“I want to help you, if I can,” Mason told her.
“I’m afraid you can’t. I seem to have put my foot in it all the way along the line.”
The matron said, “I’ll stand just outside the door here, and...”
“Go ahead and close the door,” the sheriff told her. “Let them talk in private.”
When the door had swung shut Mason said, “Tell me about it.”
Helen Monteith seemed fatigued to the point of spiritual and mental exhaustion. “Oh, what’s the use,” she said. “... I guess I was just too happy, that’s all... The bottom dropped out of everything. By the time this is over, my job will be gone. The only man I ever really loved is dead. They’re accusing me of murdering him, and... and...” She blinked back tears and said, “No, I’m not going to cry. It’s all right. When a woman reaches my age, crying is just a sign of self-sympathy, and I don’t intend to give in to myself.”
“Why did you leave Della Street?” Mason asked.
“Because,” she said, in that same dispirited tone of voice, “I wanted to go back and burn the letters I’d received from... from my husband,” she said, with a trace of defiance in her voice.
Mason said, “He may really have been your legal husband, after all. There’s some doubt as to the validity of his marriage to Helen Watkins. If you’ll help, we may be able to do something.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” she said wearily. “They have the cards all stacked against me. I didn’t tell you the worst thing against me.”