He gave me a pale sort of grin, as if he understood why I had to talk or go into shrieking hysterics.

“I’m Anthony King,” he said. “Generally known as Tony.” He seemed to think I might know the name. I didn’t.

“Any ideas about this thing?” he asked. “See any weapon when you got here? Anybody hate your sister-in-law? No. Then do you mind if I sit down? I’m just getting over a spell in the hospital.”

He sat down rather abruptly and drank his coffee. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a fine platinum chain with a small white silk tassel hung on it. I stared at it.

“Ever see it before?”

“Never”

“It was under the—under Mrs. Shepard. Kind of funny, isn’t it? I mean, do women hang tassels on chains?”

He let me take it and look at it. I suppose because there could be no fingerprints on a thing like that. The chain was the usual sort, but the tassel was not. It was ordinary enough in itself, but on the small solid top someone had made a cross in ink.

The King man had his eyes on me.

“Curious, isn’t it?” he said.

I gave it back to him.

“I can’t imagine her having a thing like that,” I told him. “You’d better show it to the police.”

“They know I have it,” he said cryptically, and got up. “I’m just asking around.”

He stopped in the doorway however and looked back at me.

“Look here,” he said, “you can’t do anything, you know. Why not get out, for a while anyhow? Go home and get some rest. You may not know it, but you have a bad case of shock.”

Well, I suppose I had, for the next thing I realized was that I was in a chair and he was pushing my head down between my knees.

“Take it easy,” he was saying. “You’re a big girl now, and big girls don’t faint.”

He didn’t leave me until the pantry shelves had stopped whirling, dishes and all. Then he wandered back to see the women in the kitchen, and I carried coffee to Mother. She was still on the stairs, looking defiantly at the police as they trampled over and around her. I thought she wanted to say something to me, but there was no chance.

She never moved until at two o’clock the police ambulance came to take Isabel away. Larry was in the library with the Inspector, whose name turned out to be Welles, and a half-dozen detectives. Alma had been sent up to the house for the guest list of the dinner, and it was being checked over in the sun parlor. Other policemen were searching inside and out for the weapon, which the medical examiner had said was a knife. But they had not found it when the ambulance came.

Mother got up then. It was the first time she had moved since she saw the body. She came downstairs stiffly, to close the library door so that Larry would not see that awful basket being carried out. She looked very queer. Not shocked, exactly. If anything, she looked stealthy.