Her husband failed to respond. She had to shake him awake, impressing upon him the fact that there’d been a series of noises.
“Junior coming in,” he said.
Mrs. Gentrie looked at the clock. It was thirty-five minutes past midnight. “He’ll have been in long before this,” she said.
“Look in his room?”
“No. I tell you it was someone running, stumbling over something.”
“It was Junior coming in and the wind blowing a door shut.”
“But I heard some other noises from down on the lower floor.”
“Wind,” he said, then as her very silence became sufficiently pronounced to constitute a contradiction, “Well, I’ll go take a look.”
She knew that Arthur’s look would be perfunctory. She could hear him moving around on the lower floor, switching on lights. She wondered about Junior. Once more she walked down the corridor toward the head of the stairs. Junior’s room was the first on the right as you came up the stairs. His door was closed. She opened it gently, looked inside.
“Junior.”