Hilda was at a loose end that afternoon. Courtney had recovered from his collapse and had gone out, still pale, to drive around in his car and think his own unhappy thoughts. Marian’s door had been closed and locked since the inspector’s visit. Jan wandered around the house, worried about her mother and ignorant of what was going on. And Susie, recovered from her fright about her husband, had settled down on her bed to a magazine.
“I’d better loaf while I can,” she told Hilda. “It’s me for the pigpens from now on. If you think Carl will change his mind now that he gets some money you can think again.”
Hilda was standing in the doorway, her face bland but her eyes alert.
“What do you think about the police holding Mr. Garrison?” she asked.
“Me? They’re crazy. Carl says that paper they found will convict him, but I don’t believe it. If you ask me—”
She stopped abruptly.
“If I asked you, what?”
“Nothing,” said Susie airily. “If I were you I’d take a look at the radio by Mrs. Fairbanks’s bed. Maybe you can make something out of it. I can’t.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t know. It’s set to a blank spot on the dial. That’s all. Carl says he didn’t move the needle.”
She went back to her magazine, and Hilda went to the old lady’s room. She closed the door and going to the radio switched it on. There was a faint roaring as the tubes warmed up, but nothing else. She was puzzled rather than excited. But she had already decided to go out, and now she had a double errand.
Her first errand was to the ladies’ room of Stern & Jones. The attendant was the same woman who had looked after Ida, and she was immediately loquacious.
“A friend of hers, are you?” she said. “Wasn’t it dreadful? And nobody knowing who she was all that time!”
“Was she very sick when she got here?”
“She looked terrible. I asked her if she had had anything that disagreed with her, and she said only a cup of tea. I called up the tearoom right away. Some of the girls had gone, but nobody remembered her. Anyhow, our tea is all right. It could not have been that, or a lot of other people would have been sick too.”
“Is that all she said?”
“Well, she tried to tell me where she lived. She wanted to go home. Grove Avenue, I think she said. But after that she got so bad she couldn’t talk at all.”
Hilda was filled with cold anger when she left the store. The thought of Ida, dying and unable to tell who she was, enraged her. And now the radio assumed a new importance. If it had been turned to a blank spot on the dial and still played, the whole situation changed. Mrs. Fairbanks might have been already dead when it was turned on.
She visited a number of stores where radio sets were sold, including Stern & Jones. Some of them had remote controls. The boxes they showed her were only a foot long and four inches wide, and they operated as far as sixty feet from the instrument.
“You can set it out in the street,” said one salesman, “and turn your radio on and off with it. Magic, ain’t it?”
Sixty feet! That would include even Marian’s room. But when she told the make and age of the machine the man shook his head.
“Sorry,” he said. “It wouldn’t work on one of those old ones. Not a chance.”
It was the same everywhere. The machine in Mrs. Fairbanks’s room was too old. And the remote controls which used cables were not only modern. They required considerable time for adjustment. But in the end she found something.
She was tired and her feet ached when at six o’clock she got back to the house, going directly to the kitchen. William was on the back porch, relaxing in the summer sun, and Maggie was baking a cake. She turned a red face from the oven when Hilda drew a chair to the kitchen table and sat down. But some of Maggie’s suspicions had died in the last few days. She even offered her a cup of tea.
Hilda, however, was definitely off tea, at least for a time.
“I’d like a glass of water,” she said. “Then I want to talk about Ida.”
“I’m not talking about Ida,” Maggie said stiffly.
“If anyone thinks she got that stuff here in this house—”
“I’m not asking about her death. That’s for the police. It’s just this. Have you any idea why she carried those blankets out to Amos?”
“No. He didn’t need them.”
“Can you remember what happened that day? It was the day after Mrs. Fairbanks was killed, wasn’t it?”
Maggie considered this.
“You know how she was that morning. She was so bad I sent her up to rest. She came down later, and that was when Amos says she carried out the blankets. I didn’t see her myself. All I know is she didn’t eat any lunch. She left when we were sitting down.”
Hilda drank her water and went out to the stable. To her annoyance Amos, in his shirt sleeves, was smoking a pipe inside the garage. He was reading the paper, his chair tilted back. He looked up when he saw her.
“Anything I can do for you, miss?”
He grinned with his usual slyness, and Hilda regarded him with disfavor.
“You can come up to the loft with me,” she said coldly. “And don’t smirk at me, I don’t like it.”
Thus reduced, Amos followed her up the stairs. There was still light enough to see around, and to her shocked surprise she found the entire place had been swept and put in order.
“Who did this?” she said sharply.
He grinned.
