The Silver Shawl (4 page)

At length, he had heard Charity give a soft,
pensive sigh.

“What’s the matter?” he said, looking down at
her. “That sounded almost unhappy.”

“Oh, no…I’m not unhappy,” said Charity,
resting her head against his arm, and looking up at the slate-blue
moonlit sky. “How could I be? But sometimes—sometimes to be happy
like this is almost painful.”

Randall laughed, putting his arm around her
and drawing her closer to him. “Happiness doesn’t hurt. I’ve tried
it, and I know.”

“It isn’t the happiness,” said Charity, a
little smile playing about her lips; the influence of his
personality that she could never resist. “It’s remembering what it
used to be like before, when I had no one to—to really care
anything about me. Life was like that for so long that it makes
now—tonight—seem too wonderful to be true.” Her wide eyes searched
the vista of trees and sky. When she spoke again her voice was
nearly a whisper. “Whenever I see a night like this, I feel that
I’ll never see one like it again.”

“Then don’t remember, if it hurts you,” said
Randall gently.

Charity sighed again. “I don’t always
remember because I want to.”

“It’ll fade after you’ve been happy long
enough, darling. One day those memories will be so far off they
won’t have the power to hurt you.” He looked down into her eyes.
“You believe that, don’t you?”

“I do,” she said.

And then he had put his fingertips under her
chin and lifted her face and kissed her, and Charity had clung to
him as though trying to erase as many memories as possible with one
moment’s bliss.

Randall put his face down in his folded arms
on the kitchen table. He had never been more wrong than he had been
on that summer night. It was memories of happiness that hurt worst,
when the thing itself was torn away from you.

Mrs. Meade sat very still. Her gaze rested
gently on Randall’s tousled brown head, but wisely, she did not
speak. She lifted her head to look away at the kitchen wall, and
for a moment her bright eyes were dim, and old.

Mrs. Meade, childless all her life, was not a
woman who made much of her widowhood, or expounded much on her past
joys or sorrows. Those who did not know her well, or had not the
capacity to know anyone well, might have thought the cheerfulness
with which she went through life was a lack of deeper feeling. But
she still held in her heart, ten years after her last parting with
him, a deep and precious affection for the husband who stared out
of the faded photograph that stood on her bureau. There were
remembrances both bitter and sweet tucked away in the pages of her
own little history, a record not on display for all the world to
read. Hers was a heart that knew many things, and a heart that did
not forget.

Randall slowly lifted his head, and Mrs.
Meade saw that his eyelashes were wet as he blinked unsteadily.

He looked toward her, and she smiled. “You
mustn’t let your mind run away with you,” she said.

Randall shook his head. “She would have told
me,” he said. “She loved me—she
trusted
me. I know that. I
could
feel
it.” His eyes fixed entreatingly on Mrs. Meade’s
gentle, sensible face. “
You
don’t believe it, do you, Mrs.
Meade?”

“No, I do not,” said Mrs. Meade with
emphasis. “Even though I have no real reason to be so sure. I don’t
believe it.”

“Then do you think someone deliberately put
those letters in Charity’s room?”

“How could someone have gotten into Charity’s
room?” said Mrs. Meade. “Even supposing—merely supposing, of
course!—that it was someone who lived in this house, who might have
had a chance to step in unnoticed—the door was locked. The only
person with a spare key was Mrs. Henney, whom I think we can safely
discount! The letters could only have been introduced into the room
after Charity’s disappearance, or she would sooner or later have
discovered them in her bureau drawer. But she locked her bedroom
door upon going out that evening, and it was still locked when we
tried it the next morning.”

“But it had to have been whoever kidnapped
her. That’s what I thought from the first. Charity had the keys to
the house and her room in her bag—they used those to get in.”

Mrs. Meade shook her head. “I don’t think so,
Randall. If it was the kidnapper, they would have had to know all
about this Mary Taylor business well beforehand, which would have
been rather extraordinary.”

“But
someone
put those letters there,”
said Randall doggedly.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Meade. “I think we should
assume that. It would be a little strange, don’t you think—if
Charity really was Mary Taylor—that she should run away to escape
being apprehended, and yet leave such plain evidence of her
identity behind?”

