There is a chance that I shall not be quite unaided. Henry has promised not to come again until I bid him, but he is to send a detective here from Boston – one whom he knows. In fact, the man is a cousin of his, or else there would be small hope of our securing him, even if I were to offer him a large price.
The man has been remarkably successful in several cases, but his health is not good; the work is a severe strain upon his nerves, and he is not driven to it from any lack of money. The physicians have forbidden him to undertake any new case, for a year at least, but Henry is confident that we may rely upon him for this.
I will now lay aside this and go to bed. Tomorrow is Wednesday; my father will have been dead seven weeks. Tomorrow morning I will commence the work, in which, if it be in human power, aided by a higher wisdom, I shall succeed.
* * * * * *
(The pages which follow are from Miss Fairbanks’s journal, begun after the conclusion of the notes already given to the reader.)
Wednesday night. – I have resolved to record carefully each day the progress I make in my examination of the house. I began today at the bottom – that is, with the room least likely to contain any clue, the parlour. I took a chalk-line and a yard-stick, and divided the floor into square yards, and every one of these squares I examined on my hands and knees. I found in this way literally nothing on the carpet but dust, lint, two common white pins, and three inches of blue sewing-silk.
At last I got the dustpan and brush, and yard by yard swept the floor. I took the sweepings in a white pasteboard box out into the yard in the strong sunlight, and examined them. There was nothing but dust and lint and five inches of brown woollen thread – evidently a ravelling of some dress material. The blue silk and the brown thread are the only possible clues which I found today, and they are hardly possible. Rufus’s wife can probably account for them.
Nobody has come to the house all day. I went down to the store this afternoon to get some necessary provisions, and people stopped talking when I came in. The clerk took my money as if it were poison.
Thursday night. – Today I have searched the sitting-room, out of which my father’s bedroom opens. I found two bloody footprints on the carpet which no one had noticed before – perhaps because the carpet itself is red and white. I used a microscope which I had in my school work. The footprints, which are close to the bedroom door, pointing out into the sitting-room, are both from the right foot; one is brighter than the other, but both are faint. The foot was evidently either bare or clad only in a stocking – the prints are so widely spread. They are wider than my father’s shoes. I tried one in the brightest print.
I found nothing else new in the sitting-room. The bloodstains on the doors which have been already noted are still there. They had not been washed away, first by order of the sheriff, and next by mine. These stains are of two kinds; one looks as if made by a bloody garment brushing against it; the other, I should say, was made in the first place by the grasp of a bloody hand, and then brushed over with a cloth. There are none of these marks upon the door leading to the bedroom – they are on the doors leading into the front entry and the china closet. The china closet is really a pantry, although I use it only for my best dishes and preserves.
Friday night. – Today I searched the closet. One of the shelves, which is about as high as my shoulders, was bloodstained. It looked to me as if the murderer might have caught hold of it to steady himself. Did he turn faint after his dreadful deed? Some tumblers of jelly were ranged on that shelf and they had not been disturbed. There was only that bloody clutch on the edge.
I found on this closet floor, under the shelves, as if it had been rolled there by a careless foot, a button, evidently from a man’s clothing. It is an ordinary black enamelled metal trousers-button; it had evidently been worn off and clumsily sewn on again, for a quantity of stout white thread is still clinging to it. This button must have belonged either to a single man or to one with an idle wife.
If one black button had been sewn on with white thread, another is likely to be. I may be wrong, but I regard this button as a clue.
The pantry was thoroughly swept – cleaned, indeed, by Rufus’s wife, the day before she left. Neither my father nor Rufus could have dropped it there, and they never had occasion to go to that closet. The murderer dropped the button.
I have a white pasteboard box which I have marked ‘clues’. In it I have put the button.
This afternoon Phoebe Dole came in. She is very kind. She had re-cut the dyed silk, and she fitted it to me. Her great shears clicking in my ears made me nervous. I did not feel like stopping to think about clothes. I hope I did not appear ungrateful, for she is the only soul beside Henry who has treated me as she did before this happened.
Phoebe asked me what I found to busy myself about, and I replied, ‘I am searching for my father’s murderer’. She asked
