Afternoon Tea Mysteries, Volume One: A Collection of Cozy Mysteries (Three thrilling novels in one volume!)

by Anne Austin

  Mr. Mutchey drew a long breath. In his heart was unmitigated admiration for his colleague’s skill, which seemed to him to fall little short of inspiration. By-and-by, no doubt, he would sing her praises to the first person who came along with a hearty good will; he had not, however, the slightest intention of so singing them in her own ears—excessive praise was apt to have a bad effect on the rising practitioner.

  So he contented himself with saying:

  “Yes, very satisfactory. Now tell me how you hunted the fellow down to his diggings?”

  “Oh, that was mere ABC work,” answered Kristen. “Mrs. Williams told me he had left his place at Colonel James’s about six months previously, and had told her he was going to look after his dear old grandmother, who kept a sweet stuff-shop; but where she could not remember. Having heard that Emmett’s father was a cab-driver, my thoughts at once flew to the cabman’s vernacular—you know something of it, no doubt—in which their provident association is designated by the phase, ‘the dear old grandmother,’ and the office where they make and receive their payments is styled ‘the sweet stuff-shop.’”

  “Ha, ha, ha! And good Mrs. Williams took it all literally, no doubt?”

  “She did; and thought what a dear, kind-hearted fellow the young man was. Naturally I supposed there would be a branch of the association in the nearest market town, and a local trades’ directory confirmed my supposition that there was one at Wreford. Bearing in mind where the black bag was found, it was not difficult to believe that young Emmett, possibly through his father’s influence and his own prepossessing manners and appearance, had attained to some position of trust in the Wreford branch. I must confess I scarcely expected to find him as I did, on reaching the place, installed as receiver of the weekly moneys. Of course, I immediately put myself in communication with the police there, and the rest I think you know.”

  Mr. Mutchey’s enthusiasm refused to be longer restrained.

  “It’s capital, from first to last,” he cried; “you’ve surpassed yourself this time!”

  “The only thing that saddens me,” said Kristen, “is the thought of the possible fate of that poor little Stephanie.”

  Kristen’s anxieties on Stephanie’s behalf were, however, to be put to flight before another twenty-four hours had passed. The first post on the following morning brought a letter from Mrs. Williams telling how the girl had been found before the night was over, half dead with cold and fright, on the verge of the stream running through Craigen Wood—“found too”—wrote the housekeeper, “by the very person who ought to have found her, young Holt, who was, and is so desperately in love with her. Thank goodness! at the last moment her courage failed her, and instead of throwing herself into the stream, she sank down, half-fainting, beside it. Holt took her straight home to his mother, and there, at the farm, she is now, being taken care of and petted generally by everyone.”

  END

  Cozy Mystery Two: Murder at Bridge

  CHAPTER ONE

  Bonnie Dundee stretched out a long and rather fine pair of legs, regarding the pattern of his dark-blue socks with distinct satisfaction; then he rested his black head against the rich upholstery of an armchair not at all intended for his use.

  His cheerful blue eyes turned at last—but not too long a last—to the small, upright figure seated at a typewriter desk in the corner of the office.

  “Good morning, Penny,” he called out lazily, and good-humoredly waited for the storm to break.

  “Miss Crain—to you!” The flying fingers did not stop an instant, but Dundee noticed with glee that the slim back stiffened even more rigidly and that there was a decided toss of the brown bobbed head.

  “But Penny is so much more like you,” Dundee protested, unruffled. “And why should I be forced always to think of you as a long-legged bird, when even our mutual boss, District Attorney William S. Sanderson, has the privilege of calling you what you are—a bright and shining new penny?”

  “I’ve known Bill Sanderson since I was born,” the unseen lips informed him truculently, even as the unseen fingers continued their fiercely staccato typing.

  “Ah! That explains a lot!” Dundee conceded handsomely. “I just wondered, amidst all this bonhommie of ‘Bill’ and ‘Penny,’ why I—”

  “I only call Mr. Sanderson ‘Bill’ when I forget!” the small creature defended herself sharply. “Goodness knows I try to be an efficient private secretary! And I could be a lot more efficient if lazy strangers didn’t plump themselves down in our best visitors’ chair, and try to flirt with me. I don’t flirt! Do you hear?—I don’t flirt with anybody!”

