A MESSAGE IN THE NIGHT
Patricia took the crumpled scrap of paper to the table and smoothed it
out under the lamp. It was a single sheet and was torn almost in two,
one way across and partially along all its edges, as if an attempt had
been made to destroy it, an attempt that had not been totally
successful, probably because the paper was rather thick and tough. It
looked very much as if some one had tried at first to tear it in pieces,
and, not having succeeded in this, had simply crumpled it and thrown it
away. The writing was in a fine, cramped, almost foreign-looking hand.
And the note, for such it appeared to be, was un-addressed, beginning
abruptly, without a name, and signed at the end with only an initial.
Patricia read it through wonderingly. It ran thus:
"Mary and George have arrived. Heard they got home yesterday. Can it be
true? Let no circumstances detain you. Need I say more to you? If they
stay in town while here, I can no longer visit them. We go out every
week to see cousins. Their house is quite new in the suburbs. See
Hanford before you leave. At a store there once had good cream. Meet
Mary soon and you will find Josephine there.
"F."
"Well of all the silly letters!" thought Patricia, after the first
reading. "What can it all mean? Of course, it refers to people and
circumstances I don't know anything about, but even so, it sounds sort
of scrappy. I wonder why Chet wanted me to read it? I suppose I really
shouldn't have done so. I feel as if I'd been prying into some one's
affairs in a rather horrid way, reading the letter they thought they had
destroyed. I suppose it was one of Madame Vanderpoel's. It isn't in the
least interesting, anyway, and I do wonder why Chet saved it and asked
me to read it. All I get from it is that somebody 'arrived' and she had
to go, probably to meet them. Perhaps that explains why they left so
suddenly. Well, Chester will have to explain later why he thought it
worth showing to me."
Then her mind reverted to the strange, unnerving revelations the boy had
made concerning her father, the unknown pair who had known so much about
his affairs and had left before they arrived, and the terrible Franz and
Hofmeyer who had doubtless been spying on them all the time, and who,
even now, were probably in possession of the Crimson Patch. And Peter
Stoger—spy without doubt and a disguised one at that—confirming her
worst suspicions of him! By what a hideous net they were surrounded! And
her father did not even know all these details. How helpful they might
be to him in his search, if she could only put him in possession of the
facts. But that was impossible till he was with her again in person. And
meantime, there was all this long night to be got through, without her
father to share her anxiety.
She took up the crumpled note once more and read it again, critically.
At the second reading it struck her as even more foolish and disjointed
than at first. It really meant very little when boiled down to the bare
facts. It seemed scarcely possible that Madame Vanderpoel could find any
very informing news in it.
While she was still studying it, the telephone rang with a sudden
shrillness that caused her to jump, and she hurried over to take down
the receiver.
"Hello! hello!" she heard from very far away. "Is that you, Patricia?"
And she recognized her father's voice.
"Oh, yes, yes, Daddy! Where are you? Are you coming back to-night?"
"No, I cannot do that," came the answer. "I called up to see whether you
were all right. I was a little worried about you. How are you getting
on?"
Patricia was on the point of telling him all her troubles and her
loneliness and the absence of Mrs. Quale, when something stopped her.
Her father was having far heavier worries of his own. Why should she
burden him with these lighter ones? It would help him far more if she
put a brave face on everything and answered him cheerfully, so she
summoned all her courage and answered brightly:
"I'm all right, Daddy. Fine as a fiddle. But tell me, are you
succeeding? Have you had any luck?"
"We've struck something that looks very important," he returned. "But
I'll have to tell you, dear, that it may keep me away another whole day,
and possibly even over another night. You must get along somehow. Keep
Mrs. Quale close to you. Tell her it's very urgent. I'll call up
to-morrow night, if possible, but I may not have another chance before
that. Now I must stop, for this is long distance and costing like
Sancho. Can you manage, honey?"
"Yes, oh, yes!" she assured him in a voice from which she tried to keep
a quaver of fear.
"Then, good-bye!"
Patricia hung up the receiver and walked back to the table in a daze.
Not a single chance had she had to tell her father some of the important
details revealed by Chester Jackson; and even if the chance had
presented itself, she doubted if it would have been wise to divulge them
over the telephone. But if her father were on the track of any important
discovery, perhaps it was just as well that she had not. And by the way,
he had said, "_we've_ struck something!" now what in the world could he
mean by "_we_?" She had not supposed that he would admit any one else
into the secret. Well, it was all very mysterious, and it was growing
more so every moment. And he was to be away at least twenty-four hours
longer!
Again her glance fell on the foolish and disjointed little note lying on
the table, and it vaguely disturbed her. Its very lack of meaning held
something sinister in it. She looked at her watch and took a sudden
resolution. It was not yet quite ten. She _must_ see Chester Jackson
once more before he went to his own home for the night, and she
remembered that he had said he went off duty at ten-thirty.
"I don't know what the hotel people will think of my wanting so many
things," and she smiled rather ruefully, "but I don't very much care.
This is too important." She went to the telephone and ordered a glass of
milk and some crackers to be sent up.
Jackson arrived in a few minutes with the tray and a broad grin.
"I thought you'd be needin' something else after a while!" he remarked,
as he placed the tray on the table. "Make anything out of the nice
little note I handed you?"
"Why no. It seems to me simply crazy. There doesn't seem to be any sense
_to_ it, not even if one knew all the people and circumstances it
referred to. Can you make anything of it?"
