“Mrs. Tewman’s been gone ever since Monday,” Mrs. Waller put in thoughtfully. “I been lookin’ for her. The bathroom’s a mess. I cleaned it up once myself. I been lookin’ for her.”
Mrs. Tewman gone, too! It quickened Mr. Waller’s interest, as it did mine.
“Okay, I’ll go huntin’ the old so-and-so.” There was a gleam in his eye as he turned to his wife. “Never thought I’d go huntin’ her, did you, Agnes?”
“No, I never did.” Mrs. Waller was increasingly excited. “I can’t think what can have happened to her, now I think about it. I’ve never known her to go off like this before.”
“Before we start off on any wild-goose chase, though”—Mr. Waller turned back—“we ought to look through the house for sure. You say you called her?”
“Yes, I did. Thoroughly.”
“Well, we can soon look.”
The looking was quickly done. Upstairs rooms, parlor, stair room, cellar. The Tewmans’ rooms in the front were again unlocked and vacant, the furnace room empty.
Mr. Waller bellowed, “Mrs. Garr!” before the basement kitchen, but except for an answering bark from the dog, all was quiet.
“She ain’t here, that’s a cinch,” he concluded.
He left with Mr. Grant. I invited Mrs. Waller to stay downstairs with me until they came back. We stopped at Miss Sands’ door to ask her to come, too; she came with alacrity when she heard what was afoot.
There were only the three of us in the house.
Our wonder grew as we talked, hashing over Mrs. Garr’s nonappearance from every angle.
“Perhaps she’s lost her mind and is wandering around somewhere, not knowing who she is,” was my best solution. “She’s old, you know. She’s been acting queerly all along; I’ve thought she was queer ever since I moved here. Did she ever tell you she thought people went snooping around the house at night? People who live here, I mean?”
“No, she never said to me.” Miss Sands shot a furtive look from me to Mrs. Waller.
Both the women were anxious to speculate about Mrs. Garr’s peculiar behavior in this one instance of not coming home; they were avid to talk about it. But every time I switched to Mrs. Garr’s general peculiarities and to her life in the past, they were both queerly reluctant. I couldn’t get any gossip out of them at all, in spite of an admission wrung from Miss Sands that she had lived in that house with Mrs. Garr for twelve years.
“It’s handy,” she excused herself. “You know, walking distance and all.”
“Has Mrs. Garr always been like she is now?”
“Well, she was different when I first knew her.”
That was all I could get.
A thought hit me.
“I’ll bet it will turn out she went somewhere. She must have known she was going to be away for a long time because—think of those animals in the basement. They’d be crazy for food by this time if she hadn’t left a lot. And the dog hasn’t been barking much—I’ve just heard a growl once in a while. By this time, though . . . Do you think we should go down and let them out?”
“They’d be awful hard to get back in,” Mrs. Waller objected.
We decided to wait to see what the men found out.
Mr. Waller and Mr. Grant did not return to the house until nearly ten o’clock. They both looked stirred up and alert when they walked into my living room, and they were not alone. Mrs. Halloran was with them.
Mrs. Halloran was drunk with excitement.
“Oh, Aunt Harriet! Oh, Aunt Hattie! Oh, she must have been killed! I can’t think whatever happened! There I was, thinking she did it a-purpose, and getting mad, and going on about how I’d show her I could have a good time anyway, and she may be kidnapped!”
“It’s funny, it’s pretty funny, all right.” Mr. Waller looked quickly from one to the other of us. “I guess we better call the hospitals, all right.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked Mrs. Halloran. “She was all right when she came home with you from Chicago on Tuesday, wasn’t she?”
“That’s it! That’s it! She never went to Chicago!” Mrs. Halloran screamed at me, twisting her hands. “Right up at the gate we was, Aunt Hattie and me, and I kep’ a-saying, ‘Better get out your ticket, Auntie, better get out your ticket, Auntie’—I had mine all ready in my hand—but she kep’ a-saying, ‘I got plen’y o’ time,’ until right when the man says, ‘See your ticket, lady,’ and she opened her purse and hunted, couldn’t find it. She says to me, ‘You go ahead save me a seat,’ she says to me, so I go ahead on down to the train; I get on and pick a good seat right in the middle of the car, and she never come! I kep’ lookin’ out the window and up the aisle, and there was lots of other people wanted to sit by me, sayin’, ‘This half took, lady?’ And I kep’ sayin’, ‘Yes, I got a friend comin’,’ but she never come. So then the train started, and I thought she must-a been lookin’ for me in some of the other coaches. The conductor come and took my ticket, and I says, ‘You see a lady lookin’ for a lady?’ I says to him, but he says, ‘There’s a awful lot of ladies on this train, madam,’ so after a while, I got another lady across the aisle to keep my seat for me while I went through all the train lookin’, and she wasn’t there. So the other lady, she stayed, and she said maybe they run two trains. So then in Chicago I went to the Clinton Hotel. I went in a taxi where she said we was goin’ to stop in that hotel, but she never come there, neither. So I was mad and said nobody was goin’ to leave me like that, so I went to four movies and saw the house where the girl
