A Scrap of Paper

For the first time in twenty years, I kept my bed that day. Liddy was
alarmed to the point of hysteria, and sent for Doctor Stewart just
after breakfast. Gertrude spent the morning with me, reading
something--I forget what. I was too busy with my thoughts to listen.
I had said nothing to the two detectives. If Mr. Jamieson had been
there, I should have told him everything, but I could not go to these
strange men and tell them my niece had been missing in the middle of
the night; that she had not gone to bed at all; that while I was
searching for her through the house, I had met a stranger who, when I
fainted, had carried me into a room and left me there, to get better or
not, as it might happen.

The whole situation was terrible: had the issues been less vital, it
would have been absurd. Here we were, guarded day and night by private
detectives, with an extra man to watch the grounds, and yet we might as
well have lived in a Japanese paper house, for all the protection we
had.

And there was something else: the man I had met in the darkness had
been even more startled than I, and about his voice, when he muttered
his muffled exclamation, there was something vaguely familiar. All
that morning, while Gertrude read aloud, and Liddy watched for the
doctor, I was puzzling over that voice, without result.

And there were other things, too. I wondered what Gertrude's absence
from her room had to do with it all, or if it had any connection. I
tried to think that she had heard the rapping noises before I did and
gone to investigate, but I'm afraid I was a moral coward that day. I
could not ask her.