anything she wanted with it. He was kind of disagreeable. I got along a little better with one of the maids. She says some of Mrs. Correll’s pretties disappeared last week. Mrs. Correll said she had lent them to a friend. I’m going to show the stuff the hock-shop has to the maid tomorrow, to see if she can identify it. She didn’t know anything else—except that Mrs. Correll was out of the picture for a while on Friday—the day the Banbrock girls went away.”
“What do you mean, out of the picture?” I asked.
“She went out late in the morning and didn’t show up until somewhere around three the next morning. She and Correll had a row over it, but she wouldn’t tell him where she had been.”
I liked that. It could mean something.
“And,” Pat went on, “Correll has just remembered that his wife had an uncle who went crazy in Pittsburgh in 1902, and that she had a morbid fear of going crazy herself, and that she had often said she would kill herself if she thought she was going crazy. Wasn’t it nice of him to remember those things at last? To account for her death?”
“It was,” I agreed, “but it doesn’t get us anywhere. It doesn’t even prove that he knows anything. Now my guess is—”
“To hell with your guess,” Pat said, getting up and pushing his hat in place. “Your guesses all sound like a lot of static to me. I’m going home, eat my dinner, read my Bible, and go to bed.”
I suppose he did. Anyway, he left us.
We all might as well have spent the next three days in bed for all the profit that came out of our running around. No place we visited, nobody we questioned, added to our knowledge. We were in a blind alley.