Her nerves taxed to the breaking point, Judy gave up searching for the day and went to the office. Emily Grimshaw was not there but she had left a message:
Will be away for a time and leave you in charge.
“Me in charge!” Judy exclaimed. She couldn’t imagine herself conducting Emily Grimshaw’s business sensibly. “I’ll just close up for the day,” she decided in exasperation. Leaving a notice to that effect at the hotel desk, she locked the office and started for Dr. Faulkner’s house.
In the entrance hall she was met by an anxious group of faces. Dale’s, Pauline’s—and Peter’s.
“Judy!” he cried, and then when her only answer was a choked sob, again, “Judy!”
“Oh, Peter! You’ll help?”
“That’s why I’m here. We telephoned everywhere. We thought you’d never come.”
“Where on earth were you?” Dale asked.
“Hunting for Irene,” Judy explained brokenly. “I—I followed up a clue. I thought I knew where Irene was and I went out there to get her to—to bring her home and surprise you, but she wasn’t there.”
“Wasn’t where?”
“Where I thought she was ... the most awful place just off Gravesend Avenue out in old Parkville. The—the house has a tower, just like the tower in Sarah Glenn’s poems. It’s burned halfway up and—and—and——”
“And what, Judy? Don’t act so frightened.”
“There was something in the tower,” she blurted out, “something yellow——”
“Probably a yellow dog or some such ordinary thing,” Pauline interrupted.
“Oh, but it wasn’t! I saw it as plainly as anything, and it looked like a woman in a yellow robe, only she was too tall and too thin to be real. Then I looked again and she was gone but I could still feel her watching me. It was awful! I didn’t think there could be a tower of flame or a ghost, but there they were!” Judy leaned back against the closed door and threw both hands outward in a gesture of bewilderment.
“And I always thought I was a practical person. I always trusted my own head—and eyes.”
Impulsively, Peter caught her hands in his. His voice was husky. “I still trust them, Judy. Tell me everything,” he pleaded. “I know you must have had a good reason for thinking that Irene might be in this queer old house. Why did you?”
“Because Irene looks so much like the poet’s daughter, Joy Holiday. I thought they might be related. Mr. Lang spoke of Irene’s relatives. He told her to look them up. But the poet is crazy! Anything might happen!”
“And yet you went there alone!” Peter exclaimed. “Don’t you realize that whatever happened to Irene might have happened to you?”
“I did realize it—when I got there,” Judy faltered. “I—I guess I wasn’t very brave to run away, but nobody seemed to live in the house. It looked—empty.”
“Then, of course, Irene couldn’t be there,” Pauline concluded.
“Oh, but they might have moved—and taken her with them!” Judy turned to Peter, a new fear in her eyes. “You know about law. Tell me, if Irene is related to Sarah Glenn wouldn’t she inherit some of her property?”
“That depends upon the will,” he replied. “If she made a will before she went insane——”
“She did!” Judy interrupted. “She willed the property to her daughter and, in the event of her death, it was to go to her brother, Jasper Crosby. He’s a crook and a scoundrel,” she declared, “worse than Slippery McQuirk or any of Vine Thompson’s gang, if I’m any judge of character. You see, if Irene is related to the poet through Joy Holiday, how convenient it would be for him to have her out of the way?”
“You mean that Joy Holiday might have been Irene’s mother?”
“She couldn’t have been,” Pauline spoke up. “Joy Holiday has been dead for twenty years.”
“Supposedly! Her mother never did believe the body was hers, and even Emily Grimshaw says it didn’t look like her.”
“Where’d they get the body?” Peter asked.
“Jasper Crosby went to the morgue and got it. He identified it as Joy’s, and people paid no attention to his sister’s objections because they knew she was insane.”
“Then this girl, Joy Holiday, is legally dead. But if we can prove that there has been a fraud....”
“What fraud?” Dale questioned. “You don’t mean to tell us that this Jasper Crosby may have falsely identified some unknown girl’s body in order to inherit his sister’s property?”
