Prye waited for her sobbing to stop, turning her words over in his mind. If Mary had found Joan’s ring in Tom’s room it meant that Joan had visited or met Tom some time on Monday afternoon.
“What time was this?” Prye said at last.
“I don’t know. I guess around eight o’clock.”
“What did you do with the ring?”
“I can hardly remember but I think I threw it out of the window. And then I came back and I don’t know anything after that except that I wanted to die. I thought I was dying.”
“You didn’t know that Tom and Joan were — well acquainted?”
“No. How could he? She was just a child. But Tom’s dead now and so is she and I don’t blame either of them. I was such a fool. Pretty soon it won’t matter what any of us did.” Her voice had begun to fade, as if she were too tired and depressed to talk any longer.
A potential suicide, Prye thought. He rose briskly and prepared a hypodermic, and in ten minutes she was sleeping again. Prye went downstairs and gave some orders to Jennie. Then he and Nora walked up the lane to Miss Bonner’s house.
It was ten o’clock. The veranda sprang into light at their knock and two bright black eyes surveyed them from the small window in the top of the door.
“Like a speakeasy,” Nora said. “Hurry up, Wang. Somebody’s after me with an ax.”
The door opened and Wang bowed humbly before Nora. “I offer my head on a platter for presuming to keep you waiting, but such are my commands.”
Prye smiled at him rather fiercely. “Someday, Wang, somebody is going to take you literally.”
“Some persons are deeply touched by my protestations of loyalty,” Wang announced in an injured voice. “Even the heart of Miss Bonner is not inflexible.”
“Miss Bonner still up?”
“Miss Bonner is as unsleeping as the evil eye.”
“That’s a pity,” Prye said. “It means that Miss Shane will be forced to entertain her while I talk to Miss Alfonse.”
“You entertain your own Eumenides,” Nora cried.
“Since Miss Alfonse and I will require the strictest privacy, I hope you are prepared to be reasonable, Nora.”
“I am always reasonable. But Emily will throw me out on my ear. I called her a name once to somebody I thought I could trust and she has a good memory.”
“That’s fine,” Prye said heartily. “That’s your excuse for calling on her. Apologize for the name you called her. Tell her it was a case of mistaken identity. Or if it was a nice name tell her it was not a case of mistaken identity. Do you get the idea?”
“Not after you’ve finished mangling it,” Nora said, and followed Wang up the steps with dignity.
A few minutes later Prye went up. He stopped for a while outside Miss Bonner’s door and listened.
“A liar, that’s what it was!” Emily was saying. “I have strong information to the effect that you called me a liar, Miss Shane.”
Prye walked down the hall and rapped softly on the door of Miss Alfonse’s room. There was no answer. Without wasting further time he took the picklock from his pocket and opened the door.
The room was in darkness. He fumbled for the light switch, listened for movements in the room. But when the light went on there was nobody there. The uniform that Miss Alfonse had worn that day lay crumpled on the bed. A drawer in the dresser was open, spilling out clothes on to the floor. Prye went over automatically and began to pick them up. Then he saw the small, dark-red pool at his feet.
Chapter Fourteen
Prye closed Miss Alfonse’s door behind him and went quietly downstairs.
“Wang, phone Professor Frost’s cottage and ask Inspector White to come here immediately.”
“Do you anticipate another murder?” Wang asked serenely.
“Anticipate is not the word,” Prye said. “Where did Miss Alfonse have her dinner tonight?”
“In her room.”
“After I left this afternoon did she go out?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Did anyone come to see her?”
“Assuredly not. I have watched the doors with the eyes of a lynx.”
Prye went back upstairs, rapped lightly on Emily’s door, and walked in.
“What,” Emily demanded, “is going on here tonight? First Miss Shane forces herself on me with the thinnest story I have ever heard—” Her voice faded as Prye continued to stare at her.
“What have you been doing all evening?” he asked gravely.
Her eyes narrowed, almost disappeared under fat lids. “What for? What’s happened?”
“I don’t know,” Prye said.
“I’ve been sleeping.”
“It’s amazing how much sleep the people in this vicinity require. Susan sleeps on the beach. Tom sleeps in the sitting room. You sleep—”
“I was doped,” she said acidly. “I never go to sleep after dinner.”
“After one of your dinners I’m surprised you don’t sleep forever. Who doped you? And why? And with what? And when?”
Nora seized her opportunity to slip quietly through the door.
“That’s your business,” Emily said. “Aren’t you a doctor?”
Prye knelt down and looked carefully at her eyes.
“Your pupils seem normal to me, Emily. That, and the fact that you are a notorious liar, almost disqualifies your statement. Where’s Miss Alfonse tonight?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her all day.”
“Is that unusual?”
“I give her one day a week off and she asked for today.”
“Who brings up your dinner when Alfonse is off duty?”
“The cook.”
“And you think the cook doped you?”
Emily banged her fist on the arm of her wheelchair. “No, I don’t! But someone did.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“Coffee taste all right tonight?”
“Very peculiar,” she said firmly. “It tasted very peculiar, now that I remember it.”
“I understand you’ll be ninety soon, Emily. People of ninety usually haven’t a keen sense of taste.”
“I— Nonsense!”
“They imagine things, too, sometimes, and invent things.”
“I’m sixty-five,” she said in a resigned voice.
“That’s better. Much more convincing. And you’ll want to be as convincing as possible when Inspector White gets here.”
“Why?”
“Because Miss Alfonse has disappeared and there’s a pool of blood in her room.”
The breath was pushed out of her and she folded like an accordion.
“Think it over, Emily,” Prye said. “Here is how it will look to Inspector White. Miss Alfonse met Tom Little last night and witnessed his murder. Tonight she disappears from a room on the second floor of your house with you and Ralph a few yards away.”
Emily had recovered. She took a wisp of handkerchief from one of her innumerable hiding places and dabbed at her eyes. She stopped crying in a minute to ask: “What’s the second floor got to do with it?”
“Miss Alfonse’s door was locked. Apart from the difficulty of the murderer getting past Wang downstairs there was the difficulty of getting into Alfonse’s room to kill her. It’s odd that Miss Alfonse, who was very much on her guard against just this, should have let anyone into her bedroom, unless she couldn’t have stopped him. This is your house. I presume you have a set of keys to the various doors, and if Miss Alfonse was, by any chance, doped, it wouldn’t have been difficult for you or Ralph to get into her room. And it might be rather cute of you to have suggested that you were doped before anyone discovered that she was.”
“And the body?” Emily asked calmly.
“Flung from the window perhaps.”
She began to laugh, first softly, and then with uncontrollable mirth.