“Where is she?”
“Heaven knows. It wasn’t a very satisfactory arrangement. She was a friend of Mr. Milbers, and he suggested we both might cut expenses by sharing this apartment. I wasn’t very keen about it, but you know how it is when the boss makes a suggestion.
“Well, we tried it. She’s impossible! I left a note for her yesterday saying the rent was up tomorrow, that’s Monday. I told her I was going to be packing up tonight, and when she rang me up today what do you think she said?”
“What?” Bertha asked as the doorbell sounded again.
“Told me that she came up here this afternoon and had already moved out. She only moved in a short time ago, so she didn’t have much stuff, but there’s a five-dollar checking-out charge for cleaning the apartment, and she just didn’t say a word about paying her share of that. I didn’t think about it at the time.”
Josephine Dell went over to the door telephone and said, “Who is it, please?” and then wearily, “No, this is her roommate. I don’t know where she is. She left this afternoon — moved out. That’s right, and I’m moving out myself. No, I can’t see you. I can’t talk with you. I’m packing. I’m undressed, and I’ve got to catch a midnight plane — I don’t care how important it is or who you are. She isn’t here. I don’t know where she is, and I’ve done nothing all evening long but answer the doorbell for people who wanted to see her.”
Josephine Dell slammed down the receiver and came back to stand in the middle of the room, looking things over with a somewhat hopeless air.
“I can’t help wondering about that girl and her relationship with Mr. Milbers,” she said. “Oh, it’s all right as far as that end of it’s concerned, but I have an idea she was snooping on me all the time she was here.
“Two weeks ago my diary disappeared. Then it showed up again, right in its accustomed place, but under some scarfs. As though I’d be sap enough to think I’d overlooked it there! She was the only one who could have taken it. I can imagine a girl of a certain type being interested in reading it on the sly; but why did she take it, and where did she take it?”
“Did you ask her about it?” Bertha inquired.