“Not along it,” the cook looked at him wonderingly—“but by the end of it, like.”
“And did you see any one on the veranda? Any one at all?”
The woman thought hard. “Well, I sh’d have said no—first off—but now you speak of it, I must say I do have a remimbrance of seein’ a figger—but sort of vague like.”
“You mean your memory of it is vague—you don’t mean a shadowy figure?”
“No, sor. I mean I can’t mind it rightly, now, for I was thinkin’ intirely of the fire, and so as I was runnin’ past the end of the verandy all I can say is, I just glimpsed like, a person standin’ there.”
“Well, he might have been moving—I dunno.”
“I’m not. I’m thinkin’ it was, but yet, I couldn’t speak it for sure.”
“And thought no more about the person on the veranda?”
“No, sor. And it niver wud have entered me head again, savin’ your speakin’ of it now. Why—was it the—the man that——”
“Oh, probably not. But everything I can learn is of help in discovering the criminal and perhaps freeing your employers from suspicion.”
“And I wish that might be! To put it on the good man, now! And worse, upon the ladies—angels, both of them!”
“I am that! I’ve worked here for eight years, and never a cross word from the missus or the master. As for Miss Maida—she’s my darlint.”
“They’re fortunate in having you here,” said Stone, kindly. “That’s all, now, cook, unless you can remember anything more of that person you saw.”
“Nothin’ more, sor. If I do, I’ll tell you.”
It was the most unusual case he had ever attempted. If he looked no further for the murderer than the Wheeler family, he still had enough to do in deciding which one of the three was guilty. But he yearned for another suspect. Not a foolish phantom that went around piping, or a perhaps imaginary prowler stalking on the piazza, but a real suspect with a sound, plausible motive.
Though, to be sure, the Wheelers had motive enough. To be condemned to an absurd restriction and then teased about it, was enough to make life gall and wormwood to a sensitive man like Wheeler.
And who could say what words had passed between them at that final interview? Perhaps Appleby had goaded him to the breaking point; perhaps Wheeler had stood it, but his wife, descending the stairs and hearing the men talk, had grown desperate at last; or, and Stone knew he thought this most plausible of all, perhaps Maida, in her window-seat, had stood as long as she could the aspersions and tauntings directed at her adored father, and had, with a reckless disregard of consequences, silenced the enemy forever.