“Certainly,” I said righteously. I wondered what use a driver’s license would be in proving my story, but I obligingly dug it out and handed it to him.
“All right,” he said after studying it long enough to memorize the number, “you can talk to the sergeant.”
He left his post long enough to walk me to the gate. “Sarge!” he yelled. One of the men by the door looked up. “This is the Thayer girl’s governess!” he called, cupping his hands.
“Thank you, Officer,” I said, imitating Miss Jean Brodie’s manner. I walked up the drive to the doorway and repeated my story to the sergeant.
He frowned in turn. “We didn’t have any word about a governess showing up. I’m afraid no one is allowed in right now. You’re not with a newspaper, are you?”
“Certainly not!” I snapped. “Look, Sergeant,” I said, smiling a bit to show I could be conciliatory, “how about just asking Miss Thayer to come to the door. She can tell you if she wants me here or not. If she doesn’t, I can leave again. But since she did ask for me, she’s likely to be upset if I’m not allowed inside.”
The upsetness of a Thayer, even one as young as Jill, seemed to concern the sergeant. I was afraid he might ring for Lucy, but instead he asked one of his men to fetch Miss Thayer.
Minutes went by without her appearance, and I began to wonder whether Lucy had seen me after all and set the police straight on my governess story. Eventually Jill arrived, however. Her oval face was pinched and anxious and her brown hair had not been brushed. Her face cleared a little when she saw me. “Oh, it’s you!” she said. “They told me my governess was here and I thought it was old Mrs. Wilkens.”
“Isn’t this your governess?” the patrolman demanded.
Jill gave me an anguished look. I moved into the house. “Just tell the man you sent for me,” I said.
“Oh, yes, yes, I did. I called Miss Warshawski an hour ago and begged her to come up here.”
The patrolman was looking at me suspiciously, but I was in the house and one of the powerful Thayers wanted me to be there. He compromised by having me spell out my name, letter by laborious letter, for his notebook. Jill tugged on my arm while I was doing this, and as soon as we were through spelling, before he could ask more questions, I gave her a little pat and propelled her toward the hall. She led me to a little room near the big green statue and shut the door.
“Did you say you were my governess?” She was still trying to figure that one out.
“I was afraid they wouldn’t let me inside if I told them the truth,” I explained. “Police don’t like private detectives on their turf. Now suppose you tell me what’s going on.”
The bleak look reappeared. She screwed up her face. “Did you see the car outside?” I nodded. “My father-that was him, they shot him.”
“Did you see them do it?” I asked.
She shook her head and wiped her hand across her nose and forehead. Tears were suddenly streaming down her face. “I heard them,” she wailed.
The little room had a settee and a table with some magazines on it. Two heavy-armed chairs stood on either side of a window overlooking the south lawn. I pulled them up to the table and sat Jill in one of them. I sat in the other, facing her. “I’m sorry to put you through it, but I’m going to have to ask you to tell me how it happened. Just take your time, though, and don’t mind crying.”
The story came out in little sobs. “My dad always leaves-leaves for work between seven and seven thirty,” she said. “Sometimes he goes earlier. If something special-special is-going on at the bank. I’m usually asleep when he goes. Lucy makes-made him breakfast, then I get up and she makes another breakfast. Mother has toast and coffee in her room. She’s-she’s always on a-a diet.”
I nodded to explain not only that I understood these details but why she was reporting them. “But today you weren’t asleep.”
“No,” she agreed. “All this stuff about Pete-his funeral was yesterday, you know, and it shook me up so I couldn’t-couldn’t sleep very well.” She’d stopped crying and was trying to control her voice. “I heard Daddy get up, but I didn’t go down to eat with him. He’d been so strange, you know, and I didn’t want to hear him say anything terrible about Pete.” Suddenly she was sobbing, “I wouldn’t eat with him, and now he’s dead, and now I’ll never have another chance.” The words came out in great heaving bursts between sobs; she kept repeating them.
I took her hands. “Yes, I know, it’s tough, Jill. But you didn’t kill him by not eating with him, you know.” I patted her hands but didn’t say anything else for a while. Finally, though, as the sobs quieted a bit, I said, “Tell me what did happen, honey, and then we can try to figure out an answer to it.”
She worked hard to pull herself together, and then said, “There’s not much else to tell. My bedroom is above here and I can see the side of the house. I sort of-of wandered to the window and watched him-watched him drive his car down to the road.” She stopped to swallow but she had herself in hand. “You can’t see the road because of all the bushes in front of it, and anyway, you can’t see all the way down to the bottom from my room, but I knew from the sound that he’d gotten down and turned onto Sheridan.” I nodded encouragingly, still holding her hands tightly. “Well, I was sort of going back to my bed, I thought I might get dressed, when I heard all these shots. Only I didn’t know-know what they were.” She carefully wiped two new tears away. “It sounded horrid. I heard glass shattering, and then this squeal, you know, the way a car sounds when it’s turning a corner too fast or something, and I thought, maybe Daddy had an accident. You know, he was acting so crazy, he could have gone charging down Sheridan Road and hit someone.
“So I ran downstairs without taking off my nightgown and Lucy came running from the back of the house. She was yelling something, and trying to get me to go back upstairs and get some clothes on, but I went outside anyway and ran down to the drive and found the car.” She screwed up her face, shutting her eyes, and fought against her tears again. “It was terrible. Daddy-Daddy was bleeding and lying all spread out on the steering wheel.” She shook her head. “I still thought he’d been in an accident, but I couldn’t see the other car. I thought maybe they’d driven off, you know, the ones with the squealing tires, but Lucy seemed to guess about the shooting. Anyway, she kept me from going over to the car-I didn’t have any shoes on, and by then a whole lot of cars had stopped to stare at it and she-Lucy-made one of them call the police on his CB. She wanted me to come back to the house but I wouldn’t, not until the police came.” She sniffed. “I didn’t like to leave him there all by himself, you know.”
“Yeah, sure, honey. You did real well. Did your mother come out?”
“No, we went back to the house when the police came, and I came upstairs to get dressed and then I remembered you and called you. But you know when I hung up?” I nodded. “Well, Lucy went to wake up Mother and tell her, and she-she started crying and made Lucy get me, and she came in just then so I had to hangup.”
“So you didn’t get a glimpse of the people who killed your dad?” She shook her head. “Do the police believe he was in the car you heard taking off?”
“Yes, it’s something to do with shells. I think there weren’t any shells or something, so they think they must be in the car.”
I nodded. “That makes sense. Now for the big question, Jilclass="underline" Did you want me to come out for comfort and support-which I’m happy to provide-or to take some kind of action?”
She stared at me through gray eyes that had seen and heard too much for her age lately. “What can you do?” she asked.
“You can hire me to find out who killed your dad and your brother,” I said matter-of-factly.
“I don’t have any money, only my allowance. When I’m twenty-one I get some of my trust money, but I’m only fourteen now.”