Four Lost Ladies (The Hildegarde Withers Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  She sat up in bed to face the pale glow of Manhattan’s dawn, shivering a little. It had been a very real and unpleasant fantasy indeed. Miss Hildegarde Withers was not given to oneiromancy; she turned neither to Freud nor to the Gypsy Dream Book to have her dreams analyzed, but it was perfectly clear what her subconscious mind had been trying to tell her about the reason why Alice Davidson hadn’t sent her a Christmas card this year.

  “He that will go to the City … must needs go out of this World.”

  —John Bunyan

  3

  THOUGH SHE HAD BEEN ACUTELY uncomfortable for every single minute of the eight hours she had spent in that day-coach, Miss Withers stood on the station platform and looked wistfully after the rear end of the departing train. The town of Bagley’s Mills, Pennsylvania, might not have been the identical whistle-stop immortalized by Irvin S. Cobb when on a lecture tour he looked out of his Pullman window early one rainy morning and whispered, “Oh, God, what a wonderful place to die in!” but it would have done just as well.

  There was of course no waiting taxicab or bus, so she plodded through the slushy mixture of coal dust and snow toward the distant business section. Eventually her quest led her past innumerable miners’ shanties to the hill at the far edge of the town, where she climbed the steep steps leading to what had no doubt once been the local mansion, now a sagging and decrepit edifice covered with architectural gingerbread and bearing signs reading: Justice of the Peace and Abstracts and Tourists Taken.

  To reach the door the schoolteacher had to run the gantlet of snowballs hurled with more malice than accuracy by what seemed a horde of screaming red-nosed little girls on either side of the uncleared walk. Nor was there any warmth in the expression of the gloomy gray man who answered her knock. He was thinnish, stooped, and balding, and there was egg on his vest and bitterness in his eye.

  “Mr. Davidson?” she opened briskly. “I am Miss Hildegarde Withers—”

  “I’m Judge Davidson—but we don’t want to subscribe to anything or buy anything,” he said quickly.

  But the door was firmly blocked by her overshoe. “It’s about Alice!”

  “What about her?”

  “If I might come in—?”

  He hesitated, then silently stood aside. Miss Withers marched into a hall filled with mittens, overshoes, and skis, and then on into a big battered living-room from which numerous larger girls of assorted sizes, all wearing a uniform of boys’ shirts and blue-jeans, hastily exited on a barked command of “Scat!”

  “Oh, you run a girls’ school?” Miss Withers asked innocently.

  “My daughters,” admitted Davidson. “My wife,” he added, nodding toward a shapeless, pink-faced woman who hastily entered from the kitchen, wiping her hands on an apron.

  “How do you do?” said the schoolteacher politely.

  But her host gestured impatiently toward a chair. “Now what’s this about Alice? What’s the fool girl been up to now?”

  “George!” murmured the fat woman vaguely.

  “Well,” began Miss Withers, “it’s rather a long story. It began, you see, with a Christmas card—”

  He wasn’t listening. “She’s been home on vacation since before Christmas, but of course she never tells us anything. Not Alice!”

  The schoolteacher felt as if she had sat down in a chair that wasn’t there. “Do I understand you to say that Alice Davidson is here in this town, in this house?”

  “Why wouldn’t she be? It’s her home, isn’t it?”

  “But—”

  “As a matter of fact, she’s up taking a bath right now.”

  But a clear voice corrected him. “I am not, I’m listening on the stairs.” And there appeared a long-legged, hoydenish girl, wrapped in a woolly white robe, her hair like a drowned rat’s. But the face, in spite of its remainder of baby-fat and its well-scrubbed shininess, was one which Miss Withers felt would be extremely disturbing to a number of men before her time was up. “Did I hear my name taken in vain? What goes, or shouldn’t I ask?”

  Miss Withers sighed. “I’m afraid I’ve got the wrong Alice,” she admitted. “Mr. Davidson, haven’t you a sister?”