“That’s exactly what I was trying to say. I don’t know anything about Irene’s mother and neither does she. Mr. Lang only remembered the name, Annie, and that, as well as Joy, may have been only a nickname.” Judy turned to Peter. “I know how you felt when your parents were a mystery. Well, wouldn’t Irene feel the same way? Her father gave away some family history in his letter, and Irene was more impressed than we know by Emily Grimshaw’s collapse. Remember, I wrote you about it, Peter? She wanted to find out about her mother——”
“Then she did take the poetry,” Pauline put in.
“Yes,” Judy agreed. “I’m afraid she did. It’s a terrible thing not to know the truth about one’s parents, and Irene must have taken the poetry to help her find that horrible house that seems to have swallowed her up.”
“She said she didn’t,” Dale maintained.
Judy felt suddenly ashamed that his trust in Irene should be greater than hers. But if, distrusting her, Judy found her, then she could be glad of her disbelief.
“There is another possibility,” she ventured and made her voice sound more hopeful than she felt. “There is the possibility that Irene may be safe in the poet’s house.”
“That sounds more plausible,” Dale agreed, “but you said the house was empty.”
“I said it looked empty, except for that unearthly thing in the tower. But, now that I think of it, something alive must have been there to pull the shades. Do you suppose,” Judy asked in a tremulous whisper, “that somebody could be locked there like Joy Holiday was when she vanished?”
“It sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? But not,” Peter added gravely, “if Irene is in the tower. Judy, we must do something—and do it quickly.”
It did not take him long to decide what that something would be. “We’ll get a policeman to go with us,” he declared. “The police have a right to force their way into a house if nobody answers.”
“Without a search warrant?” questioned Pauline.
“That’s the dickens of it,” Dale fumed. “There’s sure to be some red tape attached to it and loss of time may mean—loss of Irene. We’ve got to convince the police that this is a matter of life and death!”
A taxi was the quickest means of getting to the police station. It took considerable explaining, however, to convince officials that the case was urgent. The fact that the owner of the house was known to be insane and that Irene might be held there against her will proved to be the strongest argument in favor of the search warrant they requested. But it could not be served until the following day.
“You have to go before a magistrate,” Lieutenant Collins explained, “and night warrants are allowed only in cases where persons or property are positively known to be in the place to be searched. However, there are several ways of getting around that. If a felony has been committed, as in the present case, we don’t need a warrant.”
“What felony?” Judy asked.
“Great guns!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you call kidnaping a felony? If the girl’s held there against her will it’s a plain case of kidnaping!”
Judy hadn’t thought of that. Kidnapers and killers were almost synonymous in her mind and the thought was terrifying.
Lieutenant Collins wasted no further time but called the Parkville Precinct, and two policemen were detailed to meet Judy, Pauline, Dale and Peter and accompany them to the house with the crumbling tower.
Neither Peter nor Dale stopped to count the cost of taxicabs that night. The driver hesitated only a moment. Their request that he make the fastest possible time to the distant Brooklyn police station was not a usual one. Knowing that it must be urgent, the driver made good his promise and soon they were speeding across Manhattan Bridge, through side streets in reckless haste and then down the long stretch of boulevard. Judy leaned out of the window and searched the scene ahead for a trace of anything familiar.
Ocean Parkway, lined with its modern dwelling houses and new apartment buildings was as unlike Gravesend Avenue as anything could be. Still, the two were only a few blocks apart. The driver turned his cab down a side street, sure of his bearings; and Judy, watching, saw the sudden change. The boulevard with its lights and stream of traffic, then queer old Parkville, a village forgotten while Brooklyn grew up around it.
The police station looked all the more imposing in this setting. Two young policemen were already there, waiting beside the high desk and talking with the captain.
Sarah Glenn’s house was only a short distance away, and together they walked it. Soon they were turning down the unpaved end of the street that bordered the railroad cut.
“There it is!” Judy shivered a little and drew her coat closer as she pointed.
The house was dark and silent. The windows were black—black with an unfathomable blackness that must be within. Peter sensed Judy’s fear for he took her arm and guided her as they came up the broken walk.
On the steps Dale stopped and picked up a white flower.
“What can it mean?” Pauline whispered. “How would a rose get here?”
He shook his head. “It’s beyond me. What’s this?” He fingered a lavender ribbon that was still attached to the door.
“Looks as if there’d been a funeral here,” one of the police officers observed.
Both girls stood trembling as he banged and pounded on the door and then shouted a threat to the still house.
