“The storekeeper! Now, Mary Lou, your ideas are running wild. Next thing you’ll be suspecting me!”
“Maybe I do,” laughed her chum. “No, but seriously—if Dad is working on a murder case, he always finds out immediately who profited by the victim’s death. That supplies a motive for the crime. Well, it’s the same with a fire. Didn’t this storekeeper profit—by getting extra business—because Flicks’ burned down?”
“Yes, he did,” admitted the other girl. “But, on the other hand, it didn’t do him a bit of good for the Hunters’ bungalow to be destroyed.”
“No, of course not. But, then, that may have been an accident.”
“Yet this Lemuel Adams might have been responsible for both fires. He seems a lot guiltier to me. If he hated Mr. Hunter particularly, he’d naturally burn his cottage first. Then he’d go about destroying all the rest of Shady Nook.”
“Your reasoning sounds good to me, Jane,” approved Mary Louise, her brown eyes sparkling with excitement. “And we’ve got to make a call on Mr. Adams right away. This very afternoon!”
“Not me,” said Jane. “I’m going canoeing with Cliff Hunter.”
Mary Louise looked disappointed.
“Suppose Watson had told Sherlock Holmes that he had a date with a girl and couldn’t go on an investigation with him when he was needed?”
“Watson was only a man in a book who didn’t make dates. I’m a real girl who’s full of life. I came up here for some fun, not just to be an old character in a detective story! And besides, Mary Lou, you have a date too. I heard you promise David McCall you’d go canoeing with him today.”