Before he was off to sleep he heard another auto horn and the whirr of a car passing. He couldn't say how long after this was, as he was half asleep.
How long he'd slept he didn't know—it really was between four and five in the morning—when he was roused by a great battering at the door and a sound of voices. He jumped up just as he was, ran to the window and opened it. There in the road he could see plain—the clouds were gone, the moon sailing clear and high—a motor and some people all talking very excited, and one voice, a woman's, saying over and over, "Oh, how horrible—how horrible!"
He took them for a party of merry-makers, half drunk and wanting more, and called down fierce and savage:
"What in thunder are you doing there?"
One of them, a man standing on the steps of the piazza, looked up at him and said:
"There's a murdered woman up the road here, that's all."
As he ran to the place with the men—there were two of them—they told him how they were on a motor trip with their wives and that night were going from Bloomington to Huntley. The moon being so fine they were going slow, otherwise they never would have found the body, which was lying by the roadside. A pile of brushwood had been thrown over it, but one hand had fallen out beyond the branches and one of the women had seen it, white in the moonlight.
They had unfastened an auto lamp and it was standing on the ground beside her. Hines lifted it and looked at her. She lay partly on her side, her coat loosely drawn round her. The right arm was flung out as if when the body stiffened it might have slipped down from a position across the chest. As he held the lantern close he saw below the hat, pulled down on her head, with the torn rags of veil still clinging to it, a thin line of blood running down to where the pearl necklace rested, untouched, round her throat.
It was Sylvia Hesketh, her skull fractured by a blow that had cracked her head like an egg shell.