“Me? Go to the police station? What if they think I’ve done something wrong?”
I smiled at her anxious little face. “The letter is addressed to Captain Sullivan, Aggie. You just have to hand it to one of the officers and say that it is urgent. That’s all.”
I had been trying to teach her to read without too much success. She took the letter from me and off she went. I waited, impatiently. Mr. Emory’s bewildered face hovered in front of me. I kept telling myself that one day in a jail cell wouldn’t do him too much harm, but in truth I felt horribly guilty because it was I who had put him there. What if Daniel didn’t believe my second hypothesis? The clues all pointed so firmly to Mr. Emory as his wife’s killer. Then I reassured myself that if no body was found, the police wouldn’t have much of a case. Surely they’d be forced to let him go.
I ate my lunch with one eye on the street, but Daniel didn’t return. When I’d finished my meal Mrs. Sullivan came to take it away. She looked at me critically. “You’re looking quite pale and washed out, my dear. All that gallivanting around has not been good for you. Two weeks of bed rest, that’s what I said. Now if you’ll take my advice you’ll have a good sleep this afternoon.”
Unfortunately I realized she was right. I was not as strong as I thought I was, and a nap did seem like a good idea. I let her help me into bed and fell asleep almost immediately. I awoke to the sound of the front door slamming and then Daniel’s deep voice in the hallway.
“No, nothing’s wrong, Mother. I just called in to see Molly. Is she upstairs? She’s feeling all right, isn’t she?”
I couldn’t hear my mother-in-law’s reply but it was probably something along the lines of “If she will get up before she should she only has herself to blame.”
I sat up hastily, smoothed down my hair and tried to look awake and alert as Daniel came up the steps. “Ah, there you are,” he said. “Gone back to bed then?”
“Just taking a little rest after lunch,” I said, “but I’m fine. You got my note then. I’m glad you came. Did you find out about the butcher and the laundry?”
“I did, but what is all this about? I’m not quite sure how they apply to our investigation.”
He perched on the bed beside me.
“I think I might have made a horrible error, Daniel,” I said. “I don’t think that Mr. Emory killed his wife after all.”
“What?” Daniel snapped. “But you were the one who suggested this in the first place. You yourself pointed out the bloodstains, the wrong assortment of clothes.”
“I know I did. But I saw Mr. Emory’s face when you led him away. He looked completely bewildered, as if he couldn’t comprehend what was going on. So that started me thinking: if you’d just killed your wife, wouldn’t you make sure you got rid of any trace of evidence? If you had a bloodstained handkerchief, wouldn’t you have disposed of it? Burned it? Not stuffed it behind a dresser where it could be easily found by the police. And would you really have invited the police into the room where the evidence was so noticeable?”
Daniel ran his hand through his thick curls. “So what are you suggesting now? That it was an intruder who killed her? The butcher’s boy, maybe?” His voice had a hint of sarcasm to it.
“First answer me this—who ordered the deliveries? Did you find that out?”
“Strangely enough, it was Mrs. Emory.”
“Aha-!” I wagged a triumphant finger at him. “And did she order something like a nice, juicy steak?”
He looked surprised. “She did. How did you know that?”
“Because I think she wanted a nice bloody piece of fresh meat to provide the blood stains. If you test, I think you’ll find it isn’t human blood on that handkerchief or the basin.”
Daniel frowned at me, digesting this. “You are trying to tell me that she wanted it to look as though she had been murdered?”
“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting.” I laid my hand on his arm. “The more I think about it, the more sense it makes, Daniel. When I first met her she was clearly unhappy in her marriage. She was trapped in a loveless, childless relationship with a man who was a controlling bully. She was living a life that was so different from what she had hoped for, so different from her childhood in New Orleans…. AND she told me she had been suffering a broken heart from a hopeless romance when she met Mr. Emory.”
“What has that to do with it?” Daniel asked.
“What if her former love showed up to take her away and she finally had a chance to escape?”