I could not afford to buy a newspaper so I hurried to the Denver Public Library in the Civic Center. What could the story be? Perhaps the clerk meant Lillie—I never mentioned her name nor even admitted she was my daughter—but something might have happened to her or her husband that revealed who she really was. As I clumped into the library, dressed, as usual, in my black dress, veiled motoring cap headgear and heavy boots, the clock said a few minutes past nine-thirty.
“Oh, dear,” I said to the librarian at the desk. “Am I too late to read tonight’s paper? I know the newspaper files close at half-past nine—”
She looked up and with some penetration, perhaps recognition, gazed at me for a brief instant.
“Yes, the newspaper room is closed. But if you will go in and sit down in the reference room, I think I can manage to bring you an evening paper.”
I thanked her very pleasantly and did as she bade. While I waited, I absently traced the grain of the heavy walnut with my finger nail, trying not to show any distress. Soon she quietly laid the paper down in front of me and stole away. But with that sixth sense you have in a crisis, out of the back of my head I could feel the librarians watching me.
“Silver!” I gasped to myself and wanted to faint.
But I made myself sit extremely straight and read very quietly, knowing there were alien eyes observing me. The account told of a young woman, who had posed under various aliases but lastly as Ruth Norman. She had been scalded to death under very suspicious circumstances in a rooming house in the cheapest district in Chicago. She was a perpetual drunk, was addicted to dope and had lived with many men of the lowest order. But her doctor knew who she really was. She was Rose Mary Echo Silver Dollar Tabor, who had signed her songs Silver Echo Tabor and her novel, Rose Tabor.
“My darling little Honeymaid!” I wailed inwardly and thought my heart must break. My eyes blurred with tears so that I could not read. “What a ghastly tragic end—poor, poor little girl!”
A strange photograph had been found in her room on which Silver had written this warning: “In case I am killed, arrest this man.” He was later identified as a saloon-keeper who had been one of her lovers. But insufficient evidence was brought out at the coroner’s inquest to attach definite guilt to him.
To save Silver’s body from the potter’s field, Peter McCourt was wiring $200 for the burial of his niece.