HER MAJESTY ARRIVES
The meal that Peter Dobbs cooked and served was a merry one. Truly, it
was an occasion for rejoicing.
“A party after all,” Dale said. He told Irene about the other party and
how they waited and waited.
Judy sat between Arthur and Peter dividing her attention between them.
She rose, lifted her glass of water and gave a toast:
“Happiness for all of us! Here’s how!”
Her gayety was contagious. Everybody was laughing now. It was good to
be able to laugh with Irene again. She was just meant to be spoiled and
laughed with Dale declared.
Horace brought in dessert. Like children at a birthday party everybody
screamed, “Ice cream! Hurray for ice cream!”
“And cake,” he added. “It’s a little late, Irene, but we might call
this your birthday cake.”
He placed a foamy creation of walnuts and chocolate at her place. She
cut the first slice for Dale and the second slice for Horace.
“Now you, Judy,” she went on, flourishing the knife, “and a little
crumb for Blackberry.”
The cat caught it in his paws and played with it, like a mouse, before
he ate it.
“To think that I used to dislike him,” Dale said apologetically.
Everyone was served now. Judy remembered the two extra candles left
over from the party that hadn’t been a party. She brought them out and
Irene lit them. How golden everything looked in their light! Irene’s
eyes shone. Her hair was a halo around her head.
“You’re beautiful,” Dale said softly.
Judy heard him and smiled, sharing their happiness. She turned to the
others. “It’s worth waiting for—this kind of a party, isn’t it,
people?”
“We’ll dance afterwards,” Pauline suggested. She excused herself to
turn on the radio, hoping to tune in on Irene’s song. But before she
found anything worth while the doorbell rang.
“I’ll answer it,” Irene cried. “I feel like surprising somebody and I’m
sure, whoever it is, they’ll be terribly surprised.”
They were all watching Irene as she danced toward the door, quite
unprepared for the kind of surprise that awaited her on the other side.
She swung it open. There, framed in the doorway, stood Her Majesty,
Emily Grimshaw.
“I’ve come to settle with you, Joy Holiday,” she shouted and raised a
threatening finger at Irene.
The three boys stared in blank bewilderment. They had never seen this
strange old lady and imagined that she must be an escaped inmate from
some near-by asylum—except that she had used the now familiar name,
Joy Holiday.
Chairs were pushed back from the table. Dale Meredith rose and strode
over to the door, followed by Judy and Peter.
“What’s this?” the indignant young author demanded. “Miss Grimshaw,
what’s the big idea of storming in here and frightening Irene?”
“Who has a better right?” she retorted belligerently.
Taking her gently by the shoulders, Peter pushed her into a chair. “Sit
down quietly now while we finish dinner. No need to raise a row about
it. I’m sure Irene will be glad to listen to what you have to say.”
“Irene, nothing!” she fumed. “That girl’s Johanna Holiday, the wench
who made away with her mother’s poetry. I know you!” She pointed a
shaking finger at the trembling Irene.
Judy, standing near the old lady, caught a whiff of her breath and
guessed that she had taken an overdose from the bottle that she called
her tonic. She had noticed how frequently her employer resorted to the
stimulant. After a few drinks she always talked freely of spirits. But
Judy was in no mood for listening to ghost stories now.
“I know you!” the indomitable old lady repeated. “I saw you, Joy
Holiday, just before your mother’s funeral. Break her heart while she
lived and then come back to gloat over her when she’s dead. You’re a
devil, you are. Only devils are immune to death.”
Dale moved closer to Irene as if to ward off the blows that must come
to her senses with the old lady’s words.
“We’ve got to get her out of here,” Peter whispered hoarsely to Dale.
“No! No!” Judy protested. “We must be civil to her. There’s some black
coffee on the stove. That may sober her up a bit, and after all we did
want to see her.”
“Then let’s get Irene out of the room.”
“You take her out on the roof garden, Dale,” Judy begged. “I’m used to
being alone with Miss Grimshaw.”
He protested at first but when he saw that the black coffee was doing
its work he finally slipped quietly out of the door, an arm about
Irene’s waist.
“What’s the trouble?” Horace whispered. He and Arthur couldn’t
understand Emily Grimshaw’s grievance.
“Too much excitement,” Judy stated briefly. “She was at the poet’s
funeral and thinks Irene is her mother’s ghost. We’ll be able to reason
with her after a bit.”
“But what does she mean about the poetry?” Horace insisted.
Judy, however, would say nothing more. She turned her attention to the
old lady now, endeavoring to engage her in a sensible conversation. “So
you were at the funeral, Miss Grimshaw. I wondered why you hadn’t come
in to the office. When did Sarah Glenn die?”
