Chapter 18
AN ELDERLY maid he had seen the day before let McCord in and showed him into a small sitting room bright with chintz and flowers. Beyond French windows a terraced rear lawn, washed clean by the rain, sparkled in the afternoon sun, and there was the smell of fresh moist loam from the borders of petunias. On the hearth a small fire burned crisply, its warmth pleasant on McCord’s shins.
He wondered what he was going to say to Welles’ widow that he couldn’t have said yesterday. It was a ticklish business at best, and he wouldn’t have reopened the inquiry from this angle had it not seemed to him imperative to divorce, once and for all, the previous killings from that of Gretchen Van Dorn. If there was a connection he wanted to know it. And if there wasn’t, he wanted to know that to
