Country homes -- Fiction; Middle-aged women -- Fiction; Murder -- Investigation -- Fiction; Mystery fiction
At six o’clock the body was taken away, and at seven-thirty, after an
early dinner, Mr. Harton went. Gertrude had not come down, and there
was no news of Halsey. Mr. Jamieson had taken a lodging in the village,
and I had not seen him since mid-afternoon. It was about nine o’clock,
I think, when the bell rang and he was ushered into the living-room.
“Sit down,” I said grimly. “Have you found a clue that will incriminate
me, Mr. Jamieson?”
He had the grace to look uncomfortable. “No,” he said. “If you had
killed Mr. Armstrong, you would have left no clues. You would have had
too much intelligence.”
After that we got along better. He was fishing in his pocket, and after
a minute he brought out two scraps of paper. “I have been to the
club-house,” he said, “and among Mr. Armstrong’s effects, I found
these. One is curious; the other is puzzling.”
The first was a sheet of club note-paper, on which was written, over
and over, the name “Halsey B. Innes.” It was Halsey’s flowing signature
to a dot, but it lacked Halsey’s ease. The ones toward the bottom of
the sheet were much better than the top ones. Mr. Jamieson smiled at my
face.
“His old tricks,” he said. “That one is merely curious; this one, as I
said before, is puzzling.”
The second scrap, folded and refolded into a compass so tiny that the
writing had been partly obliterated, was part of a letter—the lower
half of a sheet, not typed, but written in a cramped hand.
“——by altering the plans for——rooms, may be possible. The best way, in
my opinion, would be to——the plan for——in one of the——rooms——chimney.”
That was all.
“Well?” I said, looking up. “There is nothing in that, is there? A man
ought to be able to change the plan of his house without becoming an
object of suspicion.”
“There is little in the paper itself,” he admitted; “but why should
Arnold Armstrong carry that around, unless it meant something? He never
built a house, you may be sure of that. If it is this house, it may
mean anything, from a secret room—”
“To an extra bath-room,” I said scornfully. “Haven’t you a thumb-print,
too?”
“I have,” he said with a smile, “and the print of a foot in a tulip
bed, and a number of other things. The oddest part is, Miss Innes, that
the thumb-mark is probably yours and the footprint certainly.”
His audacity was the only thing that saved me: his amused smile put me
on my mettle, and I ripped out a perfectly good scallop before I
answered.
“Why did I step into the tulip bed?” I asked with interest.
“You picked up something,” he said good-humoredly, “which you are going
to tell me about later.”
“Am I, indeed?” I was politely curious. “With this remarkable insight
of yours, I wish you would tell me where I shall find my
four-thousand-dollar motor car.”
“I was just coming to that,” he said. “You will find it about thirty
miles away, at Andrews Station, in a blacksmith shop, where it is being
repaired.”
I laid down my knitting then and looked at him.
“And Halsey?” I managed to say.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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