“Nobody home,” he turned and said. “Do you think it’s necessary to force our way in?”
“More than ever,” Judy replied. “We must see what’s in the tower!”
“Okay! Give me a hand, partner, and we’ll smash the door.”
Underneath the porch they found a beam which would serve their purpose. Peter and Dale helped the policemen, and soon the heavy door gave way and crashed into the empty house. A sickening, musty smell combined with the heady odor of flowers greeted them as they stepped inside.
“A funeral all right!” the policeman reiterated. “Get the perfume, don’t you? But everything’s cleared up—except....” He and Judy had seen it at the same time but the policeman was the first to pick it up. “... this card.”
“Let me see it.”
Obligingly he handed it to the girl. She turned it over in her hand and passed it on to Dale. It read:
“Do you know the party?” the other officer asked.
“My employer,” Judy replied simply.
The question in her mind, however, was less easily answered. Was Emily Grimshaw’s absence from her office explainable by this death? Whose death? If Emily Grimshaw had sent flowers certainly she must know.
The policemen were busy searching the house, and Judy and her three companions followed them. The rooms upstairs, like those on the first floor, were empty of furniture. But the tower room was found to open from a third floor bedroom. To their surprise, this room was completely furnished, even to bed coverings and pillows. A little kitchen adjoined it and there were evidences that food had recently been cooked there. An extra cot was made up in the hall.
So the poet and her brother had lived in their immense house and occupied only two rooms! Or three? They had yet to explore the tower. Peter Dobbs tried the door and found it locked.
“We’ll have to break this one, too,” the policemen said, and Dale offered to get the beam.
Pauline’s hand kept him. “Wait a minute,” she pleaded. “It’s a shame to spoil the door and maybe this key will fit.”
She took a queer brass key from her hand bag. Judy and Peter frankly stared. The policemen, though obviously doubting its usefulness, consented to try it. To their astonishment, it turned.
“Where did you find that key?” Dale questioned.
“In the pocket of Irene’s brown suit. I put it in my own hand bag for safe-keeping.”
“Rather suspected it fitted something, didn’t you?” he said sarcastically. “Well, to me it doesn’t prove a thing.”
“It does to me,” Judy put in, “although not what you think. This must have been Joy Holiday’s room when she was a child! And if Irene had the key surely Joy Holiday is related to her—perhaps her own mother!”
“It sounds like pretty sound figuring to me,”’ Peter agreed, flashing a look of boyish admiration in Judy’s direction.
Then, as the door swung open, they followed the policemen into the tower. Peter pushed a button and the light revealed a circular room with a gay panorama of nursery rhyme characters frolicking across the wall.
Upon closer inspection, however, the room was seen to be six-sided with shelves built into two of its corners. On one of these dolls and expensive toys were neatly arranged. Books and games for a somewhat older girl adorned the other shelf.
A curtained wardrobe concealed another corner, while a white cot bed, all freshly made, occupied the corner at the left of the door. The two remaining corners were cleverly camouflaged by concave mirrors with uneven distorting surfaces, such as are sometimes seen in amusement park funny houses. In spite of Judy’s anxiety, she could not suppress a smile when the two policemen walked by them.
So this was the room where the poet had locked Joy Holiday! Did she think those silly mirrors and a roomful of books and toys could make up for a lack of freedom? Judy, who had always been allowed to choose what friends she liked, could easily see why the poet’s daughter had wanted to run away—or vanish as people said she had done. How strange it all was and how thrilling to be standing in the very room where Irene’s mother had stood twenty years before!
“It’s so quiet and peaceful here,” Judy said. “Nothing very terrible could have happened in this pretty room.”
She had momentarily forgotten that the whole lower structure of it had been burned away, that she had seen a tall yellow specter peering out of its window.
Peter, however, remembered the fantastic story Judy had told him. It did not surprise the young law student that no one was in the tower. He and the two policemen immediately set about looking for clues to Irene’s whereabouts. But it was not until Dale drew back the wardrobe curtain and they found her yellow dress and jacket hanging there that they became truly alarmed. Now they knew, past any doubt, that Irene had visited her grandmother’s house. There had been a funeral! Even if it had been Sarah Glenn’s, Irene might have been with her when she died. Alone with a crazy woman ... timid little Irene!
