Jeanette sat down behind her desk and gave Mary a grudging smile. “Well, I do love cocoa. And it does sound like you made progress. Much more than I did. All I really found out is that the Sternbergs’ Pixie was the ‘sweetest little moggie the good Lord ever made’ and she just vanished into thin air one night. An account remarkably similar to what happened to Mrs. Fesler’s Princess.”
Mary nodded toward the colored pins. Three of them were scattered around Duluth’s eastern half, and one up over the hill. “You’re hoping to see a pattern of some kind.”
“Correct.”
“They look perfectly random, if you ask me.”
“So it would seem,” Jeanette sighed. “The thefts have nothing to do with geography, I’m afraid.”
Mary stood and went over to examine the map closely. “I wouldn’t get discouraged quite yet, Jeanette. You never know where we’ll uncover something significant. Sometimes it’s just a matter of luck. After you interview Mr. Pettyjohn and Miss Campbell, we’ll review your notes and come up with a plan to canvas their neighborhoods.”
Jeanette crossed her arms again, clearly not on board. “My dear cousin, your father hired me to be your personal secretary and perform all duties therein required. Because John wants me to keep an eye on you as much as possible.” She paused for a few meaningful seconds. “Perhaps I’m being tiresome, bringing this up again, but I did not sign on to be a junior investigator in the field. The application of shoe leather, as you call it, is not my job.”
Mary, showing no reaction, settled back into the chair. Jeanette had a point. But if Moody Investigations had any chance of succeeding, simply having one active agent just wouldn’t do. Some gentle persuasion was required.
“Honestly, Jeanette, I can’t do this without you. I thought I could, but it’s painfully obvious that a second pair of eyes and ears would make all the difference. You’re smart, you’re observant, you’re a quick study, you understand human nature, and you’re solid as the Rock of Gibraltar. I need you in the field as well as the office.”
Jeanette seemed mollified and a little flattered. “Well, let’s take it one day at a time. I will visit with Mr. Pettyjohn and Miss Campbell, and ask them about their blasted cats. But only if you come with me.”
“Was your visit with Mrs. Sternberg that onerous?”
“Of course not. But it was, I think, a waste of time.”
This wasn’t exactly how Mary wanted to conduct the business—two operatives trudging around like Siamese twins—but perhaps Jeanette would come around to see how easy detecting could be with the right methodology. “All right then, we’ll interview the remaining cat owners together.”
“Good. I’ve made appointments with both of them for Saturday. I checked your calendar and confirmed that you have no other engagements.”
Blast it! Mary thought. Now she’d need to get word to Edmond that she had to break their date—afternoon tea at a café east down Superior Street. If she tried to beg off visiting Mr. Pettyjohn and Miss Campbell, Jeanette would surely smell a rat.
“Excellent,” she said, trying to sound like she meant it. “We’ll sally forth together.” She stood and headed into her own office, but turned around. “Now if you don’t mind, I need to write a few letters. Would you please call the O’Toole Stables and ask them to send Jiggs around tomorrow morning?”
“That young fellow’ll be over the moon that you have a lead on his timepiece. What’s your plan, then?”
“Next week I’ll be going to every jeweler I can think of, to ask after young Signor Rossi’s mystery collector. Even if they don’t know him, they might know other collectors who do. I think we can wrap this case up in a timely way.” She gave Jeanette a big smile, but her cousin didn’t appear to get the joke.
Mary plopped down behind her own desk and jotted a brief note to Edmond, with apologies, which she would have Jiggs deliver tomorrow. Then she scribbled out a long missive to her lifelong friend Lillian Burns. Daughter of the MacDougall family’s doctor, Lillian was down in Minneapolis, attending the university with the goal of becoming a physician herself. Mary admired her grit and wanted to hear everything about her first weeks at school. At the end of her note she asked if she might come down for a visit on the weekend after next—which coincided with the school’s homecoming celebrations. Mary explained that she would stay in her father’s apartment in St. Paul. She folded the note, put it in the already addressed envelope, and posted it in the mailbox down on the corner.
