Both of them were neatly bundled up in some curtains.
Two hours later Lillian Shan got herself loose—in a linen closet on the second floor. Switching on the light, she started to untie the maid. She stopped. Wang Ma was dead. The rope around her neck had been drawn too tight.
Lillian Shan went out into the empty house and telephoned the sheriff’s office in Redwood City.
Two deputy sheriffs had come to the house, had listened to her story, had poked around, and had found another Chinese body—another strangled woman—buried in the cellar. Apparently she had been dead a week or a week and a half; the dampness of the ground made more positive dating impossible. Lillian Shan identified her as another of her servants—Wan Lan, the cook.
The other servants—Hoo Lun and Yin Hung—had vanished. Of the several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of furnishings old Shan Fang had put into the house during his life, not a nickel’s worth had been removed. There were no signs of a struggle. Everything was in order. The closest neighboring house was nearly half a mile away. The neighbors had seen nothing, knew nothing.
That’s the story the newspapers had hung headlines over, and that’s the story this girl, sitting very erect in her chair, speaking with businesslike briskness, shaping each word as exactly as if it were printed in black type, told the Old Man and me.
“I am not at all satisfied with the effort the San Mateo County authorities have made to apprehend the murderer or murderers,” she wound up. “I wish to engage your agency.”
The Old Man tapped the table with the point of his inevitable long yellow pencil and nodded at me.