  “Flirt with you, you funny little Penny?” Dundee’s voice was a little sad, the voice of a man who finds himself grievously misunderstood. “I only want you to like me, if you can, and be a little nice to me, for after all I—”

  “Oh, I know!” Penny Crain jerked the finished letter from her typewriter and spun about on her narrow-backed swivel chair to face him. “I know you are ‘Mr. James F. Dundee, Special Investigator attached to the office of the District Attorney,’ and that you have a right to drive me crazy if you want to.”

  “Crazy?” Dundee was genuinely amazed, contrite. “I beg your pardon most humbly, Miss Crain. I’ll go back to my cell—”

  “Your office is almost as big and nice as this one,” Penny retorted, but her sharp, bright brown eyes—really almost the color of a new penny—softened until they took on a velvety depth.

  Dundee did not fail to notice the softening, nor did the little heart-shaped face, with its low widow’s-peak, its straight, short nose, and its pointed little chin, made almost childish by the deep cleft which cut through its obvious effort to look mature and determined, fail to please him any more acutely than on the other days of the one short week he had been privileged at intervals to gaze upon it.

  “But the files, and—other things—are in this office,” he told her, his blue eyes twinkling happily once more.

  “Don’t you dare touch my files again!” Penny cried, springing to her feet and running toward the wall which was completely concealed by drawers, cabinets and shelves, filled with the records of which she was the proud custodian. “That’s why I said just now that you were driving me crazy. Thursday you took a whole folder of correspondence out of the letter files and put it back under the wrong initial. I had to hunt for it for two hours, with Bill—I mean, Mr. Sanderson—gnawing his nails with impatience. He thought I had filed it wrong, and you might have made me lose my job.”

  Unconsciously her slightly husky contralto voice had sunk lower and trembled audibly.

  “I’m awfully sorry. I shan’t touch your files again, Miss Crain.”

  “Oh—go on and call me Penny,” she conceded impatiently. “What do you want now? … And you can get anything you need out of the files if you’ll just put the folder in the bottom drawer of my desk, so that I can file it myself—correctly!”

  “Thank you, Penny,” Bonnie Dundee said gravely. “I’d like awfully to have the complete transcript of ‘The State versus Maginty.’ Mr. Sanderson is determined to get a conviction where our former district attorney most ingloriously failed. The new trial comes up in two weeks, and he wants me to try to uncover a missing link of evidence.”

  “I know,” she nodded, and stretched her short, slender body to pull down the two heavy volumes he required.

  Without a by-your-leave, Special Investigator Dundee resumed his comfortable seat, and laid the first of the volumes open upon his knees. But he did not seem to take a great deal of interest in the impanelling of jurors in the case of one Rufus Maginty, who had won the temporary triumph of a “hung jury” under the handling of the state’s case by District Attorney Sherwood, deposed in November’s election.

  Rather, his eyes followed the small, brisk figure of Miss Penelope Crain, as it moved about the room, and his ears listened to the somehow charming though emphatic tapping of her French heels…. French heels! Hadn’t she been wearing sensible
, Cuban-heeled Oxfords all other days of this first week of his “attachment” to the district attorney’s office? … Cunning little thing, for all her thorniness and her sharpness with him, which he now saw that he had deserved…. Pretty, too…. Damned pretty! … What color was that dress of hers? … Ummm, let’s see … Chartreuse, didn’t they call it? Chartreuse with big brown dots in it. Bet it was sleeveless under that short little jacket of golden-brown chiffon velvet…. By Jove—and Dundee lapsed into one of the Englishisms he had picked up during his six months’ work in England as a tyro in the records department of Scotland Yard, before he had come to Hamilton to make a humble beginning as a cub detective on the Homicide Squad—yes, by Jove, she was all dressed up, for some reason or other.

  “Of course! Because it’s Saturday and you have the afternoon off!” Dundee finished his reverie aloud, to the astonishment of the small person trying to reach a file drawer just a little too high for her. “I mean,” he hastened to explain, “that I’ve just noticed how beautiful your costume is, and found a reason for it.”