  “Oh!” he said flatly, his face darkening. “You mean that—”

  “George!” his wife put in.

  “What makes you think that she’d be here?” he asked.

  “I didn’t, really,” admitted the schoolteacher. “But I have to eliminate all the possibilities. I thought it would do no harm to find out. She doesn’t seem to be anywhere else, either.”

  “I haven’t heard from my sister Alice in years, and I don’t care if I never do!” he said, biting off the words.

  “Father!” said the girl in the doorway.

  “You go to your room and get some clothes on!” he snapped.

  “Father, sometimes—” she began, and gave a most lady-like shrug. Then she reluctantly departed.

  “I suppose Alice is in some trouble or other,” Davidson went on after a moment, almost hopefully.

  “Perhaps,” said Miss Withers. “Anyway she has disappeared, dropped out of sight. I’m an old friend of hers, or at least we used to be neighbors, and without quite understanding how it happened I find myself trying to get to the bottom of it all. I’m here because during my investigation I found the manager of an apartment house where she used to live who remembered that she always took the weekly edition of your Bagley’s Mills News-Republic, and that office informed me that Alice lived here as a girl and that you were her brother.”

  “She’s no sister of mine,” he said querulously. “Alice never thought of anyone but herself. And after what she did—” Davidson’s mouth snapped shut tight.

  There was a long silence. “Could you suggest any possible way in which I might get in touch with her? Did she have any old friends who might know, or is there any way at all—?”

  He shook his head, almost fanatically. “As far as we are concerned, Alice is dead.”

  “George!” came the monotonous refrain from the corner.

  “Perhaps,” Miss Withers suggested, “she’s dead as far as everyone else is concerned, too. That’s what I’m trying to find out.” She rose to her feet. “Sorry to have troubled you for nothing. I have no official standing, of course. I can’t make you answer any questions you don’t want to answer. But I wonder if you’d be kind enough to take my card, and let me know if you hear anything of her, or even if you think of anything that might shed light on her disappearance?” She scribbled a few words on a bit of pasteboard.

  “Sure, sure,” said George Davidson. He took the card, but there was a look in his eye which indicated that it would be filed immediately in the wastebasket. As they started to leave the living-room there was the sound of teen-age giggles in the hall, and a scurrying on the stairs. Then Miss Withers was out in the cold air again, running the snowball gantlet in reverse.

  Another blind alley, she thought. No wonder George Davidson was bitter, with a dozen or so daughters and all at home. Like most people who have come to middle age without experiencing domestic felicity, the schoolteacher was apt to romanticize it a bit, but it was at moments like this that she realized it might have its drawbacks.

  Somewhat resigned to her solitary existence, she returned hastily to the railroad station, to be immediately seized upon there by a breathless young woman in leather jacket and baggy pants, a red scarf wrapped around her head. “Oh, here you are!” the girl cried. “Flang myself into some rags and patches and came helling down the back way on skis, because—”

  “Oh?” said the startled schoolma’am. “Can it be that you’re the one who was taking the bath, the wrong Alice?”

  “Yep. Only my friends call me Jeeps. I didn’t want you to go away with the wrong impression, I mean about Aunt Alice.” The girl hesitated. “Pops said—well, you see, he had a perfectly awful fight with her when she was here last. I was only a child then, so I don’t remember much about it.”

  “Really? These family quarrels
can be very bitter, I understand. Tell me, were you named after your aunt?”

  Jeeps nodded. “Sure. But about the quarrel—my father wanted Aunt Alice to borrow money on a big insurance policy she carried, to help him finance a new business. She wouldn’t do it. Poor dear, he’s failed at most everything, so maybe it was just as well.” She lowered her voice. “I wouldn’t want this to get around, but Auntie kept in touch with me on the quiet; she even lent me money to finish my last year at school!”

  “Oh?” said Miss Withers. “Do go on, child.”

  “And then this summer I got a job in Scranton, working in a beauty parlor and making a lot of money. I wrote her early in the fall that I could start paying some of it back, but she answered and said that she didn’t need it! That’s the last I heard from her—it was in September.”

  “No Christmas card?”

  “Nothing. And always before this she sent me some little present, care of general delivery so Father wouldn’t find out and hit the ceiling. I guess she had a soft spot in her heart for me because I was her godchild. Do you really think that something has happened to her?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Miss Withers admitted. “And it isn’t any of my business, really. But all the same—” Impulsively, she felt a strong liking for this girl. In an affair of this kind she couldn’t have too many allies, and so she told her her suspicions. It was a somewhat condensed report, cut even shorter by the roar of the approaching east-bound local.

  “I think what you’re trying to do is wonderful!” Jeeps said. “It’s like—it’s like Joan of Arc! I want to help, in any way I can.”

  But Miss Withers had to grab up her belongings and run. Standing on the train step, she turned. “Perhaps you can help,” she said. “About that insurance policy you mentioned—”

  The intent young face frowned with concentration. “All I know is that it was a big one—fifteen thousand, I think.”

  “And who was the beneficiary, do you know?”

  The train was moving now, but strong young legs kept pace with it. “Why—”

  There was a sudden shriek from the engine and a blast of released steam, and then a lurch that knocked Miss Withers galley-west. Clutching her hat, her umbrella, her handbag, and a surprised brakeman who happened to be standing near by, the schoolteacher leaned out and cried, “I can’t hear you! Who did you say was the beneficiary?”

  The train was picking up speed now, and Jeeps was dropping back, growing smaller as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. But the girl valiantly held her mittened hands to her lips, and faintly above the noises of the train Miss Withers heard the one word, ungrammatical but clear. “Me!” sang out the wrong Alice.

  And that was that. The schoolteacher settled herself into a plush seat, let down with disappointment. Of course there was a certain negative value in eliminating the possibility that the missing woman had, as the Inspector had suggested, got tired of the big city and gone home. One look at Bagley’s Mills had settled that. But like a tenderfoot in the wilderness of the north woods, Miss Withers had been wandering in circles. Every promising lead that she tried to follow either petered out or else led eventually back to the point from which she had started, in a blind alley opening off a dead-end street.

  She said almost as much to the Inspector when she phoned him a few days later. “But I am glad to find that you’re still at your old desk,” she added.

  “It may not be for long,” the little Irishman told her. “Because the heat is still on.”

  “Then I gather that you’re not in a position to be sympathetic about my little problem of the missing women, and particularly about what happened to Alice Davidson?”

  “Frankly, no,” he said. “We have enough unsolved murders as it is—more than our share, in a big city like this. And you have nothing but a flash of intuition to indicate that there was any crime here at all. If you’ve dedicated yourself to be the champion of lost causes, then it’ll have to be on your own head.”

  “But Alice—” she began.

  “Maybe she went down the rabbit-hole,” he suggested.

  “I wish you wouldn’t show off your erudition at times like this. Oscar, I know I’ve got something here. If you’d been with me, if you’d talked with that pretty little girl in that awful town in the coal country of Pennsylvania—”

  “God forbid,” the Inspector said. As far as he was concerned, everything west of the Hudson was a howling wilderness, to be avoided as the plague. “All I can say to you is to repeat my advice—”

  “Wait!” she interrupted. “Somebody at the door.” For a little while there was silence, and then Miss Withers’s voice again, tense with excitement. “Oscar, she’s here!”

  “Who’s here—I mean there?”

  “The girl, Oscar! The wrong Alice, and she says she has a clue!”

  “Angels and ministers of grace defend us from women with clues,” muttered the Inspector. But the line was dead.

  Jeeps Davidson was perched on the edge of Miss Withers’s sofa, looking very sleek and grown up in a smart tailored suit, her short toasted-blond hair neatly waved over her forehead. “I hope you don’t mind too awfully,” she was saying breathlessly. “But I thought and thought about what you were doing, and I just couldn’t stay away. I found the card with your address that Father threw into the fireplace, and so—”

  “But what will your family think?”

  “Oh, I’m supposed to be on my way back to Scranton and my job. Only why should I waste myself on being a beautician all my life, when I took a degree in education?”

  “But surely you don’t want to be a detective?”

  Jeeps shrugged. “What I’ve always really wanted to do most was go on the stage. But this sounds loads more exciting even than that! Please, please say you’ll let me stay and help! I won’t get in your way or be any burden—I have some money of my own. And remember, it’s my aunt that you’re trying to investigate the disappearance of!”

  “Yes, child, but—”

  “And I did think you ought to know about the insurance policy.”

  “The one of which you are the beneficiary?”

  “But that’s just the point, I’m not really! Oh, she had to put some name down on the policy. But it was a twenty-year endowment that Aunt Alice took out when she got her first job, before I was out of diapers. I waited until Father was out one day and wormed the details from Mother. What I want to know now is, does it help any?”

  “Why—perhaps. I suppose the more we can learn about Alice Davidson, the better chance there’ll be—”

  “But don’t you see?” Jeeps interrupted eagerly. “The twenty years is up, and that policy must have matured or whatever they call it, by this time. Suppose Aunt Alice collected her fifteen thousand dollars—and that’s why she wrote me that she didn’t need any money?”

  The vague pattern which had been trying to form in Miss Withers’s mind now suddenly rearranged itself, like a kaleidoscope. “Oh, dear!” she murmured.

  Jeeps nodded wisely. “Motive!”

  For a long moment there was silence in the room. Then the schoolteacher sighed resignedly. “Where’s your suitcase?”

  “Downstairs in the hall. You mean, I can stay?”

  Miss Withers sniffed. “This wicked old city with its pitfalls is no place for a pretty girl to go running around in alone.”

  “You don’t know me very well, do you?” Jeeps grinned. “Pitfalls, look out—here I come!”

  “You bring that suitcase up here and unpack it,” said the schoolteacher. “We have work to do.”

  “A scarecrow in a garden of cucumbers keepeth nothing.”

  —Baruch 6

  4

  ONE THING LED TO ANOTHER, and before the week was out Miss Hildegarde Withers began to feel rather like the boy in the story who started to jerk an angleworm out of the ground and kept pulling and pulling until he found he had a fullgrown boa-constrictor by the tail.

  “It is certainly time this
evidence was laid before the police,” the schoolteacher observed over the toffee cups one bright wintry morning. “I can’t wait to see the expression on the Inspector’s face! The man is always accusing me of taking the law into my own hands and rushing in where the properly constituted authorities should be treading. But now—”

  “They’ll have to do something about it, certainly,” Jeeps said. “But what?”

  “Photographs on the teletype, releases to the newspapers, all sorts of publicity. They have all the facilities to make a tremendous explosion about this.” Miss Withers frowned. “Child, don’t you ever eat anything for breakfast except a cup of coffee and a cigarette?”

  “Sometimes I have a stick of gum. But I’m too excited to eat anyway. Can I please tag along when you go down to Headquarters?”

  “May I,” the schoolteacher said automatically. “No, not unless you change out of those red pajamas into something a little less likely to cause a riot among the younger policemen.”

  An hour later they were entering the portals of the dismal old stone building at 240 Centre Street, Jeeps sedately clad in a fur jacket and soft wool dress but still standing out in those grim corridors like an orchid in an ashcan. Never in her life had Miss Withers had so many men rush to hold doors open for her.

  She parked the girl outside the Inspector’s office, and went in alone. For once his face lit up. “Well,” he cried, “I was beginning to think you’d done a disappearing act too, along with your three thousand missing ladies. Nobody’s been home when I phoned.”

  “We’ve been busy,” she said crisply. “More than busy.”

  “‘We?’” He looked blank. “Don’t tell me that girl is still with you, the one you called the wrong Alice?”