“What do you mean?”
“It’s just poison-pen stuff. I tell you there wasn’t anyone.”
“How do you know?”
“Belder told me so.”
Sellers sighed. “Well, I guess I’ll have to let it go at that for the time being.”
“How about Mrs. Belder’s mother?” Bertha asked.
“In a state of collapse. Mother and sister, both had been having fits all night. They’d been calling headquarters at intervals, trying to find out if Mrs. Belder had been in an automobile accident. Finally, I guess the mother-in-law got the idea Belder might have knocked her on the head and hidden the body some place in the house, so she started prowling. Declared she was going to search the house from cellar to attic. She started with the cellar... That was along about eight o’clock this morning. What she found knocked her for a loop. She thought it was Mabel’s body at first, then it turned out to be a total stranger to her. Belder made the identification of the body.”
“Didn’t Mrs. Goldring know the maid?”
“Apparently not. Mrs. Goldring lived in San Francisco. She hadn’t been down since Mabel had employed that particular maid.”
“Well,” Bertha said, “I don’t see how all this concerns me.” Sellers scraped a match on the sole of his shoe, made an attempt to get his cigar burning again.