  There was sudden color in the creamy face. The French heels tapped an angry progress across the big office, and Penny sat down abruptly in her swivel chair, reached across the immaculate desk, snatched up a morning paper and tossed it, without a glance, in the general direction of her tormentor.

  “Page three, column two, first item,” she informed him ungraciously, and then began to search with a funny sort of desperation for more work to consume her extraordinary energy.

  Bonnie Dundee grinned indulgently as he opened The Hamilton Morning News and turned to the specified page and column.

  “Ah! My old friend, the ‘society editress,’ in her very best style,” he commented as he began to read aloud:

  “‘Mrs. Juanita Selim, new and charming member, is entertaining the Forsyte Alumnae Bridge Club this afternoon, luncheon to be served at the exclusive new Breakaway Inn on Sheridan Road—’”

  “I’ve read it—and I’m busy, so shut up!” Penny commanded, as she gathered up pencils to sharpen.

  Quite meekly, Bonnie Dundee subsided into silent perusal of an item he was sure could have no possible interest for himself, in either a personal or professional capacity, unless Penny’s name was in it somewhere:

  “—after which the jolly party of young matrons and maids will adjourn to Mrs. Selim’s delightful home in the Primrose Meadows Addition.”

  He chuckled, and dared to interrupt the high importance of pointing-up pencils. “I say, that’s funny, isn’t it? … ‘Primrose Meadows Addition’!”

  “I don’t think it’s funny,” Penny retorted coldly. “It so happens that my mother named it, that my father went into bankruptcy trying to make a go of it, and that ‘Mrs. Selim’s delightful home’ was built to be our home, and in which we were fortunate enough to live only two months before the crash came.”

  “Oh!” Dundee groaned. “Penny, Penny! I’m dreadfully sorry.”

  “Shut up!” she ordered, but her voice was huskier than ever with tears.

  Dundee’s now thoroughly interested eyes raced down the absurdly written paragraphs:

  “Although not an alumna of that famous and select school for girls, Forsyte-on-the-Hudson, graduation from which places any Hamilton girl in the very inner circle of Hamilton society, Mrs. Selim has been closely identified with the school, having for the past two years directed and staged Forsyte’s annual play which ushers in the Easter vacation.

  “Indeed it was Mrs. Selim’s remarkable success with this year’s play which caused Mrs. Peter Dunlap, long interested in a Little Theater for Hamilton, to induce the beautiful and charming young directress to come to Hamilton with her. Plans for the Little Theater are growing apace, and it is safe to conjecture that not all the conversation flying thick and fast about ‘Nita’s’ bridge tables this afternoon will be concerned with contract ‘conventions,’ scores, and finesses which failed.

  “Lovely ‘Nita’ was elected to membership a fortnight ago, when a vacancy occurred, due to the resignation of Miss Alice Humphrey, who has gone abroad for a year’s study in the Sorbonne. The two-table club now includes: Mesdames Hugo Marshall, Tracey A. Miles, Peter Dunlap, John C. Drake, Juanita Selim, and Misses Polly Beale, Janet Raymond, and Penelope Crain.”

  Dundee lowered the paper and stared at the profile of District Attorney Sanderson’s private secretary. So she was a “society girl,” a “Forsyte” girl! Was that the reason, perhaps, why she had been so thorny with him, a mere “dick”? Well, he wasn’t just a dick any longer. He was a Special Investigator … A society girl, playing at work….

  But there was more, and he read on:

  “As is well known, the ‘girls’ have their ‘hen-fight’ bridge-luncheon every Saturday afternoon from the first of October to the first of June, and a bridge-dinner, in which mere men are graciously included, every other Wednesday evening during the season. Mr. and Mrs. Tracey A. Miles are scheduled as next Wednesday’s host and hostess.”

  “I take off my hat to your ‘society editress’,” Dundee commented with false cheerfulness, when he had laid the paper back upon Penny’s desk. “She makes half a column of this one item in what must be a meager Saturday bunch of ‘Society Notes,’ then writes it all over again, in the past tense, for an equally meager Monday column…. Like bridge, Miss Crain?”