“I did,” he said. “Anything to say about it, Miss Policewoman? Any reason why I can’t clean the place I live in?”
She ignored that, looking around her carefully. She had had very little hope at any time, but she disliked giving up. Amos was grinning again, pleased at her discomfiture.
“That isn’t funny,” she said. “I want some answers, and if I don’t get them the police will. When you cleaned this place did you find anything that didn’t belong? That you hadn’t seen here before?”
The mention of the police sobered him.
“Nothing new. Only the birdcage was on the floor. It used to be in the cupola, when Ida kept her bats and things in it. Wrapped it in a cloth, she did. I threw it out.”
“Oh!” she said blankly. “You knew it was Ida, did you?”
“Well, when a woman gets an old birdcage and a net and keeps climbing at night into that tower up there, I didn’t think she was after butterflies, and that’s a fact.”
“Did you tell anybody, Amos?”
“Not me,” he said negligently. “Bats don’t hurt anybody. Let her have her fun, said I. She didn’t have much.”
She looked at him. He was incredible, this stocky individualist who had believed in letting Ida have what he called her fun, and who apparently knew far more than he had even indicated. It amused him to tell her so, leaning against one of the trunks and now and then sucking at his dead pipe. Indeed, once started it was hard to stop him. He said that one night Carlton came and, getting the cage, carried it to the house. It was empty, as he—Amos—happened to know. But he had brought it back before morning. He said it was Frank Garrison who had caught Susie by the garage the night Mrs. Fairbanks was murdered. He’d seen him. And he observed cheerfully that he knew Marian had been in the house that same night.
“Funniest sight I most ever saw,” he said, his shrewd eyes on hers. “Her streaking across the grass in her nightgown when the police cars were coming in. I slid down and unlocked the door, but she never saw me. She hid in the loft until Ida brought her clothes and bags. Toward morning, it was.”
“Why didn’t you tell it at the time, Amos?”
“Nobody asked me.”
She felt helpless before the vast indifference, the monumental ego of the man. But she had not finished with him.
“Why did Ida have those creatures, Amos? Was it to scare Mrs. Fairbanks away? After all, she had worked here for years.”
He grinned at her slyly.
“Maybe she didn’t like her,” he said. “Or maybe she didn’t like the stairs. Lots of climbing in the house. May have wanted her to move to an apartment. I’ve heard her say as much.”
“I suppose you know how she got them into the room, too?”
“Sure,” he said, and grinned again. “Through Mrs. Carlton Fairbanks’s peephole in the closet.”
She left him then. She felt that even now he might have certain reserves, certain suspicions. But he did not intend to tell them. She could see that in his face.
“So they’ve arrested Mr. Garrison,” he said as she went down the stairs. “Mr. Garrison and the doc across the street. Don’t let them fool you, Miss Policewoman. They’ll have to eat crow before they’re through.” He seemed to think this was humorous. He laughed. “But I’d like to know how Ida felt when she got that snake,” he said. “I’ll bet she didn’t like it.”
“So there is something you don’t know!” said Hilda coldly, and went back to the house.
Nevertheless, she had a curious feeling about Amos as she left him. As though he had been trying to tell her something. As though he was hoping that she would see what he could not tell her. And there had been something in his small sly eyes which looked like grief; a deep and tragic grief.
When she went upstairs she found Jan in the upper hall.
“She’s still sleeping,” she said. “I suppose she needs it, Miss Adams. They won’t hold Father long, will they? They must know he didn’t do it.”
Evidently she did not know about Courtney, and Hilda said nothing. She tried the door to Marian’s room and found it locked.
“How long has she been asleep, Jan?” she asked.
“I don’t know. She’s been in there since the inspector left. It’s seven now.”
Hilda rapped on the door. Then she pounded hard and called. There was no response, however. Jan was standing by, looking terrified.
“You don’t think she’s—”
“She’s probably taken an overdose of sleeping medicine,” Hilda said briskly. “Get a doctor. If you can’t get Courtney Brooke get someone else. And hurry.”
It was Brooke who came, running across the yard and reaching the house as Amos and William were lifting a ladder to the porte-cochere. He shoved them aside and climbed up. A moment later the screen gave way and he unlocked and opened the door into the hall.
“She’s still breathing,” he said. “Go away, Jan. I don’t want you here. She’ll be all right.”
Hilda went in, and he closed the door behind her. Marian was lying on the bed, not moving. She looked peaceful and lovely, almost beautiful, as though that deep sleep of hers had erased the lines from her face and brought back some of her youth. But she was very far gone.
Brooke examined her and threw off his coat.
“Come on, Miss Adams,” he said. “We’ve got to get busy if we’re going to save her.”