“Lord knows!” Emily Grimshaw answered. “But I went out there to pay my
respects to the dead. Heard about it through friends. And there was
that—that—that——”
Her voice trailed off in a groan. She was pointing again but this time
not at Irene but at the vacant spot where the girl had stood.
“Good Lord! She’s gone again.”
“She went out quietly,” Judy explained. “Dale Meredith was with her.
They’ll be back.”
“They’d better be,” the irate woman answered. “Those poems had better
be back too or I’ll know the reason why. Ghost or no ghost, that girl
can’t get away with stealing——”
“Your poems are here,” Judy interrupted, her voice quiet but firm. She
lifted the stack of papers from the desk, and before Emily Grimshaw
could get her breath, she had deposited them in the startled old lady’s
lap. “Now,” she continued, “after you finish another cup of this nice
strong coffee, I’ll call Dale and the girl back into the room and all
of us can hear her story.”
“You mean Joy Holiday?”
“I mean the girl you call Joy Holiday. The real Joy Holiday is dead.
You see, she didn’t vanish as you thought she did. She climbed down
from the tower window and eloped with her lover. This girl is her
daughter and she was wearing her mother’s yellow dress the day you saw
her.”
Emily Grimshaw sat forward in her chair and passed her hand across her
eyes.
“Say that again. It didn’t—register.”
Judy laughed. She could see that her employer was coming back to her
senses.
“You tell her, Horace.” She motioned to her brother who had been
sitting beside the table with Pauline and Arthur, listening.
Joy Holiday’s story was a real romance, however badly told. But Horace
Bolton, the reporter, made the tale so vivid that the five who heard it
lived the adventure all over again. Whatever else it did, it cleared
Emily Grimshaw’s clouded brain and brought the old, practical look back
into her eyes.
Arthur wound up by telling of his search by air for Irene’s distracted
father. Now, if only Irene could explain about the poetry, they had
nothing to fear.
Opening the door quietly, Judy beckoned to the two figures who sat in
the hammock. As Dale stood up, outlined against the sky, it reminded
her of that first night that she and Pauline had found them there and
they had been invited to that never-to-be-forgotten dance on the hotel
roof garden. She caught Irene’s hand as she entered the door.
Impulsively she kissed her.
“Tell us about it now, dear,” she murmured. “The boys and I will
understand and I’m sure Pauline will too. And if Emily Grimshaw gets
another queer spell we’ll send her packing with her precious poetry. We
have what we want—you.”
The agent looked up as Irene entered the room. She stared for a moment
as if the girl’s golden beauty fascinated her. Then she passed one hand
across her forehead, smoothing out the furrows that twenty years had
left there. The light of understanding came into her eyes.
“You are ... you are the image of your mother,” she said at last.
“While you live Joy Holiday will never be dead.”
“‘Death cannot touch the halo of your hair,’” Judy quoted dreamily.
“After all, it is a beautiful thought, Irene. There’s nothing uncanny
about that kind of a spirit.”
“Don’t talk spirits to her,” the agent snapped.
Her seriousness brought to Judy’s mind the phantom shape she had seen
in the tower window. Disregarding her, she asked Irene to tell her
about it.
The girl laughed, that familiar silvery laugh.
“It frightened me too,” she admitted, “until Uncle Jasper told me it
was only a reflection. Then it seemed stupid of me not to have guessed
it. He said any sane person would have. But you’re sane, Judy, and you
didn’t.”
“That proves there’s no truth in what he said,” Horace assured her.
It was a great satisfaction to Irene, knowing that. She sighed and went
on explaining about the ghost in the tower.
“You know, the room is round and there are windows on all sides.
Between the windows are mirrors that make the oddest reflections. I
must have been standing in the room so that you could see the mirror
but not me. I should think you would have been scared to death.”
“And then you pulled the shades?” Judy anticipated.
“No, I didn’t. Uncle Jasper did, just before he went down and started
taking the props out from under the tower. That must have been after
you left.”
“We saw the mirrors afterwards, too—and your yellow dress. But that
was when we searched the house. You were gone by then.”
“Yes, and Grandma was gone, too. Poor soul! It really made me happy to
think she could die in peace, believing that her golden girl still
lived. That poem you just quoted, Judy, was written to me. She thought
I was immune to death.”
“Well, people never do die if you look at it that way,” Judy said
thoughtfully. “Your mother’s beauty was reborn in you, and you may pass
it on to your children and their children——”
“What about your children?” Arthur asked, smiling quizzically at Judy.
“Oh, me? I’m too young to be thinking about them. My career comes
first. Now I’m sure Chief Kelly will listen to me when I tell him I
want to be a detective.”
They all agreed. No one could doubt that solving mysteries was Judy’s
one great talent.
And yet—the missing poetry was still unexplained.
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