The Window at the White Cat | Page 3

"Oh, I know I'm not helping you," she exclaimed, "but I have thought over everything until I can not think any more. I always end where I begin."
"You have not noticed any mental symptoms--any lack of memory?"
Her eyes filled.
"He forgot my birthday, two weeks ago," she said. "It was the first one he had ever forgotten, in nineteen of them."
Nineteen! Nineteen from thirty-five leaves sixteen!
"What I meant was this," I explained. "People sometimes have sudden and unaccountable lapses of memory and at those times they are apt to stray away from home. Has your father been worried lately?"
"He has not been himself at all. He has been irritable, even to me, and terrible to the servants. Only to Carter--he was never ugly to Carter. But I do not think it was a lapse of memory. When I remember how he looked that morning, I believe that he meant then to go away. It shows how he had changed, when he could think of going away without a word, and leaving me there alone."
"Then you have no brothers or sisters?"
"None. I came to you--" there she stopped.
"Please tell me how you happened to come to me," I urged. "I think you know that I am both honored and pleased."
"I didn't know where to go," she confessed, "so I took the telephone directory, the classified part under 'Attorneys,' and after I shut my eyes, I put my finger haphazard on the page. It pointed to your name."
I am afraid I flushed at this, but it was a wholesome douche. In a moment I laughed.
"We will take it as an omen," I said, "and I will do all that I can. But I am not a detective, Miss Fleming. Don't you think we ought to have one?"
"Not the police!" she shuddered. "I thought you could do something without calling a detective."
"Suppose you tell me what happened the day your father left, and how he went away. Tell me the little things too. They may be straws that will point in a certain direction."
"In the first place," she began, "we live on Monmouth Avenue. There are just the two of us, and the servants: a cook, two housemaids, a laundress, a butler and a chauffeur. My father spends much of his time at the capital, and in the last two years, since my old governess went back to Germany, at those times I usually go to mother's sisters at Bellwood--Miss Letitia and Miss Jane Maitland."
I nodded: I knew the Maitland ladies well. I had drawn four different wills for Miss Letitia in the last year.
"My father went way on the tenth of May. You say to tell you all about his going, but there is nothing to tell. We have a machine, but it was being repaired. Father got up from breakfast, picked up his hat and walked out of the house. He was irritated at a letter he had read at the table--"
"Could you find that letter?" I asked quickly.
"He took it with him. I knew he was disturbed, for he did not even say he was going. He took a car, and I thought he was on his way to his office. He did not come home that night and I went to the office the next morning. The stenographer said he had not been there. He is not at Plattsburg, because they have been trying to call him from there on the long distance telephone every day."
In spite of her candid face I was sure she was holding something back.
"Why don't you tell me everything?" I asked, "You may be keeping back the one essential point."
She flushed. Then she opened her pocket-book and gave me a slip of rough paper, On it, in careless figures, was the number "eleven twenty-two." That was all.
"I was afraid you would think it silly," she said. "It was such a meaningless thing. You see, the second night after father left, I was nervous and could not sleep. I expected him home at any time and I kept listening for his step down-stairs. About three o'clock I was sure I heard some one in the room below mine--there was a creaking as if the person were walking carefully. I felt relieved, for I thought he had come back. But I did not hear the door into his bedroom close, and I got more and more wakeful. Finally I got up and slipped along the hall to his room. The door was open a few inches and I reached in and switched on the electric lights. I had a queer feeling before I turned on the light that there was some one standing close to me, but the room was empty, and the hall, too."
"And the paper?"
"When I saw the room was empty I went in. The