Peril at the Pink Lotus: A Jane Carter Historical Cozy (Book One) (Jane Carter Historical Cozy Mysteries 1)

by Alice Simpson

  “It hasn’t been nearly that long,” said Florence. “I hurried as fast as I could. As I was coming back with the police, we’d only gotten as far as the River Road when we happened upon Henderson and that woman Pauline climbing up the river bank. Evidently, there’s another way out of the tunnel which comes out down by the river. Fortunately, Henderson and Pauline never made it to their get-away car. Even so, it was quite a chase on foot, and it took time before they could be subdued.”

  “And to think I missed all the excitement!”

  “I’d say you were in the thick of it yourself,” Dad said. “In another two hours, at the rate the river is rising, you’d have been drowned! When I think of it—”

  “Then don’t think of it. I’m quite all right, I only wish I had worn my rubbers.”

  “I’m sorry it took us so long to reach you,” Flo said. “If I’d known you’d go down into the tunnel on your own—"

  “I didn’t go on my own. Jack was with me, but early on in the proceedings he unwisely allowed Henderson to smash a crockery water jug over his head, and after that, he became rather a spent force.”

  By now, the stretcher cases had been removed, and Flo, Dad, and I made our way down the tunnel.

  I took Dad’s flashlight and searched the floor as we went for my cosh.

  I located it just below the ladder and discretely pocketed it.

  “What was that?” Dad asked.

  “Just a little something I like to keep in my handbag.”

  Dad gave me a very odd look but left it at that, and we emerged into the doll shop.

  The police had sent for an ambulance. I went over to where they’d lain Jack out on the grass. He was conscious now and even gave me a weak smile. The goose egg on his head might easily have come from an ostrich.

  “He should be himself again in a week or so,” one of the policemen assured me.

  Clara seemed little the worse for her experience save that she had a bad cold.

  “We’ll send you to a hospital, too,” Dad told her. “Several days rest will do wonders for you. Then we’ll bring you home with us until you are able to reestablish yourself in the doll shop.”

  “This place will have such dreadful memories—”

  Two ambulances had arrived, and the orderlies were putting Jack onto a stretcher.

  “Oh, we’ll find you a new, better building,” I said.

  “You’ve been so kind to me,” Clara said, tears streaming down her face. “I don’t know how to tell you—”

  “Please don’t try. Just hop into that ambulance and go to the hospital like a good child.”

  “I’ll ride with you,” Flo said and climbed into the vehicle after Clara.

  They had loaded Jack’s stretcher into the second ambulance and were about to close the door.

  “Aren’t you going with them?” Dad asked.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Don’t be coy, just go,” said Dad and gave me a little shove in the direction of the ambulance.

  The ambulance pulled away, and I was in it. Jack looked a sight. In addition to the ostrich egg, he had a blackened and swollen eye and a split lip from when he’d fallen unconscious to the rocky floor of the tunnel.

  “Where did you spring from?” Jack asked, opening his remaining good eye.

  “Oh, around,” I said. “Don’t you think Henderson’s capture might make a good newspaper story?”

  “A good story? It’s tremendous! We’ll scoop every paper in town.”

  “Dad’s speeding toward the Examiner office as we speak. I’m sure he’s already composing headlines.”

  “I can see it now,” said Jack. “A screaming banner that Henderson has been captured, an account of the police battle, then your own signed story of what happened in the tunnel, and the events leading up to Silva’s mysterious disappearance.”

  “Why should I write any story?” I asked. “Why don’t you write it? You were there. You can jot it down from your hospital bed. Use the back of a medical chart or something, and then I can run it down to Dad.”

  “I was just supposed to be the muscle,” Jack reminded me. “It was you who claimed to be the mastermind. Think you can swing writing up the story? We’ll have to get those presses rolling in double-quick time.”

  “Are you and Dad in league with each other?” I protested. “Sometimes it feels like you two make it your sole aim in life to turn me into a reporter, despite my protests.”

  “You and Florence were responsible for Henderson’s apprehension,” Jack said. “You really should be the one to write the story.”

