New Clues
“Someone,” she went on, “has been to my desk and has stolen the code
letter.”
I could manage nothing but an echo. “Fortunate!” I said.
“I had a careful copy of it, locked up, of course. I have been leaving
the letter in plain sight on my desk for bait. Don’t you see, Mary,”
she forgot her formality in her excitement, “this is the mistake I
have been hoping for. I have found a beginning—at last. It is bound to
be easy from now on. Oh, Joy!”
She was almost doing dance steps. I wasn’t. I was thinking, hard, in
the tidy space in my mind; trying not to get it cluttered with her
excitement, trying to cook up some common sense.
“The letter,” she went on, “could not have concerned anyone in this
house except Miss Canneziano, her father, and, possibly, not probably,
young Mr. Stanley.”
“I guess,” I said, “that was likely what you were wanted to think.”
Her gray eyes questioned me.
“Supposing,” I answered, “that Mrs. Ricker, or Hubert Hand, or anyone
of us, wanted to get you clear off the track, suspecting especially
Danny, could one of us do better than to steal the code letter?”
“My word!” she said. “And you, with a mind that works like that,
spending your life doing cooking.”
“Doing cooking,” I told her, “is how my mind comes to work like that.
If anyone ever told you that it didn’t take brains to cook, he was
making a big mistake.”
“But such quick, sure thinking,” she said, “is marvelous.”
She laughed. “Listen to me doing a Dr. Watson for your Holmes,” she
said. “Golly, but I’m lucky to have you at hand, though.”
I love to be flattered. I sat and preened myself.
“All the same,” she went on, “it does prove one thing. That the
murderer, or his close accomplice, is right here on the place, now.”
“Chad’s confession proved that. The key in the fireplace proved it,
too.”
“Dear me, no. Not conclusively. Now, let me see.” She took a folded
paper from the front of her dress. “Here is my copy of the letter. It
does look a mess, doesn’t it?”
I looked at the paper and read, as before:
“Paexzazlytp! f-y nyx ogrgrsgo, rn fgao atf jan j-asn, ahzgo zkg c-.
ahhalo, vkgt nyx clplzgf rg lt zkg kypulzae, zkaz nyx. . . .”
It surely looked a mess.
“The fact that it was written on the typewriter,” she said, “makes me
suspect that the typewriter may unwrite it for us.”
I told her then what I had not thought to tell her before; about my
having heard the typewriter going, slowly, in Gaby’s room right after
she had received the letter.
“Fine!” she said. “She had burned the caps for the keys, too—all but
the curly ‘Q’ that rolled away. May I use the same typewriter that she
used?”
We went together into Gaby’s room.
“I should have thought you’d want to clean this room, first of all,” I
said.
“Mr. Stanley unlocked it for me that first night. I spent five or six
very busy hours in here, and I slept here that night, too.”
“Upon my soul! Doesn’t that go to show? I’d have taken oath in any
court that you spent the night in your own room.”
“That is exactly it,” she said. “Honest people are so sure that they
know things, which they don’t know at all, and that they have seen
things, which they haven’t seen.”
I have wished, since, that I had said something else instead of
saying, “Well, I might think I knew something which I didn’t know; but
I’d never make a mistake about what I had seen or had not seen.”
“Perhaps not——” she said.
“Did you find anything in here that night?” I questioned.
“Nothing. The burned papers were completely burned, as they usually
are. Of course, the complete absence of clues should be made into a
valuable clue—but I haven’t quite worked it out. For instance, though,
you insist that she was a vain, conceited person?”
“If ever there was one.”
“Vain women usually have photographs of themselves about. I found not
one in here.”
“She used to have one, in a silver frame,” I said. I looked around and
saw the frame lying face down on the mantel. I picked it up. An old
faded picture of Sam and Margarita in their wedding togs confronted
me. I had seen it plenty of times before, but in the old album
downstairs.
When I had shown it to Miss MacDonald, and had told her about it, she
took it and carried it to the window.
“The glass has been washed, carefully,” she said, “since the picture
was put in here.”
She pressed on the purple velvet back and took the picture from the
frame. Across the bottom of the picture, where the wide silver frame
had hidden it, written in Gaby’s bold handwriting, were these words.
