Of course since I had, in my own right, a normal list of acquaintances of fair size, I knew a woman or two who’d shot friend husband; but the moving impulse was not financial. The widow—I mean the woman who immediately made herself the widow—in one case happened upon husband with another lady on the wrong landing; in the other case, she’d become peeved about something purely private and so highly sensational when sobbed out on the witness stand, and followed by an effective faint, that the jury not only justified her but acquitted her with cheers.
The widow Scofield, lying here on the bed before me, failed to fall in that same class in my mind. I doubted if she would in the emotions of any jury; and some doubt of this nature seemed to flit across the eyes of blue which kept watching me. She was gambling, if not with her life itself, at least with her liberty for life; and her stake, if she won, was the neat little sum of five hundred thousand dollars to enhance her joys of freedom.
Elsewhere in this house the aged youth, her husband, lay dead; and whatever was to happen, her chapter with him was concluded and she could not contrive to conceal from me a certain relief at that. Perhaps I imagined it, with my picture of her at her piano last night still haunting my mind; yet I’m not imaginative. I felt her saying to herself, as she gazed at me, “Well, whatever’s to come next, that’s over. Twenty-two with sixty-seven, rejuvenated!”
She said aloud to me, “What did you mean by the words on your card?”
“If you don’t know,” I said, “why did you change your mind, after you had the card, and send for me?”
She didn’t respond; she lay waiting, watchfully, and let me look her over and think her over with all the deliberation I wanted. She seemed to me not so slight as that Christina who’d met me at the river ledge with Keeban; but I knew enough about the effect of negligee, and of a figure loosed from a girdle, to allow for more fullness now. Her hair was bronze; but yellow over that bronze would have been easy enough to manage, especially in the dim light of that dock room. Her manner of speech had changed; yet I was wholly sure she was Christina.
At the next moment, she admitted it. “I know what you meant, Steve,” she said, speaking my name as she had in that room by the river. “You think you have something on me, do you?”
“You’re Christina,” I said.
“Right! Call in my step-son Fred and whoever else you care to; I’ve something to confess which I should have told the police this morning—but I didn’t. Yet it didn’t hurt anything to hold it back. Call him in!”
She sat straight and raised an arm and pointed to the door in some cabaret imitation of a grand gesture. “Open the door,” she ordered me.