“How do you expect me to feel?”

She was half asleep when Hilda left the room.

The search was still going on when she closed the door behind her. One of the detectives was on his way to the third floor, and she gathered nothing had been found. There was a uniformed guard outside Mrs. Fairbanks’s door, and two men in white were inside by the bed with a long wicker basket.

So Eliza Fairbanks was leaving the home to which she had come as a bride, going in a basket, without the panoply of flowers and soft music, without even dignity or any overwhelming grief.

Standing in the hall Hilda swore a small and very private oath; to help the police to revenge this murder, and to send whoever had done it to death. “So help me God.”

Chapter 13

The family and servants were still in the library when she went downstairs. They paid no attention to her. It was as though the knife, now wrapped in cellophane and in the inspector’s pocket, had cut them all away from their normal roots, their decent quiet habits of living. Only Jan looked up when Hilda entered, her eyes swollen, and clutching a moist handkerchief in her hand.

“Are they through?”

“Not quite.”

“But this is dreadful. We’re not prisoners. None of us would have hurt Granny.”

“I don’t see how it’s possible for anyone to have done it.”

Carlton turned his head and looked at her with blood-shot eyes. He was holding a highball, and it was evidently not his first.

“Where were you?” he demanded. “I thought your job was to protect her. What do we know about you? How do we know you didn’t do it yourself?”

“Oh, shut up, Carl,” Susie said wearily. “Why would she?”

Watch them all, the inspector had said. They’ll have the gloves off now. Watch Carlton. Watch his wife. Watch the servants, too. They may know something. Tell them about the ladder and the screen. That may make them sit up.

She sat down. The servants were huddled in a corner, Maggie stiff and resentful, Ida staring at nothing, her hands folded in her lap, and William on the edge of a chair, his head shaking with an old man’s palsy.

“Someone may have got in from outside,” she said. “Mrs. Garrison’s screen was open. They’re looking now for a ladder.”

She thought Carlton relaxed at that. He even took a sip of his drink.

“Plenty of ladders about,” he said. “Police have some sense, after all.”

Only Jan showed a sharp reaction. She sat up and stared at Hilda wildly.

“That’s absurd,” she said. “Who would want to do such a thing? And even if they did they couldn’t get into Granny’s room. Miss Adams was always in the hall.”

Hilda watched her. She was not only terrified. She knew something. And Susie was watching her, too.

“Don’t take it too hard, Jan,” she drawled. “They’ve got to try everything. No use getting hysterical. That won’t help.”