The Silver Shawl (2 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said, sounding slightly
short of breath. “Mr. Benton and his family are out of town until
tomorrow, and he asked me to lock up the store at night. I hadn’t
opened my shop yet this morning.”

“Is Charity here?” demanded Randall Morris
without preamble.

“Charity?” said Diana Lewis. She sounded
surprised. “No, she isn’t here.”

“What time did she leave last night?”

“She didn’t come here last night. I was
expecting her, but she never came—I supposed she must have
forgotten this once, since she has so much on her mind,” said Diana
with a slight smile.

“She never came?” said Randall, staring at
her unbelievingly.

“No. Why?—is something wrong?”

“She didn’t come back to the house last
night! Mrs. Henney says she started out after supper to come here,
but—she never came back! Excuse me, Miss Lewis—I’ve got to—” And
turning as he put his hat on he ran blindly down the steps.

* * *

In about the time it takes for a fine horse
to travel half a block, Sheriff Andrew Royal was surprised in his
office and in the middle of his breakfast by a distraught young man
who demanded that Sour Springs be turned upside down and vigorously
shaken. Sheriff Royal, once he had got down the half a biscuit with
honey which had prevented his interrupting sooner, made routine
answer. He told Randall for Pete’s sake to calm down, said that
yes, he was
aware
that Randall didn’t know where Charity
was, but it didn’t follow that nobody else did, and reached for his
hat to lend some credence to his assurances that yes, he’d ask
around if anybody’d seen her. As Randall showed signs of giving
vent to a burst of outrage at this innocuous understatement, Royal
gave him (in an annoyed voice) a list of very good reasons why harm
should
not
befall a respectable young woman in a town like
Sour Springs, then jammed his hat over his bushy eyebrows and
stalked out to prove it.

But by midday, a reasoned anxiety was not
only possible, but excusable. After questioning her few closer
friends or acquaintances provided no clue to her whereabouts, a
general alarm was spread that Charity Bradford was missing, and
when it had traveled around the town, the result was that no one
had seen her that day.

Royal, once roused, though in no better mood,
was persistent. His efforts at length turned up two witnesses. One
was a small boy who rightly judged that his being an important
witness in the case of a missing young lady would render
insignificant the fact that he had been sneaking back into the
house at a time he was not supposed to be out of it when he saw
her. He had seen Miss Bradford walking along the street after dark,
but hadn’t gotten close enough to see anything more because he had
hidden to avoid her seeing
him
.

The second witness was an old man, rather
shaky to begin with, whose closest friends were rather doubtful
about his testimony because they knew he was in the habit of taking
a nip of something on chilly evenings. But he was more specific,
and more insistent. He had stepped out on his porch for a moment
that evening, and had seen a young lady with dark hair walking on
the other side of the street. She had on a light dress and a hat
and a shimmery shawl of some kind. He was too far away to see her
face, but yes, he thought it had been Miss Bradford. She was the
right height and she’d been wearing what they said she had on that
night. Sheriff Royal repeatedly cross-questioned him as though with
a perverse desire to find some flaw in his story, but the old man
stubbornly held on to every detail, chilly evening or no. She was
wearing a light-colored dress—yes, it might have been green, but he
wouldn’t say for sure; his eyes weren’t
that
good—and a
silver shawl. Well, not a
silver
shawl, he admitted when
Royal pounced on him, but a silvery one, or shimmery one—something
light like that. That’s what he’d seen and that’s all he could say.
No other girl had admitted she was walking up Main Street at that
hour, had she? So who else could it be? Royal gave him up in
disgust.

The baffling thing about both accounts was
that Charity had been seen walking
up
Main Street—that is,
away from Diana Lewis’ shop and in the direction of Mrs. Henney’s
boarding-house—late that evening, a good three hours after she had
first left Mrs. Henney’s. If she had not been to Diana’s shop,
where had she been during all that time, and what had happened to
her between the spot where the witnesses had seen her and the
boarding-house where she had never arrived?

