Jerry brought Mrs. Halloran back.
“You’re next, Kistler.”
Mr. Kistler went.
Mrs. Halloran was sobbing wildly. Jerry eased her into the armchair and turned to me.
“Okay if she stays here? She can’t go home, not in the state she’s in. Besides, she might get wanted again.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “Let her stay.”
In a few minutes Mrs. Halloran was asleep; her head lolled back like a limp rag doll’s.
Mr. Kistler’s interview lasted a scant half hour. Mr. Grant went next, Miss Sands after him.
So they were leaving me for the last. What did that mean? That I knew least, of course. I’d been in Mrs. Garr’s house such a short time, compared to the others. I couldn’t be expected to know much of Mrs. Garr’s affairs.
When I finally was called I stumbled with weariness as I got to my feet. Since Miss Sands had left I had been lying on the couch, and I’d dropped into a stiff, half-awake sleep. Jerry took me in; Red stayed with Mrs. Halloran. In passing, I took a look at the clock: almost eight.
I squeezed past men and the grand piano to get before Lieutenant Strom. He sat in the middle of the davenport, which stood with its back to the bay of the front windows; there was a card table in front of him, and a chair in front of the table. Seven or eight other men stood about the room, smoking, writing in little books, or just watching. The lieutenant had a fountain pen in his hand and two piles of paper on the table before him, one pile written on, one not. He made notations as I answered.
I was put in the chair facing him. The light from the windows struck me full in the eyes; I was blinded and numb with tiredness.
The lieutenant’s heavy eyelids drooped a little lower over his eyes. He spoke quietly, but his first words shook the exhaustion right out of me.
“No use stalling, Mrs. Dacres. Who helped you out on this job?” My tongue stuck to the top of my mouth, paralyzed.
Abruptly he lunged forward over the table, yelled: “Come on, talk!”
“But I don’t know what you’re talking about! You can’t mean you think I—”
“Yeah, I mean I think you! And you don’t even have to answer. We know who was in with you on it—Kistler!”
“Mr. Kistler?” I vainly tried to piece sense out of it.
“Oh, so it wasn’t Kistler! So it was someone else! Talk fast, now.”
He bellowed at me, and it reminded me so much of Mr. Gangan that what he was doing suddenly made sense—and not in the way he wanted it to. A quick glance at the other men in the room—all poker faces—clinched it.
Lieutenant Strom was putting on a loud bluff to shake me into admitting something, anything, that would involve me in Mrs. Garr’s death.
I became angry then, and anger pulled me together. I shifted my chair enough so the sun hit me from the side instead of squarely in the eyes. It was a relief to see without weeping.
“Nonsense.” I put decision into it. “I didn’t have a thing to do with Mrs. Garr’s death.”
“You can take care of yourself, can’t you? Good control, too. And you didn’t have a thing to do with it. Perhaps you can tell us who did?”
“Haven’t you found that out yet?”
“I’m asking, not answering.”
“Isn’t it possible that she may have died naturally? She wasn’t young—over sixty-five, I’m sure. Her heart was bad, too. She told me so.”
“So that’s your story, eh?”
“I haven’t any story. I’m completely in the dark.”
His manner became silkily insinuatory.
“Odd, isn’t it, how many disturbances began after you moved in?”
“Did they? I don’t know what happened here before I moved in.”
“Well, it was a decent, quiet house before then.”
“Perhaps you’d like to suggest I got Mr. Buffingham’s son to rob a bank? Or tried to throttle myself? If that’s what you mean by disturbances.”
“Was that what you meant when you talked about disturbances in this house to Mr. Kistler?”
“Oh, you mean about the house listening at night?” It sounded silly when I put it into words in that roomful of stolid men.
“Yeah, what did you mean by that?”
I took a moment to think it over. “Just that I often wake in the night and feel a tension, an exaggerated stillness, as if the house or people in it were lying tensely awake, listening.”
“Uh,” he grunted. “Now listen, lady, does that make sense?”
“No, it doesn’t,” I admitted. “I can’t get away from it, though. I feel it every time I wake at night.”
“Well, no one else hears the house listen.” He ended that subject grimly. “No one heard anything and nothing happened in this house before you came. It was a respectable, quiet—”
“Perhaps it was,” I broke in on him. “Perhaps it still is. But I don’t think so, myself. I think there was something going on here long before I came. I don’t think Mrs. Garr died naturally. I think she was killed. It seems more—reasonable.”
There, it was out. I hadn’t known I believed those things before I said them, but as the words came out, I knew those were my convictions.
“Now we’re getting somewhere.” Strom was sitting forward, his eyes following my lips. “Keep on.”
“Mrs. Garr told me she asked the people who had my rooms before me to leave because she caught them snooping.”
“Caught them what?”
“She thought they were searching through her things.”
“For what?”
“She didn’t say. I asked that, too. She passed it off as curiosity about her possessions.”
“Nuts. Those people been back since?”
“Not that I know of. But someone was.”
I told him then, two or three times over, to every detail, the story of the prowler I had seen run out on that afternoon, weeks before, when Mrs. Halloran and Mrs. Garr had gone to the movie.
Lieutenant Strom, finally satisfied, said, “M-m-m-m,” still watching me intently from under his heavy eyelids.
“What’s your first name, Mrs. Dacres?”
“Gwynne.”
“Maiden name?”
“MacGowan.”
“Husband?”
“Divorced.”
“In jail?”
“In hospital.”
“M-m-m-m. You a record?”
“No.” Indignantly.
“Why’d you move