When Mary and Jeanette arrived home a bit after five o’clock that afternoon, Emma Beach practically pounced on them.
“That nice Aksel Adamsen stopped by. You just missed him. He asked if you’d made up your mind about joining him on his father’s sailboat Sunday afternoon. I suggested he invite you, too, Mrs. Harrison. He’s very eager to meet you.”
Mary and Jeanette exchanged smiles. Aksel had, in fact, met Jeanette, when she was playing the role of Mrs. Davidson’s peevish serving maid.
“I would love to go sailing,” Jeanette said. “Daniel and I had a little skiff that we took out almost every weekend in the summer. I miss it so much.” Her look suddenly went very, very far away.
Jeanette’s recollection caught Mary off guard. She sometimes forgot that her cousin had once had a great love. By rights, she ought to have a husband and, by now, two or three children—a life far better, no doubt, than serving at the pleasure of a millionaire and his whimsical daughter.
Mary loved sailing, too. She and Jim had spent years, unsuccessfully, trying to persuade their father to buy a little sloop or something of the sort. Without fail, he retorted that the only kind of boats he’d invest money in were iron ore and lumber steamers. What point, he huffed, is a boat that didn’t make money?
“That does sound delightful,” Mary said. “I’ll give him a call after dinner.”
“And there’s this, as well,” Emma said, handing Mary a little yellow telegram envelope.
Mary tore it open and quickly read the message inside. “From Tena, and I quote: ‘Your father to arrive this weekend can see the storm clouds and hear the thunder hoping to honeymoon in Egypt. Love Tena.’”
“Your aunt is nothing if not plucky,” Emma drolly observed as she left the two of them standing there.
After a light supper and some time perfecting her Haydn on the Chickering grand, Mary said goodnight. She was quite exhausted from all her tramping around. Shoe leather, indeed. Cozy in her room, she crawled into bed and started reading Fergus Hume’s latest novel, The Turnpike House. A few minutes later, her eyes fluttered shut and she didn’t even hear the book fall onto the floor.
She felt fully revived at breakfast the next morning, though Jeanette had already eaten and was back up in her room. As Mary spread butter on her toast, she glanced at the headlines in the copy of the Duluth Herald that Emma had left on the table. Normally, John MacDougall would be hogging the paper, but with him out east, Mary had the world’s headlines all to herself.
As she munched away, she scanned the top of the front page. A bank robbed. The city council debates bonding for a new bridge. President Roosevelt considers action in the long-running United Mine Workers coal strike.
Brushing the crumbs off her fingers, she turned the front page over to look at the bottom half and saw a small headline over a brief item. She gasped, feeling a jolt of electricity run up her spine.
Chapter X
Mary read the little article six times, afraid of missing some key point, then pushed the newspaper aside.
Now the puzzle pieces were starting to come together. Mrs. Ivey’s story of a body washing ashore in St. Louis Bay. Detective Sauer’s hint of an international incident. The distress in the Ostovian community. The interviews conducted by the police among those recent immigrants. The photograph of the dead boy in the Petrescus’ shop.
Mary firmly believed she could be of some help, if only the police would let her get involved. She quickly scribbled a note to Detective Sauer before she
left home.
Mary knew all too well she was persona non grata at Duluth police headquarters. So, as she dropped off her note, she hoped the scarf she was wearing and her pronouncedly slouching posture would mask her identity. No one, it seemed, paid her any attention—the desk sergeant didn’t even look at her as he took the envelope.
When she finally arrived at the office, Jiggs Nyberg was leaning jauntily against the doorjamb.
“You told me to be here at nine sharp, and I been waiting for you. No one home, when I arrived.”
As Mary unlocked the door, she wondered where Jeanette had gotten to. Jiggs swaggered in before her, taking off his cap as he did. Mary sat down behind Jeanette’s desk and Jiggs took the seat opposite
“Well,” she said, “I have good news and I have bad news.”
