“Wait a minute,” commanded Groot. “I’m nearly through, and then I’ll go away and he can have his hysterics in peace. Go on, Stryker, finish up this yarn. What did you do when you heard Mr. Duane accuse you?”
Stryker looked at him solemnly and blinked in an effort to concentrate. Then he said, “Why, I pretended I’d had a telephone call from Molly, and I ran around here as fast as I could, and Molly she says, they’ll be after you, go over to Mrs. Gedney’s and stay there. And I did, till you spied me out.”
“All right,” and Groot rose to go. “Your father is all right, Mrs. Adler. Don’t coddle him too much. It makes him childish. Keep him here with you, and my word for it, no suspicion will rest on him. I had his alibi pretty well fixed up anyway, between the insurance agent and the doctor, and his story just about completes it. There isn’t one chance in a thousand that he’ll be accused, so keep him here and keep him quiet, and I’ll see you again in a day or two. But if your father tries to run away or to hide again, then he will find himself in trouble.”
Mrs. Adler proved amenable to these orders and Groot went away to begin his hunt for the purloiner of Stryker’s handkerchief.
“You won’t have to look far,” Whiting said, when he heard the detective’s story. “If you wanted one more thread in the strand of the rope for young Landon’s neck, that’s it. Of course, he got the handkerchief some way, whether from the housekeeper or not. Go to it and find out how.”
Indirectly and by bits, Avice learned of Groot’s discoveries, and keeping her own counsel, she worked on a side line of her own devising.
As a result, one morning when she went to see Alvin Duane with, what she felt sure he must call real evidence, he was very much interested indeed.
“I hunted and hunted all through my uncle’s desk,” she said, fairly quivering with excitement, “and at last I was rewarded by finding this. It was tucked away in a pigeon-hole, and is evidently unfinished.”
She gave Mr. Duane a slip of paper with a few typewritten words on it. The paper was torn and a little soiled, but perfectly legible. “Should I ever be found dead by some alien hand,” the paper read, “do not try to track down my murderer. I do not anticipate this event, but should it occur, it will be the work of John Hemingway. Do not search for him; he cannot be found. But his motive is a just one, and if——”
The writing ended abruptly, as if the writer had been interrupted and had never finished the tale.