  Penny snatched up the paper and crushed it into her wastebasket. “I do! And I like my old friends, even if I am not able, financially, to keep up with them…. If that’s why you’ve suddenly decided to stop being—comrades—”

  “Please forgive me again, Penny,” he begged gently.

  “I was born into that crowd, and I still belong to it, because all of them are my real friends, but get this into your thick Scotch-Irish head, Mr. Dundee—I’m working because I have to, and—and because I love it, too, and because I want to earn enough before I’m many years older to give Mother some of the things she’s missing so dreadfully since—since my father failed and—and ran away.”

  “Ran away?” Dundee echoed incredulously. How could any man desert a daughter like this!

  “Yes! Ran away!” she repeated fiercely. “I might as well tell you myself. Plenty of others will be willing to, as soon as they know you are—my friend…. As I told you, my father”—her voice broke—“my father went bankrupt, but before the courts knew it he had sent some securities to a—to a woman in New York, and when he—left us, he went to her, because he left Mother a note saying so. His defrauded creditors here have tried to—to catch him, but they haven’t—yet—”

  Very gently Bonnie Dundee took the small hand that was distractedly rumpling the brown waves which swept back from the widow’s-peak. It lay fluttering in his bigger palm for a moment, then snatched itself away.

  “I won’t have you feeling sorry for me!” she cried angrily.

  “Who owns your—the Primrose Meadows house now?—Mrs. Selim?” he asked.

  “The ‘lovely Nita’?” Her voice was scornful. “No. She rents it from Judge Hugo Marshall—or is supposed to pay him rent,” she added with a trace of malice. “Hugo is an old darling, but he is fearfully weak where pretty women are concerned. Nita Selim had known Hugo in New York—somehow—and as soon as Lois—Mrs. Dunlap, I mean—had got Nita off the train, the stranger in our midst hied herself to Hugo’s office and he’s been tagging after her ever since…. Though most of the men in our crowd are as bad as or worse than poor old Hugo. How Karen keeps on looking so blissfully happy—”

  “Karen?” Dundee interrupted.

  “Mrs. Hugo Marshall,” she explained impatiently. “Karen Plummer made her debut a year ago this last winter—a darling of a girl. Judge Marshall—retired judge, you know—had been proposing to the prettiest girl in each season’s crop of debs for the last twenty years, and Hugo must have been the most nonplussed ‘perennial bachelor’ who ever led a grand march when Karen snapped him up…. Loved him—actually! And it seems to have worked out marvelously…. A baby boy
three months old,” she concluded in her laconic style. Then, ashamed; “I don’t know why I’m gossiping like this!”

  “Because you can’t find another blessed scrap of work to do, you little efficiency fiend,” Dundee laughed, “Come on! Gossip some more. My Maginty case will wait till afternoon, to be mulled over while you’re losing your hard-earned salary at bridge with rich women.”

  “We don’t play for high stakes,” she corrected him. “Just a twentieth of a cent a point, though contract can run into money even at that. The winnings all go to the Forsyte Scholarship Fund. On Wednesday evenings the crowd plays for higher stakes—a tenth—and winners keepers. Therefore I can’t afford to go, unless I sink so low as to let my escort pay my losses—which I sometimes do,” she confessed, her brown head low for a moment.

  “Is this Mrs. Peter Dunlap a deep-bosomed club woman, who starts Movements?” he asked, more to bring her out of her depression than anything else. “Bigger and Better Babies Movements, and Homes for Fallen Girls, and Little Theater Movements?”

  The brown head flung itself up sharply, and the brown eyes hardened into bright pennies again. “Lois Dunlap is the sweetest, finest, most comfortable woman in Hamilton, and I adore her—as does everyone else, Peter Dunlap hardly more than the rest of us. She is interested in a Little Theater for Hamilton, but she won’t manage it. That’s why she got hold of Nita Selim. Lois will simply put up barrels of money, without missing them, and give a grand job to a little Broadway gold-digger. Funny thing is, she really delights in Nita. Thinks she’s sweet and has never had a real chance.”