12:06 a.m. —The Stillness of a Grave
Lieutenant Valcour went to the head of the stairs.
“O’Brian!” he called down.
O’Brian looked up at him from below.
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
“Send Hansen up here, please.”
“Yes, sir.”
A painting on the wall held Lieutenant Valcour’s attention while he waited. A Gauguin, he thought, and, going closer, confirmed it. His eye drifted over the entire corridor. Everywhere were the details of great wealth, and the young owner of it all not a happy child of kind fortune, but a detested, a passionately hated, and a passionately loved man. There flashed again before him in brief review Mrs. Endicott, a storehouse of mountain storms in summer; Mrs. Siddons, spiritual ash; Roberts, the shortest step this side of some fervour bred in the swamps of lunacy; Hollander—Marge Myles—who knew? And would one ever know? Suppose, as Dr. Worth had more than hinted, Endicott should refuse to speak—if that strange reticence harped upon so insistently both by his wife and his physician should resist …
“Lieutenant, sir, Officer Hansen reporting.”
Lieutenant Valcour dragged his eyes from the Gauguin unwillingly.
“All right, Hansen,” he said. “Come with me.”