  “Honestly? Then maybe I’ll have money to put Bouncing Betsy on the highways again!” I looked down at my feet. “Plus, it seems I’ve ruined yet another pair of shoes.”

  “Tell your father you want to write the story,” Jack urged. “I’m going to be fine. Just as soon as we get to the hospital, catch a taxi to the Examiner office.”

  The Examiner office was already in a state of feverish activity when I arrived.

  “Great story!” Jones, the rewrites man barked to DeWitt, the city editor. “Leonard Henderson captured by police! We’re going to town on it!”

  “Right!” snapped DeWitt. “Bancroft, get down to the station. Telephone in the latest. We’ll want photographs. Where’s Shep?”

  I went into my father’s office and shut the door behind me.

  “About the Henderson story—” I said.

  Three minutes later my father pushed a typewriter in front of me. He shot a long sheet of yellow copy paper into the roller.

  “No flowery English,” he said. “Write it simple. Shoot straight from the shoulder and shoot fast.”

  I pecked out a sentence, crossed it out, and started again.

  “Never mind the lead,” Dad said. “DeWitt can take care of that.”

  “Dad, this is my story and you said you wanted me to do it. I wish you’d go away and leave me alone. I can do it, but not with you hovering over my shoulder.”

  Dad nodded and went to his own typewriter. The steady tap of the keys gave me the confidence I needed. Soon I was writing as rapidly as my father.

  DeWitt came and looked over my shoulder ten minutes later.

  “Going great!” he said. “I’ll not have to change a word!”

  Before I had finished the story, DeWitt jerked off the first part of it so that he could write the headline. I kept on, and at last, wrote “30” at the end of my copy. The tale was ended in the allotted time.

  “I’m proud of you, Jane,” Dad said. “I didn’t see your story, but DeWitt said it was fine.”

  “You may not like one paragraph.”.

  “Oh, I’ll take DeWitt’s judgment any day, Jane. We scooped the town! Blackburn sent in Henderson’s signed confession from the police station. The man has given up Miss Barnett’s diamond necklace and other stolen loot. He plotted everything just about as you figured it out.”

  “Well, don’t think you’re going to make a reporter out of me,” I said.

  “You’re equal to any man on my staff.”

  “I didn’t realize you’d so yearned for a son, Dad.”

  I couldn’t help the sarcasm. Dad just raised an eyebrow at me.

  “What will happen to Henderson and that woman, Pauline?” I asked Dad.

  “Oh, they’ll both get prison terms. Henderson still has an old sentence to serve.”

  “And Clara?”

  “She’ll not be held. It will be easy to prove she had no real part in the witch doll affair.”

  I rocked back in Dad’s padded swivel chair and sighed.

  “It was all very exciting,” I said, “but I’m not cut out for the life of a detective. It’s too exhausting. After this, I shall rest upon my laurels.”

  When the paper came off the presses and I held the fresh sheet in my hand, I was surprised to see my byline. Someone had changed “Mrs. Jane Carter” to “Miss Hortencia Higgins.”

  “Dad, you shouldn’t have written me up l
ike this!” I protested. “You’ll blow my cover. I’ll be as notorious as Henderson!”

  “But in a slightly different way,” Dad smiled. “Besides, it wasn’t me who changed it.”

  “Who changed it, then?” I demanded. I couldn’t imagine that staid Mr. Dewitt would have done such a thing, and Jack was still at the hospital.

  As far as I was aware, Jack, Mr. Dewitt and my friend Shep were the only others at the newspaper who even knew I wrote for Pittman’s Weekly.

  Dad continued reading until he’d reached the end of the article.

  “What’s all this?” he asked, pointing to the last paragraph.

  “Oh, you mean that paragraph about the witch doll?” I said. “Didn’t I warn you it would finally make the front page?”

  THE END

  CHAPTER 1 of Room Seven: A Jane Carter Historical Cozy (Book Two)

  “You know, I’ve been doing a lot of wondering lately,” I said to my friend Flo.

  We were riding in my ancient Peerless Model 56, otherwise known as Bouncing Betsy. Betsy was bouncing more than usual for the pavement was bumpy in this section of Greenville.

