ANOTHER JULIET
No matter what happens the trivialities of life must go on. Food must
be cooked and eaten, no matter how dry it tastes. Work must be done.
Judy knew that and dragged her tired body out of bed. She dressed and
went down into the kitchen where Mary made coffee and brought out the
toaster. Pauline had left for school, she said. Would Judy mind the
toast herself?
She nodded, staring at the coffeepot and wondering if Irene would ever
sit across the breakfast table and drink coffee with her again. She let
the toast burn and threw it away. Then she put on a second piece,
watched it until it turned golden brown and flipped it over.
The doorbell rang!
Always, when the doorbell rang, there came that sudden exaltation. It
might be news of Irene! Peter might have found her! With each new
disappointment Judy’s hopes for Irene’s safe return sank lower.
This time it was not Peter. It was Arthur Farringdon-Pett, the young
pilot-engineer, who owned his own airplane and had taken Judy for a
never-to-be-forgotten ride far above the beautiful St. Lawrence River.
Judy’s brother, Horace, stood in the doorway beside him, and both of
them looked as if they had not slept for a week. Horace’s usually sleek
hair was disordered and Arthur needed a shave. He was the first to
speak.
“Any news of Irene?”
“Didn’t you bring any?” she asked. And before they could answer she
went on saying how sure she was that they must have news or they
wouldn’t have flown all the way to New York. She could tell they had
been flying as they were still dressed for it.
“We were in too much of a hurry to bother changing these togs at the
hangar where I left the plane,” Arthur explained.
“That’s all right,” Judy murmured, trying to shake off the queer
feeling she had that he was some stranger.
“We do have news,” Horace told her finally, “but, I’m sorry to say,
it’s not news of Irene.”
“What is it then?”
“News of her mother. We thought it might help you find her. I mean
Irene. Her mother, of course, is dead.”
“I knew that,” Judy said. “But she has relatives. I’m sure your news
will help me.” Taking their things, she invited the boys to sit down
and share her breakfast while they told her. She poured out the extra
coffee Mary had made and pushed her brother into a chair. Arthur found
his own and soon all three were seated beside the table. The boys
explained their delay.
They had expected to arrive a day earlier but when Horace and Honey
called at the sanitarium they found that Mr. Lang was gone.
Immediately, Horace telephoned Arthur who agreed to help search for him
in his plane. It would have been easy to find him if, as they expected,
he had taken the straight road for New York. But his crippled legs gave
out and, toward evening, they found him helpless in the edge of a deep
wood. Here, while they were waiting for the ambulance to take him back
to the hospital, Mr. Lang told his story.
When Tom Lang was a young man, only eighteen or twenty, he had worked
as a chauffeur for a wealthy family in Brooklyn. The daughter of the
house gave parties, a great many of them, and after the parties Tom
would drive the whole crowd of young people home. He never paid much
attention to them until, one night, a new girl came to a party. She was
different from all the others. She had glamour, radiance, all the
qualities a man wants in a girl. But the young chauffeur dared not hope
that she would have any use for him. She only came to the one
party—like a princess in her golden dress and slippers. He took her
home and remembered the house. After that he would drive past it,
always hoping that she would see him.
And one day she did! She waved to him from the tower window. Finally he
understood, from the motion of her hand, that she wanted to come
down—and couldn’t. The door locked from the outside, and her tiny key
was of no use from within. Clutching it in her hand, she leaned farther
and farther out of the tower window.
Just like the princess in Tom’s old fairy book. He would be the brave
knight and rescue her. There was a rope in the car. It had been used as
a towing rope but would now serve a nobler purpose.
He swung one end of it up to the tower; he saw the slim white hand
reach out and grasp it, the lithe body throw itself over the window
sill and descend—slowly, slowly. She was almost to the ground when the
rope came loose from where she had fastened it.
She fell!
Quick as a flash, Tom Lang caught her in his strong young arms. That
same day he made her his bride. She lived just long enough to bear him
a little daughter, the image of herself. Heartbroken, Irene’s father
had never spoken of her. But he had saved her golden wedding dress and
on Irene’s seventeenth birthday sent it to her with a letter explaining
his gift and enclosing the key to her tower room. His Annie had been
just seventeen.
* * * * *
“Romantic, wasn’t it?” Arthur asked after Horace had told the story as
only a reporter could tell it.
Judy, who had listened to it all without making any comment, admitted
that it was the most romantic true story she had ever heard.
“But Mr. Lang didn’t give Irene the name or address,” Arthur said
thoughtfully. “He only sent the key to her mother’s room because he
wanted her to have it as a remembrance. In fact, he told so little in
his letter that it seems impossible—unthinkable—that she could have
found her grandmother——”
“Unless she found the same description somewhere else,” Judy
interrupted.
“Yes, but where?”
“In her grandmother’s poems. She and I read them together.”
Judy did not add that the manuscripts were now missing and that she
felt almost certain that Irene had taken them to help locate her
relatives. That knowledge was confined to four persons: Pauline, Dale
Meredith, Peter and herself.
The fact that Irene’s grandmother wrote poems surprised Arthur. He had
heard the popular song, _Golden Girl_, but had never connected it with
Irene, probably, because he had never seen her in her mother’s golden
dress.
“And you say the poet’s name is Glenn?”
“It’s really Holiday,” Judy explained. “She wrote under a nom de plume.”
But the boys couldn’t remember ever hearing the name Joy Holiday. Mr.
Lang had called his wife simply Annie.
When Judy had finished a complete account of the police search through
Sarah Glenn’s house they were more puzzled than ever. But they appeared
to be simply puzzled—not alarmed.
“We’ll find out all about it,” Horace promised, “when we find Irene.”
It was good to hear them saying “when.” It gave Judy new courage. She
would need courage to get through that day. She told them her plans.
First they were to get in touch with the police to learn what they
could of the funeral that had been held in Sarah Glenn’s house. Judy
then suggested that Horace and Arthur call on Dale Meredith and ask his
advice while she spent a few hours in Emily Grimshaw’s office.
“I’ll be of more use there than anywhere else,” she said. “Besides,
it’s my job and I’m being paid for it. Irene comes first, of course.
But the police are doing all they can, and if I could see Emily
Grimshaw and talk with her—well, I might find out some things that
even the police don’t know. We discovered a card on the floor when we
searched the poet’s house. It showed that my employer must have
attended the funeral.”
Both boys agreed that Emily Grimshaw’s office was the place for Judy.
Knowing that there must be stacks of papers for her to read and
correct, Judy even consented to their plan that she go to the office at
once and await news of Irene there. They would go on to the Parkville
police station and telephone her. Peter had gone there and they might
meet him.
After giving them explicit directions, Judy walked with them as far as
the subway station at Union Square. There they separated, Judy taking
the uptown train while the boys boarded an express for Brooklyn.
Horace turned to Arthur and spoke above the roar of the train.
“What puzzles me is how Irene found that house with nothing but a few
crazy verses to go by, and I think that Judy knows if only she would
tell.”
“She certainly knows something more,” he agreed, “but I’m not worrying.
Judy is on the square.”
“I believe she is,” Horace replied, “but what about Irene?”
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