It was a sober moment for all of them.
“That girl’s been held captive all right,” one of the policemen said in a voice more troubled than one would expect of an officer of the law. “It looks as if we’ve found the evidence right here.”
He stood examining the folds of her yellow dress. It appeared to have been hanging in the wardrobe for some time. Other clothes were there, too, but the full skirts and puffed sleeves were in the style of twenty years ago. On a shelf above them were two or three queer little hats, all decked out with feathers and flowers. Irene would have laughed at them. She would have tried them on and posed before the comical mirrors. Judy wondered if she had done that.
Someone, apparently, had tried on one of the aprons. It was a simple gingham affair such as girls used to wear to protect dainty dresses, and it had been thrown carelessly over a chair. When Judy made a move to hang it up she was warned to leave everything exactly as it was.
“If this turns out to be a murder case,” one of the policemen said, “this bedroom may contain important evidence.” He turned to Dale who still held the rose he had found on the steps. “That flower proves that the funeral must have been held today. It’s still sweet,” he continued, making a grimace as he sniffed it. “We’ll get together all the facts on the case and have the place watched. If this man, Jasper Crosby, returns tonight there’ll be a policeman here to nab him. A general alarm will be dispatched to our radio cars, and we’ll find out whose funeral it was, too, and let you know first thing in the morning.”
“Oh, if you only would,” Judy cried gratefully. “Perhaps you can find out from my employer. She’s decided to take a vacation for some unknown reason but you may be able to locate her here.”
She gave them Emily Grimshaw’s home address. Peter Dobbs, who had taken a keen interest in the legal aspect of the case, jotted it down, too. Much to Dale’s discomfiture, he kept talking about Irene.
“If we find her,” he declared, “this may be my big opportunity. She would contest the will, of course, and I might be able to help her then.”
“If we find her,” Dale repeated doubtfully.
Later Peter gave Judy the address and telephone number of the hotel where he was staying. He would be either there or at the police station in case she needed him.
“If I do call you,” Judy promised, with an attempt at lightness, “you may be sure that I’m in trouble because it’s really your place to call me.”
No matter what happens the trivialities of life must go on. Food must be cooked and eaten, no matter how dry it tastes. Work must be done. Judy knew that and dragged her tired body out of bed. She dressed and went down into the kitchen where Mary made coffee and brought out the toaster. Pauline had left for school, she said. Would Judy mind the toast herself?
She nodded, staring at the coffeepot and wondering if Irene would ever sit across the breakfast table and drink coffee with her again. She let the toast burn and threw it away. Then she put on a second piece, watched it until it turned golden brown and flipped it over.
The doorbell rang!
Always, when the doorbell rang, there came that sudden exaltation. It might be news of Irene! Peter might have found her! With each new disappointment Judy’s hopes for Irene’s safe return sank lower.
This time it was not Peter. It was Arthur Farringdon-Pett, the young pilot-engineer, who owned his own airplane and had taken Judy for a never-to-be-forgotten ride far above the beautiful St. Lawrence River. Judy’s brother, Horace, stood in the doorway beside him, and both of them looked as if they had not slept for a week. Horace’s usually sleek hair was disordered and Arthur needed a shave. He was the first to speak.
“Any news of Irene?”
“Didn’t you bring any?” she asked. And before they could answer she went on saying how sure she was that they must have news or they wouldn’t have flown all the way to New York. She could tell they had been flying as they were still dressed for it.
“We were in too much of a hurry to bother changing these togs at the hangar where I left the plane,” Arthur explained.
“That’s all right,” Judy murmured, trying to shake off the queer feeling she had that he was some stranger.
“We do have news,” Horace told her finally, “but, I’m sorry to say, it’s not news of Irene.”
“What is it then?”
“News of her mother. We thought it might help you find her. I mean Irene. Her mother, of course, is dead.”
“I knew that,” Judy said. “But she has relatives. I’m sure your news will help me.” Taking their things, she invited the boys to sit down and share her breakfast while they told her. She poured out the extra coffee Mary had made and pushed her brother into a chair. Arthur found his own and soon all three were seated beside the table. The boys explained their delay.
