In the Best Families

I was pleased to observe that he struck to routine to the end, putting the time down. Also it was nice of him to end his note to me the same as Wolfe had ended his. Nevertheless, it was a discouraging welcome home after a night in the hoosegow. And there had been a period of more than five hours when any phone calls that might have come would not have been answered, something that had never happened before in all the years I had worked and lived there. Unless

Theodore…

I beat it to the stairs and up the three flights, and entered the plant rooms.

One step inside the first room, the warm one, I stopped and surveyed. It was more of a shock, somehow, than it had been a year ago when it had been used as a target for tommy-guns from across the street. Then they had at least left a mess; now there was nothing but the benches and stands. It really got me for a minute. I moved on through: medium room, cool room, potting room, spray chamber,

Theodore's room-all empty. Hewitt must have sent an army to clean all that out in one day,I thought, heading back downstairs.

In the kitchen was another longer note from Fritz, reporting phone calls that had come before he left and various minor matters. I opened the refrigerator and poked around, and settled for a jar of home-made pate, a hunk of Italian bread,

Vermont cheese, and milk. As I sat working at it with an evening paper propped up before me, I kept listening for something-nothing in particular, just something. That had never been a noisy house, but I had never known it anything like that quiet. Almost no cars went by, and the few that did must have been coasting in neutral.

My meal finished and things put away, I wandered into the dining-room, office, front room, down to the basement to Fritz's room, up one flight to Wolfe's room, up another to my room. As I undressed for my post-jail bath, I thought that the hell of it wasn't how I felt, but that I didn't know how to feel. If I had actually seen the last of Nero Wolfe, it was a damn' sad day for me, there were no two ways about that, and if I got a lump in my throat and somebody walked in

I would just as soon show him the lump as not. But what if it was Wolfe himself who walked in? That was the trouble. Damned if I was going to work up a fancy lump and then have him suddenly appear and start crabbing about something.