Jane Carter Historical Cozies: Omnibus Edition (Six Mystery Novels)

by Alice Simpson

  The problem lies with me. I’m not looking for any specimen of manhood to marry, reasonably appealing or otherwise. I’ve been married once. There was no happily-ever-after. The last newspaperman I married—Timothy Carter—ended up dead in an ally after coming in between a mafia hitman’s bullet and it’s intended target. Now I’m Widow Carter and intend to stay that way.

  Late last fall, in a moment of weakness, I almost let Jack kiss me, but ever since then, my better senses have prevailed, and I’ve been keeping him on ice. I don’t know how many times during the last few months I’ve turned down invitations to go to the pictures with him.

  “We’re practically the only people aboard who didn’t come with a crowd,” I told Florence, “except for that couple over there.”

  I nodded my head in the direction of a young man and girl who slowly paced the deck. Earlier in the evening, their peculiar actions had attracted my attention. They kept strictly to themselves, avoiding the salon, the dining room, and all contact with others.

  “I wonder who they are,” said Florence. “The girl wears a veil as if she’s afraid someone might recognize her.”

  “Yes, I noticed that, and whenever anyone goes near her, she lowers her head. I wish we could see her face.”

  “Let’s wander over that way,” Flo suggested.

  Arm in arm, we sauntered toward the couple. The young man saw us coming. He touched the girl’s arm and, turning their backs, they walked away.

  “They did that to avoid meeting us,” Florence said. “I wonder why?”

  The couple had reached the end of the deck. As the young woman turned to glance over her shoulder, a sudden gust of wind caught her hat. Before she could save it, her cloche skittered dangerously close to the railing.

  Not giving the young man an opportunity to act, I darted forward. I rescued the hat and carried it over to the couple.

  “Thank you,” the girl mumbled, keeping her head lower. “Thank you very much.”

  She hastily jammed the felt hat on her head and replaced the veil, but not before I had seen her face clearly. The young woman was unusually pretty, with large blue eyes, heavily-penciled eyebrows, a smattering of freckles and a smoothly brushed black bob—an unusual combination of coloring.

  “This is certainly a miserable night,” I remarked, hoping to start a conversation.

  “Sure is,” replied the young man as he tipped his hat and steered his companion away from me.

  I returned to where Flo stood a few yards away.

  “Did you get a good look at them?” she asked.

  “Yes, but I’ve never seen either of them before.”

  “They wouldn’t talk?”

  “No, and the girl lowered her veil as soon as she could.”

  “Perhaps she’s a movie actress traveling in disguise,” Flo suggested.

  Flo is obsessed with Hollywood. She subscribes to six different motion picture magazines and reads them religiously from cover-to-cover. She sees every movie that’s showing at the Pink Lotus Theater at least three times during its run—seven or eight times if it’s staring Rudolph Valentino. Flo swears that the only reason she and Mr. Valentino are not installed in a bungalow in Hollywood Hills, complete with three children—two boys and a girl, plus a Yorkshire terrier named Rufus—is that Mr. Valentino has not had the privilege of meeting her yet.

  In real life, I suspect that Flo has set her sights considerably closer to earth. Shep Murphy, an old friend of mine and another member of my father’s newspaper staff, buzzes around Florence from time-to-time, but whenever I bring Shep up, Flo vigorously denies she has any aspirations in that direction.

  “I don’t think it very likely that a movie actress would be cruising incognito on the Grassy River,” I told Flo.

  “Then maybe she’s a criminal trying to elude the police.”

  “I fear the mystery of her identity must remain forever unsolved,” I said. “We’ll dock in another five minutes.”

  A dim glow of lights along the Greenville wharf pierced through the fog. The Flamingo, its whistle tooting repeated signals, was proceeding more slowly than ever. Sailors stood ready to make the vessel fast to the dock posts when she touched.

  People began to pour from the salon, and Florence and I joined the throng. Passengers pushed and jostled each other, trying to obtain a position close to the gangplank.

  Suddenly a girl who stood not far from me gave an alarmed cry.

