The Missing Groom: A Jane Carter Historical Cozy (Book Three) (Jane Carter Historical Cozy Mysteries 3)

by Alice Simpson

  I hesitated, and then took the opposite direction, coming out of the woods at a point directly opposite the drawbridge.

  Gazing far up the river, I could see the white cruiser, flashes of fire coming from the cabin window as those in the boat exchanged shots with the police concealed in the woods. The boat was going to make a run for it, I thought. If only the drawbridge were down.

  I kicked off my shoes and dove into the water, swimming diagonally across the river to take advantage of the swift current. I got to the shallow water and waded ashore through ankle-deep mud. I scrambled up the slippery bank, my wet clothing plastered to my body. It was then that I heard the roar of the cruiser’s motor. In another minute the boat would be at the bridge.

  I reached the gearhouse and groped frantically under the door. Had Thorny failed to hide the key there? No, my fingers seized upon it.

  My hands were shaking as I turned the key in the lock. The door of the gearhouse swung open. I hoped I could remember how to lower the bridge. I could hear the motor launch already moving down the river at full speed. I wished I had a light so that I could see the gears clearly.

  I pulled a lever and the motor responded with a pleasant purr. The power was on, now all I had to do was lower the bridge. I hoped I could remember which lever was the right one. I grasped the one closest at hand and eased it forward. There was a grinding of gears as the tall cantilevers began to move. They were coming down, but far too slowly, it seemed to me.

  The white cruiser continued toward the bridge at full speed. The bridge was lowering, but it was apparent that it would be a matter of inches whether or not the boat would clear. The man at the wheel did not swerve from his course.

  The bridge settled into place. As the crash came, I closed my eyes, and sagged weakly against the gearhouse.

  CHAPTER 25

  Minutes later I was still leaning limply against the building when a convoy of cars drove up to the bridge. Jack, my father, Shep, and a bevy of policemen and government representatives sprang out and ran across the bridge to where I stood.

  “Jane, what happened?” Dad said, hugging me to him. “You’re soaking wet! Didn’t we hear gunfire as we turned in here?”

  Jack was looking at me as if he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to kiss me or punch me. I looked quickly away from Jack’s gaze and waved my hand weakly toward the river below.

  “There’s your story, Dad. Pictures galore. Boat smashes into dangerous drawbridge. Police pursue and shoot it out with desperadoes, taking what’s left of ’em into custody. I’m afraid to look.”

  “And what were you doing while all this was going on?” my father demanded.

  “Me? I was just waiting for the drawbridge to go down.”

  We all moved to the edge of the bridge to watch a police boat come alongside the badly-listing cruiser. Three male prisoners and a girl were being taken off.

  “All captured alive,” Dad said. “Shep, get that camera of yours into action! What happened, anyhow? Can’t someone tell me?”

  I started to explain just what had happened, but at a certain point in the story, I was forced to turn my back on my audience.

  “Excuse me just a minute,” I said and pulled a sodden photograph from the front of my dress. I turned back around and handed the picture to my father.

  “This picture is in pretty bad shape, now,” I said, “but it’s clue number one. It’s a photograph of Miss Furstenberg, and on the back is written, ‘To Father, with all my love.’ I found the picture this afternoon in Room 381 at the Colonial Hotel.”

  “Then you’ve located Furstenberg?” one of the G men demanded.

  “I have. He’s been masquerading as the Furstenberg gardener, coming back here, no doubt, to witness the marriage of his daughter.”

  “We’ll arrest him right away,” said the government man, turning to leave. “Thanks for the tip.”

  “I am confident Miss Furstenberg and her mother had nothing to do with Thomas Atwood’s disappearance,” I went on. “Aaron Dietz plotted the whole affair himself. I guess he must have learned about Furstenberg’s cache of gold while he worked for the man. He believed that Thomas Atwood shared the secret and could tell him where the money was hidden.”

  “You’ve located the gold, too, I suppose,” Dad remarked whimsically.

  “No, Dad, I slipped up there. I thought the gold was in a secret vault under the alligator pool, but I was wrong. I don’t know where it is.”

  “We’ll let the G men solve that mystery when they take Furstenberg into custody,” Dad said. “Our work is cut out for us now. We’ll talk with young Atwood, and rout Miss Furstenberg and her mother out of bed for an exclusive interview.”

  “And this time, I am sure they’ll answer questions,” I said.

  During the next hour, Jack, my father, and Shep set about gathering every fact of interest to the readers of the Greenville Examiner.