“What’s that mean?”
“The good news is that the thief sold your watch at a pawnshop in the West End.”
Jiggs’s face lit up. “Did you tell ’em Beansie stole it and that I’m the rightful owner?”
“Yes, I did, and they felt awful about that. Unfortunately, the watch was sold the day it was brought in, to a collector whose name they didn’t know. I’m planning to visit every jewelry store in town to track him down.”
Jiggs deflated. “The fellow’ll say he bought the thing fair and square, and want his money back and…” He gave Mary a desperate look. “…I can’t afford to pay him. And I suppose you’ll want more money, too.”
Mary felt a rush of pity for the motherless kid. “Don’t you worry about it, Jiggs. I mean to persuade the gentleman to do the right thing, and get the watch back at no extra cost to you.” She tilted her head. “As far as my expenses go, there may be a way for you to pay me in kind.”
“Huh?” Jiggs scratched his head.
“I’m in need of a reliable runner, a messenger. You do errands for me when I need them, and I’ll deduct your pay from my bill. After we’re square, I’ll pay you fifty cents per errand in the downtown area. More, if you have to go further.”
Jiggs sat up straight, eyes bright and eager. “I can do that. I know this town like the back of my hand. I been everywhere.”
“We’ll give it a try for a few weeks and see how it goes. Now here is your first job.” She handed him an envelope.
He looked down at it. “Mr. Edmond Roy,” he read. “Oddfellows Hall on Lake Avenue. Sure, I know the place. They had a free Thanksgiving dinner there last year—awful good grub. As much as you could eat. Turkey, ham, gravy, taters, cranberries, rutabagas, bread rolls…”
But Mary’s thoughts were not on Thanksgiving feasts. She just hoped Edmond wouldn’t be too disappointed that she was canceling their date on Saturday. With any luck, though, she would see him the next weekend, if Lillian Burns agreed to the plan Mary had suggested in her letter.
Jiggs stood and put his cap back on. “I’ll get this delivered right away, miss.” He ran out the door, practically knocking over Detective Sauer, who had just arrived.
“Watch it, boy,” the policeman growled down the hallway at Jiggs’s receding footsteps. He came in and glared at Mary.
“What are you doing letting a street ruffian like that in your office? Look away, and you’ll have that fancy new typewriter walk right out the door.”
Mary smiled. “Actually, Detective Sauer, he’s one of our first clients. We’re trying to recover a valuable timepiece for him that got stolen.”
“A waste of time, if you ask me,” the detective huffed. “Now you left a message saying you have something to tell me about this morning’s newspaper headline. Perhaps some insights on the bridge bonding issue before the city council?”
“Very funny.” Mary sat down again and gave him a Cheshire cat smile. “No, I meant another headline a bit lower on the page. The one about the Ostovian prince who drowned in St. Louis Bay. Prince Nicolae Floria.”
The detective sat down and made a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a sigh.
“What’s that, Detective Sauer?” Mary cupped a hand to an ear.
He narrowed his eyes. “I distinctly told you not to go sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. But why do I think you’ve already ignored my advice?”
Mary knew better than to deny it. She held out her hands, palms up. “Here I am, ready to offer you the benefit of my network of contacts in the Ostovian community. The community in which you have been making serious inquiries.” She failed to mention that her network of contacts was limited to a priest’s wife, a shoemaker, and a baker.
The detective leaned back in his chair. “Thank you for your generous offer, but your assistance won’t be required. You’ll be pleased to know that the coroner and the chief of police consider it an open-and-shut case. No signs of foul play, no signs of a struggle, they tell us. A simple drowning. It’s believed that he fell into the water from a boat that came up lake from Cleveland or Buffalo. The Ostovian mission in Washington and the State Department have accepted that conclusion.”
“Who found the boy and how was he identified?” Mary asked.
“Doesn’t hurt to tell you, I suppose. But don’t blab it about.”
Mary nodded.