They had expected to arrive a day earlier but when Horace and Honey called at the sanitarium they found that Mr. Lang was gone. Immediately, Horace telephoned Arthur who agreed to help search for him in his plane. It would have been easy to find him if, as they expected, he had taken the straight road for New York. But his crippled legs gave out and, toward evening, they found him helpless in the edge of a deep wood. Here, while they were waiting for the ambulance to take him back to the hospital, Mr. Lang told his story.
When Tom Lang was a young man, only eighteen or twenty, he had worked as a chauffeur for a wealthy family in Brooklyn. The daughter of the house gave parties, a great many of them, and after the parties Tom would drive the whole crowd of young people home. He never paid much attention to them until, one night, a new girl came to a party. She was different from all the others. She had glamour, radiance, all the qualities a man wants in a girl. But the young chauffeur dared not hope that she would have any use for him. She only came to the one party—like a princess in her golden dress and slippers. He took her home and remembered the house. After that he would drive past it, always hoping that she would see him.
And one day she did! She waved to him from the tower window. Finally he understood, from the motion of her hand, that she wanted to come down—and couldn’t. The door locked from the outside, and her tiny key was of no use from within. Clutching it in her hand, she leaned farther and farther out of the tower window.
Just like the princess in Tom’s old fairy book. He would be the brave knight and rescue her. There was a rope in the car. It had been used as a towing rope but would now serve a nobler purpose.
He swung one end of it up to the tower; he saw the slim white hand reach out and grasp it, the lithe body throw itself over the window sill and descend—slowly, slowly. She was almost to the ground when the rope came loose from where she had fastened it.
She fell!
Quick as a flash, Tom Lang caught her in his strong young arms. That same day he made her his bride. She lived just long enough to bear him a little daughter, the image of herself. Heartbroken, Irene’s father had never spoken of her. But he had saved her golden wedding dress and on Irene’s seventeenth birthday sent it to her with a letter explaining his gift and enclosing the key to her tower room. His Annie had been just seventeen.
“Romantic, wasn’t it?” Arthur asked after Horace had told the story as only a reporter could tell it.
Judy, who had listened to it all without making any comment, admitted that it was the most romantic true story she had ever heard.
“But Mr. Lang didn’t give Irene the name or address,” Arthur said thoughtfully. “He only sent the key to her mother’s room because he wanted her to have it as a remembrance. In fact, he told so little in his letter that it seems impossible—unthinkable—that she could have found her grandmother——”
“Unless she found the same description somewhere else,” Judy interrupted.
“Yes, but where?”
“In her grandmother’s poems. She and I read them together.”
Judy did not add that the manuscripts were now missing and that she felt almost certain that Irene had taken them to help locate her relatives. That knowledge was confined to four persons: Pauline, Dale Meredith, Peter and herself.
The fact that Irene’s grandmother wrote poems surprised Arthur. He had heard the popular song, Golden Girl, but had never connected it with Irene, probably, because he had never seen her in her mother’s golden dress.
“And you say the poet’s name is Glenn?”
“It’s really Holiday,” Judy explained. “She wrote under a nom de plume.”
But the boys couldn’t remember ever hearing the name Joy Holiday. Mr. Lang had called his wife simply Annie.
When Judy had finished a complete account of the police search through Sarah Glenn’s house they were more puzzled than ever. But they appeared to be simply puzzled—not alarmed.
“We’ll find out all about it,” Horace promised, “when we find Irene.”
It was good to hear them saying “when.” It gave Judy new courage. She would need courage to get through that day. She told them her plans. First they were to get in touch with the police to learn what they could of the funeral that had been held in Sarah Glenn’s house. Judy then suggested that Horace and Arthur call on Dale Meredith and ask his advice while she spent a few hours in Emily Grimshaw’s office.
“I’ll be of more use there than anywhere else,” she said. “Besides, it’s my job and I’m being paid for it. Irene comes first, of course. But the police are doing all they can, and if I could see Emily Grimshaw and talk with her—well, I might find out some things that even the police don’t know. We discovered a card on the floor when we searched the poet’s house. It showed that my employer must have attended the funeral.”
Both boys agreed that Emily Grimshaw’s office was the place for Judy. Knowing that there must be stacks of papers for her to read and correct, Judy even consented to their plan that she go to the office at once and await news of Irene there. They would go on to the Parkville police station and telephone her. Peter had gone there and they might meet him.