  “My pocketbook! It’s gone!”

  Chapter Two

  Those near the girl expressed polite concern and assisted in searching the deck, but no one found the missing purse. Before the captain could be notified, the gangplank was lowered, and the passengers began to disembark from the steamer.

  The girl, whose pocketbook had been lost, remained by the railing, quite forgotten. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

  “Excuse me,” I said to her, “is there anything I can do to help?”

  Disconsolately, the girl shook her head. She made a most unattractive picture. Her blouse was wrinkled, and her skirt was spotted with an ugly coffee stain. Beneath a dark blue, misshapen roll-brim hat hung a tangle of brown hair.

  “Someone stole my pocketbook,” she said listlessly. “I had twelve dollars in it.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t leave it somewhere?” Florence asked.

  “No, I had it in my hand only a minute ago. I think someone lifted it in the crowd.”

  “A pickpocket, no doubt,” I said. “I’ve been told they frequent these river boats.”

  “Nearly everyone has left the steamer now, so I suppose it would do no good to notify the captain,” said Florence.

  “You have friends meeting you at the boat?” I asked.

  “I haven’t any friends—not in Greenville.”

  “None? Don’t you live here?”

  “No, I’ve been working as a waitress at Little Falls, up-river. The job played out last week. Today I took this boat, thinking I might find work in Greenville. Now I’ve lost my purse, and I don’t know what to do or where to go.”

  “Haven’t you any money?” I asked.

  “Not a cent. I—I guess I’ll have to sleep in the park tonight.”

  “No, you won’t,” I said. I opened my purse, took out a five-dollar bill and thrust it into the girl’s hand. “This isn’t much, but it may tide you over until you can find work.”

  “You are very kind to help me. I’ll pay you back just as soon as I get a job.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” I said. “However, I should like to know your name.”

  “Rosie Larkin.”

  “Mine is Jane Carter, and my friend is Florence Radcliff. Well, good luck in finding that job.”

  “You were generous to give a stranger five dollars, Jane,” Florence said when we out of earshot of Rosie.

  “She needed it.”

  “But that was the last of your money from the final installment of ‘Evangeline: The Horse Thief’s Unwilling Fiancée,’ wasn’t it? What are you going to do if you can’t talk Mr. Pittman into buying another serial from you? Perhaps, calling the hand that feeds you a scurvy knave and a pustule on the face of literature was a trifle unwise.”

  “No,” I said. “Those were perfectly merited criticisms. Where I may have gone a step too far was informing him that I did not wish to see or speak to him again in this world or the next and that my proclamation extended to a prohibition against written correspondence.”

  Mr. Pittman is my editor—or at least he used to be. Mr. Pittman owns Pittman’s All-Story Weekly Magazine which was the source of my meager income before I developed a serious beef with the aforementioned after he authorized unforgivable changes to the final installment of my long-running serial ‘Evangeline: The Horse Thief’s Unwilling Fiancée.’

  “I don’t know how I’m going to keep myself in stockings and foundation garments,” I admitted to Flo, “but bringing in Mr. Herbert Hickenloper—or whatever the dastardly man’s name was—from the adver
tising department to butcher the last installment and make Evangeline marry the evil horse-thief masquerading as the upstanding rancher was unforgivable. Reformed horse-thief, bushwa! Damascus road conversion, phonus bolonus! That horse thief was an unrepentant fiend without a shred of remorse or humanity left in him. At the very least, Mr. Franklin Funkhouser, junior advertising copywriter—or whoever it was ended up putting those disgraceful words down on paper—should at least have allowed Evangeline to end up with the worthy hero. After all, the man had endured being unjustly framed as the real horse-thief for the last One-thousand forty-seven and three quarters column inches. After the hero lost his right arm rescuing the heroine from a pack of ravening wolves, that’s the least that could have been done for him.”

  “But in your original manuscript you didn’t let the hero get the girl, either,” Flo pointed out. “That’s what led to Mr. Pittman’s order to alter your final installment in the first place, and I can’t say I entirely blame him. It was supposed to be a romance. Somebody was supposed to get the girl.”

