He decided he’d go to the room of Kimball Webb and once again make those hopeless rounds of walls, ceiling and floor; doors and windows; chimney and bathroom window, which were all the points to be examined.
He asked Miss Webb a few preliminary questions. How long had they lived in the house, and such things as that.
This led nowhere. How could it possibly help to know they had lived there six years; to know where they had lived in Boston; to know when Kimball first met Elsie Powell; to learn why the Webbs didn’t fully approve of the match; all these things were as chaff which didn’t even show which way the wind blew.
And Miss Webb’s attitude had greatly changed since the last time he talked with her.
She had now begun to despair of ever seeing her brother again.
With a womanly injustice she was inclined to blame Elsie for the whole trouble, but when Coe told her that Elsie, too, was mysteriously missing, she saw the thing as he did, that a gang or at least a pair of able and ingenious villains were at work.
Coe was tempted to tell her of the valet, Bass, and his master, but concluded to wait a little longer.
He asked for a talk with the two men servants, who had broken into Kimball’s room that morning, and this being willingly granted, he asked them again of any point or hint they might remember that hadn’t yet been brought.
“No, sir,” said Hollis thoughtfully, “I’ve had all sorts of notions, but they’ve all been wrong, and sometimes I’m ready to agree with Mrs. Webb herself that it’s the spirits as done it.”
“Rubbish!” Coe observed, and Hollis really agreed, though he had no wiser suggestion to make.