CHAPTER II
AT THE HIGGLEDY PIGGLEDY SHOP
The Higgledy Piggledy Shop had proved even more successful than its owners had dreamed possible even in their most wildly sanguine moments. When Josie O’Gorman, the detective’s daughter—herself a budding detective—had gone into partnership with Elizabeth Wright and they had opened the Higgledy Piggledy Shop, it had been with the idea of building up a business gradually. But the first six months, indeed the first three months, had demonstrated to them and to Dorfield that such a shop was much needed in the town.
Elizabeth held up the secretarial end, doing all of the typing, correcting manuscript for would-be authors, writing club papers for aspiring females, and, occasionally, even love letters for bashful youths or maidens whose hearts were bigger than their heads or whose love burned too fiercely to make it safe for them to approach too closely to such inflammable material as scented note paper. Josie was the blanchisseuse au fin who laundered the fine laces and linen brought to the shop by their wealthy clients. And she did most of the research work in the books of reference from her father’s magnificent technical library. Another one of her duties was the matching of silks and wools. It was one that she did not relish much, as clothes and fancy work were her abomination, but her eye was so sure that she never made a mistake and Elizabeth found herself constantly making slight errors in shades when she undertook to do that part of the work.
The clipping bureau, that had been started with some trepidation because of the outlay necessary to subscribe to so many papers and magazines to enable them to carry on the work successfully, had developed into a thriving branch of the business. It was really astonishing to see how many persons were willing and anxious to pay so that, if their names appeared in print, they would be sure to know about it.
Irene Macfarlane still took entire charge of the fine needlework, orders for which poured in on the girls. She had not been content until she had learned to put in an invisible patch as well as the nefarious Hortense Markle whose whereabouts was still a mystery to the detective force. Certainly Hortense had been as much a party to the frauds practiced by her husband as Felix Markle himself; but she had seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth. After Mary Louise’s wedding, she had tripped away from the festivities gowned in palest diaphanous grey with stockings, slippers and gloves to match and a picture hat that could have been identified by everyone at the wedding, since it had been noted and admired by all the guests as being a work of real art. She had tripped away, and, for all the police could find out, the earth might have opened and swallowed her.
Josie always had a feeling that, sooner or later, the Hortense Markle mystery would be solved. She had the thought constantly in the back of her busy brain, but, since the men who were implicated in the wholesale robberies that had been committed throughout the whole of the United States, had one and all been caught, the police seemed to feel that the woman was not worth hunting for. Josie knew that it was the genius of the woman as much as that of her husband that had made the robberies so successful and she knew also that a character like Hortense Markle’s could not be downed but would, in the course of time, assert itself in other channels of wickedness. No doubt she had left America and was in some foreign country awaiting the release of her husband from the penitentiary. The love she bore her husband was the one good point in her character. At least, it was the only good point Josie was ready to grant her. With all Hortense’s charm, wit and beauty, artistic taste, and efficiency, she was, according to Josie and Mary Louise’s other friends, rotten to the core.
What they could not forgive in the fascinating Mrs. Markle was her treachery in regard to Mary Louise, the beloved of Dorfield. Mary Louise herself made excuses for the Markles, but then Mary Louise always made excuses for everybody.
“They were brought up wrong!” or, “They must have been greatly tempted!” or perhaps, “They inherited some weakness from their ancestors!” she would say when the exciting topic of the attempted robbery of all her wedding gifts was under discussion, as it often was at the Higgledy Piggledy Shop.
“Oh, gracious me, Mary Louise, you can’t see straight for sheer goodness!” Josie exclaimed at one of these occasions. “If the Markles weren’t wicked—as wicked as his Satanic Majesty—then their parents must have been, to bring them up so badly; or, if not their parents, at least some of their forbears from whom they inherited their traits. The blame has to go somewhere and it might just as well be put on Felix and the fair Hortense as on their dead progenitors. No doubt said Satanic Majesty is able to entertain the whole bunch of them in the lower regions.”