Randall Morris asked these questions over and
over, in a way that seemed calculated to torture himself and to
drive Andrew Royal to the limit of his already short patience. He
hung over the sheriff’s desk while Royal painstakingly made out a
telegram in between telephoning to the other towns in the county
that
had
a telephone, giving out a description of the girl
and explaining when she had gone missing. Every word he spoke
seemed gratingly halting and deliberate to Randall, and his stub of
a pencil dithering and slow on the paper. When at last the telegram
was completed Randall snatched the paper and raced his horse down
to the depot to hand it over to the telegraph operator there, then
back to the sheriff’s office to announce that he was going to form
a search party to go over the outlying farms and countryside, and
to stipulate that a messenger should be sent to find him if there
was any news of Charity.

When Randall had gone Andrew Royal ran his
bony hands up through his thick gray hair until it all stood wildly
on end, and then flattened it down again lest someone should come
in and see it like that and guess that he was disturbed.

* * *

There was no need to send a messenger after
Randall Morris that afternoon, and no news awaiting him when he
returned to the office at dusk. The search party’s efforts, which
had produced nothing, were halted by the onset of darkness.

Morning brought pale sunshine, but shed no
light on the fate of the missing girl. Randall Morris had not
slept. His face was haggard and marked by strain.

“She must have been kidnapped,” he said,
giving voice for the first time to the thought that had been
haunting him all along.

His eyes were fixed on the sheriff’s face,
but Royal did not look at him. But Randall’s mute demand for
acknowledgement in the silence that followed was more insistent
than his speech, and the sheriff was forced to look up with
exasperation.

Andrew Royal was a man who lived in undying
terror of being thought soft-hearted or sentimental. In
self-defense he cultivated a fierce moustache and a growling,
annoyed manner that was always at its height when he felt most
strongly. As he was most uncomfortable when around highly emotional
people, Randall Morris was the last companion he would have chosen
under these circumstances.

“Someone had to have taken her,” Randall
insisted. “She had no reason to go off by herself, in the middle of
the night, without a change of clothes or even any money with her!
Something’s happened to her, Sheriff.”

“You think I don’t know that?” said Andrew
Royal shortly.

“Can you just sit there and not do anything
about it?” exploded Randall.

“Why don’t you quit talking and start
thinking?” Royal shot back. “If someone took her away from here,
say in a wagon or buggy, by a road, they had all night to travel in
the dark without being seen. If some harm had come to her nearer
here…well, we’d have found some trace by now. But if anybody’s seen
her, or seen them, it’d have to be yesterday in the daylight, and
by that time they’d have been far enough away from Sour Springs
that word about a missing girl hasn’t got there yet. You’ve got to
give time for whoever might have spotted them to hear about it, and
get word back. Eat something,” he ordered, pointing with a
jam-smeared knife to the remains of his breakfast, which he was
eating at his desk according to custom.

“I can’t.” Randall shook his head
miserably.

The sheriff had his mouth full once again, no
doubt requiring some fortification after the longest speech he had
made in the course of a year, when a man with a valise in his hand
came up the street, looked at the sign over the open door and
stepped into the office.

“Sheriff Royal?” he inquired, looking
questioningly at the sheriff as he removed his hat. At Royal’s
brusque nod he came forward and took a card from his waistcoat
pocket. “My name is Edgerton.”

Andrew Royal glanced up from the card to the
newcomer’s face. “A detective?”

Edgerton nodded. He was a slim man of medium
height, with close-cropped gray hair and serious, attentive gray
eyes, dressed plainly but in clothes that spoke subtly of the city.
“I’m hoping that you can provide me with some information.”

“Oh,” said Royal, glancing over at Randall
Morris. Randall, who had been pacing the office when Edgerton
arrived, had come quickly forward with dreading expectancy at his
entrance, but turned away as abruptly when he heard the man’s
words. “Thought you were coming to give me some information. Maybe
you hadn’t heard, but there’s a girl missing from here and I’m
doing my
best
to find her.” He accompanied the emphasis with
another sharp glance in Randall’s direction.