"I didn't at first," he replied; "but I just naturally doped it out that
there was something shifty about it. So I took it all to pieces, and put
it together again, and turned it every which way, and all at once I got
on to it. You can just _bet_ it means something, and something pretty
slick at that!"
"Oh, tell me. Tell me quickly!" cried Patricia. "How did you find it all
out?"
"Well," began Chet, plainly enjoying very much his rôle of _Sherlock
Holmes_, "there was just one word in the thing that made me sit up and
take notice. And that word was 'Hanford.' Do you know what Hanford is?"
Patricia shook her head.
"Well, it's a little two-cent hole of a town about ten miles from here.
Nothin' special to it at all, just a little, one-horse country town with
about thirty houses and a couple of hundred inhabitants. There ain't any
reason on this livin' earth why any one should 'see Hanford,' because
there ain't nothin' in it _to_ see! So I just shied at that, I did. An'
I took Hanford as a startin' point, an' I turned and twisted that note
inside out and upside down till, all off a sudden, I struck it! I gotta
go now. I got another call to tend to on this floor. But you just take
that note and put a pencil mark under every fourth word and copy them
out afterward an' see what you get. I'll be back after a while to get
this tray. Don't forget—_every fourth word_!"
When he was gone, Patricia got a pencil and paper and did as he had
instructed her. She counted off every fourth word in the letter,
underlined it, and feverishly copied down the sequence. The result
caused her to drop her pencil and sit staring at the paper, while a
shiver of fear ran icily down her spine. The reconstructed letter ran:
Have got it. No need to stay here longer. Go to house in Hanford at
once. Meet you there.
F.
The meaning of the communication was only too clear.
Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door and Chet reappeared. He
only glanced at the sentences she had written and remarked:
"Guess that made you sit up and take notice, didn't it?"
"Oh, Chester," she moaned. "It's awful! It just confirms my worst
suspicions. Do you suppose some one sent it to Madame—Vanderpoel?
Who—who could it have been?"
"We can be pretty plum sure of _one_ thing," remarked Chet. "The note is
signed 'F' an' it don't take much guessin' to dope out that F stands for
Franz; but who Franz is, unless it's that slick Peter Stoger, I can't
guess. But as Peter has lit out too, we wouldn't be so far off to take
it for Peter, I fancy. But say, Miss, will you pardon me if I ask an
awful personal question? _Did_ you folks lose anything or miss anything
before last night? If you haven't, I don't quite get what it means by
those words, 'Have got it.'"
Patricia thought hard for a moment. Should she or should she not confide
in this boy the secret she had been guarding for her father? What would
her father wish her to do? It was plain that he knew a great deal about
their affairs already, and was as honest and straightforward as even her
father could wish. Perhaps, too, he might be of infinite help in
unraveling the tangle. She would risk it. She would risk all and tell
him. But she felt firmly convinced that the risk was not very great.
"Yes, Chester," she acknowledged. "We _have_ missed something—the most
important thing my father has. You wouldn't think so to look at it, for
it is only one of those pretty sketches of butterflies that you were
looking at yesterday. I didn't know about it at the time, or I wouldn't
have left it around; but sometime during that afternoon or evening it
disappeared, and Father is almost frantic about it. He is off hunting
for it now, and has been ever since morning. I—oh, I just hate to think
that Madame Vanderpoel or Mademoiselle de Vos took it or were in any way
concerned with it. I—I think an awful lot of Mademoiselle Virginie.
We—we were friends."
Chet scratched his head and thought deeply for several moments. "Which
sketch was it, if I may ask?" he said at length.
"The one called the Crimson Patch," she replied. "Do you remember seeing
it?"
"You bet I do!" he cried enthusiastically. "I remember that one
particular because it had a queer name and was such a purty one. Gee!
that proves one thing, at least. It didn't disappear _before_ I come in,
so the responsible party must have come afterward. Who was in here
later?"
"Why, only Peter Stoger and Virginie. But _she_ didn't take it, I know.
I will never, never believe such a thing of _her_!"
"Sure she didn't!" agreed Chet. "It must have been Peter. Of course it
was Peter, don't you see? 'Cause if he's Franz, he sends a note
afterward to the madame that he's got it, an' they all beat it out of
here. Can't get it any straighter than _that_!"
"But what has poor little Virginie to do with all this?" wondered
Patricia, distractedly. "Surely—surely she can't be working with a lot
of horrid spies. What _is_ the explanation?"
"You can search me!" rejoined the boy. "I ain't on to the dope about
that little mam'selle an' never was. She's a plum deep mystery, she is.
But one thing is sure—"
At that moment the telephone bell rang again, and they both jumped
nervously. Patricia went to it and took down the receiver. There was a
faint, "Hello!" to which she responded, and then silence.
"Why, that's queer!" she said in an aside to Chester. "Nobody seems to
answer. And the voice that said hello first seemed so faraway and
scared—"
"Hello! hello!" she exclaimed again, turning to the receiver. "Yes, yes,
this _is_ Patricia.... Oh, Virginie! is it _you_?... Oh, I can't hear
you very well. Can't you speak a little louder?... You can't?... What is
that you say?... You want to warn me.... What about? I don't
understand.... There is danger?... Who is in danger?... I am?... We
_both_ are?... Oh, can't you tell me more plainly? Where are you?... You
are ... where?"
"Oh!" cried Patricia, turning to the listening boy. "She hung up the
receiver without telling me!"