Plot It Yourself

“My job was the same as Mr Cather’s,” she said, “except that it was with Jane Ogilvy instead of Simon Jacobs. I didn’t get to see Mrs Ogilvy, Jane’s mother, until this afternoon. I showed her the photograph and asked her if she had ever seen the subject. After studying it she said she was pretty sure she had. She said that one day more than two years ago the subject had come to see her daughter, and they had gone to the cloister. If you have read the newspapers you know about the building that Jane called the cloister. In half an hour or so they returned to the house because the electric heater in the cloister was out of order. They went up to Jane’s room and were there for three hours or more. Mrs Ogilvy didn’t learn the subject’s name and never saw her again. By association with other matters she figured that it was in February, 1957 that the subject had come to see her daughter. She didn’t make the identification positive, but she said she could, one way or the other, if she saw the subject in person instead of a photograph.”

I turned my head for a look at Alice Porter. She was on the edge of the chair, rigid, her eyes half closed, her head thrust forward, and her lips parted with the tip of her tongue showing. She was looking at Wolfe, oblivious of the eight pairs of eyes, including mine, that were aimed at her. When Sally Corbett returned to her chair and Fred Durkin took her place at the corner of Wolfe’s desk, Alice Porter s gaze didn’t leave Wolfe, even when Fred spoke.