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

by Alice Simpson

  Dad ripped open the envelope, and, as he scanned the telegram, his face darkened.

  “Dad, what’s wrong?”

  My father crumpled the sheet into a ball and hurled it toward the waste paper basket.

  “Your aim gets worse every day,” I said, stooping to retrieve the paper. I smoothed it out and read aloud:

  “YOUR EDITORIAL ‘FREEDOM OF THE PRESS’ IN THURSDAY’S EXAMINER THOROUGHLY DISGUSTED THIS READER. WHAT YOUR CHEAP PAPER NEEDS IS A LITTLE LESS FREEDOM AND MORE DECENCY. IF OUR FOREFATHERS COULD HAVE FORESEEN THE YELLOW PRESS OF TODAY WE WOULD HAVE REGULATED IT, NOT MADE IT FREE. WHY DON’T YOU TAKE THAT AMERICAN FLAG OFF YOUR MASTHEAD AND SUBSTITUTE A CASH REGISTER? FLY YOUR TRUE COLORS AND SOFT-PEDAL THE FIELDING BRAND OF HYPOCRISY!”

  “Stop it—don’t read another line!” Dad commanded before I had half finished.

  “Why, Dad, you poor old wounded lion,” I said. “I thought you prided yourself that uncomplimentary opinions never disturbed you. Can’t you take it anymore?”

  “I don’t mind a few insults,” my father snapped, “but paying for them is another matter.”

  “That’s so, this little gem of literature did set you back one dollar and ten cents. Lucky I collected before you opened the telegram.”

  My father slammed his desk shut with a force which rattled the office windows.

  “This same crack-pot who signs himself ‘Disgusted Reader’ or ‘Seth Burrows,’ or whatever name suits his fancy, has sent me six telegrams in the past month. I’m getting fed up!”

  “All of the messages collect?”

  “Every last one of them. That nitwit has criticized everything from the Examiner’s comic strips to the advertising columns. I’ve had enough.”

  “Then why not do something about it? Refuse the telegrams.”

  “It’s not that easy,” Dad growled. “Each day the Examiner receives many ‘collect’ messages, hot news tips from out-of-town correspondents and from reporters who try to sell freelance stories. We’re glad to pay for those telegrams. This fellow who keeps bombarding us is just smart enough to use different names and send his wires from various places. Sometimes, he addresses the telegrams to me, and sometimes to City Editor DeWitt or one of the other staff members.”

  “In that case, I’m afraid you’re out of luck,” I said. “How about drowning your troubles in a little sleep?”

  “It is late,” my father admitted, glancing at his watch. “Almost midnight. Time we’re starting home.”

  My father reached for his hat, switched off the light, locked the door, and followed me down the stairway to the street. At the parking lot opposite the Examiner building, he tramped about restlessly while waiting for an attendant to bring my car.

  “Good thing I’m driving,” I said, sliding behind the steering wheel of my old Peerless. “In your present mood you might inadvertently pick off a few pedestrians.”

  “It makes my blood boil,” my father muttered, his thoughts reverting to the telegram. “Call my paper yellow, eh? And that crack about the cash register.”

  “Oh, everyone knows the Examiner is the best paper in the state,” I said, trying to coax him into a better mood. “You’re a good editor too, and a pretty fair father.”

  “Thanks,” my father said. “Since we’re passing out compliments, you’re not so bad yourself.”

  Suddenly relaxing, he reached out to touch my hand in a rare expression of affection. My father has a reputation for courage and fight, and he has only two interests in life—his paper and me. Scratch that. My father has only three interests in life—his paper, me and Doris Timms.

  Mrs. Timms has been our housekeeper for as long as I can remember. She was the one who nursed my late mother through her long—and ultimately fatal—illness. She was also the one who brought my father and I back from the brink of despair after we lost my beloved mother. In short, although Mrs. Timms’ will never take the place of my late mother, she’s become something like a second mother to me. I love her like billy-o despite her tendency to nag and her constant harping on the finer points of the proper grooming and deportment required—in her view—of a respectable young woman.

  I’m afraid Mrs. Timms has failed miserably in her attempt to turn me into a well-behaved and well-groomed lady, and I fear she’ll never come to terms with my insistence on carrying a cosh and a pocket-knife in my handbag (the former for purposes of self-defense and the latter for purposes of peeling apples and other such sundry little tasks one so often encounters which are made so much easier by carrying one’s own personal cutting implement).

  Last spring, when I returned home one evening hours before expected and found Mrs. Timms and my father canoodling on the couch, they were far more horrified than I.

  When the truth came out, Mrs. Timms took great pains to assure me that they’d only lit a fire under a pot together after my mother had been gone for years. It had never occurred to me to suspect otherwise, but the oh-so-conscientious Mrs. Timms was mortified that I might believe her to be a woman of low morals and no amount of assurance that I couldn’t be happier that my father thought Mrs. Timms was the tree from which his life’s happiness hung could put her mind at rest.

  I looked over at my father sitting in the passenger seat. He looks older when he’s tired. I considered pointing out that if he and Mrs. Timms wanted to enjoy their golden years together as man and wife, they’d best not put it off too long, but instead I said. “Hungry, Dad? I know a dandy new hamburger place not far from here. Wonderful coffee too.”

  “Well, all right,” my father said. “It’s pretty late, though. The big clock’s striking midnight.”

  As we halted for a traffic light, I listened to the musical chimes which preceded the regularly spaced strokes of the giant clock. I turned my head to gaze up at the Moresby Memorial Tower, a grim stone building which rose to the height of seventy-five feet. Erected ten years before as a monument to one of Greenville’s wealthy citizens, its chimes could be heard for nearly a mile on a still night. On one side, its high, narrow windows overlooked the city, while on the other, the cultivated lands of truck farmers.

