AFTER WE’D CALLED THE HOSPITAL YET ONCE MORE AND HEARD that there was no change, I went next door to see how Jane was doing. Really, I suppose, I was restless and wanted to do something, anything. Getting no answer to my knock at the back door, I poked my head in. The dogs, for once, only whined instead of setting up a cacophony of barking.
Jane was asleep in the kitchen rocking chair. She looked, suddenly, very old, and somehow defenseless. I felt like a peeping Tom. She would hate my seeing her without her usual stoic armor. I backed away as quietly as I could, hoping the dogs would stay still, and went back to Alan.
“Sleep is the best thing in the world for her,” he said when I told him.
“Yes, but I’m antsy. I feel like Don Quixote. I’m itching to run off in all directions at once, tilting at whatever windmills present themselves.”
“Well, then, suppose I go get a copy of the letter, and we can worry over that for a while.” So he went over to the police station and came home with not one copy, but two.
We sat down in front of the fire with them. “I can’t believe Derek is letting me look at this,” I said, shaking my head.
“Only tangential evidence, as I said before, love. And don’t forget you have a few special privileges.”
“Wife of VIP. Right.” I grinned at him and stuck out my tongue.
“Ah, a prophet is not without honor save in his own home. All right, let’s see what this can tell us.”
“Read it out loud, Alan. I’m still not too good at English handwriting, and this is old and dirty, besides.”
He cleared his throat. “No return address. No date. Here is the text:
Dear Waffles, Good to get your last letter. Sounds as though things are fairly quiet there, ha-ha. I heard from an old friend of yours the other day, Sam Smith. He’s going on a little trip soon. Do I recall that you used to know some people in the States? He’s going to try to get to Indiana, though travel is difficult these days. Plans to visit some pleasant little towns called Donaldson, Tiosa, Spring Grove, Laketon, and Rolling Prairie. I’ve not beard of any of them, have you? Then it’s on to Mount Auburn—he says be may visit there twice—before he sees Orestes and then rests from his travel in Dabney or Manson. Sounds frightfully dull to me, but if you have friends that way, you might warn them that Sam’s toddling through. They might want to be ready”
Alan stopped reading.
“Be ready for what?”
“I don’t know. The letter ends there.”
“‘Be ready to entertain him,’ I suppose. Well. That surely isn’t very interesting, is it?”
“Dull as ditch water. Which makes one wonder all the more why Bill thought it worth hiding.”
“And worth copying onto a map of Indiana. I
wish
that atlas weren’t lost.”
“I think I brought back the Indiana map we bought when we went to the States for that visit. I’m afraid I haven’t the least idea where it might be, however.”
“I suppose we could order one from W H. Smith or somebody. Or I could get my friend Doc Foley to buy one and send it to me.” I went back to the letter. “‘ … though travel is difficult these days.’ What do you suppose that means?”
“I thought it might refer to the austerity program after the war.” He didn’t need to say which war. To people of our generation, there is only one war. “Do you know about the currency restrictions and so on?”
“Just from old Agatha Christie novels. You were allowed to take only a few pounds out of the country, right?”
“So few that most people couldn’t travel abroad at all, unless they had bank accounts in another country, or wealthy friends.”
“Why, in that case, would an Englishman want to go to all that trouble to visit a bunch of boring places in Indiana? Besides, it doesn’t sound as though he was planning to go and stay with anybody, so how could he possibly have managed the money angle?”
Alan shrugged. “There was a thriving black market, of course.”
“In Europe, probably. But in the wilds of Indiana?” I shook my head. “Anyway, I had another thought. What if the letter means
during
the war? The paper and ink look old and faded enough to date back sixty years or so.”
“But your objections would apply tenfold, a hundredfold. Travel to America in those years wasn’t merely difficult, it was nearly impossible, and wildly dangerous. The U-boats were attacking commercial shipping as well as warships, you know.”
“I was pretty young at the time, but I do read occasionally,” I said pointedly. “Maybe we’re wrong about the time frame. Maybe it was later, in the late fifties or early sixties, and travel was difficult only because money was tight. Look, I’ve just had an idea. We’ve agreed that the letter must be important, somehow, or Bill must have thought it was. Do you suppose Derek and his crew would turn loose of it long enough to have an expert date it?”
Alan ran a hand down the back of his neck. “Dorothy, do try to remember what we’re dealing with here. Officially, I mean,” he added hastily as I opened my mouth to protest. “We have one man dead of apparently natural causes and one attacked, and a couple of items of no value apparently stolen from a museum. When Walter recovers—”
“If
he recovers—”
“All right, if he recovers, he may be able to tell us who his attacker was, and—”
“Alan, I’m sorry to keep interrupting, but you know perfectly well that’s not likely. He may have some brain damage, and even if he doesn’t, he’s almost certain to have amnesia about the events immediately before the blow. Even I know that much about head trauma. And he may not have seen his attacker at all. He was hit on the back of the head, don’t forget.”
“All right, given all that, what I was about to say was that we have a serious but not major crime here. So long as there’s the possibility that Walter may be able to help solve it, the department isn’t likely to spend the money to chase this particular wild goose.” He tapped the letter. “You and I may think there’s funny business going on and this letter’s at the heart of it, but the police operate on evidence, not hunches.”
I am not easily squelched. I sat and thought about that for a while. “All right. Suppose I came up with a way to have it looked at that wouldn’t cost the department anything. Would they allow that?”