“My one deadly enemy.”
“My word!” said Miss MacDonald.
“Are you certain,” she questioned, next, “that the girl’s mother is
not living?”
“Don’t ask me to be certain of anything,” I said, and looked for a
chair to sit down in.
She came and put one of her capable hands on my shoulders. “You
shouldn’t let this trouble you,” she said. “It is more than likely
that Gabrielle Canneziano had nothing to do with it. I must verify the
handwriting.”
In the next instant she certainly gave me a fine turn. Her eyes went
big and round, her cheeks blazed with blushes, and she clapped her
hands to them and stood staring at me as if I were the original human
horror. “I——” she gasped out, “I—have made a mistake.”
I felt like rising and giving her a good shaking. “Lands!” I snapped.
“Who hasn’t?”
“I would discharge one of my assistants like that,” she snapped her
fingers, “for such a mistake. Crime analyst! Confounded ass! Conceited
amateur! Oh!” She went running out of the room, leaving me sitting
there to do what I liked with that talk of hers.
She was back in two minutes. She had Gaby’s last note to Danny in her
hands. “I have been assuming,” she said, and her cheeks flamed up
again, “that Gabrielle Canneziano wrote this note. I have had a
pleasant little assumption. Now I will get some facts. I must find a
sample of her handwriting——”
She began to search through Gaby’s desk. I helped her. Gaby had made a
thorough job of her burning. There was not a scratch of her writing to
be found.
“Danny will have something,” I said. “I’ll see whether she is in her
room.”
Danny was in her room, sitting at her own desk, writing out checks and
addressing envelopes. I told her I had come to ask her for a sample of
Gaby’s handwriting.
“I am sorry, Mary,” she said, as she finished addressing an envelope,
sealed it, and looked for a stamp in the stamp-box, “but I haven’t
anything, except, of course, the last note she wrote to me, and Miss
MacDonald is keeping that.”
“Please, dear,” I urged, “won’t you search through your desk and your
papers? It is really very important.”
“But I have looked, Mary. Mrs. Ricker had the same idea, yesterday.
She thought that Gaby might not have written that last note. I am
certain that she did; but I searched and searched to satisfy Mrs.
Ricker. I destroyed Gaby’s letters to me, when we came to the United
States. She has had no reason for writing anything to me since then.
Hubert Hand had several notes from her; but he says he has not kept
them.”
She addressed another envelope, and added it to the pile beside her.
“It isn’t,” she said, noticing my reluctance to leave, “that I am not
interested, Mary. It is only that I know that I haven’t a scrap of her
writing.”
I turned to go. I had reached the door when she called to me and asked
me to take her letters downstairs for the mailbag, when I went
downstairs.
I returned to Miss MacDonald with my information.
“Dear me!” she said. “Mrs. Ricker indeed? If only they would work with
me, Mary, instead of by themselves, or—against me. At any rate,” she
put aside the photograph, a ruler-like thing, and her magnifying
glass, “the note to Danielle Canneziano, and the writing on the
photograph were done by the same person. What are the letters you have
there, in your hand, Mrs. Magin?”
I told her they were some that Danny had asked me to take downstairs.
She held out her hand for them. I had to allow her to have them. But
first I read the addresses. They were the names of mail-order stores
in Portland, Oregon, and in San Francisco, California.
Miss MacDonald looked at them closely. Then she took up a flat paper
knife, from Gaby’s desk, and deliberately opened the envelope by
lifting the flap.
“She surely does not seal her letters carefully,” she said, and took
out a check, nothing else, from the envelope.
“It is dated to-day, the thirteenth of July,” she said.
“Of course it is,” I answered, tartly, not liking any of this. “She
was writing them just now, while I was in there.”
“Did you see her writing them?” she asked.
“I certainly did.”
She sighed and moved her head with an impatient gesture, rather like
John’s worried gestures. “Then that is that,” she said, and returned
the check to the envelope, sealed the envelope, and gave it, with the
others, back to me.
“Now for the code letter,” she said, and sat down in front of the
typewriter. I left her there, and went to look for Sam.