After giving them explicit directions, Judy walked with them as far as the subway station at Union Square. There they separated, Judy taking the uptown train while the boys boarded an express for Brooklyn.
Horace turned to Arthur and spoke above the roar of the train.
“What puzzles me is how Irene found that house with nothing but a few crazy verses to go by, and I think that Judy knows if only she would tell.”
“She certainly knows something more,” he agreed, “but I’m not worrying. Judy is on the square.”
“I believe she is,” Horace replied, “but what about Irene?”
Just as she had expected, Judy found plenty of work waiting for her. The clerk at the hotel desk gave her a pile of manuscripts left by hopeful young authors. She glanced through these, waiting for the telephone to ring. All of them seemed inexcusably bad. Why, she wondered, did so many people waste their time trying to write when they had no idea of plot construction or character development?... Why didn’t the telephone ring? Peter must have had time to reach the police station.
One of Emily Grimshaw’s old clients came in and offered Judy another book manuscript. This was better than the others. She promised to read it.
“But where is Miss Grimshaw?” the author asked.
“Away,” Judy said briefly. “She left me in charge.”
Cautioning her to take care of the manuscript, the caller left. Judy’s despondent mood returned. It all seemed such a futile undertaking, helping struggling young authors who were trying to write about life when life itself was so much more important—Irene’s life.
At last the telephone rang and Judy recognized Arthur’s voice.
“We just missed Peter. Did he call you?”
“Not yet,” Judy answered.
“Then he couldn’t have heard the latest police report! The man who lets garage space to Jasper Crosby saw him driving out of the garage yesterday, and a girl was with him. It might have been Irene? That was in the morning, an hour or so after you called at the house. We haven’t learned anything else.”
“Nothing about the funeral?”
“We haven’t learned anything else,” Arthur repeated. “Jasper Crosby’s car is still out of the garage but the police have the license number. They’ll be watching for him.”
“Do you think he took Irene—away?” Judy’s voice broke. She knew what might have happened and so did he. It was impossible to talk.
Dale Meredith called up a little later and seemed very hopeful when he learned that Irene had been seen only the day before.
“She’s alive then!” he cried.
“You mean she was alive,” Judy amended gravely. “She must have been in the tower, and I was too frightened to do anything then. Now it may be too late. Jasper Crosby took her away in the car, and there was a funeral since then.”
“I don’t think it was Irene’s funeral. Honestly, I don’t. So keep on hoping and call me as soon as anything new develops.”
Judy promised him that she would and turned to see the door slowly opening.
There stood Jasper Crosby himself!
“Where’s Emily Grimshaw?” he demanded.
It took courage of the highest order for Judy to answer him calmly, in a businesslike voice. But she knew that she must. He must not know that she had ever seen or heard of Irene. She must not reveal that she had ever been near the house with the crumbling tower.
Assuming the manner of a disinterested clerk, she replied, “Miss Grimshaw is away. She left me in charge. What can I do for you?”
“Plenty,” he cried. An angry flush spread over his face. “You can tell me for one thing what happened to my sister’s poetry. The publishers say that they have never seen it.”
Judy pretended surprise. She rose and stood beside the man, her back against the door.
“There must have been some mistake,” she went on. “You can search Miss Grimshaw’s desk yourself and see if the poems are there.”
“Thanks! I will.”
He made a dive for the desk and began turning over papers recklessly, his hawk eyes searching every one.
Judy, with her back still against the door, turned the key in the lock, slowly, cautiously, so that he would not hear. Now she had him imprisoned in the room. He could not escape. But neither could she! For a moment she felt completely at his mercy.
“The poems aren’t here,” he announced in a voice that boded no good for Judy.
Quickly, then, she planned her course of action. She breathed a silent prayer that she might not fail. Aloud she said, “I’ll call Emily Grimshaw and ask her what happened to the manuscripts.”
He muttered something about making it snappy and Judy walked over to the telephone. She began dialing a number. But it was not Emily Grimshaw’s number. It was the number Peter Dobbs had given her!
“Hello!” his voice sounded over the wire.
Judy glanced at Jasper Crosby who stood near the desk. He was watching her like a cat.
