The following day, Mrs. Bell asked Stella if she had gone for a drive with Hester Holt the evening of the latter’s disappearance, and Stella Dean promptly replied, “No; the last time I saw Hester was when she left here that afternoon. She said good-bye to me as usual on the other side of the road, and I have never set eyes on her since.”
She admitted she had once been engaged to Pete Simpkins, but emphatically denied that Hester’s keeping company with him had led to any rupture between them. “Hester and I were always on the very best of terms,” she said, “and it would be downright mean of anyone to allege otherwise. Besides, I can produce proofs to the contrary.”
The next day, as Hester was still missing, Mrs. Bell told the police. The affair was at once inquired into, and Pete Simpkins’ story about the buggy was corroborated. Someone else had seen the two girls driving towards the outskirts of the town that same evening; whilst a car proprietor also came forward and declared that he recollected Miss Holt hiring a buggy from him, but that she had driven off in it alone. When the buggy was brought back, he being out, his wife had taken the money for it. But as it was then dusk, she could not possibly swear to the identity of the lady who had paid her, especially as the latter had been so muffled up, presumably on account of the coldness of the night, that practically nothing of her face was visible. She could only say Miss Dean resembled her both in build and height.
“Who is that tall, good-looking girl, Stella, that I’ve seen following you into the building...?”
Stella Dean was now asked if she could produce an alibi; and, accordingly, her mother, a very decrepit old lady, declared that Stella had come straight home from the office, and had remained indoors all that evening. To add to the complexity of the affair, someone else testified to having seen Hester Holt enter Mrs. Britton’s house with a latch key rather late on the night in question; and this of course made some people suspect Mrs. Britton, but the police could prove nothing, and the matter was eventually dropped.
All this happened about three months before I arrived in Denver.
A week after the disappearance of Hester Holt, Mrs. Bell had a new assistant called Vera Cummings, a very material, practical young lady, the daughter of a farmer somewhere near Omaha.
The day after her arrival, Miss Cummings was busy typewriting in the office with Mrs. Bell and Stella Dean, when she suddenly exclaimed, “How is it that I get convulsed with shivers whenever I sit next to you, Miss Dean? I don’t when I’m sitting next to Mrs. Bell. Eugh! I feel as if the icy east wind were blowing right through me.”