In the Onyx Lobby Part 45

"No--I suppose not--and yet, why not? A messenger from the bakery people,--any of them,--of course, _could_ be a woman,--one of the maids, or some employee of the house."

"Suppose we go and search."

"Look here, Miss Everett, you are a sensible girl, and I'm going to speak frankly. You know that suspicion now is directed toward the aunt of Mr Bates or----"

"Or my mother! Yes, I do know it, but either supposition is so ridiculous----"

"Wait a minute; no matter how ridiculous a suspicion may seem to the people involved, it must be met and denied or it remains. Now, if suspicion in the two directions mentioned are so absurd, we must prove their absurdity."

"How?"

"Either by making it clear that the suspected women could not have been guilty or, better still, finding the guilty party."

"Let's do that, then! I know my mother had no hand in it,--and I'm equally sure that Miss Prall didn't----"

"But your surety and your certainty are of no evidential value."

"That's why I say let's find the real women! You are a detective just as much as Mr Wise is one,--I'm an interested princ.i.p.al, just as much as Richard Bates is,--can't we do something big?"

"Good! That's the talk! We'll try, at least. Let's go to the Binney rooms now, and see what we can see."

"Small chance of seeing anything in rooms that Mr Wise has already searched."

"Oh, I don't know. Set a woman to catch a woman! If women have sought and found that recipe, we'll find their traces. If it's still there, we must find the paper ourselves."

Zizi looked at Dorcas in surprise.

"You're a trump!" she exclaimed; "good for you! Come along, we'll see what we can do."

The two girls went to the Binney rooms and began their search. But it seemed useless to look through papers in the desk or books on the book shelves after Wise and the other detectives had gone over that ground.

"Was Sir Herbert sly and canny?" asked Zizi, thoughtfully.

"Oh, yes, indeed. He was never caught napping. If he hid that paper, he hid it in a good place. It won't be found easily. We must think of some inconspicuous place,--in the back of a picture, or tacked up above the inside of a drawer."

"Clever girl!" and Zizi's admiration increased. "Here goes, then."

They both looked in all such places as Dorcas had suggested, but with no success at all.

Wise came in while they were thus busy, and smiled approval at the work in progress.

"h.e.l.lo," he said, suddenly, as Dorcas peered behind a picture that was hung low, "the wall paper isn't faded at all in this room. Must be new."

"It is," Dorcas told him. "Sir Herbert had this room repapered when he took the apartment."

"Why?"

"Said he didn't like the paper that was on."

"And yet he could stand that frightful Cubist nightmare on the wall of the bedroom! H'm! Well, well! Very interesting--ve-ry interesting! See, Ziz?"

The black eyes of his little a.s.sistant sparkled. "Of course I do! He had the room papered in order to hide his precious recipe."

"Right! Now, we may have to peel off the paper from the whole room,--for it's not probable he kindly left it folded, in order to help us along."

Dorcas listened with growing surprise. Here was a clever detective, indeed, to jump to this important conclusion,--if it was the true one.

"Let's feel around," Zizi said, and began pa.s.sing her little brown paw over the walls.

"Not in plain sight, Ziz," said Wise, and he started moving out a bookcase to look behind it.

They felt nothing that seemed like a paper behind the wall paper, but if the recipe had been placed without folding at all it would doubtless cause no appreciable extra thickness.

"Maybe he left a memorandum," suggested Zizi, "or even a cryptogram in his desk telling where he hid it."

"Not likely," said Wise. "You see he wouldn't forget and he had no reason to make the thing clear to anybody else."

"Molly said somebody was in here prowling," Dorcas reminded, "so somebody knew there was a paper to look for."

"But all this paper business presupposes the bread or cake people, and they aren't women," objected Wise.

"That paper about the women may be misleading," Zizi said, thoughtfully.

"They may have been back of the murder, or, on the other hand, they may have been the tools of men responsible for the murder."

"But you can't get away from women's connection with the crime. Whether directly or indirectly guilty, they are the people to look for,--they are our quarry, and they must be found."

Dorcas paled and her red lower lip quivered. "Oh, Mr Wise," she begged, "do be careful! It would be so awful if you suspected innocent women just because of the paper! Even granting it is a genuine dying message, it may mean so many things----"

She broke down and Zizi ran to her and threw her aims around the shaking form.

"Come, dear," she said; "you're all unstrung; don't look around here any more now. If there's a paper to be found, Penny will find it."

She led Dorcas away and took her back to her own home, and, urging her to lie down, she soothed the throbbing forehead with her magnetic finger-tips and soon Dorcas fell asleep.

Zizi tiptoed from the girl's bedroom, and encountered Mrs Everett on her way out.

"Do sit down, Miss Zizi," the lady urged. "I'm pining for some one to talk to. Tell me now, do you think Let.i.tia Prall is at the back of all this? Not of course, the actual criminal, but in any way implicated?"

The plump little blonde lady fluttered about and finally settled herself among some cushions on a couch and turned an inquisitive gaze on her visitor.

"What would be her motive?" Zizi parried. "To say she did it for young Bates' sake sounds poppyc.o.c.k to me."

"Me, too," and Mrs Everett smiled. "If she did it, she had a deeper motive than that! A more disgraceful one."

"Meaning?"

"Well?--not to put too fine a point upon it,--breach of promise!"

"Was there such a breach?"