“Oh, yes, yes, I did. I called Miss Warshawski an hour ago and begged her to come up here.”
The patrolman was looking at me suspiciously, but I was in the house and one of the powerful Thayers wanted me to be there. He compromised by having me spell out my name, letter by laborious letter, for his notebook. Jill tugged on my arm while I was doing this, and as soon as we were through spelling, before he could ask more questions, I gave her a little pat and propelled her toward the hall. She led me to a little room near the big green statue and shut the door.
“Did you say you were my governess?” She was still trying to figure that one out.
“I was afraid they wouldn’t let me inside if I told them the truth,” I explained. “Police don’t like private detectives on their turf. Now suppose you tell me what’s going on.”
The bleak look reappeared. She screwed up her face. “Did you see the car outside?” I nodded. “My father—that was him, they shot him.”
“Did you see them do it?” I asked.
She shook her head and wiped her hand across her nose and forehead. Tears were suddenly streaming down her face. “I heard them,” she wailed.
The little room had a settee and a table with some magazines on it. Two heavy-armed chairs stood on either side of a window overlooking the south lawn. I pulled them up to the table and sat Jill in one of them. I sat in the other, facing her. “I’m sorry to put you through it, but I’m going to have to ask you to tell me how it happened. Just take your time, though, and don’t mind crying.”
The story came out in little sobs. “My dad always leaves—leaves for work between seven and seven thirty,” she said. “Sometimes he goes earlier. If something special—special is—going on at the bank. I’m usually asleep when he goes. Lucy makes—made him breakfast, then I get up and she makes another breakfast. Mother has toast and coffee in her room. She’s—she’s always on a—a diet.”
I nodded to explain not only that I understood these details but why she was reporting them. “But today you weren’t asleep.”
“No,” she agreed. “All this stuff about Pete—his funeral was yesterday, you know, and it shook me up so I couldn’t—couldn’t sleep very well.” She’d stopped crying and was trying to control her voice. “I heard Daddy get up, but I didn’t go down to eat with him. He’d been so strange, you know, and I didn’t want to hear him say anything terrible about Pete.” Suddenly she was sobbing, “I wouldn’t eat with him, and now he’s dead, and now I’ll never have another chance.” The words came out in great heaving bursts between sobs; she kept repeating them.
I took her hands. “Yes, I know, it’s tough, Jill. But you didn’t kill him by not eating with him, you know.” I patted her hands but didn’t say anything else for a while. Finally, though, as the sobs quieted a bit, I said, “Tell me what did happen, honey, and then we can try to figure out an answer to it.”
She worked hard to pull herself together, and then said, “There’s not much else to tell. My bedroom is above here and I can see the side of the house. I sort of—of wandered to the window and watched him—watched him drive his car down to the road.” She stopped to swallow but she had herself in hand. “You can’t see the road because of all the bushes in front of it, and anyway, you can’t see all the way down to the bottom from my room, but I knew from the sound that he’d gotten down and turned onto Sheridan.” I nodded encouragingly, still holding her hands tightly. “Well, I was sort of going back to my bed, I thought I might get dressed, when I heard all these shots. Only I didn’t know—know what they were.” She carefully wiped two new tears away. “It sounded horrid. I heard glass shattering, and then this squeal, you know, the way a car sounds when it’s turning a corner too fast or something, and I thought, maybe Daddy had an accident. You know, he was acting so crazy, he could have gone charging down Sheridan Road and hit someone.