“As near as I now can size it up, the poorer-clad woman, if her garments corresponded with her shoes, arrived here before the other, and she may have been the veiled woman who talked with Maybrick. The other may have seen her, or suspected that she was in the library with Maybrick, and she may have come here to watch them and overhear what passed between them.”
“And the two men beyond the picket fence may have been watching both.”
“I think so.”
“Gee whiz!” Patsy said perplexedly. “All this increases the mix-up, chief, for fair.”
“Decidedly,” Nick agreed.
“Why were two men and two women here? Can one of them have been the Crandall woman?”
“I’m going to find out a little later,” said Nick, a bit grimly. “We first will have a talk with Mrs. Soule, however, and see what we can discover in the house.[Pg 15] Miss Farley, though a bright and brainy girl, may have overlooked something.”
Nick led the way to the rectory door and rang the bell. He was admitted by Mrs. Soule, to whom he introduced Patsy and himself, and whom he found to be an elderly, gracious woman of sixty, burdened with anxiety concerning the missing rector and eager to do all in her power to aid the detectives.
But she could add nothing to what she already had told Harriet Farley, as imparted to Nick, nor give the latter the slightest clew to the mystery. She could describe the rector’s veiled visitor only as a woman of about Kate Crandall’s height and figure, and had not observed whether she was well or rather poorly clad. She stated that the woman had merely asked whether Mr. Maybrick was at home and would see a lady for a short time, and that the rector had received her in his library.
“Are you sure that she spoke of herself as a lady?” Nick inquired. “She did not say woman, did she?”