“No, he didn’t,” Christopher Milbers said. “He always kept five—”
Bertha Cool brushed him backwards and into silence with a sweeping gesture of her arm. “How do you know it wasn’t in his wallet when he died?” she demanded of Mrs. Cranning.
Mrs. Cranning exchanged glances with the others, and failed to answer the question.
Eva Hanberry said indignantly, “Well, good heavens, I guess if we’re responsible for things here, it’s up to us to look through the things a dead man leaves, isn’t it?”
Paul Hanberry said, — “We had to find out who his relatives were.”
“As though you didn’t know,” Christopher Milbers said.
Bertha Cool said belligerently, “I didn’t come out here to waste time in a lot of arguments. We want that ten thousand dollars.”
“He might have concealed it in his room,” Nettie Cranning said. “I’m quite certain it wasn’t in his wallet.”
“It most certainly wasn’t in his wallet by the time I got it,” Milbers said, growing bolder as Bertha Cool’s direct tactics got the others on the defensive.
“All right,” Bertha observed. “That’s a starting point. We’ll go look at the room where he died. How about the other rooms? Did he do any work here in the house?”