eat,' he said.
She was sitting on the chesterfield near the front window. The morning light was unkind to her parched blonde face. It was two full days and nights since the first telephone call on Monday morning. She looked as if all the minutes in those forty-eight hours had passed through her body like knots in wire. The red piece of knitting on the seat beside her hadn't grown since I'd seen it last.
She managed a rather wizened smile and extended her hand to Bastian. `Ralph says you have something to show me.'
`Yes. It's a piece of yarn, which may or may not have come off your boy's sweater.'
`The black one I knitted for him?'
`It may be. We want to know if you recognize the yarn.'
Bastian handed her the evidence board. She put on reading glasses and examined it. Then she put it aside, rose abruptly, and left the room. Hillman made a move to follow her. He stopped with his hands out in a helpless pose which he was still in when she returned.
She was carrying a large, figured linen knitting bag. Crouching on the chesterfield, she rummaged among its contents and tossed out balls of wool of various colors. Her furiously active hand came to rest holding a half-used ball of black wool.
`This is what I had left over from Tom's sweater. I think it's the same. Can you tell?'
Bastian broke off a piece of yarn from the ball and compared it under a glass with my piece. He turned from the window: `The specimens appear identical to me. If they are, we can establish it under the microscope.'
`What does it mean if they are identical?' Ralph Hillman said.
`I prefer not to say until we have microscopic confirmation.'
Hillman took hold of Bastian's arm and shook him. `Don't double-talk me, Lieutenant.'
Bastian broke loose and stepped back. There were white frozen-looking patches around his nose and mouth. His eyes were somber.
`Very well, I'll tell you what I know. This piece of yarn was found by Mr. Archer here, caught in the lock of a car trunk. The car was one driven by the alleged kidnapper, Harley.'
`You mean that Tom was riding in the trunk?'
`He may have been, yes.'
`But he wouldn't do that if-' Hillman's mouth worked. `You mean Tom is dead?'
`He may be. We won't jump to any conclusions.'
Elaine Hillman produced a noise, a strangled gasp, which made her the center of attention. She spoke in a thin voice, halfway between a child's and an old woman's: `I wish I had never recognized the yarn.'
`It wouldn't change the facts, Mrs. Hillman.'
`Well, I don't want any more of your dreadful facts. The waiting is bad enough, without these refinements of torment.'
Hillman bent over and tried to quiet her. `That isn't fair, Elaine. Lieutenant Bastian is trying to help us.'
He had said the same thing about me. It gave me the queer feeling that time was repeating itself and would go on endlessly repeating itself, as it does in hell.
She said: `He's going about it in a strange way. Look what he's made me do. All my balls of yarn are spilled on the floor.'
She kicked at them with her tiny slippered feet.
Hillman got down on his knees to pick them up. She kicked at him, without quite touching him. `Get away, you're no help, either. If you'd been a decent father, this would never have happened.'
Bastian picked up the evidence board and turned to me. `We'd better go.'
Nobody asked us not to. But Hillman followed us out into the hall.
`Please forgive us, we're not ourselves. You haven't really told me anything.'
Bastian answered him coolly: `We have no definite conclusions to report.'
`But you think Tom's dead.'
`I'm afraid he may be. We'll learn more from an analysis of the contents of that car trunk. If you'll excuse me, Mr. Hillman, I don't have time for further explanations now.'
`I do,' I said.
For the first time that morning Hillman looked at me as if I might be good for something more than a scapegoat. `Are you willing to tell me what's been going on?'
`So far as I understand it.'
`I'll leave you men together then,' Bastian said. He went out, and a minute later I heard his car go down the drive.
Hillman deputed Mrs. Perez to stay with his wife. He led me into a wing of the house I hadn't visited, down an arching corridor like a tunnel carved through chalk, to a spacious study. Two of the oak-paneled walls were lined with books, most of them in calf-bound sets, as if Hillman had bought or inherited a library. A third wall was broken by a large deep window overlooking the distant sea.
The fourth wall was hung with a number of framed photographs. One was a blownup snapshot of Dick
