“Did you look in all the rooms?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Question anybody?”
“Everybody, Lieutenant. There’s no one has seen hide nor hair of her.”
“How about the men at the doors?”
“Each one was at his post, sir. She didn’t go out.”
“Then in that case,” said Lieutenant Valcour, “she must still be in.”
The thought was both a bromide and a consolation. Nowadays, Lieutenant Valcour assured himself, people didn’t vanish into thin air; it just wasn’t being done. While concentrating in his mind as to the possible whereabouts of the unfindable Mrs. Endicott, his hands were mechanically placing the piles of letters he had assorted back into the empty drawer. He had shoved the letter from Marge Myles carefully to one side. Any reading of it would have to come later, after he had hit upon some logical explanation for this sudden move on the part of Mrs. Endicott.
“He must have been some stepper, Lieutenant,” Cassidy said, eyeing with interest one disappearing pack of pink envelopes.
“Quite a stepper, Cassidy.” … Where could she hide? And why should she? …
“Each one of them piles from some dame?”
“That’s right, Cassidy—each one from some dame.” … She wanted to get out of the house, one could be pretty sure of that, and go to the hospital to see Hollander. But how could she have got past the men at the doors? She couldn’t. …
“It certainly does beat hell what some guys can get away with, Lieutenant.”
“But it never does beat hell, Cassidy.” … And Hansen had been out around the backyards, even supposing she had attempted anything so unbelievable as to scale fences. That was absurd. …
“It ain’t all a matter of looks, exactly—no, nor money, either.” Cassidy’s glance toward the bed was but half complimentary. “I’ve run with lads that was one step this side of being human monkeys, but could they pick them? I’ll say. They had sex appeal. How about it, Lieutenant?”
“Undoubtedly, Cassidy.” … As for the roof, it was peaked and offered no passage to the roofs of the adjoining houses. One couldn’t picture her, in any case, scrambling over roofs any more than one could believe that she would scramble over fences. …
“And the worst of it is with these bimbos that have it, they ain’t ever satisfied.”
“No one is ever satisfied, Cassidy.” … There might be a way to the roof at that, from the attic … attic …
“Not ever with anything, Lieutenant?”
“Not really ever with anything.” … Attic … and that curious look that one had had to interpret as exaltation. It couldn’t be possible, but still—“Stay right here, Cassidy!”
Cassidy gave a nervous jump. The words were sparks from flint striking steel. Lieutenant Valcour’s sudden spurt of speed as he rushed toward the door was surprising.
A possible solution to Mrs. Endicott’s absence had just come to him with rather horrible clearness.
XXVIII
6:00 a.m.—Mist Drifting Through Mist
Lieutenant Valcour was out of the door in no time and racing along the corridor up the stairs to the floor above. Somewhere—somewhere was the entrance to the stairs leading farther up to the attic. Ah!—softly now, quietly, not to disturb or shock. Thank God the treads were firm and didn’t creak. …
There was a window in the attic, at the garden end of its peak, not a large window, but big enough to permit the cold white light of morning to illumine the place grayly.
Mrs. Endicott’s back was toward him, her face toward that window, and the light from it blurred softly about her silhouette of darkness. She had upended the trunk she was standing on, and it had placed her hands within convenient reach of the rafter about which she had fastened one end of a short rope. Its other end was coiled in a running noose about her neck.
Lieutenant Valcour measured the distance between where he stood at the top of the stairs and the trunk. He could never make it. Some board would creak. And yet, if he cried out, or spoke, if he failed in the proper choice of a word—in fact, the least thing that startled her would destroy her almost calm stance of fatalistic poise.
He took a penknife from his pocket and, slitting the laces of his shoes, removed them. Thank God her back was toward him, and the window was there with its square of light cut clearly in muffled grays—its light with which she seemed to be holding some private service of communion—that inevitable farewell with earth indulged in by each wretched soul before exchanging its conscious lonesomeness for the obscure and problematic company of the damned. …
He was very near her now, himself a mist drifting softly through mist. …
Whispering—whispering—he could hear her whispering—a thin flow of meaning rather than of words, sent from the grayness to that light beyond—sent through a little measured casement out into the immeasurable brilliance of eternity. Her hands were resting easily by her side; her body relaxed more and more peacefully in repose.
“… and if you’re there, Tom darling, and Herbert, too …”
He could leap forward now and catch her if it were necessary, but better be safe, quite safe.
“… it won’t be heaven, dear. They have no room for such as you and me in heaven. But when you come—”
His arms closed gently about her, and her body seemed to stiffen into steel. She relaxed at once, and then stared down at him incuriously. She removed the noose from about her neck as casually as she might have taken off a hat. He lifted her to the floor.
“There isn’t any hurry,” she said.
He knew that she was hinting definitely at the future, when he and the law were finished with her and she would be free to book her passage for eternity again without supervision or restraint.
“No hurry, Mrs. Endicott; nor any need, now.”
The “now” dragged her sharply from the mists. She stared at him with penetrating interest.
“Mr. Hollander,” he said, “will undoubtedly recover.”
“Yes?”
The word was clipped from some inner store of ice.
“Doesn’t that alter the