“Good gosh, that’s right!” cried Randall. “I
never thought of that. Didn’t Edgerton see that?”

“I don’t blame him for not seeing it,” said
Mrs. Meade. “He found what he was expecting to find, exactly where
he expected to find it, so of course it all made sense to him. But
still…”

She tapped two fingers thoughtfully on the
edge of the table. “Do you know, I would like to take a look around
that room myself. I don’t know why, but I have a feeling there must
be something…”

“Something Edgerton missed, you mean?”

“No, I don’t think he missed anything. He is,
I think, a very intelligent man. But perhaps there was something he
didn’t know he was looking for.”

She rose from the table, and Randall stood up
too, looking at her with doubtful hope. Mrs. Meade patted his arm
with a reassuring gesture as she stepped past him toward the
kitchen doorway. “I think I shall ask Mrs. Henney if we may use the
key again—just to see…”

* * *

Mrs. Meade looked slowly about Charity’s
room. It was the same as she had seen it many times. Something of
the personality of the girl who had lived there seemed to hang over
it still, lending an intangible soft charm to the plain, sparse
furniture and the few simple decorations. But it was
quiet—pitifully quiet without its occupant.

She turned in a circle, her eyes marking and
considering each object in the room as they reached it. Randall
Morris watched her from a few steps back, and Mrs. Henney stood
clasping her ring of keys in the doorway.

Mrs. Meade’s gaze directed itself
thoughtfully toward the wardrobe, as it had done on the previous
morning. She moved around the foot of the bed and opened the doors.
For a moment she looked at the clothes hanging inside, and then she
turned to look at Randall.

“Suppose for a moment that Mr. Edgerton’s
theory was correct—that Charity left of her own accord, to avoid
meeting him,” she said. “If that was so, when she went somewhere
other than Miss Lewis’ shop that night, she must have met someone,
received a warning or discussed plans—but then she
came back
here
. Two people saw her walking in this direction. If she were
planning to leave town she could only have been coming back here to
gather some of her possessions. But none of her clothes are
missing. That isn’t right. Why didn’t she take them?”

“Because she didn’t come back here. She was
kidnapped,” said Randall.

“Yes…but there is still the question of where
she was, those three hours…” Mrs. Meade was looking down at the
hatbox on the floor of the wardrobe. “Did Mr. Edgerton put
everything back just as he found it, Mrs. Henney?”

“Why, yes—everything exactly. He was very
careful,” said Mrs. Henney mournfully.

Mrs. Meade bent and picked up the hatbox,
moving as if to look underneath it, but something halted her—drew
her attention to the box itself in her hands. She gave it a slight
shake. Turning around, she set it on the bed and lifted the lid.
She took out a small thick bundle of knitted material, and
carefully unfolded it. It fell open in her hands, a light
triangular shawl in a soft shade of green.

Mrs. Meade looked over at the landlady. “Mrs.
Henney—did you put this in here?”

“Why, no, I didn’t,” said Mrs. Henney with a
gasp. “I haven’t touched a thing in this room, not since Miss
Charity left.”

“Was it here when Mr. Edgerton searched the
room?”

Mrs. Henney’s eyes looked as if they could
not possibly grow any bigger. “Why, yes—yes, it was. I saw him open
the hatbox, and look all inside it. He folded it up neatly when he
was done.”

Mrs. Meade looked across the bed at Randall
Morris, the shawl still held up before her. “But this shawl was not
in the hatbox when I looked in the wardrobe yesterday morning. The
box was empty when I lifted it then—I could feel the difference at
once when I lifted it again just now.” She held the shawl out to
the light. “This is the shawl Charity was wearing when she went out
the other night, isn’t it, Mrs. Henney?”

Mrs. Henney could hardly breathe. “The very
same, Mrs. Meade! She always wore it with her green gingham—the
very same color.”

“Then someone put this shawl into the hatbox
between the time I touched it yesterday morning, and the time you
saw Mr. Edgerton examine it today.”

“Someone—in this room? In my house?” shrilled
Mrs. Henney.

“The kidnapper!” said Randall, to whom the
quaking landlady might as well not have existed.

