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.