  “How strange,” I said as the last stroke of the clock died away.

  “What’s strange?” my father asked.

  “Not much, just that the Moresby Tower clock just struck thirteen times instead of twelve.”

  “Bunk and bosh.”

  “Oh, but it did,” I insisted. “I counted each stroke distinctly.”

  “And one of them twice,” scoffed my father. “Or are you spoofing your old Dad?”

  “I am most certainly not.” As I pulled forward, I craned my neck to stare up at the stone tower. “I know I counted thirteen. Dad, there’s a green light burning in one of the windows. I never saw that before. What can it mean?”

  “It means we’ll have a wreck unless you watch the road,” my father said, reaching over and giving the steering wheel a quick turn. “Where are you taking me, anyhow?”

  “Out to Hodges.” Reluctantly I centered my full attention upon the highway. “It’s only a mile into the country.”

  “We won’t be home before one o’clock,” my father complained. “But since we’re this far, I suppose we may as well keep on.”

  “Dad, about that light,” I said. “Did you ever notice it before?”

  My father turned to look back toward the stone tower.

  “There’s no green light,” he said. “Every window is dark.”

  “But I saw it only an instant ago, And I did hear the clock strike thirteen. Cross my heart and hope to die a million deaths—”

  “Never mind the dramatics,” my father cut in. “If the clock struck an extra time—which it didn’t—something could have gone wrong with the mechanism. Don’t try to build up a mystery out of your imagination.”

  The car rattled over a bridge and passed a deserted farm house that formerly had belonged to a strange man named Paul Firth. My gaze fastened momentarily upon an old-fashioned storm cellar w
hich marred the appearance of the front yard.

  “I suppose I imagined all that, too,” I said, waving my hand toward the cement hump. “Mr. Firth never had any hidden gold, he never had a secret pact with tattooed sailors, and he never tried to burn your newspaper plant.”

  “I admit you did a nice piece of detective work when you uncovered that story,” my father acknowledged. “Likewise, you brought the Examiner one of its best scoops by getting trapped underneath an alligator pond.”

  “Don’t forget that old witch doll, either,” I reminded him. “You laughed at me then, just as you’re doing now.”

  “I’m not laughing,” Dad insisted. “I merely say that no light was burning in the tower window, and I very much doubt that the clock struck more than twelve times.”

  “Tomorrow, I shall go to the tower and talk with the caretaker, Sam McKee. I’ll prove to you that I was right.”

  “If you do, I’ll treat to a dish of ice cream decorated with nuts.”

  “Make it five gallons of gasoline to slack the unquenchable thirst of Bouncing Betsy, and I’ll be really interested,” I said, as I affectionately patted the dashboard of my rickety, unreliable and much-beloved Peerless Model 56.

  Bouncing Betsy—so named because her suspension is shot to bits—has recently sprung a leak in her fuel tank, and I’ve not been in a position to take her in for the required first-aid. Now that I’m a bonafide lady novelist with a luxurious advance on her second and yet-to-be-actually written novel, a sequel to Perpetua’s Promise (a timeless tale of love, redemption and containing a thrilling scene in which the heroine engages the dasterdly villain in hand-to-hand combat armed with only a parasol and a trio of hat pins and from which our brave heroine naturally emerges unscathed and victorious).

  Now that I’m a respectable woman-of-letters I can afford to have all Bouncing Betsy’s ailments tended to promptly and thoroughly by any one of a number of reputable Greenville garages familiar with Old Betsy’s various quirks and complaints, but, what with one thing and another, I’ve been too busy to have her perforated fuel tank tended to.

  Soon, an electric sign proclaiming “Fisher’s Cafe” in huge block letters loomed up. I swung into the parking area. We went inside and took a table by the window.

  “Coffee and two hamburgers,” I ordered with a flourish. “Everything on one, and everything but, on the other.”

  “No onions for the young lady?” the waiter grinned. “Okay. I’ll have ’em right out.”

  While we waited, I noticed that another car, a gray sedan, had drawn up close to the building. The two men who occupied the front seat did not get out. Instead they hunkered down in their seats and conversed as they watched someone inside the cafe.

  “Dad, notice those two men,” I whispered, touching his arm and inclining my head toward the window.

  “What about them?” he asked, but before I could reply, the waiter came with a tray of sandwiches.

  “Not bad,” my father said as he bit into a giant-size hamburger. “First decent cup of coffee I’ve had in a week, too.”

  “Dad, watch!” I chided him.

  The restaurant door opened, and a muscular man of early middle age went outside. Immediately, the two men in the gray sedan stiffened to alert attention. As the lone diner passed their car the two lowered their heads, but the instant he had gone on, they turned around to peer after him.

  The man who was being observed so closely seemed unaware of he was being subjected to scrutiny. He crossed the parking lot and vanished down a footpath which led into a dense grove of trees.

  Both men in the gray sedan got out and disappeared into the woods after the man they’d had under surveillance.

  “Dad, I wish I could hear what they said. They look like they are up to no good.”

  “Tough looking customers,” my father agreed.

  “I’m afraid we mean to rob that first man. Isn’t there anything we can do?”

  My father barely hesitated.

  “I may make a chump of myself,” he said, “but here goes. I’ll tag along and try to be on hand if anything happens.”

  “Dad, don’t do it. You might get hurt.”

  My father paid me no heed. He stood up from our booth and crossed over to the swinging doors at the entrance of the café. I watched as he strode across the parking lot and entered the dark woods.

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