Joan's Enemies/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII
Lottie Steals the Letter
STORMONT went straight to his office after leaving Joan, and in a conference with Lismore related a part of his conversation with Miss March—in particular her admission that Rufus Cran had frequently brought platinum home. Lismore was for burglarizing Elm House in order to search for the stuff, but Stormont overruled such crude methods. Lottie was to visit Joan; and they counted on the jealousy Lismore had stirred up in his daughter to spur her on to some successful prying.
After Lismore had gone, Stormont wrote something in a notebook, tore out the page and then pushed a button on his desk.
Plyden the clerk entered.
“Plyden, take this note to Ramage's,” directed Stormont, “and bring back what he gives you. Have you any particular engagement this evening?”
“No sir—nothing of importance.”
“Do you care to earn twenty-five dollars?”
“Rather!”
“Then you might dine with me and learn what the fee will be for. Do you happen to know whether there is a moon to-night?”
Plyden, who was prepared to be surprised at nothing, whipped out a little calendar-notebook.
“No sir—doesn't rise till four-two a.m.”
“Thanks; you may go to Ramage's now. You can let the boy go.”
DURING dinner, which had been delayed on Lottie's account, Joan felt very grateful to her aunt. She was experiencing a reaction from the excitement caused by Grant's message, and would have found the sustaining of conversation, even with a friend so familiar as Lottie, more than irksome.
They lingered over their coffee, and it was nine o'clock when they moved to the drawing-room, Lottie rejecting the suggestion from Miss Gosling that they might spend a few minutes in the garden.
“I don't like the darkness,” said Lottie with a dainty shudder, “and I'm sure it's less sultry indoors than out, to-night. It was suffocating on the way here. I think you might play to us, Joan.”
“Anything you like, dear,” Joan replied, feeling that she was doing badly as a hostess, and making an effort to rouse herself.
But she rose from the piano without having touched a note, and joined the others, saying:
“It seems too soon, doesn't it? It's not a month since he—” She paused.
“Perhaps it is,” Miss Gosling said gently.
“Too soon?” cried Lottie. “Oh, I see what you mean. But aren't you a little absurd, Joan? It's not as if you had any special regard for him—when he was alive, at any rate.”
“Lottie!” exclaimed Joan, her blue eyes wide.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” Lottie said in sudden contrition. “Forgive me. I didn't know what I was saying, Joan. It must be this ghastly weather.”
“I'm sure you couldn't have meant it,” Joan said after a moment. “Aunt Griselda, can you get your smelling-salts quickly?”
“No, no—I'm all right,” protested Lottie, who had gone white. “I'm only fagged and—and worried,” she added the moment Miss Gosling left the room.
“Worried, poor child! Can't I help you?”
“Yes, you can—only it must be a secret. I thought I gave you a hint in my note.”
“So you did,” said Joan, ashamed of having forgotten. “You were going to ask a favor. Forgive me. I didn't think of its being so urgent, and I—I've had rather a crowded day. We'll go to the library at once, and you'll tell me all about it.”
“Not yet, not yet,” Lottie murmured with a surreptitious glance at her bracelet-watch. “In a little while.”
“When you please, dear,” Joan said soothingly, as Miss Gosling, whose room was on the ground floor, returned with the salts.
The changeable Lottie was now all pretty thanks and smiling apologies. She took the green bottle and sniffed at it daintily. “I'll be all right in a minute. Perhaps I ought not to have come to-night. I'm sorry to be so silly.”
Presently Miss Gosling remembered a letter that must be written. “I'll be in my own room, if you want me, Joan,” she said, and went out.
Arrived in her own room, however, she seemed to have forgotten about the letter. After turning the key in the door, she switched off the light and groped her way to the chair by the wide-open window. For many years she had lived in loneliness, and there had been many evenings which she had spent in darkness for economy's sake. Partly from force of habit and partly because she could think most clearly there, she sat in the darkness now, for there were several things which Miss Gosling wanted to think about.
IN the library Lottie was saying petulantly: “Oh, Joan, would you mind opening the windows wide and having only one light? My head aches.”
When Joan had carried out her friend's wishes, she seated herself at the writing-table and said: “Now, Lottie, old girl, what is it? You know you can trust me to be secret, and to help if I possibly can.”
