GRETCHEN
Dorothy awoke from troubled dreams to find that it was another day.
Through the open window she saw the swirl of snowflakes driven in a high
wind. The bedroom was cold and in the grey light of the winter morning
it had lost its cheerful air.
She heard a knock on the door.
“Who’s there?” she called drowsily.
“It’s the maid, miss. Mrs. Lawson thought you might be wanting your
breakfast now.”
Dorothy looked at her wrist watch. The hands marked ten-thirty. She
jumped out on the rug, which felt cold and clammy under her bare feet,
went to the door and unlocked it. Then she scampered back to bed and
snuggled under the warm covers.
In walked a trim little figure wearing the small white apron and gray
uniform of a chambermaid. Dorothy saw a round merry face, and a pair of
big blue eyes beneath the white lawn cap, and thick flaxen braids were
coiled round the neat head. She was surprised and somehow pleased to
discover that this attractive member of the household staff could not be
much more than sixteen, just her own age.
The little maid shut the door softly, crossed to the window and closed
it, turned on the steam heat and came to the bedside. “Good morning,
Miss Jordan.” She smiled engagingly. “I’m Gretchen, miss. Will you have
your breakfast in bed?”
“Why, thank you, Gretchen—that will be cozy. But if it’s going to give
you any trouble, don’t bother.” With the covers drawn up to her eyes,
Dorothy smiled back at the girl.
“Oh, no, miss—it’s no trouble at all.” Gretchen was insistent. “It’s
all ready now. I’ll run down and bring it up.”
She whisked out of the room and Dorothy rolled over for another cat-nap.
“If you’ll be good enough to sit up now, Miss Jordan—I have your
breakfast here.”
Dorothy awoke again, yawned and stretched luxuriously. Gretchen stood
beside her bed with the breakfast tray.
“If you’ll be good enough to sit up, miss?” she repeated.
Dorothy punched the pillows into position behind her, slipped the
quilted gown about her shoulders and leaned back. Gretchen moved
nearer—then almost dropped the tray.
“Why—why—miss—”
Dorothy leaned over and steadied the tray. “What’s the matter,
Gretchen?” The little maid was staring at her open-mouthed, her big blue
eyes as round as saucers.
“Oh, I—I beg your pardon, but it’s—it’s the resemblance, miss—Miss
Jordan.” She set the tray over Dorothy’s knees and drew back still with
that astonished look. “I couldn’t see you very well before, miss, with
the covers up to your eyes. But when you sat up, it sure did give me a
start.”
“What do you mean, Gretchen? The resemblance to whom?” Dorothy,
outwardly calm, fingered her glass of orange juice, but her thoughts
raced toward this new complication.
“Why, you look so much like Dorothy Dixon—the flyer, you know, miss.
She’s my hero—I mean, heroine, Miss Jordan. I’ve read everything the
newspapers printed about her and Bill Bolton. You must have read about
them too, everybody has?”
“Oh, yes, I’ve heard about them.” Dorothy hoped her tone sounded
indifferent. “But you know, Gretchen, newspaper pictures are often very
poor likenesses.”
The girl smiled and nodded. “I know that, Miss Jordan. I’ve got them all
and there isn’t no two of the pictures that looks alike.”
“Then how—?”
“You see, it wasn’t the newspaper pictures I was thinking of, miss, but
Dorothy Dixon herself. You see I know Miss Dixon,” she went on proudly,
“and you two are certainly the spittin’ images of each other, if you
don’t mind my saying so.”
Dorothy minded very much, but it was not consistent with the part she
was playing to admit it. Here was a contretemps not even Ashton Sanborn
had foreseen. Yet, of course, New Canaan was only ten miles away. She
had many friends in Ridgefield, and she’d been there hundreds of times.
But she simply couldn’t remember having seen Gretchen in any of their
homes. Her answer was but a feeble stall for time.
“So you know her then?” she said lamely.