  Cybil Furstenberg, overjoyed to find her fiancé alive, posed for pictures with him, and answered all questions save those which concerned her father.

  Not until a telephone call came from the Colonial Hotel, saying that Mr. Furstenberg had been taken into custody, would either Cybil or her mother admit that the man had posed as the gardener.

  “Very well, it is true,” Mrs. Furstenberg acknowledged at last. “James has been trying to avoid government men for over a year. Wishing to return for Cybil’s wedding, he disguised himself as a gardener. Then after Thomas’s disappearance, he remained here trying to help.”

  “And it was your husband who managed to get rid of the alligator?” I asked.

  “Yes, we were afraid police might ask embarrassing questions. James disposed of it to a zoo late yesterday afternoon.”

  “And the cache of gold under the lily pool,” Jack said. “What became of that?”

  “There is no gold.”

  “None at all?”

  “None.”

  “And there never was any?” I was incredulous. “Then why was the vault ever built?”

  “Tell her the truth, Mother,” Cybil urged. “She deserves to know. Anyway, it can do Father no harm, now.”

  “At one time, my husband did have a considerable supply of gold,” Mrs. Furstenberg admitted. “Since he could not trust a bank, he constructed his own vault under the pool and placed the alligator there as a precaution against prying persons.”

  “My father really did nothing so very wrong,” Cybil broke in. “The gold was bought with his own money. If he chose to sell it later at a profit, it was his own affair.”

  “Not in the opinion of the government,” Dad said with a smile. “Not if he never paid income tax on the proceeds of the sale. So, how did your father dispose of it all?”

  “All I know is that he shipped it out of the country months ago, and no one will ever be able to prove anything against him.”

  “My husband is a very clever man,” added Mrs. Furstenberg proudly.

  “That remains to be seen,” said Jack. “I know a number of very clever government men, too.”

  Later, in dry clothing loaned to me by Miss Furstenberg, I motored back to Sunnydale with my father, Jack, and Shep. There we learned that the four prisoners had been locked up in jail, while James Furstenberg was being questioned by government operatives. He readily admitted that he had disguised himself as the gardener, but defied anyone to prove he ever had disposed of an unreported stash of gold.

  We did not wait to learn the outcome of the interview. Instead, Dad telephoned the big story to DeWitt and arranged for complete coverage on every new angle of the case. Satisfied that no more could be learned that night, we prepared to return to Greenville.

  “Aaron Dietz and his confederates ought to get long prison sentences,” I said, “But what will happen to Mr. Furstenberg, Dad? Do you think he will escape punishment as his wife believes?”

  “He’ll get what is coming to him,” Dad replied. “A government man told me tonight that Furstenberg’s income tax reports have been
falsified. And Furstenberg knew they had evidence against him, or he never would have gone into hiding. No, even if it can’t be proven that he disposed of his undeclared gold without reporting what must have been substantial profits, he’ll certainly be fined and given a year or so in prison for tax evasion.”

  “I hope he receives a light sentence for Cybil’s sake,” I said. “Cybil and Thomas Atwood are going to be married tomorrow. They told me so.”

  “There’s a fact we missed,” declared Jack. “Jane is always showing us up.”

  “Oh, I didn’t prove myself so brilliant tonight,” I said. “When I was down in that vault I decided I was a really dumb Dora. If you hadn’t had sense enough to guess where Thomas Atwood and I were being held—well, Dad would have had to adopt a new daughter.”

  “It was easy enough to tell what had happened,” said Jack. “You already told me you thought there was a secret vault beneath the pool. The water had only been running in a few minutes.” He fished in his pocket and brought out a pin which he handed to me. “I also found this, recognize it?”

  “That’s Florence’s cameo pin. She dropped it the day we were on the Furstenberg estate together.”

  “The police gave you full credit for the capture of those men, Jane,” said my father with pride. “You yanked the drawbridge just in time to trap them.”

  “Shep did his share, too,” I said. “He went for the police just as soon as he realized Jack and I had been carried away on the cruiser.”

  “The only trouble was that the cops wasted too much time searching for you down river,” said Shep. “We finally went back to Sunnydale and ran into Mr. Fielding who suggested we come to the estate.”

  “How did you happen to be in Sunnydale, Dad?” I asked.

  “You might know—I was looking for you. Isn’t that my usual occupation?”

  “You’re not angry at me, are you?”

  “No, of course not,” Dad admitted. “You’ve all done fine work tonight. This is the biggest story we’ve run into in over a year! We’ll score a beat on the rival papers.”

