“Could anyone have overheard?” asked Miss Cornelia.
The question had rung in Dale’s ears ever since she had come to her
senses after the firing of the shot and seen Fleming’s body stark on
the floor of the alcove.
“I don’t know,” she said. “We were very cautious.”
“You don’t know where this room is?”
“No, I never saw the print. Upstairs somewhere, for he—”
“Upstairs! Then the thing to do, if we can get that paper from the
Doctor, is to locate the room at once.”
Jack Bailey did not recognize the direction where her thoughts were
tending. It seemed terrible to him that anyone should devote a thought
to the money while Dale was still in danger.
“What does the money matter now?” he broke in somewhat irritably.
“We’ve got to save _her!_” and his eyes went to Dale.
Miss Cornelia gave him an ineffable look of weary patience.
“The money matters a great deal,” she said, sensibly. “Someone was in
this house on the same errand as Richard Fleming. After all,” she went
on with a tinge of irony, “the course of reasoning that you followed,
Mr. Bailey, is not necessarily unique.”
She rose.
“Somebody else may have suspected that Courtleigh Fleming robbed his
own bank,” she said thoughtfully. Her eye fell on the Doctor’s
professional bag—she seemed to consider it as if it were a strange sort
of animal.
“Find the man who followed _your_ course of reasoning,” she ended, with
a stare at Bailey, “and you have found the murderer.”
“With that reasoning you might suspect _me!_” said the latter a trifle
touchily.
Miss Cornelia did not give an inch.
“I have,” she said. Dale shot a swift, sympathetic glance at her lover,
another less sympathetic and more indignant at her aunt. Miss Cornelia
smiled.
“However, I now suspect somebody else,” she said. They waited for her
to reveal the name of the suspect but she kept her own counsel. By now
she had entirely given up confidence if not in the probity at least in
the intelligence of all persons, male or female, under the age of
sixty-five.
She rang the bell for Billy. But Dale was still worrying over the
possible effects of the confidence she had given Doctor Wells.
“Then you think the Doctor may give this paper to Mr. Anderson?” she
asked.
“He may or he may not. It is entirely possible that he may elect to
search for this room himself! He may even already have gone upstairs!”
She moved quickly to the door and glanced across toward the
dining-room, but so far apparently all was safe. The Doctor was at the
table making a pretense of drinking a cup of coffee and Billy was in
close attendance. That the Doctor already had the paper she was
certain; it was the use he intended to make of it that was her concern.
She signaled to the Jap and he came out into the hall. Beresford, she
learned, was still in the kitchen with his revolver, waiting for
another attempt on the door and the detective was still outside in his
search. To Billy she gave her order in a low voice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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