“Hello! Miss Grimshaw? This is Judy. Jasper Crosby is here.”
“Who? What?” Peter sputtered.
“Jasper Crosby. He’s here in the office. He wants to know what happened to the poetry. Will you come right over?”
There followed a moment of silence. Jasper’s eyes seemed to be taking an X-ray picture of Judy’s mind. She felt that he must know she had not been talking to her employer. Then Peter’s voice, lowered and tense, “You bet your life I’ll come right over. And I’ll have the whole police force with me. Brave little Judy!”
She replaced the receiver and turned to Jasper Crosby.
“She’ll be right over. Will you wait?”
“Wait nothing,” he muttered. “Why should I wait? Say, who was that you were talking to then?”
“Emily Grimshaw,” Judy lied gallantly.
“Mighty queer. She’s home sick and then you call her up and she promises to get right up and come. Funny sickness, I call it.”
“Who said she’s sick?”
“Well, she took a fainting spell at the funeral yesterday.”
“Whose funeral?”
He detected the anxious note in her voice and became suspicious.
“Nobody’s business whose funeral it was. Emily Grimshaw can tell you. She was there. I’ll be back later to see about the poetry.”
“You’re not going!” Judy cried in alarm as he turned toward the door.
“Why not? There’s nothing to keep me.”
Judy’s thoughts answered him in a whirl. “Oh, but there is, Mr. Crosby. There’s a locked door to keep you, and if you find out that I locked it you will know that I set a trap for you, that I must have known about Irene’s disappearance. You’ll be furious! You may kill me before Peter and the police get here.”
In reality she said, “Please, Mr. Crosby. Miss Grimshaw will be only a minute and I would like to see this misunderstanding about the poetry cleared up.”
“You would, eh? Interested, aren’t you? So damned interested that you go prowling around our house like a thief.”
This startled Judy so much that she could only gasp.
“What’d you want of my sister?” he demanded.
“I wanted to tell her about the poetry,” Judy answered quickly. “You see, it’s—it’s lost.”
“The deuce it is! Then how’s Emily Grimshaw going to help matters by coming over?”
“She may know where it is. She was, well—intoxicated when it disappeared.”
Jasper Crosby gave a dry chuckle. “Eh! heh! She can’t even stay sober at a funeral. I’ll be going now. Got to see a lawyer and sue the old lady for the loss of my sister’s manuscripts.”
“Oh, no! Wait a minute! Miss Grimshaw may have them. In fact, I’m almost sure she has,” Judy cried in a panic. Anything to stall him, keep him talking until help came.
“Then tell her to send ’em to the publishers and make it snappy! I’m going.”
Judy laid her hand firmly on his arm. “You’re not going, Mr. Crosby. You’re going to wait for Emily Grimshaw.”
“Who’s giving orders around here?” he snapped. “I tell you I’m going!”
Wrenching away from her, he bolted for the door.
Judy realized that she had held him off as long as she could. Now if Peter would only come—and come quickly!
Jasper Crosby tried the door. Then he turned to Judy with an oath. “So that’s your game, is it? Well, it won’t work. See? Better give me that key right now, sister.”
“I will not give you the key.”
“Then I’ll take it from you!”
“You can’t!” Judy cried as he lurched toward her. “You don’t know where it is.”
“Then you’ll tell me!” He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her until she felt dizzy and faint. “You’ll tell me, do you hear?”
“I will—not,” she gasped. “Let me go!”
His grip on her shoulders tightened. It hurt. It hurt terribly and Judy wanted to cry out for help. But if she screamed the hotel clerk would force open the door and Jasper Crosby would be free.
“I’ll tell you wh-where the key is,” she managed to say. “It’s—it’s in the small drawer of my desk under that pile of typewriter ribbon.”
He looked at Judy shrewdly. He knew better than that. Judy was not used to deceiving people and her timidity betrayed her.
“You lie!” he shouted. “That key’s on you and I know it. But I don’t need a key. I’ll break down the door!”
“And rouse the whole hotel?” Judy asked quietly.
His hands clutched her throat now. “Then give me the key!”
She could feel it, the cold little key that she had thrust down her neck. It felt colder still when her breath was short. She tried to scream but found she could make no sound. It was then that she thought of his hands on Irene. His relentless hands....