Lottie was half sitting, half lying at the end of the couch, almost with her back to the other girl. She moistened her lips and fell to toying with her bracelet.
“There are two things,” she began at last: “I'm sorry for what I said the other day about Douglas Grant, and I'm going to try to believe that he never took that money.”
“You may believe it without trying, Lottie,” Joan remarked a trifle coldly.
“Don't be hard on me. You heard Mr. Cran say it; I didn't. It makes all the difference, just how a thing is said—now, doesn't it, dear?”
“That's true. But you know very well, Lottie, that I've always begged you to believe the best.”
“I know. But you see, I couldn't. You never offered the smallest proofs—”
“For one thing, he didn't require the money. For another—but we needn't go over it all again.”
“I wonder where he is now,” said Lottie suddenly, turning her head.
But Joan was not unready. “In some outlandish place, or he would have heard of his uncle's death. The lawyers have had no word from him.”
AFTER a little pause: “Joan, do you know what would make me believe? If only he were to write to some one of us. It's the silence that makes it difficult for me.”
“Yes, I quite understand; and perhaps we may speak about it another time.” Joan's voice was calm and kind. She was wondering whether unstable Lottie really cared for Stormont.
“You are so sympathetic,” said Lottie sweetly, with anger in her heart. She had failed in her first task.
“There was something else, wasn't there?” Joan inquired.
“Yes—and it's rather horrid.” Lottie got up and came over to the table. From the bosom of her pale pink dress she brought a packet covered with azure-tinted paper, sealed with azure wax, tied with azure ribbon—a packet suggestive of nothing in the world but love-letters. She laid it on the table. “I want you to keep this for me—keep it safe,” she said.
“Yes?” Joan murmured quite doubtfully.
“It's the money I got from Mr. Cran. The lawyers paid it yesterday. It's in bank-notes—I asked for it that way—five thousand dollars. I've no place to hide it.”
“But Lottie, you told me your father was going to invest it for you.”
“I've changed my mind about that. I don't wish him to have it. But if you wont keep it for me, he's sure to get it.”
“Oh, Lottie, do you really—”
“If I put it in a bank, he'd force me to take it out again. In your care, he can't touch it. In that great, strong safe of yours it will be all right. Please, Joan!”
To Joan the thing seemed too unpleasant for further discussion.
“Very well,” said she. “Write your name, the address and date on it while I get the keys; then I'll give you a receipt for it.”
“Nonsense! Don't be so horribly businesslike!”
“It's Mr. Cran's teaching; I sha'n't be a minute.”
LFFT to herself, Lottie scribbled her name and the rest. Then, one after another, she tried the drawers in the table. Some were locked; the contents of the others did not attract her. She went back to the couch. She had never seen the big safe open; yet she knew what it was like inside. It was fitted with shelves, and halfway from the top were a couple of drawers side by side. And the drawers required different keys.
Joan came back, wrote on a sheet of note-paper, “Received from Miss Lottie Lismore one sealed packet,” and the date, signed her name and handed the document to her friend, saying: “When you want your property, you must bring along the receipt.”
She went over to the safe, expecting to hear Lottie's laugh behind her, but Lottie made no sound at all. The moment was too critical. As the ponderous door swung open, she rose quickly and stood for a single second facing the windows, her arms thrown out like semaphores. In the next moment she joined her friend, who was fitting a key into the right-hand drawer.
“You may as well see where it is to go,” Joan remarked as the drawer came open. “There are really no valuables, and very few papers in the safe. The lawyers and banker save me a lot of worry. Nothing here but my bank-book, check-book and a few.papers and a little money. Your packet will be safe enough; it is so pretty no burglar would think of taking it.” She laid it in the drawer, which she closed. “I'm only sorry, Lottie, that—”
There came a frantic ringing of the front doorbell.
“Good gracious!” exclaimed the mistress of Elm House. “I've never heard it ring like that. Who on earth can it be?' The thought of another telegram sent her across the room to the door.
“It surely can't be my taxi yet,” said Lottie. “It was ordered for ten-thirty.”
Her friend did not seem to hear. Then there was a scurry outside the door, and the housemaid entered without knocking. She looked scared.
“Please, ma'am, Inspector Davis wants to see you at once.”
