Mary Louise brought the car to a stop and parked it some distance from the house, cautiously avoiding the trees this time. Even though she had a constable with her, she wasn’t taking any chances of being hit again.
“That’s the tree we were parked under,” she pointed out, “where I got hit in the head.”
“Did you see anybody?”
“No. But my friend said afterward he heard somebody laugh. But he couldn’t wait to investigate, because he had to get me to a doctor.”
“Maybe it was just a bad boy. We have some young bums around here once in a while.”
Mary Louise got out of the car, and the constable followed her, making a tour of the outside of the house, examining the boarded windows, trying the locked doors. Apparently it was deserted.
“I’d love to get inside,” remarked Mary Louise. “Couldn’t we break in?”
“Not without a warrant,” replied the officer. “We ain’t got any real evidence against this lady. You can’t tell what hit you, and besides, you was trespassin’ on private property.”
Mary Louise sighed. Evidently there was nothing she could do here. She might as well go back to Philadelphia.
It had been rather a useless waste of time, she thought, as she drove along towards the hotel. She had learned only one fact—the name of the owner of that empty house. “Ferguson,” she kept repeating to herself, wondering where she had heard that name before. And then it came to her—in a flash. Ferguson was the name of the woman who had helped Margaret Detweiler at the department store!