He took the highball that Freddie handed him, and strolled over to the windows. They were the only ones in the house he had not yet examined. But they were exactly like the others — the screens latched and intact.
Lissa still sat up in the bed, the covers huddled up under her chin, staring now and again at the knife driven into the mattress, as if it were a snake that somebody was trying to frighten her with and she wasn’t going to be frightened. Simon turned back and sat down beside her. He also looked at the knife.
“It looks like a kitchen knife,” he remarked.
“I wouldn’t let anyone touch it,” she said, “on account of fingerprints.”
Simon nodded and smiled, and took a handkerchief from the pocket of his robe. Using the cloth for insulation, he pulled the knife out and held it delicately while he inspected it. It was a kitchen knife — a cheap piece of steel with a riveted wooden handle, but sharp and pointed enough to have done all the lethal work of the most expensive blade.
“Probably there aren’t any prints on it,” he said, “but it doesn’t cost anything to try. Even most amateurs have heard about fingerprints these days, and they all wear gloves. Still, we’ll see if we have any luck.”
He wrapped the knife carefully in the handkerchief and laid it on a Carter Dickson mystery on the bedside table.
“You’re going to get tired of telling the story,” he said, “but I haven’t heard it yet. Would you like to tell me what happened?”
“I don’t really know,” she said. “I’d been asleep. And then suddenly for no reason at all I woke up. At least I thought I woke up, but maybe I didn’t, anyway it was just like a nightmare. But I just knew there was somebody in my room, and I went cold all over, it was just as if a lot of spiders were crawling all over me, and I didn’t feel as if I could move or scream or anything, and I just lay there hardly breathing and my heart was thumping away till I thought it would burst.”
“Does that always happen when somebody comes into your room?” Ginny asked interestedly.