  “Why?” I said. “I gave them a bittersweet but dignified farewell. The dastardly villain was vanquished, Evangeline’s stern and dimwitted Victorian father was duly chastened and rebuked, and the one-armed cowboy hero was fully vindicated and looking forward to a promising career in the United States Senate representing the great state of Montana. Most importantly, Evangeline was finally free to follow her life-long dream to become a world-famous mezzo-soprano and tour the opera houses of Europe.”

  “Why couldn’t Evangeline have married the hero and become a world-famous mezzo-soprano?” Flo asked.

  “A one-armed cowboy would have been miserable being dragged all the way across the Atlantic and then all over Europe. He’d miss his cows. His horse would pine away for him, develop equine ulcers and go off her feed. Not to mention that all that ocean-liner and train travel would have given our cowboy hero motion sickness. You remember what happened to him in installment seven when the dastardly villain suspended him upside down by the feet from that tree branch and set our worthy hero to swinging back and forth like the pendulum of a clock.”

  “But was it essential that Evangeline pursue a career as a world-famous mezzo-soprano?” Flo argued. “She could have given it up for love; lots of people give up promising careers for love, well, they do in stories, anyway.”

  “Even if Evangeline had been willing to relinquish her life-long dream,” I insisted, “It still would have been a disaster. Evangeline was temperamentally unsuited to be a politician’s wife. Someday, she might have had to become First Lady, and you know what a thankless job that is. No, they’d have only made each other miserable, in the end. I believe it might even have ended in an acrimonious divorce.”

  Flo just rolled her eyes.

  “If I had the money,” I said. “I’d start my own all-story magazine. I’d specialize in realistic depictions of love and romance.”

  “You mean you’d print more stories where the hero loses essential parts of his anatomy and then ends up broken-hearted and alone?” Flo asked, without cracking a smile. “Besides, I thought you were pinning all your hopes on finding a publisher for your novel?”

  “It’s not essential that the hero gets maimed,” I said. “I merely added that in a fit of pique when Mr. Pittman vetoed my idea of Evangeline fighting off the pack of ravening wolves singlehandedly, armed with nothing but a flaming torch and an improvised dagger fashioned from her corset stays. And yes, I am still optimistic that Litchfield Press will see fit to add Perpetua’s Promise to their literary offerings.”

  “I don’t know where you get these ideas,” said Flo. “By rights, you should have been a suffragette and chained yourself to something.”

  “I was too young to be a suffragette of that ilk,” I pointed out as I scanned the crowd on the dock for my father, who had promised to come with his car to pick up Flo and me. “Instances of toddlers chaining themselves to things in the furtherance of the cause of equal rights for women were, I am told, extremely rare. By the time I was old enough to take an interest in anything of that sort, hunger-strikes were the weapon of choice, and you know very well that missing even a single meal is outside my capabilities.”

  “I don’t know what’s going to become of you, Jane,” said Flo. “I can’t believe you gave away your last five dollars. You may end up on hunger strike, even though women got the vote ages ago already.

  “Piffle! Nobody’s going on hunger strike, least of all me.”

  “Speaking of suffragettes,” Florence said, “did you know that Mrs. Dunst has abdicated her throne as the perennially-elected President of the Daughters of the American Revolution to start a Greenville chapter of the American League of Women Voters? Mother is quite incensed.”

  “Well, your mother would be, seeing how she sedulously canvassed your father’s views before casting her first vote in the last election. I don’t know why she insisted on voting if she was so convinced that women have no place in the political process.”

  “I think Mother viewed it as an opportunity to give father a double degree of influence,” Flo explained. “It was a way of canceling out the vote of one of those ‘flighty, undereducated females’—that was how she put it—who insist on ‘violating the laws of God and nature’ by making up their own minds. Her words, not mine.”

  “I see. Who did your parents vote for?”

  “I’ll not tell you that,” said Flo primly. “Although, I’m sure you know who they didn’t vote for.”

