She writes first to Dr Kennedy, thinking he is a friend. The Reeds advertise, seeking the Hallidays’ former maid Lily. She did fall in love with Halliday, and loved his daughter. She was mainly interested in escaping her brother.
The servants presumed this was from her husband, but it was not. The Hallidays were soon to move to a house in Norfolk before Helen disappeared. Miss Marple finds the cook from the Halliday household, Edith, who remembers that time well. She finds the man who once gardened for the Kennedy family, brother and sister, who supplies several useful descriptions of events then. Miss Marple is often at the house, pulling out bindweed from the neglected garden. Miss Marple arranges to visit friends in Dillmouth. He replies to an advertisement placed by Giles seeking information about Helen. Helen was raised mainly by her half brother, Dr Kennedy, now retired from practice and moved to another village. Now Gwenda ponders her frightening image and the closing words of the play: are they real memories as well? Her husband Giles arrives from New Zealand and the couple decide to pursue this mystery. The coincidences prove to be memories from Gwenda’s stay in that house 18 years ago as a very young child. They rented a house in Dillmouth, where Helen grew up. Her stepmother, Helen Halliday née Kennedy, met her father travelling from India back to England, where their shipboard romance led to marriage upon arrival in England. Miss Marple suggests that Gwenda lived in England with her father and his second wife, which proves to be the case. She has memories of being on a ship, but it is clearly two ships. Her father died a few years after her mother. Gwenda was born in India where her father was stationed, then raised in New Zealand by her mother’s sister from a toddler, once her mother died. During the play, The Duchess of Malfi, when the line “Cover her face mine eyes dazzle she died young” is spoken, Gwenda screams out she saw an image of herself viewing a man saying those words strangling a blonde-haired woman named Helen. She goes to London for a visit with relatives, the author Raymond West, his wife, and his aunt, Miss Jane Marple. Further, a place that seems logical to her for a doorway between two rooms proves to have been one years earlier. When the workmen open a long sealed door, she sees the very wallpaper that was in her mind. She forms a definite idea for the little nursery. She supervises workers in a renovation, staying in a one-time nursery room while the work progresses. In a short time, she finds and buys Hillside, a large old house that feels just like home. Newlywed Gwenda Reed travels ahead of her husband to find a home for them on the south coast of England.
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