“Missing?” said Edgerton, looking from one to
the other with unexpected attention. “What sort of girl?”

Andrew Royal rapped out the description he
had given many times over the previous morning. “Five-feet-two,
middling-dark brown hair, brown eyes, wearing a green dress and a
hat with flowers and a shawl.”

“Her name is Charity Bradford,” Randall
Morris supplied earnestly.

Edgerton set his valise down on the desk and
stood with his hands resting on it. “A local girl? Has she any
family here?”

Royal jerked a thumb toward Randall. “Just
him. Randall Morris, Miss Bradford’s intended.”

Randall shook hands with Edgerton hurriedly.
“She’s been missing since the night before last, and I’m terribly
worried about her. I know she didn’t go off on her own. It’s not
like her.”

“Then it was entirely unexpected? You hadn’t
noticed anything in her behavior recently—anything that suggested
she might have something on her mind?”

“No. Why?” said Randall, suddenly becoming
aware of the gravity in the detective’s face.

“It’s only, by some coincidence,” said
Edgerton, “that I’m looking for a young woman myself, one who fits
your description of Miss Bradford quite closely. Certain
information in my possession led me to believe that she might be
found here, in Sour Springs.”

“Charity?” said Randall. “I—I don’t
understand.”

“The name of the girl I’m looking for, or at
least the name we know her by, is Mary Taylor,” said Edgerton,
taking some papers from his valise and handing them over to Andrew
Royal, who was listening frowningly. “Miss Taylor is wanted for
questioning in New Orleans, where she was known to be the associate
and accomplice of a man called John Faraday, an accomplished
gentleman burglar and jewel thief. I’ve been on his trail for more
than six years. He had a far-reaching and well-run organization,
one of the curious features of which was that his various
accomplices never had any contact with each other, only with
Faraday himself.

“Miss Taylor’s background is somewhat
vague—she may have been on the stage or she may not, but that is
immaterial—what we do know is that at different times and under
different names she worked as companion to a wealthy elderly lady,
as a fashionable milliner’s assistant and a salesgirl in an
expensive department store. In those capacities she helped to
arrange and carry out a number of successful jewel thefts.”

Edgerton clicked shut his valise. “A little
over a year ago, Mr. Faraday had the misfortune to get himself shot
in a street fracas in New Orleans. Shortly afterwards Miss Mary
Taylor disappeared from view. There is a strong possibility that
she had in her possession the fruits of their latest robbery, an
extremely valuable pearl necklace. Since that time I’ve been trying
to trace her. We’ve also been keeping an eye on several other
people who are suspected of having worked with Faraday in the past.
We know that one of them, who is now living in Denver, recently
received a letter postmarked Sour Springs, Colorado.”

“So that made you think this Taylor girl was
here?” said Andrew Royal, jabbing a long forefinger on his desk to
emphasize the location.

“It was a lead to follow up, at least,
Sheriff. There is just the possibility that some of the others who
worked with Faraday may now be in contact with Mary Taylor. At any
rate, now I think you can understand my surprise at the seeming
coincidence of a young woman who matches Miss Taylor’s description
suddenly disappearing, less than forty-eight hours before I arrived
here in search of her.”

“
Charity?
” repeated Randall Morris.
“It’s—it’s impossible! You don’t know her, Mr. Edgerton, or you’d
realize what you’re saying.”

“How well do
you
know her?” asked
Edgerton, turning to look the younger man in the eye. He spoke in a
straightforward manner, but one not untouched with compassion, as
one who knew what consequences the performance of his duty might
have for others. “What can you tell me about her, Mr. Morris? What
do you know about her background?”

“Just—that she has no family living,” said
Randall, still with incredulity, but the import of his own words
beginning to creep in on him. “She had—she’d been on her own for a
number of years—working for her living. I don’t know how many.”

“When did she come to Sour Springs?”

“A year ago.”