He ambled back to his chair and deposited himself, and told me with a frown, “I don’t like the look on your face when you’re doing things like that. Turn her loose.”
“She may scream.”
“Then hold on a minute.” He directed his eyes at hers. “You have done everything you can, and it cannot be undone. I’m going to finish this business as soon as possible. None of your family — your father and mother and brother — will suffer by it, nor will you. But I don’t want any talk about those pictures. Furthermore, you are not to leave this house. The attempt to steal that film shows that the murderer is aware of the blunder he made. He doesn’t know where the pictures are and I don’t want him to know just yet, but he knows that anything seen by your camera was seen by you too. He’s a bungler and an ass, but that merely increases your danger. Unless you promise not to leave this house, I’ll have to feed the police a lot of stuff they’re not prepared to digest, to let them take the responsibility for your death instead of me — Let her go, Archie.”
She was half Hawthorne and there was no telling about her reactions, so I unwrapped my arms and retreated two paces simultaneously. But she ignored me completely. She straightened up there against the desk, inhaled with a couple of gasps to catch up on her oxygen, and sputtered at Wolfe:
“You said he. ”
Wolfe shook his head. “You’ll have to wait, Miss Dunn. It will be ticklish going. I’m paying you a compliment by not having Mr. Goodwin tape your mouth shut and lock you in upstairs. I’m going by your eyes. You’re not to leave this house, and you’re to tell no one about those pictures—”
The door burst open and John Charles Dunn stumbled in, with May and June, Celia Fleet, and Osric Stauffer at his heels. He didn’t literally stumble, but he did run into a chair, and then stopped and grabbed the back of it and stood there and said:
“I got tired waiting. We got tired waiting.”
Sara looked at him, at his sagging face and bloodshot eyes, and then made a dive for him, crying out, “Daddy! Daddy dear!”
She put her arms around his neck and kissed him. Apparently the professional fiend acting that way served to release tension all around. Dunn put his arm around his daughter’s shoulders and made noises in his throat. Celia Fleet stared at them and chewed on her lower lip. Stauffer glared around with eyes as bloodshot as Dunn’s. June sat down and got out her handkerchief and wiped off two tears that had started down her cheeks. May marched up to the desk and said to Wolfe in a biting and contemptuous tone: