Jane Carter Historical Cozies: Omnibus Edition (Six Mystery Novels)

by Alice Simpson

  Flo nodded.

  “Do you remember that it had a bit of pasteboard inside the collar?”

  “No.”

  “Well, it did. Look in my handbag, Flo.”

  Flo withdrew the pasteboard ring which had come from the collar of the laundered shirt.

  “It looks very ordinary to me,” she said.

  “Look at what’s written on it.”

  “It has some tiny writing on it, but I can’t read it. Is it Chinese?”

  “I think so,” I said, “most of it is, anyway. But if you look closely, at the beginning of every string of Chinese lettering, there’s one letter in English.”

  Flo scrutinized the pasteboard ring.

  “Nerts!”

  “’Nerts!’ is right,” I said.

  “We should take this to the police,” said Flo.

  “I don’t think they’ll take a pasteboard collar ring very seriously,” I said.

  “But—”

  “I have a better idea,” I said. “Let’s watch the laundry until Ralph and that Sheba of his go out, and then we’ll slip in and take a gander at the place.”

  “They arrest folks for breaking and entering buildings,” Florence said firmly. “Your lovely idea does not appeal to me.”

  “Oh, we’ll take care not to be caught, Flo. You must do it! I’m certain we’ll discover something sensational if we can just get inside that place! Think of whoever wrote that desperate message. Think of poor Mr. Harwood, and that fellow, Merriweather, not to mention Jack. We ought to trace down every possible clue.”

  “Well,” Florence wavered. “I’ll do it, but I don’t like it. That place gives me the heebie-jeebies. Remember that sword?”

  “Oh, it had a blunt edge,” I said. “We’ll be in no danger if we wait until Ralph and Violet go out. I pretty sure neither he nor that girl can so much as boil a pot of water without burning it, so I expect they’ll have to leave to eat sooner or later.”

  “I’m weak minded to agree,” Florence sighed. “But I suppose I’ll have to say yes.”

  Bouncing Betsy was a familiar sight now in White Falls, and no one paid us any attention when I parked her directly opposite the laundry. We called at Old Mansion where we chatted with Emma and Mrs. Fairchild until dusk. Then we returned to the automobile to take up our vigil.

  An hour elapsed. Florence squirmed uncomfortably in the front seat, complaining that our wait was to be a hopeless one.

  “Maybe they won’t even leave the laundry for supper,” she said. “Maybe they’ll just cook up a pot of oatmeal on the boiler in the back room.”

  “Flo, you never were cut out for a detective,” I said. “We may have to wait here half the night, but we’ll finally get in.”

  Florence sighed and slumped down in the seat again. She scarcely glanced toward the shop as the minutes dragged by.

  “There, they’ve turned off the light. They’ll be coming out now.”

  Flo perked up.

  Ralph and Violet emerged from the front door, locking it behind them. Ralph looked up and down the street and then placed the key into a chink in the plasterwork above the door.

  “Very obliging of him,” I said. “Now we won’t need to smash any windows.”

  The pair did not even give Bouncing Betsy a passing glance. They walked rapidly away and soon vanished into the darkness.

  “Now is our chance,” I said. “Come along, Flo.”

  “They may return any minute.”

  “Possibly, but not likely.”

  We walked up to the front of the laundry, and Flo screened my movements while I balanced on a discarded flowerpot and retrieved the key from its hiding place. I unlocked the door and opened it. It locked from the inside, so I replaced the key in its hiding place, slipped through the door after Flo, and turned the bolt from the inside.

  Ralph and Violet might return while we were still on the premises, but they shouldn’t immediately detect anything was amiss.

  We entered soundlessly. I thought the place was empty, but I couldn’t be completely certain. It was gloomy in the interior of the shop.

  “We don’t dare switch on the lights,” I whispered, “but I brought the flash.”

  “Someone might see the light through the windows,” Florence whispered back.

  “I’ll be careful how I use it. Come on, we have no time to lose.”

  In the rear room of the laundry, I turned on the flashlight. There was a table, four chairs, a small stove, ironing equipment, and half a dozen baskets of laundry.

  “Nothing here,” said Florence.

  “We’ll try the basement if there is one.”

  We found a stairway leading down into a dark, dirty hole. At first glance, I thought we were doomed to further disappointment. The room was crowded with wash tubs, boilers and a drying machine, but that was hardly surprising.

  “I don’t know what you expect to find,” Flo said. “But whatever it is, it can’t be here.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “We’re already here. Let’s make a thorough inspection.”

  I moved around the room, investigating every nook and cranny. When I came to a large airing cupboard, I reached up and pulled a strange object off one of the upper shelves.

  “Take a look at this, Flo!”

  I flashed my light into the dark recess, so Flo could see. Three oil paintings, stacked neatly together, their frames removed, were concealed in the airing cupboard. We found six more portraits—far superior to the imitations which had replaced them, stashed in a carton next to the wringer.

  “Well, now we have found something!” Florence admitted.

  “These are Mrs. Fairchild’s stolen pictures, Flo. I’m almost certain of it.”

  “Shall we take them with us?”

  “No, they’re too large to carry. We’ll have to come back for them.”

  “I believe those two have been up to far worse things than stealing a few paintings,” I said. “Now, on to the second floor. That’s where I expect things to get really interesting.”

  We returned to the main floor. I’d seen a narrow staircase at the back of the workroom which must lead to the second floor.

  “Should we really bother with the second floor?” said Florence, as we stood in the back room contemplating the narrow staircase. “I think we’d better go. We already know about the paintings. Whatever the meaning behind that note on that bit of pasteboard, the police will find it.”

  I refused to be talked into leaving. Ignoring Flo, I started up the stairs. When I reached the upper landing, I shot the beam of my flashlight around the room.

  The stairwell opened into what appeared to be an ordinary storage room scattered with boxes and pieces of broken furniture. Against the east side of the windowless room stood a row of shabby wardrobes which took up the entire wall.

  On the outside of one of the wardrobes, a dark cloak and a mask depicting the face of a bird hung from a hook. Someone’s discarded Halloween costume, I guessed.

  It was a small room, and I thought it could not possibly encompass the whole of the second floor.

  On the wall opposite the wardrobes, there was a heavy wooden door constructed of fresh yellow boards. It was mounted on stout hinges and held closed from the outside by a heavy bolt.

  I whispered to Flo to climb up.

  Florence hesitated.

  “Close the door at the bottom of the stairs,” I said. “Then, even if they do come back, it’ll buy us some time, and they’ll not see our flashlight.”

  “Then we’ll be trapped,” Flo protested, but she climbed up anyway.

  “Look at those wardrobes,” I said. “Aren’t they spaced exactly as the four paintings on the east wall of room seven?”

  “I believe they are!”

  A single bulb hung overhead. I handed the flashlight to Florence and went in search of a light switch. I found it, and electric light flooded the room.

  I walked to one of the wardrobes and had just started to open it when Flo said.<
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  “Look at this!”

  She held up an old cake tin.

  “I opened one of the boxes,” she said, “and this was inside.”

  From within the tin, she withdrew a tangle of sparkling jewels.

  “Loot taken from Mr. Merriweather,” I said, “but the pearls seem to be missing.”

  I opened the door of the wardrobe wide. It was empty except for a flashlight lying on the floor of it. It didn’t even contain a shelf. The only thing unusual about it was a small sliding panel, located at eye level, on the back wall of the wardrobe.

  I stepped into the empty wardrobe and slid the panel open.

  “Flaming eyes,” I said to myself.

  “What are you saying?” demanded Florence.

  “Step inside, and you’ll understand,” I said.

  Florence took my place.

  “There are two small slits cut in the wall which exactly fit my eyes,” she said. “I can see right into room seven of Old Mansion!”

  “No wonder Emma thought that the eyes of those portraits seemed alive,” I said. “They were.”

  Florence emerged from the wardrobe.

  “But why didn’t we discover the trick?” she demanded. “I understand now that Ralph or Violet or some other accomplice could stand here and see exactly what goes on in room seven, but why did we never notice the slits in the paintings?”

  “Because they took care of that little detail. If you’ll step back into the wardrobe again, you’ll notice a pair of painted eyes hanging on a little peg. They were in place, but I removed them.”

  “You mean someone fitted canvas eyes into the paintings during the day time, and then when they wished to use the peepholes, simply removed them?”

  “That’s just what I do mean. And did you notice that flashlight stashed in the corner.”

  “Yes, what significance does it have?”

  “I’m not sure, but I believe that light shown upward on the watcher’s face might produce the effect of flaming eyes when viewed at night in a dark room.”

  “But how did Ralph get Mr. Merriweather’s jewels, and the paintings? He can’t have kidnaped three men through these slits in the canvas!”

  “No,” I said, “but the flaming eyes were part of the scheme. Unless I’m mistaken, we’ll find—”

  I broke off. I could hear voices downstairs. I flipped off the light switch, and Florence extinguished the flashlight.

  “The other room,” I whispered to Flo.

  We felt our way to the opposite wall. I located the latch on the heavy wooden door. The bolt slid back easily.

  CHAPTER 24

  I was not nearly as shocked as Flo by what greeted us when I opened that heavy wooden door on the second floor of Sing Lee’s Laundry.

  As soon as I slid back the bolt and opened the door a crack, light flooded out of the opening. I flung the door open and was faced with two Chinese persons.

  There were two prisoners: a young woman about my age and an older gentleman, huddled up in the corner. I thought at first that the man was sleeping, but then he groaned and turned over, and I could see that he’d been badly beaten.

  “Quick!” said the girl, springing to her feet. “Shut the door.”

  She pulled the door closed by fitting her hand under the crack at the bottom, but there was no way of latching it from the inside.

  The girl didn’t ask who Flo and I were or what we were doing there. She motioned to a pile of thin mattresses and bedding stacked in the corner and said, “You’d better hide.”

  Flo and I arranged ourselves as best we could behind the bedding. The girl switched off the light, lay down on the rug, and pretended to sleep.

  We waited in silence for a minute or two before we heard footsteps ascending the stairs.

  “We’ll have to leave the paintings,” I heard Violet say. “Let’s just get the gold and the jewelry and go.”

  “I don’t see why we should leave the paintings behind,” a man’s voice protested. I was pretty sure it must be Ralph. “It’ll only take a few minutes longer to pack them up.”

  “We’re going to get caught,” Violet said. “I told you we should have just killed them all and dumped their bodies in the river.”

  “How was I to know one of them would get away?”

  There were a few minutes of rattling about while Ralph and Violet worked in silence, then we heard footsteps approaching the door of our hideout.

  “Ralph, how could you be so careless!” Violet said from the other side of the door, before flinging it wide open. Light streamed into the room. Flo and I kept our heads down and, judging by the silence, the Chinese girl on the rug continued to pretend she was sleeping. The beaten man moaned from his corner.

  Violet abruptly slammed the door shut again, apparently satisfied that her chickens had not flown the coop. I heard the bolt slide back into place.

  “Did they get away?” Ralph asked. “And it wasn’t me who left the bolt open.”

  “Well, it seems they were too stupid to know the difference, anyway,” said Violet. “What should we do with them?”

  “Leave them where they are,” said Ralph.

  “But, isn’t it rather cruel to leave them like that?” said Violet.

  “We can’t afford for them to talk,” said Ralph. “You want to shoot them now, and put them out of their misery?”

  Evidently, Violet, despite her loose talk of dumping bodies in the river, was not in the mood for homicide, because they departed without bloodshed.

  We waited in silence for several minutes before the young woman got up, switched on the light, came over to our hiding place, and motioned for us to come out quietly.

  She, Flo and I sat on the rug in the middle of the room and looked at each other. We were all prisoners now.

  “Is that your father?” I asked, motioning to the injured man huddled up in the corner.

  “Yes,” she said listlessly.

  “Mr. Sing Lee?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “Did Ralph do that to him?”

  “Ralph and a couple of others,” Miss Lee said. “It was over a week ago, and I’m afraid if I don’t get him out of here soon—”

  “But what happened? How did you come to get mixed up with Ralph and Violet?”

  “My uncle got involved with the opium trade,” said Miss Lee, “and he somehow ended up owing Ralph a large sum of money.”

  “But what did that have to do with your father?”

  “Well, my father and his brother own this laundry together. My Uncle put up most of the money to buy the equipment, and my father and I ran the business.”

  “So, when your uncle didn’t pay up, Ralph came after your father.”

  “Yes. At first, Ralph was intent on collecting on my uncle’s debt. My father didn’t object to continuing to work while Ralph skimmed all the profits, but then Ralph met that man from next door, and they came up with a horrible scheme—"

  “It was you who wrote that note,” I said to Miss Lee.

  “You discovered it?” she asked. “I must have written over fifty of those messages on collar stays, but I guess they were too subtle and no one else noticed.”

  “It was very clever,” I said. “Interspersing an English message asking for help amongst all that Chinese lettering.”

  “What’s that smell?” Flo interrupted.

  Wisps of smoke filtered up through the crack under the door. I suddenly understood the significance of Ralph and Violet’s conversation about the cruelty of leaving Mr. Sing Lee and his daughter locked up in the laundry.

  “They’ve taken the loot and made a run for it,” I said.

  “And they’ve set fire to the building to destroy the evidence!” said Flo, her voice quavering.

  In a few minutes, the entire laundry might become an inferno. I sprang to my feet and dumped water into the basin on the wash stand. I pulled up the small rug which we’d been sitting on and dampened it, then rolled the damp rug up and shoved it into the cr
ack under the door. That would keep out most of the smoke for a while. At least, we wouldn’t suffocate before the flames reached us.

  “Lift me up,” I said to Flo. “Maybe I can get someone’s attention.”

  Flo lifted me up so that I was looking out the room’s single tiny barred window which overlooked the river. Far below, I could see the murky Grassy, flowing tranquilly beneath the stars.

  I distinguished the black outline of a rowboat floating close beside the building. It was Mud Cat Joe—I was almost certain—but could I attract his attention?

  I banged against the window with my fists, so hard I thought the glass might break, but Mud Cat Joe did not hear me. The boat was slowly drifting away. It drifted further and further, but I continued to pound on the glass until it shattered, and I heard the broken pieces splash as they fell into the river.

  I yelled again, but it was too late, Mud Cat was too far away to hear me.

  CHAPTER 25

  There was only one way out now. The inspiration had come to me while I’d balanced precariously on Flo’s shoulders and battered at the window.

  “We’ll have to break down the wall,” I said.

  Flo and Miss Lee looked at me as if I’d lost my marbles.

  “The wall?” said Flo. “I don’t think that’s possible. Wouldn’t it be more practical to try and break the door down.”

  I went to the door and felt it.

  “It’s already hot,” I said. “They must have started the fire on the second story. Even if we could break down the door, we’d be immediately engulfed by flames. We might be able to break through this wall, however.”

  I tapped the wall speculatively.

  “Old Mansion and this building are both wood construction,” I continued. “If I’m judging the distance correctly, the upstairs bath in Old Mansion is just beyond this partition.”

  “I suppose anything is worth trying, at this point,” said Flo. “But we can hardly break down lathe and plaster with our bare hands.”

  I’d thought of that myself.

  “That!” I said and pointed to small chimneyless Victorian parlor stove in the corner. It was cast iron, with pointed chrome ornamental piece attached to the top. I walked over and touched it. It was cool.