“Oh, yes, miss. Not well, you understand. I saw her and Mr. Bill Bolton
first when they finished the endurance test on the Conway motor this
fall. Then a few days later, I drove over to her house in our
flivver—over to New Canaan, you know, and I called on Miss Dixon. I
wanted her to autograph a picture of herself I’d cut out of the Sunday
paper.”
“And you met her?” Dorothy remembered the incident perfectly now. But
the maid’s uniform—and her hair—when she had seen her, Gretchen had
worn two braids over her shoulders, very much the schoolgirl. No wonder
she hadn’t recognized her. But now what should she do? Would it be
possible to keep up this camouflage with a girl whom she had met and
with whom she would come in daily contact? Gretchen was talking again.
“Yes indeed, I met her. And she was just darling to me, Miss Jordan. She
even gave me one of her own photographs and wrote on it, too. You see,
us Schmidts came over from Germany about a hundred years ago, but we’re
honest-to-goodness Americans just the same. Father was in the American
army during the war. He was an aviation mechanic. He found one of them
Iron Crosses of the Germans on some battlefield in France and kept it
for a mascot. And would you believe it, miss, Father never even got
wounded once, the whole time he was over there! Perhaps it was the
little Iron Cross, and perhaps it wasn’t. Anyway, he thought a lot of
his mascot. When I was ten years old, he had it fixed on a thin gold
chain for me to wear around my neck, and gave it to me on my birthday.
Well, when I went to see Miss Dixon this fall, I took it with me. She
goes up in her airplane so much and does so many other exciting things,
I wanted her to have it. She didn’t want to take the cross at first, but
I persuaded her to, just the same. And you don’t know how nice she was
to me, Miss! Took me out to see Will-o-the-Wisp—that’s her plane, you
know—she calls it Wispy for short. And I had a perfectly grand time.
She’s my heroine, all right. And you, miss—I hope you’ll excuse me for
talking so much about it—but you look exactly like her, and your voices
are just the same, too. It’s wonderful!”
“So you are Margaret Schmidt,” Dorothy said slowly.
“Yes, miss, that is so, though everybody calls me Gretchen. How did you
know my given name, Miss Jordan? Is Miss Dixon a friend of yours? Did
she tell you about me? But that’s silly—she wouldn’t remember me.”
Dorothy looked the little maid straight in the eyes. “She remembers you,
Gretchen. Would you be willing to do something for her—to keep a
secret, a very important and maybe a dangerous one? Do you think you
could do it?”
Gretchen looked awestruck, then she smiled. “Mother says I’m the
closest-mouthed girl she ever saw, miss. They could cut me in pieces
before I ever let out any secret of Dorothy Dixon’s. I’d never tell—not
me! You can trust me, Miss Jordan.”
“I’m sure I can, Gretchen. And I’m going to.” Dorothy slipped her hand
into the V-neck of her pajamas. “Remember this?”
“Why—it’s—it’s my Iron Cross—that I gave Dorothy Dixon. How in the
world—?”
“I am Dorothy Dixon.” Dorothy broke into laughter at the bewildered
expression on the girl’s face.
“But—but I don’t understand!” Gretchen stammered as though her tongue
was half-paralyzed. “I knew the resemblance was wonderful—but—they
said you were Miss Janet Jordan—and—”
“You sit down on the end of the bed,” said Dorothy, “I’ll go on with my
breakfast before it gets cold, and explain at the same time. We won’t be
disturbed, will we?”
“Oh, no, miss.”
“How about your work, Gretchen? Will you be wanted downstairs?”
“Mr. Tunbridge told me to unpack your trunk, miss—Miss Dixon—and to
make myself generally useful.”
“Fine,” smiled Dorothy, pouring out a cup of coffee. “But keep on
calling me Miss Jordan—otherwise you’ll be making slips in the name in
front of other people and that would be fatal.”
