She let the sleeve fall over it again, and gave me more words. They didn’t mean anything to me, but they tinkled prettily.
“All right,” I said, sliding my gun out. “If you want to go, we’ll go.”
Both her hands went to the gun, pushing it down, and she talked excitedly into my face, winding up with a flicking of one hand across her collar—a pantomime of a throat being cut.
I shook my head from side to side and urged her toward the door.
She balked, fright large in her eyes.
One of her hands went to my watch-pocket. I let her take the watch out.
She put the tiny tip of one pointed finger over the twelve and then circled the dial three times. I thought I got that. Thirty-six hours from noon would be midnight of the following night—Thursday.
“Yes,” I said.
She shot a look at the door and led me to the table where the tea things were. With a finger dipped in cold tea she began to draw on the table’s inlaid top. Two parallel lines I took for a street. Another pair crossed them. The third pair crossed the second and paralleled the first.
“Waverly Place?” I guessed.
Her face bobbed up and down, delightedly.
On what I took for the east side of Waverly Place she drew a square—perhaps a house. In the square she set what could have been a rose. I frowned at that. She erased the rose and in its place put a crooked circle, adding dots. I thought I had it. The rose had been a cabbage. This thing was a potato. The square represented the grocery store I had noticed on Waverly Place. I nodded.