“Work at it yourself, Rod,” Zizi advised him. “Get lists of the picture making companies, write to them all, and track down that film. It must be a possible thing to do. Go to it!”
“I will,” Rodney declared, and forthwith set about it.
“Now, I want to go off on a little trip,” Zizi said to Minna. “And I don’t want to say where I’m going, for it may turn out a wild goose chase. The idea is not a very big one,—yet it might be the means of finding out a lot of the mystery. Anyway, I want to go, and I’ll be back in three days or four at most.”
“I hate to have you leave me, Zizi,” Mrs Varian answered, “but if it means a chance, why take it. Get back as soon as you can, I’ve grown to depend on you for all my help and cheer.”
So Zizi packed her bag and departed.
With her she took a letter that she had abstracted from a drawer of Minna Varian’s writing-desk.
She had taken it without leave, indeed without the owner’s knowledge, but she felt the end justified the means.
“If indeed the end amounts to anything,” Zizi thought, a little ruefully.
Once started on her journey, it seemed like a wilder goose chase than it had at first appeared.
The route, the little, ill-appointed New England railroad, took her inland into the state of Maine, and then westward, until she was in the green hills and valleys of Vermont.