“Yes, Miss Jordan,” Gretchen grinned happily.
“After this beastly business is over,” Dorothy went on, “we’ll be
Gretchen and Dorothy to each other.”
The other girl looked a trifle embarrassed. “But I’m only a chambermaid,
Miss Jordan,” she said shyly.
“Don’t be silly!” Dorothy waved away the argument with a sweep of her
spoon. “You’re proving yourself a real friend—and that’s that.”
“Very well, Miss Jordan.”
“Now pin back your ears, Gretchen.” Dorothy lifted the cover from her
scrambled eggs. “I am taking my cousin, Janet Jordan’s place as Mrs.
Lawson’s secretary. Nobody in this house knows who I am except Mr.
Tunbridge, nor must they be given the slightest hint that I am anybody
but Janet Jordan. As you’ve probably guessed, Janet and I look almost
exactly alike. Our mothers were twins and that probably accounts for
it.”
“Gee—” breathed Gretchen. “It’s just like a story in a book!”
Dorothy bit into a slice of buttered toast. “Maybe it is,” she admitted,
speaking with her mouth full. “But the point is that you and I are
living this story and it may come to a very abrupt and unpleasant ending
unless we’re both terribly careful. Let’s see—where was I? Oh, yes. Mr.
Tunbridge and I are working together on this case, working for the
United States Government.”
“Secret Service?” asked Gretchen in an awed whisper.
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll be working for the secret service too?” Dorothy could see
that the girl was very much impressed with the idea.
“You will, Gretchen—that is, you are—under me. But don’t get too
pepped up about it. The work we are on is serious and it is extremely
dangerous into the bargain. I wouldn’t have brought you into it unless I
had to. Right now I haven’t the slightest notion how you are going to be
fitted into the picture. But I couldn’t have you going around, talking
about how much Janet Jordan looks like Dorothy Dixon, could I? Doctor
Winn and the Lawsons have no idea of either the resemblance or the
relationship. If that came out and they got wind of it—well, there’s no
telling what might happen.”
“Especially,” chimed in Gretchen, “after all the detective work you did
in those three big cases over to New Canaan this summer and fall.”
“You’ve got it,” declared Dorothy, and sipped her coffee. “A robbery is
being planned here, Gretchen, a robbery of some very valuable papers
from Doctor Winn’s safe. The thieves will probably try to pull it off
tonight. These papers, which have to do with an invention of the
Doctor’s are worth a million dollars or more to any number of people. So
you see the thieves are playing for big stakes, and I might as well tell
you that they aren’t the kind that would let a thing like murder stop
them. And now that you know the facts, are you willing to go on with
it?”
Gretchen seemed horrified that Dorothy should doubt her. “Oh, Miss
Jordan, I don’t want to get murdered any more than anybody else—but,
I’m not afraid—honest I’m not!”
“I knew you were true blue,” smiled Dorothy. “So we’ll call it a deal,
shall we?”
“You bet!” The two girls solemnly shook hands. “What do you want me to
do first, Miss Jordan?” Gretchen asked eagerly.
“Move this tray onto the chair over there, please. Then while I’m taking
a bath and dressing you might unpack Janet Jordan’s clothes. I’ll choose
something to wear later.”
“Very good, Miss Jordan.” The little maid took the tray, then stopped
short, her round blue eyes very serious. “But what about the secret
service work?”
“Just carry on as usual for the present.” Dorothy slipped out of bed.
“And remember—not a word to anyone about what I’ve told you—not even
Mr. Tunbridge. I don’t know myself exactly what I’m to do yet. Mrs.
Lawson expects me downstairs in about half an hour, so I’ve got to
hustle. If I need your help later on, I’ll get word to you somehow.”
“I hope you will need me, Miss Jordan.” Gretchen was taking Janet’s
frocks from the wardrobe trunk.
“And I hope I shan’t!” said Dorothy, and she disappeared into the
bathroom.