulantly. “Ida was here, and the doctor. And the nurse, of course.”
“Did you unhook the window screen over there, for any purpose?”
She went pale.
“My screen?” she said. “Do you mean—”
“It was open. Miss Adams heard it banging. She came in and closed it.”
Suddenly she sat up in bed, wide-eyed and terrified.
“I want to get out of here,” she said. “I’m sick, and I don’t know anything about it. I wouldn’t have come if I’d had any other place to go. They’d pin this murder on me if they could. They all hate me.”
“Who hates you?”
“All of them,” she said wildly, and burst into loud hysterical crying.
It was some time before he could question her further. But she protested that she had not even heard the radio, and that Mrs. Fairbanks had been as usual when she talked to her.
“She didn’t seem nervous or apprehensive?”
“She seemed unpleasant. She never liked me. But she did promise to look after me when my—when my baby came.”
She made no objection when he asked to take her fingerprints. “Part of the routine,” he told her. She lay passive on her pillows while he rolled one finger after another on the card. But she did object when he asked her to stay in the house for a day or two longer.
“I’m better,” she said. “I’m all right. The doctor said—”
“I’ll let you go as soon as possible,” he told her, and went out.
It was in the hall outside her door that Hilda remembered about the figure at the top of the third floor stairs. The inspector was about to light a cigarette. He blew out the match and stared at her.
“Why in God’s name didn’t you tell me that before?” he demanded furiously.
She flushed. “You might remember that I’ve had a murder on my hands, and a lot of hysterical people. I just forgot it.”
He was still indignant, however. He went up the stairs, with Hilda following. But nothing was changed. The guest rooms with their drawn shades were as she had last seen them; the hall stretched back to the servants’ quarters, empty and undisturbed. A brief examination showed all the windows closed and locked, and the inspector, wiping his dusty hands, looked skeptical.
“Sure you didn’t dream it?”
“I came up and looked around. There wasn’t time for anyone to have gone back to the servants’ rooms. I thought it was Maggie or Ida, curious about Mrs. Garrison.”
“When was all this?”
“Before I went down to boil the water for the hypodermic. I was gone only a minute or two. I hardly left the top of the stairs.”
He was still ruffled as he went back along the hall. There were closets there, a cedar room, and a trunk room. All of them were neat and dustless, and none showed any signs of recent use as a hiding place. He lit matches, examined floors, and, still ignoring Hilda, went on back to the servants’ quarters. Compared with the rest of the house they were musty, with the closeness of such places even in June, the closed windows, the faint odor of cooking from below, of long-worn clothing, and unmade beds.
Two of the rooms were empty, but Ida was in hers. She was sitting by a window, her hands folded in her lap and a queer look on her long thin face as Hilda went in.
“I was nervous and Maggie sent me up,” she said. “But there’s no use of my going to bed. I couldn’t sleep.”
It was the appearance of the inspector which definitely terrified her, however. She went white to the lips. She tried to get up and then sank back in her chair.
“What is it?” she asked. “I don’t know anything. What do you want with me? Can’t I get a little rest?”
Hilda tried to quiet her.
“It hasn’t anything to do with Mrs. Fairbanks’s death, Ida,” she said. “I thought I saw someone in the upper hall last night, before—before it happened. If it was you it’s all right. We’re only checking up.”
Ida shook her head.
“It wasn’t me, miss.”
“Would it have been William? Or Maggie?”
She was quieter now.
“I wouldn’t know about that. They usually sleep like the dead.”
But Hilda was remembering something. She was seeing the household gather after Susie screamed, and seeing Maggie and William come along the back hall on the second floor, while Ida was standing still, looking down from the front stairs to the third floor. She did not mention it. Quite possibly, Ida as the housemaid used those stairs habitually. She tucked it away in her memory, however, to wonder later if she should have told it. If it would have changed anything, or altered the inevitable course of events.
Neither of them could change Ida’s story. She sat there, twisting her work-worn hands in her lap. She had been in bed. She had seen nobody, and she had liked the old lady. She had looked after her as well as she could. Tears welled in her eyes, and the inspector left her there and went out, muttering to himself.
“Damn all crying women,” he said. “I’m fed up with them.”
That was when he timed Hilda, making her leave her chair in the hall, go up, look around for a light switch, and come down again. He put his watch back in his pocket and looked at her. grimly.
“Three minutes,” he said. “A lot can happen in three minutes, my girl.”
He left at nine o’clock, driving away with his uniformed chauffeur. The men who had been scattered over the grounds had disappeared, but one officer was on duty on Huston Street beside the break in the fence. Another was holding back the crowd at the gate, and two still remained in the house. Hilda watched the difficulty with which the car made its way through the crowd.
“It’s disgusting,” she said to the tall young policeman on duty in the lower hall. “They ought to be ashamed.”
He smiled indulgently.
“They like a bit of excitement, miss.” He smiled. “There’s a lot of reporters out there, too. I caught one carrying in the milk bottles early this morning.”
As she went up the stairs she could still hear Carlton at the library phone.
“Hello, George. I’m trying to locate Marian. She’s out of town somewhere. I suppose you and Nell haven’t heard from her?”