  “Well, Mr. Davis was still in prison for protesting the war at the time. I can’t imagine your parents voting for a socialist jailbird.”

  “Never mind my parent’s political leanings,” said Flo, returning to the previous theme, “What are you going to do about money now that you’ve alienated Mr. Pittman?”

  “Well, I do have a bit put away from Timothy’s life insurance policy, but that’s not to be touched. It’s meant to see me through when I’m an old and infirm widow, not keep me in stockings when I’m a young and spry one.”

  Flo looked at me and sighed. She did not appear reassured.

  “You know Dad bankrolls me, excluding gas-money and personal expenses,” I continued. “I hardly see starvation in my future. Still, my dignity will not allow me to have him keeping me in stockings, too. Perhaps, I shall have to scandalize the Ladies Aid Society by going about bare-legged.”

  Flo did not find the prospect amusing. She spends a considerable sum of mental energy in attempting to anticipate what the Ladies Aid Society—of which her mother is chairwoman—may or may not heartily disapprove of. Apparently, going without stockings, at least in Flo’s mind, would be viewed by the Ladies Aid Society as tantamount to pulling a Lady Godiva.

  “Doubtless you’ll think of something.” Flo sighed. “You always do.”

  “I couldn’t allow the girl to go hungry or sleep in the park,” I said.

  “No, I suppose not.”

  There was still no sign of my father or his car in the milling crowd that had come to meet the boat.

  “Dad must have been detained at the newspaper office,” I told Flo. “I suppose we should wait here until he comes.”

  “Is Bouncing Betsy having a fit of the vapors, again?” Flo asked.

  Bouncing Betsy is my ancient Peerless Model 56. I call her Bouncing Betsy because her suspension is shot to pieces. She seems to spend just about as much time under the care of various local mechanics who, so far, have always managed to nurse her back to health, as she does getting me from point A to point B.

  “Something to do with the carburetor,” I told Flo. “I’m sure Dad will be here soon. Shall we look around while we’re waiting?”

  Florence and I walked a short distance along the dock and halted beside a warehouse. The throng had dispersed, and still my father did not arrive.

  “I hope we haven’t missed him,” I said. “In this fog, one can’t see many yards.”

  We had waited only a few minutes longer wh
en Florence touched my arm.

  “Jane, there she is! Alone, too!”

  “Who, Florence?”

  “That girl whose hat you recovered on the Flamingo. See her coming this way?”

  A young woman was walking hurriedly along the dock. At first glance, I was inclined to agree with Florence that it was the same girl, then I was uncertain. The woman who approached wore an expensive fur and carried a distinctive beaded bag. A tendril of brilliant red hair peeked from under her lavishly-decorated green velvet hat.

  “I don’t believe I ever saw her before,” I said.

  “I guess I was mistaken,” admitted Florence. “She’s much better dressed, and her hair’s the wrong color.”

  The woman passed us without a glance. Hurriedly she walked a short distance down the wharf. When she reached the end of it, she took a package from beneath her coat and tossed it into the water.

  She then turned and retraced her steps to the gangplank of the Flamingo. A moment later, we saw her meet a young blond man in raccoon coat who had emerged from the crowd on the dock. They both got into a gray sedan driven by another young man and drove away.

  “I wonder what she threw into the river? Don’t you think she acted as if she were afraid someone would see her, Flo, although she didn’t pay us any mind.”

  “Yes, I did. Whatever it was, it’s gone to the bottom of the river.”

  We walked to the edge of the dock. Florence had been wrong in her prediction. Instead of falling into the water, the package had caught fast on a jagged dock post.

  “It’s hanging by the string!” I said.

  “You’re right!” said Flo. “But we can’t get it.”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “Please don’t,” pleaded Florence. “It’s too far down. You’ll tumble into the water.”

  “Not if you sit on my heels.”

  I stretched out flat on the dock with Florence holding tight to my ankles. I jack-knifed over the edge, clutching at the bundle which dangled an inch above the water.