Free Wall by Mary Roberts Rinehart Page B

wakened William and we made a careful search; but there was no one around.
    I was wide awake the remainder of the night. The tide was full at three in the morning, and I lay in bed listening to it as it eased softly over the rocks below. Shortly afterwards I heard Jordan open her door and come out into the hall, and I got up and spoke to her.
    “Won’t you let me give you a bromide?” I asked. “You need some rest.”
    “No thank you, miss,” she said tonelessly. “I thought I’d go downstairs and make myself a cup of tea.”
    She went on down, with that peculiar catlike tread of hers which was almost noiseless, and I went back to bed. But the sight of her had reminded me of something. Had she seen that wretched hat of Arthur’s while I was in the hospital room? She might have been there for some time. In that case—
    I went to the head of the back stairs. She was still in the kitchen, moving about. I could hear her running water for the kettle and building up the fire in the stove. It would be half an hour or more before she came back, and as quickly as I could I got the key and, passing her open door, went up the staircase in the wing.
    I was nervous, but with the lights on the rooms seemed as usual, and I retrieved the hat from under the mattress on the bed and took a quick survey of the place. The bed would have to be remade eventually. It showed signs of having been used. But with Ellen’s careful counting of the weekly sheets it would be difficult to account for the extra ones. I got the hat, none the better for its flattening, turned the pillow to its fresh side, and went downstairs again.
    But I knew that somehow I had to dispose of the hat. It would be impossible to conceal it from Maggie, and I dared not throw it away as it was. In the end I got a pair of scissors, and I was on the upper porch, cutting it into bits and dropping them into the water below, when Jordan’s voice behind me almost sent me over the railing.
    “I’ve brought you some tea and toast, miss,” she said.
    I simply let go of the scissors and what remained of the hat, and they fell into the water. When I turned she was just behind me, holding a tray.
    “Thanks,” I said. “You startled me. Will you put it in my room?”
    I watched her putting it down, and her face was set and hard. She went out again without speaking, but I knew then that she was a potential enemy, and a suspicious one.
    The county sheriff, Russell Shand, came to see me early the next morning. He looked tired but indomitable as usual, and I was sitting up in bed when he came in, my tray beside me and my arms and neck bare. He was not abashed. He pulled a chair beside the bed and eyed the coffee pot.
    “Got a toothmug or something around that I could use?” he inquired. “I could do with a bit of coffee.”
    He got up and brought a glass from my bathroom, and not until he had filled it did he give me any news.
    “Well,” he said, “I suppose you want to know. We haven’t found her, but if that mare could talk I guess she’d tell us a story. The dogs flivvered out on us; ran in circles and then sat down. But we trailed the horse from where we found her things down to Loon Lake, and I’m afraid that’s where she is.”
    I must have looked shocked, for he added quickly:
    “Maybe not. I’m only saying it looks that way. Either that or she fixed it to look so.”
    “Fixed it?”
    “She might have had some reason for disappearing. It’s been done before; and from what I gather she had her own ways of doing things.”
    “She had no money with her. And where could she go? All she had was her alimony, and we—Arthur—paid that monthly by check. I imagine she is in debt. She always has been. But she’d never run away because of that.”
    He gave me a shrewd look.
    “Well, it looks as though one idea’s ruled out,” he observed, and went on to elaborate what Tony had already told me.
    “No real evidence of any struggle,” he said. “Ground was soft