“A worker at the big lumber mill spotted the body washed up on a sandy patch of shore. When the coroner was examining it, he felt a lump in the hem of the boy’s jacket. Something sewn in. He cut open the seam.”
Mary’s eyes widened. “And what was it?”
“A heavy gold ring. A signet ring with rubies on the upper shanks and an eagle crest on the bezel, in relief.”
“Oh my word! Not something an ordinary boy should have.”
The detective nodded. “To say the least. We were stumped at first. But someone had the bright idea of taking it to Mr. Bernstein, the jeweler on Superior Street. He had a reference book and identified it as the signet ring of the Floria family. The dynasty that’s ruled Ostovia for nearly two hundred years.”
“A matter of international implications indeed! So you must have contacted the State Department immediately.”
“Well, actually, no. We didn’t want to take that action based solely on the ring. For all we knew, the victim might have stolen it from the real prince. That’s when we contacted Father Petrescu, one of the leaders of the Ostovians in Duluth. He had been acquainted with Nicolae’s father, Prince Anton, and knew what the boy looked like. He identified the drowned lad. We photographed his face in the morgue and wired it to the State Department, which confirmed our findings.”
Mary could only shake her head in wonderment. “Well, this is certainly the most significant case I’ve ever been involved in.”
The detective raised his eyebrows. “Pardon me, but this case is closed and you were never involved in it.” He stood and put on his hat. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to some real police work.”
As the detective reached for the door, it swung open and the knob rapped him sharply on the knuckles. Jeanette came in, but stopped in her tracks when she saw him. “Goodness,” she said, “you gave me quite a start.”
The detective stared at her a few seconds. “You ought to be more careful, ma’am, bursting into a room like that. You could knock someone off his pins.” He turned back to Mary. “Remember, stay out of this Ostovian business.”
Rubbing his knuckles he brushed brusquely past Jeanette and out the door, without another word.
Jeanette blinked at the closed door, then back at Mary. “I’ll say it again. That man does not like me. I can’t imagine what I might have done to offend him.”
“Oh, you’re just imagining things,” Mary said, still occupying Jeanette’s chair. She wasn’t about to say why the detective came across a bit wary. Best to let things play out, if they played out. But somehow she doubted that Detective Sauer would over his innate reticence.
“And why did he say ‘stay out of this Ostovian business’?”
Mary sighed. “I guess I just got overly curious about the prince’s death.”
&nb
sp; “That poor boy. What a horrible thing.” Then Jeanette cocked her head. “What do you mean, you got overly curious? For heaven’s sake, Mary, you weren’t trying to involve yourself in the case, were you?”
Mary rolled her eyes. “Don’t be silly. What could I contribute to an international matter like that? By the way, where were you?”
“Well, I just popped next door to the clock repair shop, to ask Mr. Callahan if he knew any watch collectors. He doesn’t, but it turns out he grew up in St. Louis. So we had a good talk about things back home. I do so enjoy getting to know my business neighbors.”
Mary stood. “Speaking of timepieces, I need to visit Mr. Bernstein, the jeweler. I’m going to see if he knows of any watch collectors in town. Now that you’re back, you can take care of office matters.”
Jeanette stepped around the desk and plopped down in her chair. “Well, that’s just the problem. There aren’t any office matters to handle. I’ve done everything that needs doing. No bills to pay. No shelves to dust. Nothing.” She sighed. “I know we’ve only been operating for just a few days, but unless our business triples, I’ll be reduced to sitting here reading the dictionary. Unless…”
Mary blinked at her. “Yes?”
“Well, I have a notion. I could go around to the other businesses in the building, and nearby, and see if they need any typing or stenography. Just what I used to do when I had my own firm.”
Mary had never considered starting a subsidiary of Moody Investigations, but she instantly recognized it for a good idea. Not that she needed the income. It was just that anything that kept Jeanette busy and happy had to be a welcome development.
“A capital idea, Jeanette. If you can fill in the gaps in your schedule and bring in some extra income, go to it, cousin.”
A Fatal Fondness Page 8