  “Then don’t you think Jack and Shep have earned a raise?” I suggested.

  “Yes,” agreed my father absently, “I’ll take care of it tomorrow.”

  “I’ll also have a small bill to present,” I told my father. “There will be several dollars for gasoline, lunches going and coming from Sunnydale, two ruined dresses, a pair of torn silk stockings, and—”

  “That’s enough,” Dad interrupted. “If you keep on listing your expenses, I’ll be broke. You turned out to be an expensive reporter.”

  “I’m not a reporter,” I said, “and don’t you forget it. Just a very highly-paid private contractor. I was worth it though, wasn’t I?”

  “You certainly were, Jane. The Greenville Examiner obtained a smashing story to scoop all the other newspapers, and I’ve got my elusive daughter back again safe and sound.”

  “Dad, will you promise me one thing?”

  “That depends on what you are after,” Dad said.

  “Whenever the Greenville Examiner has a baffling mystery to be run down to earth, will you promise to call in your ace sleuth?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” said Jack.

  “Why not?” I protested.

  “It’s too dangerous,” he said. “You’ve nearly drowned yourself twice just in the last week.”

  “Says the man who manages to get himself knocked senseless with each passing season.” I said it lightly, but I wasn’t really joking.

  I turned to speak to my father, but he was no longer with us. Shep had likewise disappeared. When I turned to face Jack again, he was standing much closer to me than he had been before.

  “Jane—” he said, and reached out his hand to touch my cheek.

  I think he might have been planning to kiss me, but he never got the chance, because just then Shep yelled out from the direction of the car, “You two love-birds coming, or are you angling to get left behind?”

  Jack dropped his hand and turned the color of an over-ripe tomato.

  All the way back to Greenville I sat in the back seat with Shep and stared out at the night sky. The stars had never looked so bright.

  THE END

  Chapter One of The Oblivious Heiress

  A blanket of early spring fog, thick and damp, swirled across the decks of the excursion steamer, Flamingo, which was cautiously plying its course down the Grassy River. Above the steady throb of the ship’s engines, a fog horn sounded a mournful warning to smaller craft.

  “I hope we don’t collide with another boat before we make it to the dock,” my friend Florence Radcliff said as we stood together at the railing.

  “That would be a perfect ending to an imperfect day,” I said, pulling my coat collar more snugly around my neck.

  “An imperfect day? I call it a miserable one. Rain and fog. Fog and rain. It’s made my hair as straight as the shortest distance between two points.”

  “Mine’s as curly as a wooly lamb’s.” I brushed a fog-dampened lock of hair from my eyes. “Well, shall we go inside again?”

  “No, I’d rather freeze than be a wallflower,” Flo said. “We haven’t been asked to dance once this evening. I can understand no man asking me to dance. The foundation of my charm is my sterling character—unlikely to cause a strange man to see me across a crowded dancefloor and experience a lightning-strike epiphany that I’m the oyster’s earrings and the tree from which the fruit of his future happiness hangs. But you, you’re tall and elegant and blond, and that wasn’t even enough to get you a second look.”

  Flo is always gripping about being short and stout, as she puts it, and not having the (supposedly) good fortune of being born blond. I keep telling her that if she wants to be blond so badly she can find her life’s dream at the bottom of a peroxide bottle, but she won’t hear of the notion of bleaching her hair. Flo is the daughter of a prominent local minister, and her mother is a pillar of the community. Flo’s mother nearly had a fit of vapors when Flo bobbed her long brown hair. Who knows what Mrs. Radcliff’s reaction might be to Florence turning towhead.

  Flo has a closet dream of becoming a flapper, or at least of rolling her stockings and having the occasional gasper, but even though she’s the same age as I am, twenty-four and a grown-up woman in her own right, she still bows to the slightest wish of the Reverend and Mrs. Sidney Radcliff—or at least she does when anyone’s looking.

  “Everyone else is dancing because they came with their own friends, Flo.”

  “I’m surprised that Jack didn’t come with us,” said Flo, “or didn’t you invite him? Now there’s a man who’s clearly noticed you’re the tadpole’s teddies.”

  I ignored Flo’s reference to Jack. Jack Bancroft is a reporter for the newspaper my father owns, and although he does show definite symptoms of thinking I’m the caterpillar’s kimono, I do not encourage him. It’s not that I don’t like Jack. He’s a reasonably appealing specimen of manhood—he may be no sheik, but there’s no question that he’s terrific husband material.

  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 the
mselves, 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 girls 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 the 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.