  “Wondering what?” Florence asked.

  “Wondering if maybe there isn’t something wrong with me,” I said. “My appetite doesn’t seem to be normal.”

  “Oh, why beat about the bush, Jane? Why not come right out and admit you’re hungry again? Or maybe ‘again’ is the wrong word. I should have said ‘yet.’”

  “Well, I could do with a lunch. How about Ridley’s? We’re close there now.”

  “Ridley’s would suit me. They have perfectly gorgeous sandwiches. Ham and cheese, olives, lettuce and mayonnaise on a toasted bun—all for a dime.”

  “What, no mustard? Well, that sounds good to me. Suppose we try it.”

  I parked Bouncing Betsy by the curb and dropped two pennies into the parking meter.

  “If we’re not back here before that old machine clocks off an hour, I’ll get a parking ticket,” I warned Flo as we started toward Ridley’s Café. “We’ll have to work fast on those sandwiches.”

  “Oh, your father knows all the policemen in town,” Florence said. “He could get the ticket fixed.”

  “He probably could fix a ticket, but he wouldn’t. You don’t know Dad, Florence. He’ll stoop to all manner of heinous skullduggery to get a scoop, but he draws the line at corrupting the police force.”

  My father, Anthony Fielding, owns the Greenville Examiner, the largest newspaper in the city. He and I often don’t see eye-to-eye, especially when it comes to the newspaper: I have no desire to go into the newspaper business, my literary talents running more to the mass production of lurid serials for Pittman’s All-Story Weekly with titles like “Evangeline: The Horse Thief’s Unwilling Fiancé” and “Marcia Makes Good: A Vamp Finds Her Soul,” all written under the nom de plume of Miss Hortencia Higgins.

  My literary interests may run more to popular fiction, rather than serious journalism, but I do respect how my father—unlike so many newspapermen—keeps to the straight and narrow when it comes to not throwing his weight around with local government.

  It was three in the afternoon, and Ridley’s was quite deserted. Flo and I found a booth in the back and waited for a waitress to bring us a menu.

  “What are you doing the rest of the afternoon?” I asked Flo. “I suppose your mother has marked out a list of chores for you.”

  Even though Flo is a grown-women in her own right—twenty-four years old to be precise—she still lives at home with her parents, the Reverend Sidney Radcliff and Mrs. Radcliff. Flo’s mother takes her role as a minister’s wife very seriously and is involved in every civic organization in the city of Greenville. All this community-mindedness leaves very little time for Mrs. Radcliff’s other major hobby: the dispensing of charity. When it comes to charitable works, they inevitably fall to Flo.

  Flo has a part-time job as children’s librarian at Greenville City Library, but I keep telling her that she should apply for a stipend from the parish, seeing as she spends almost as much time doing good works for members of her father’s church as the Reverend Radcliff spends in composing his weekly sermons.

  “My mother is knee-deep in planning the Daughters of the American Revolution’s annual bazaar,” said Flo, “so she hasn’t had the energy to come up with any little jobs for me to do today.”

  “How fortunate for the Daughters of the American Revolution,” I said. “I hope she doesn’t start another.”

  A waitress in a neat, starched green uniform, had arrived with water glasses and the menu cards.

  “Why, Emma Brown!” I said.

  “Hello, Jane. Jane Fielding?”

  “Jane Carter, actually.”

  “Oh, you got married.”

  “And widowed.”

  “Oh,” said Emma.

  No one ever knows what to say after I tell them I’m a widow. I’m only twenty-four and, outside of wartime, which is now blessedly behind us, no one expects a young woman to be a widow.

  “I didn’t know you worked here,” I said, trying to smooth over the awkward moment.

  “I’ve only had the job a week,” Emma admitted. She spoke quietly and glanced over her shoulder at a large man who stood behind the lunch counter wiping it down with a dirty rag.

  I remembered Emma from high-school, but couldn’t decide where, or even if, I’d run into her since. She was thinner and much older looking than I remembered her. Emma had been one of the brightest girls in our class, I wondered how she’d come to be working as a waitress at Ridley’s.

