Nothing indeed could be more easy of execution than what she contemplated. Her husband kept in a desk in his room a set of duplicate keys to the deed boxes in his office. Among these there must be also the one that opened her brother’s box. These iron cases were kept in a strong room that opened into a small corridor between Sherrington Trimm’s private study and the outer rooms where the clerks worked. Totty had her own box there, separate from her husband’s and she remembered that there was one not far from hers on which was painted her brother’s name. She would have no difficulty in entering the strong room alone, on pretence of depositing a deed. Was she not the wife of the senior partner, and had she not often done the same thing before? If her brother had made a new will, it must be in that box, where he kept such papers as possessed only a legal value. One glance would show her all she wanted to know, and her mind would be at rest from the wearing anxiety that now made her life almost unbearable.
She opened the desk and had no difficulty in finding the key to her brother’s box. It was necessary to take something in the nature of a deed, to hold in her hand as an excuse for entering the strong room, for she did not want to take anything out of it, lest John Bond, who would see her, should chance to notice the fact and should mention it to her husband when he came back. On the other hand, it would not do to deposit an empty envelope, sealed and marked as though it contained something valuable. Mrs. Trimm never did things by halves nor was she ever so unwise as to leave traces of her tactics behind her. A palpable fraud like an empty envelope might at some future time be used against her. To take any document away from the office, even if she returned the next day, would be to expose herself to a cross-examination from Sherrington when he came home, for he knew the state of her affairs and would know also that she never needed to consult the papers she kept at the office. There was nothing for it but to have a real document of some sort. Totty sat down and thought the matter over for a quarter of an hour. Then she ordered her carriage and drove down town to the office of a broker who sometimes did business for her and her husband.
“I have made a bet,” she said, with a little laugh, “and I want you to help me to win it.”
The broker expressed his readiness to put the whole New York Stock Exchange at her disposal in five minutes, if that were of any use to her.
“Yes,” said Totty. “I have bet that I will buy a share in something—say for a hundred dollars—that I will keep it a year and that at the end of that time it will be worth more than I gave for it.”
“One way of winning the bet would be to buy several shares in different things and declare the winner afterwards. One of the lot will go up.”
“That would not be fair,” said Totty with a laugh. “I must say what it is I have bought. Can you give me something of the kind—now? I want to take it away with me, to show it.”
The broker went out and returned a few minutes later with what she wanted, a certificate of stock to the amount of one hundred dollars, in a well-known undertaking.
“If anything has a chance, this has,” said the broker, putting it into an envelope and handing it to her. “Oh no, Mrs. Trimm—never mind paying for it!” he added with a careless laugh. “Give it back to me when you have done with it.”
But Totty preferred to pay her money, and did so before she departed. Ten minutes later she was at her husband’s office. Her heart beat a little faster as she asked John Bond to open the strong room for her. She hoped that something would happen to occupy him while she was within.