Jane Carter Investigates Episode One-Hundred and Twenty
“Won’t you stay for a few minutes?” Mr.
Roberts said to me. “Henrietta, why not show Mrs. Carter our rose garden?”
“It’s rather dark,” his daughter
replied. “Anyway, she wouldn’t care to see it.”
“On the contrary, I should enjoy it immensely,”
I said, and switched off Bouncing Betsy’s ignition.
Henrietta glared at me but dared make
no protest in her father’s presence. With a shrug, she led me along a gravel
path to the rear of the house. Mr. Roberts remained behind.
As soon as they were beyond hearing, I
said quietly: “Need we pretend? I am sure you recall that we met aboard the Flamingo.”
“Yes, I remember now,” Henrietta
admitted. “You were with another girl.”
“And you were accompanied by a young
man.”
“A friend of mine.”
“This may be something of a shock,” I
said, “but my friend and I saw you drop a bundle containing a wig into the
river.”
“Oh!”
“The bundle caught fast, and I fished
it out.”
“You have no proof it was mine! You—you
won’t tell Father?”
“Not if you can offer a good reason why
I shouldn’t.”
“There are any number of them. You
mustn’t tell my father! That’s why I pretended not to know you.”
“I certainly wish you would explain.
Rosie Larkin was robbed that night.”
“Who is Rosie Larkin?”
“One of the passengers on the Flamingo that evening. Her pocketbook
was taken shortly before the boat docked.”
“You can’t believe I had anything to do
with it!”
“I don’t wish to think so, but your
actions were very strange.”
“I can explain everything,” Henrietta
said. “My reason for wearing a disguise was a simple one. I didn’t care to have
anyone on the boat recognize me.”
“Why, may I ask?”
Before Henrietta could answer, Mr.
Roberts came around the corner of the house.
“Please say nothing about it to
Father,” the young woman pleaded in a whisper. “I’ll explain everything later.”
I nodded, and, for Mr. Roberts’s
benefit, said how well the roses were looking.
“We once had a beautiful garden,”
Henrietta said. “Now it’s in ruin, the same as the yard. Father doesn’t look
after the place as he should.”
“The grounds are very large,” replied
Mr. Roberts mildly.
“You shouldn’t try to do the work
yourself,” Henrietta protested. “It was foolish of you to let the gardener go.”
I felt increasingly ill at ease. As we
wandered about the grounds, Henrietta kept making disparaging remarks,
thoughtless comments which must have wounded her father. However, he offered no
rebuttal, nor did he reprove his daughter for complaining.
“I really must be going,” I said at
last. “It’s getting very dark.”
Mr. Roberts walked with me back to
Bouncing Betsy, closing the gate behind me after I had reversed out into the
street.
I looked back over my shoulder. He
stood there a moment, the wind rumpling his gray hair. Then he raised his hand
in friendly salute and turned toward the house.
When I arrived home, the house was
dark. I let myself in. Father had not expected me home so early and, disliking
an empty house, had remained at the Examiner
office. There was no telling when he would return. Mrs. Timms was still at the
cottage, caring for the injured Anchor Jim.
After preparing a belated dinner for
myself, I spent an hour working on the next installment of “The Mystery of the
Octopus Tattoo.” However, my mind kept reverting to the events of the day. A
great deal had happened. My meeting with Paul Firth had been interesting.
Anchor Jim’s mishap worried me, and I remained disturbed by the threatening
message left on my desk. Could it have been written by a prowler in the
building? Ever since we’d started the paper, I’d felt that someone was hiding
there. Before dropping off to sleep, I made up my mind that the following night
I would set a trap for the intruder.
The next day I took Florence into my
confidence, and we made a plan, but we waited until the evening to carry it
out. We prepared a tasty box supper, wrapped it up as usual, and laid it
conspicuously on the counter of the downstairs advertising room.
“Now the stage is set,” I said in a low
voice. “Florence, you go upstairs to my office and tap on the typewriter. I’ll
hide here and see what happens.”
After Florence had gone, I switched off
the light and secreted myself in a storage closet not far from the counter. By
leaving the door open, I could see fairly well into the darkened reception
room, for street lights cast a reflection through the plate glass windows.
The minutes stretched into a half-hour.
Florence’s typewriting, at first very energetic, began to slacken in speed. I
moved restlessly in my cramped quarters. I had not anticipated that waiting
would be so tedious.
An hour elapsed. Far down the street, a
clock struck ten times. I got up from the floor. I could no longer endure
sitting and waiting. As I emerged from my hiding place, intending to call
Florence, a door opened at the west end of the room. I froze against the wall.
A flashlight beam played across the
floor, missing me by a scant two feet.
I remained motionless, my heart beating
at a furious rate. A shadowy figure of a man moved toward me. Boards squeaked
beneath his weight.
Midway across the room, the man paused, evidently listening to the steady clatter of Florence’s typewriter. Satisfied, he went to the window where he stood for several minutes watching street traffic.
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