Detective and mystery stories; New Jersey -- Fiction; Telephone operators -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
"I do. I make the medicine for my swole up face and go upstairs."
"Did you hear any more screams?"
"No—there are no more. If there are I would have hear them, for I can’t
sleep ever all night. All I hear is automobiles—many automobiles passing
up and down and maybe—two, three, four times—the horns sounding."
The Coroner asked her a few more questions, principally about Hines’
movements, and her answers, if you could get over the lingo, were all
clear and in line with what Hines had said.
The railway men followed her, Sands and Clark and Jim Donahue. Jim was
as nervous as a cat, holding his hat in his hands and twisting it round
like a plate he was drying. He told about the woman he put on the
seven-thirty train on Sunday night.
"Where did you first see this woman?" he was asked.
"On the platform, just before the train came in. She came down along it,
out of the dark."
"Can you swear it was Miss Hesketh?"
Jim didn’t think he could swear because he couldn’t see her face plain,
it being covered with a figured black veil. But he never thought of it
being anyone else.
"Why did you think it was she?"
"Because it looked like her. It was her coat and her gold purse and I’d
know her hair anywhere. And when I spoke to her and said: ’Good evening,
Miss Hesketh, going to leave us?’ it was her voice that answered: ’Yes,
Jim, I’m going away for a few days.’"
"Did you have any more conversation with her?"
"No, because the train came along then. She got in and I handed her her
bag and said ’Good night.’"
When he was asked to describe the bag, he said he hadn’t noticed it
except that it was a medium sized bag, he thought, dark colored.
Then he was shown the clothes—that was heart-rending. The Coroner held
them up, the long fur coat, the little plush hat, and the one glove. He
thought they were the same but it was hard to tell, the platform being
so dark—anyway, it was them sort of clothes the lady had on, and though
he couldn’t be sure of the glove he had noticed that her gloves were
light colored.
Sands, the Pullman conductor, and Clark, from the Junction, testified
that they’d seen the same woman on the train and at the Junction. Sands
particularly noticed the gold mesh purse because she took her ticket out
of it. He addressed her as Miss Hesketh and she had answered him, but
only to say "Good evening."
Then came the Firehill servants. The two old Gilseys were dreadfully
upset. Mrs. Gilsey cried and poor old David kept hesitating and looking
at Mr. Reddy, but the stamp of truth was on every word they said. Casey
followed them, telling what I’ve already written.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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