  “How do you like it here?” I asked.

  Emma glanced again toward man behind the lunch counter.

  “I hate it! Mr. Ridley works me so hard. He never has enough waitresses, and he’s always berating me for mistakes.”

  “Why don’t you leave?” I asked her. “Couldn’t you find other work?”

  “I doubt I could find anything better. I tried everywhere before I accepted this position. It seems no one wants to hire anyone without experience these days.”

  I wondered what she’d been doing in the six years since we’d graduated.

  “You’re living with your parents, I suppose?” Flo said.

  Emma just looked at us. Flo had said something wrong, but I had no idea what.

  “Didn’t you know?” Emma said. “My parents were killed in an auto accident just a month after I left Greenville High.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Florence said. “We hadn’t heard.”

  “Father always was so careless in his driving. I guess the accident was his fault. I—I can’t tell you about it now. Mr. Ridley is watching. Your orders please?”

  “A number three special with hot chocolate,” Florence said.

  “Make mine the same.”

  Emma nodded and disappeared through the swinging doors to the kitchen.

  “No wonder she seems so changed,” Flo said.

  “If the accident was her father’s fault, I suppose not a cent of compensation was paid,” I said. “Poor Emma!”

  “And I’ve always heard this was a hard place to work. I don’t think Emma is strong enough to be a waitress.”

  “No, she’s delicate.”

  Emma returned from the kitchen, carrying a tray of sandwiches and two cups of chocolate. She handled her burden awkwardly. I could see Mr. Ridley watching from behind the coffee urn. While Emma was easing the tray onto a nearby table, he came from behind the counter and said, “Try to work with more speed, Miss Brown. Our customers expect quick service.”

  “Yes, Mr. Ridley,” Emma said and started to place one cup of chocolate at my elbow. In her nervousness, she set it too close to the edge of the table. When she reached across the table again to put down the plate of sandwiches, her arm brushed against it. I saw the cup sliding and tried to rescue it, but I wasn’t quick enough.

  The cup of steaming liquid crashed to the floor, splattering Emma’s shoes and uniform. She was not burned, but the chi
naware smashed into a dozen pieces. Mr. Ridley descended upon us.

  “You’ve broken another dish,” he said. “The second this week.”

  “I—I’m terribly sorry—”

  “It really was my fault,” I said. “My hand brushed against the cup.”

  “I saw exactly what happened,” Mr. Ridley said. “Miss Brown, clean up this mess. The cashier will settle with you.”

  “You’re discharging me?”

  “You are through here,” Mr. Ridley said. “And don’t ask me for a recommendation.”

  Emma went away to the kitchen. When she came back with a cloth to wipe up the spilled chocolate, her face was very white.

  “Don’t you worry, Emma,” Florence whispered. “You’ll find a better job. Mr. Ridley is an old slave driver anyway!”

  Emma didn’t reply. She kept her head bent low as she mopped at the floor.

  “Emma,” I asked, “how long will it take you to change your uniform?”

  “About five minutes.”

  “Then meet us outside as soon as you’re ready to leave.”

  Emma nodded and returned once more to the kitchen. A minute later, Mr. Ridley brought me a fresh cup of chocolate.

  “I am sorry you have been annoyed. Is everything quite satisfactory now?”

  “No, it is not, Mr. Ridley,” I said. “I don’t care for the flavor of your chocolate. In fact, I don’t care for the flavor of anything about this place!”

  I slammed a quarter down on the table, stood up, and walked out of the café.

  Florence followed me, but once we were outside she protested.

  “We might at least have eaten the food since we paid for it,” she said.

  “I’d starve before I’d touch anything at that place, Flo. I’ll never set foot in there again—not after the way he acted.”

  We waited in Bouncing Betsy. Emma came out wearing her hat and carrying a paper bundle under her arm. Florence made room for her in the front seat.

  “It was kind of you to wait.”

  “We’ll take you home,” I said, starting the car.

  Emma said that she lived at a rooming house on Bancroft Street, and I turned the car in that direction.