“Who is Inspector Davis, and what is his business?” Joan asked with some asperity.
“A sort of policeman in plain clothes, and I think it's about burglars, ma'am.”
“Nonsense! But I suppose I must see him. I sha'n't be a minute, Lottie.”
“I'll come with you,” said Lottie, but she followed only as far as the door. Pushing it to, she ran back to the safe. Her pretty face was white and set. Under her breath she was muttering: “I've got to try to find a letter with Douglas Grant's name on it; and if I do, I've got to drop it out of the window; and when I've done that, I've got to switch off the light and then go after Joan, and look as if nothing had happened, and explain that I switched off the light when I was trying to switch the others on.” She continued talking to herself during the brief act that followed.
IN the drawer which Joan had closed but not locked her search was vain. Reclosing it carefully, she removed the key and found another on the bunch to fit the adjoining drawer. Without pausing, she drew it open; it contained but one item.
To Lottie's amazement rather than her delight, she read the name “Douglas Grant.” It was written in Joan's firm hand on a fairly large yellowish envelope. On lifting the envelope, Lottie saw it was unsealed. She hesitated an instant and then drew out the contents, a smaller, white envelope addressed in Rufus Cran's big writing to his nephew. Across the top were scrawled the words: “If not delivered as directed within six months from date, to be burned unopened.” A second date had been added in pencil by Joan. On the spur of the moment, Lottie decided to leave the outer envelope where she had found it; its presence might delay discovery.
But now her unnatural courage began to fail. She became conscious of voices sounding from the hall. Only the bitter stimulant of envy and jealousy upbore her. She closed the drawer and replaced the keys where the owner had left them. Then she went to the window with the letter. For an instant a sort of hysterical bravado possessed her: holding the white thing out over the ledge, she gave it a little flutter before letting it drop. Somehow she had got it into her head that her father would be the recipient, that he was hidden somewhere in the darkness.
She shut down the window, darted across the room, switched off the light—and for an age, as it seemed, stood helplessly leaning against the door, sick with terror. Indistinctly she heard faint sounds outside the window.
BY the time Lottie joined her hostess
and the servants in the hall, Inspector Davis, a tall, thin person with a thick straw-colored mustache, of awkward movements and speech not at all New Yorky, seemed to have said his say. Yet he continued to repeat himself, possibly for the newcomer's benefit.
“Well, Miss, it is our duty to warn you; and as I was saying, a house like this, in its own grounds, has special attractions for them blackguards. So as you happen to have shutters on the ground windows, I advise you to use them after dark, and keep a bright lookout generally. Suspicious characters, as I was saying, are about this district at present, and the public has a duty as well as the police.”
Joan got rid of him at last. “I'd have offered him beer,” she remarked, “only I fancied a great many people had done that already. However, he meant well, and we must take his advice—and goodness me, Lottie, we left the safe open—the window, too!”
DESPITE the long wait in the shrubbery, at a considerable distance from the house, Stormont enjoyed moments of genuine amusement. That had been really a humorous idea—to get Plyden, in a false mustache, to give warning of suspicious characters in order to have the coast clear for Lottie's bit of work at the safe. However, he became serious enough from the moment of the girl's first signal, at which he dispatched Plyden to the house. It was now or never! He had no extravagant hopes of success; at the same time, the possibilities had been well worth testing.
He could not see the safe from his lurking-place, but he detected Joan leaving the room. A period of very acute anxiety followed. At last came relief in the flutter of the letter and its fall into the shadow. Next the window went black. He had no time to lose; yet he must proceed with the utmost caution. There was a broad lawn to cross and a steep bank to climb, and he must take a very roundabout course to escape the glare from the doorway. But all the way he kept smiling to himself. If the letter turned out to be the right one, that little girl was entitled to a decent reward. Why, he might even marry her, after all—no, not that!
At length he was there, right under the window, stooping over the narrow flower-bed whereon the letter had indubitably fallen. The air was as still as ever; the scent of flowers was sweet and heavy in his nostrils. A faint chuckle escaped him as his eager hands began to grope..... After a little while he brought out a small electric torch, and putting his handkerchief over the lens to reduce the brilliance, resumed the search.
But the light showed him nothing—nothing save the stunning fact that the letter was no longer there.