“Of course not,” was Mrs. Meade’s somewhat
surprising answer. “Why would they go to all that trouble when they
could simply keep it with them? Supposing they
were
the one
who put those letters in the drawer—if the shawl was found here
too, it would betray that someone else had been in the room. If
they wished Charity to be identified as Mary Taylor they wouldn’t
want that.”

“Then—it
wasn’t
whoever brought the
letters?” said Randall, who was beginning to flounder out of his
depth.

Mrs. Meade did not answer at once. She moved
slowly around the bed, still turning over the light shawl in her
hands, and stopped by the window. She stood for a moment gazing
through it, but not seeing anything outside.

“No,” she said at last, “it was done by
someone who did not want this shawl found in their possession—and
that person also put the letters in the drawer.” There was an
unusual firmness about her voice as she spoke, and her fingers
tightened on the folds of the shawl in an odd way. “Their reason
for getting rid of the shawl…was strong enough for them to risk its
being connected with the letters.”

“In—in this room? Someone came into my
house?” quavered Mrs. Henney again.

“At night,” said Mrs. Meade. “No one in this
house ever heard Charity come in late at night, did they? They came
in the same way.”

“In my house? At night? How did they get into
my house?” Mrs. Henney was nearly beside herself.

“With Charity’s keys,” said Mrs. Meade.

“But—I thought you said it wasn’t the
kidnapper,” said Randall, staring.

“It wasn’t,” said Mrs. Meade.

The stunned silence that followed this remark
was broken in a wholly unexpected manner.

“I believe I have some errands to run,” said
Mrs. Meade briskly. She laid the shawl across the foot of the bed
and walked straight to the door. “Thank you for the use of the key,
Mrs. Henney.”

She vanished into the hall, and Randall
Morris and the landlady were left staring after her in
bewilderment.

Randall came slowly out into the hall, and
Mrs. Henney followed and locked the bedroom door behind them,
stealing an awed and sympathetic look after the young man. They
were both too amazed by Mrs. Meade’s sudden change in manner, and
the apparently unconcerned way in which she had put the question of
Charity’s fate behind her, to think of their own troubles, grave as
they had seemed a moment before.

Mrs. Meade emerged from her own room,
adjusting her hat. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Henney—I will be back in a
little while,” she said as she started down the front stairs.
Randall trailed after her mechanically, the fog of confused
depression settled about him again.

At the foot of the stairs Mrs. Meade paused
and turned to wait for him. When he joined her she laid her hand on
his arm and beckoned him to bend his head down, and when he did so
she murmured something in his ear. He gave her a quick, startled
look.

Mrs. Meade nodded. “Yes,” she said. “But
don’t make much noise about it, do you understand? Good. Now I must
be going.”

* * *

Mrs. Meade mounted the stairs to the second
floor above Benton’s dry-goods store and rapped at the closed door.
After a moment, the sound of a woman’s footsteps approached from
within and Diana Lewis opened the door.

“Good afternoon, Miss Lewis,” said Mrs.
Meade. “I have a question for you—some work I would like you to
help me with. May I come in?”

Diana Lewis gave a deferential nod and stood
aside for her to enter, and Mrs. Meade stepped into the room. It
was a pleasant place, with long windows admitting the sunlight
through the branches of a tall tree just outside. A sewing-machine
stood in the corner, and by the windows were a sofa and several
chairs for the accommodation of clients. At the far end of the room
a door stood ajar, offering a glimpse of the workroom in back and
the couch that could be made up into a bed at night.

Mrs. Meade had paused and stood looking at a
white silk dress that was displayed on a mannequin near the end of
the front room. The beautiful, intricate beaded embroidery on the
yoke was nearly finished; there remained only some finishing
touches on the sleeves and the flounces on the skirt to
complete.

Diana Lewis shut the door and waited with her
hands folded in front of her. She was a slim, dark girl, with a
rather pretty face, but with the tired eyes and faded complexion
that spoke of ill health and much time spent indoors. But in spite
of any infirmity she was an exquisite seamstress. Charity
Bradford’s was the first wedding-dress she had made in Sour
Springs, and half the female population had already manufactured
errands to her shop in hopes of catching a glimpse of its
progress.