“Certainly.”
“Then we’ll have to take it that way. Those, then, are the facts. I have finished. Now it’s your turn to talk. All of you. Of course this is highly unorthodox, all of you together like this, but it would take too long to do it properly, singly.”
He leaned back and joined his finger tips at the apex of his central magnificence. “Miss Timms, we’ll start with you. Talk, please.”
Maryella said nothing. She seemed to be meeting his gaze, but she didn’t speak.
“Well, Miss Timms?”
“I don’t know—” she tried to clear the huskiness from her voice— “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Nonsense,” Wolf said sharply. “You know quite well. You are an intelligent woman. You’ve been living in that house two years. It is likely that ill feeling or fear, any emotion whatever, was born in one of these people and distended to the enormity of homicide, and you were totally unaware of it? I don’t believe it. I want you to tell me the things that I would drag out of you if I kept you here all afternoon firing questions at you.”
Maryella shook her head. “You couldn’t drag anything out of me that’s not in me.”
“You won’t talk?”
“I can’t talk.” Maryella did not look happy. “When I’ve got nothing to say.”