“What are you thinking?” he asked, deeply suspicious. “You’re not planning to send the thing to America to some friend of yours, are you? They’d never allow—”
“Of course not. I’m thinking of a friend of mine who works at the British Museum. Charles Lambert, you’ll remember him, he’s been to dinner a time or two. You’ve probably forgotten that he’s an expert on old documents. Really old, I mean, Old Testament and like that. But I’ll bet he’d know somebody who’s an expert on twentieth-century stuff, and I’ll bet he and I between us could get that expert here to look at this. For free.” “Are you, my love, saying that you plan to use your feminine wiles on not one but two men, right under my nose?”
“Well,” I said, batting my eyelashes for all they were worth, “the alleged expert might be a woman, in which case you’d have to use your masculine wiles, wouldn’t you?”
It took a while to hunt Charles down. A transplanted American like me, he came over to work in the museum for a year and never went home. He hides in the warren of basement rooms in the venerable building, and he doesn’t like to be disturbed by the telephone. I had to let my voice quaver quite a little bit to get the museum operator to keep trying, but eventually Charles’s irritable voice came over the line.
“Lambert here. What is it?”
“Goodness, Charles, you sound as though you’ve just traveled through a couple of millennia.”
“I have. I was working. Who’s this?”
“Sorry, it’s Dorothy Martin, and I have a mystery for you.” For Charles had helped me solve the very first problem I’d encountered in Sherebury, years ago, and had found the matter as intriguing as the academic puzzles he solved for a living. I counted on that.
“Oh, well, then!” There was a sound of a chair scraping and a grunt as Charles sat down. “Got an ancient manuscript for me to look at, have you?”
“No, unfortunately it’s quite a modern one. But it’s pretty mysterious, all the same. Who do you know at the museum who can reliably date something written within the last—oh, fifty or sixty years, at a guess?”
“Fifty or sixty years, woman! The ink will still be wet! That’s so easy, there’s no fun to it.”
“Easy for you, maybe. The thing is, I’m involved in sort of an ugly problem here, and I have a letter that I think is important. It isn’t dated, but Alan and I are betting it was written during or soon after the war.”
“About
the war?”
“I don’t think so. The letter is incomplete.”
“There’s a guy here, worked in MI5 during the war and for quite a while after. Documents were his specialty. If your letter is from that period, he’d know right off the bat.”
“I knew you’d know someone. Now, the hitch is, the letter is with the police—”
“Good Lord! Not mixed up in another murder, are you?”
“Not exactly. The thing is, the police aren’t inclined to treat the letter as very important evidence, and Alan doesn’t think they’ll pay to have it dated. I know it’s asking a lot, and I’ve got a nerve, but if I invited you and your friend for dinner one day soon, and we managed to get hold of the original letter—all we have now is copies—do you think he’d be willing to look at it and give an opinion?”
“It wouldn’t be definitive, you know. There should be tests on the paper, the ink, all that.”
“Yes, I know, and I don’t think we’ll be allowed to do that. But I’d like a seat-of-the-pants opinion.”
“Hmm. Do you still have any of that California wine you served me last time?”
“I think we could dredge up a bottle or two.”
“Would you make steak and kidney pie?”
“I would. How about tomorrow night? The pie’s better the second day.”
“I’m free. I’ll have to check with James. It’s only two weeks till Christmas, and he might be busy.”
Christmas! I’d forgotten again. “Do ask him, and let me know If we can’t do it now, I suppose after Christmas would do, but the sooner the better. And of course we’d love to see you,” I added.
Charles’s chuckle came through clearly. “You don’t have to pretend. You don’t want my charming company, you want to pick my brains, and James’s. James Wilson, he is. I’ll call you back.”
I hung up. “He knows someone, and he’ll call back to let me know if they can come tomorrow. He wants steak and kidney pie. I’d better get to the grocery.”
I made a quick list, got my coat and hat, and headed out the door. I had planned to walk—I only needed a few things—but I changed my mind in a hurry. A wicked wind had come up, sending the last of the dead leaves skittering down the street. The sky was the color of pewter, and a few drops of rain were beginning to fall. I went back inside for my car keys and a sturdier hat, and when I came out again, Jane was just coming out of her door.
“I’m going shopping,” I called, shouting against the wind. “Can I drop you someplace?”
She nodded, not bothering to shout back. I backed the car out of the garage and waited while she got in.
“Have you heard—” I began at the same instant that Jane said, “Heard anything from the hospital?”
“Well, I guess that answers that.” I put the car in gear and started down the street. “Did you have a nice nap? I stopped in earlier, but I hated to wake you. You looked so peaceful.”
“Hmph. What people say when you’re in your coffin.”
There wasn’t really any reply to that, was there? I changed the subject. “Where are you headed?”
“Supermarket, same as you. Dogs out of food.”
“I’ll bet you are, too. You haven’t been thinking about food much, these past few days.”
She shrugged.
“Jane, how are you doing, really? I know none of this has been easy for you, and I wish you weren’t so stoic about it.”
She cleared her throat. “Not as bad as you might think. Bill and I—friends. Nothing more, no matter what the gossips said.”
“But you were planning to be married!”
She shrugged again. “Marriage of convenience. He needed a place to live. I was lonely. He was the one insisted on marriage. For form’s sake.”
I tried to readjust my thinking. “But—you were terribly upset when we realized he was missing.”
“Thinking about what might have happened to him. My oldest friend. We’d seen a good deal of each other, these past few years. Remembering the old days. He gave me somebody to look after a bit. I bullied him, but I was—fond of him. Thought all kinds of things when he disappeared. Knowing is better, even …”