I didn’t keep him waiting for the answers. He was a grown man. I didn’t edge around the bad news.
“Things have taken a bad break,” I said as soon as we were locked in together. “I think we’ll have to go to the police and newspapers for help. A Mrs. Correll, a friend of your daughters, lied to me when I questioned her yesterday. Last night she committed suicide.”
“Irma Correll? Suicide?”
“You knew her?”
“Yes! Intimately! She was—that is, she was a close friend of my wife and daughters. She killed herself?”
“Yes. Poison. Last night. Where does she fit in with your daughters’ disappearance?”
“Where?” he repeated. “I don’t know. Must she fit in?”
“I think she must. She told me she hadn’t seen your daughters for a couple of weeks. Her husband told me just now that they were talking to her when he came home from the bank last Wednesday afternoon. She seemed nervous when I questioned her. She killed herself shortly afterward. There’s hardly a doubt that she fits in somewhere.”
“And that means—?”
“That means,” I finished for him, “that your daughters may be perfectly safe, but that we can’t afford to gamble on that possibility.”
“You think harm has come to them?”
“I don’t think anything,” I evaded, “except that with a death tied up closely with their going, we can’t afford to play around.”