The Oblivious Heiress: A Jane Carter Historical Cozy (Book Four) (Jane Carter Historical Cozy Mysteries 4)

by Alice Simpson

  The Oblivious Heiress

  A Jane Carter Historical Cozy

  Book Four

  By Alice Simpson

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter One of A Country Catastrophe

  In this Series:

  Peril At The Pink Lotus (Book One)

  Room Seven (Book Two)

  The Missing Groom (Book Three)

  The Oblivious Heiress (Book Four)

  A Country Catastrophe (Book Five)

  Robbery at Roseacres (Book Six)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Oblivious Heiress: A Jane Carter Historical Cozy©2018 Alice Simpson. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Inspiration for this series: This series is an adaption of Mildred Wirt’s Penny Parker Mysteries which have fallen into the public domain. Although the author has made extensive alterations and additions to both the plots and characters, readers familiar with Ms. Wirt’s books will recognize many elements of both from the originals.

  Chapter One

  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 foghorn 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 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 advertising 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.”