“Fiddlesticks!” she interrupted. “Now you look here, young man— What’s your name?”
“Mason.”
“All right, Mr. Mason, you look here. I know when something’s important and when it isn’t. Now you let me tell you just what I saw over there, and you’ll realize that it is important and what a mistake those radio officers made not coming over to talk with me in the first place.
“Now, I was standing in front of that window in my dining room, looking out. I wasn’t looking at anything in particular, but you can see how things are. A body can’t help but see things that go on in the solarium over in the Prescott house unless the shades are drawn. And Mrs. Prescott never draws the shades. Land sakes, the things I’ve seen— Well, this young man was in there with Mrs. Prescott’s sister. She was alone in that house with this young man.”
“He probably just dropped in to pass the time of day,” Mason said.
Her sniff was eloquent. “The time of day,” she exclaimed scornfully. “Well, he’d been there exactly forty-two minutes before the accident, and if you’d seen what I saw when Rita Swaine let go of that canary you’d change your tune a bit.”
“What,” Mason asked, striving to keep the interest from his voice, “caused her to let go of the canary?”
“She was standing there,” Mrs. Anderson said, “right in front of that window. The shades were up and she must have known I could see her from my dining room if I’d happened to be looking out of the window — not that I make a practice of looking into people’s houses, because I don’t. I haven’t any desire to go sticking my nose into other people’s business. But if a young woman leaves the shades up and engages in passionate lovemaking right in front of my eyes, she’s got no complaint if I look. Land sakes! I’m not going to keep my shades down just because the neighbors haven’t any modesty. These modern women don’t know the meaning of the word. When I was a girl—”
“So the young man was making love to her, was he?” Mason prompted.
“Well,” she said, drawing herself up primly, “in my time that wasn’t what we’d have called it. Love, huh! I never saw two people carry on so in my life.”