But we heard no loud walking in that room under my kitchen. There, when it stepped, no foot was proud.
Now so allied, the seven lodgers of that house and Mrs. Halloran, niece of that house, stood or sat, waiting. Mr. Kistler and Mr. Waller disappeared, reappeared again. Mrs. Waller kept to her dinette chair, her eyes glassy, her lips moving without expressing sound. Mr. Buffingham smoked steadily, leaning against the buffet and tapping ashes off on my floor. At one time I picked up a smoking stand, walked across the room to plank it squarely in front of him, but he didn’t seem to notice it, beyond jumping when I appeared before him. He was more haggard than ever; a damp forelock hung over his forehead; his lips puckered and unpuckered as if he were going to whistle, but changed his mind. Miss Sands and Mr. Grant cowered in corners.
At one time a commotion began in the house, upstairs, downstairs. The dog barked loudly, and we looked at each other, sick.
Suddenly a cat, with two policemen after her, darted from the hall into the room; it was the gray she-cat, now very heavy with her kittens, running fast and low, almost brushing along the floor.
The women screamed; Miss Sands leaped on the gateleg table and stood yelling with her skirts tight around her knees; Mrs. Halloran sat up, crouching back against the wall, a hand protectively over her throat. I turned my back, but I knew when the men caught the snarling beast and took her away.
After that there was just the previous disorder. The doorbell rang, was silent awhile, rang again. Mr. Kistler grinned wryly at the roomful of us.
“Reporters,” he said.
“Oh, my goodness,” I said. “Will the papers . . . will they tell . . . ?”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Dacres,” he said grimly. “It won’t make more than a three-inch obituary on page seven. How’d you like to come across the details of this delectable little yarn in the Comet, say at the breakfast table?”
We looked sicker.
“The chance of a lifetime,” he mourned. “In on the inside. Think what I could have made out of it as a freelance! And this is the sort of story it is! Phooey!”
He turned his back on us abruptly to stare out the window.
On the face of the white electric clock on my buffet, the hands slid leadenly past three o’clock, four o’clock.
Night, I told myself. In other houses, people slept. Night, with a little moon shining down, still and white, on a dim, normal world just outside the windows of Mrs. Garr’s house.
Shortly after four o’clock a tall man with thinning blond hair and a disillusioned face stepped back into the room. He was dressed in civilian clothes but carried an air of official authority.
“I’m Lieutenant Strom. I’ll see you one at a time, please. In the room at the front of the house.” He glanced once around the room. “Who was it made the call to the office? Mr. Waller? Okay, you first, Waller.”
Mr. Waller went out with him.
Seven of us left now, with Red sitting by the door, on guard. Mr. Kistler once walked toward me, but Red stopped him.
“No talkin’ in private.”
Mrs. Halloran sobbed herself to sleep. The rest of us looked at her with envy; I was dead tired.
Mr. Waller stayed in that front room until after five o’clock.
Then Red took Mrs. Waller in. She stayed only ten or fifteen minutes; I heard her come out, join Mr. Waller in the hall, and the two of them go upstairs.
Mr. Buffingham was the next called. It was well after six before he went upstairs. Mrs. Halloran was called then. We woke her up, wiped her face with a damp cloth, sent her in trembling so she could scarcely walk, supported as she was by Red.
The rest of us began prowling then, too nervous to be quiet longer. My mind was too numb from the shocks of the night to work well. I wondered dully what the policemen were finding out.
What had happened in that room below the stairs? When had Mrs. Garr died? Could Mr. Grant be right—had he seen Mrs. Garr coming home at eight thirty that Friday night? Now that we had Mrs. Halloran’s story, it seemed quite possible that he might have seen her. And what then? What had happened in that listening house?
Had Mrs. Garr walked into her house, walked down the stairs to her dark kitchen, fallen there or had a heart attack, lain on that cement floor calling weakly for help, and slowly died?
Or was there deeper terror in it? Friday was the night an assailant had leaped upon me. Had she come home, been seized in the dark and killed—choked—by the very hands that closed on my throat? But why? Was there some strange mystery in the house that killed . . .
I didn’t think I could stand not knowing. I said loudly to Red at his doorway post:
“Did she die naturally? Was she murdered? Can’t you tell us that much?”
He shrugged.
“No talkin’.”
What did that mean? Did the police know, and not want us to know? Or didn’t they know themselves? Were they trying to break someone down? What was going on in the room at the front of the house? When one of us went in, would there be a break—a cry—a confession?
I listened tensely, my ears quick, but I could distinguish no words, only the rumble of voices in their differing rhythms.
It was daylight by that time; had long since been. Our faces looked unslept and indecent in clean morning light. A stubble came out on Mr. Kistler’s cheeks and chin; one minute, it seemed, it wasn’t
