“No, there wouldn’t be,” Zizi ruminated. “And it wasn’t paint,—you know it wasn’t.”
“It looked like paint, and what else would remain there so indelibly?”
“What could it be anyway?” queried Granniss. “What do you suggest?”
“I can’t think, myself,” and Wise looked nonplussed. “I smelled it, but there was no odor of paint. Nobody around the house uses water colors, I suppose?”
“No,” said Granniss.
“It was such a smear as might have been made by a paint brush filled with a dull green watercolor pigment,—but I don’t say it was that.”
“It was more like a vegetable stain,” Zizi suggested. “A mark like that could have been made, by grasping a dish or saucepan that had held spinach.”
“Oh, come now, Zizi, that’s a little far-fetched.”
“Not if we find cold spinach in the refrigerator,” Zizi persisted. “Martha might have been getting something to eat.”
“In that case the green smear doesn’t count for much,” Wise said. “But we have accumulated some clues. We have the yellow beads, the yellow pillow, the green streak, and last, but by no means least, the dust I scraped from the floor in this room.”