“How about the men in the shop? Can you trust them?”
“I think so, yes.”
“And what makes you think your Aunt Sarah has the diamonds?”
“Well... well, you saw what happened this noon. And when a person once gets a complex... well, I don’t know whether you’ve studied much about kleptomania, Mr. Mason, but it’s most devastating. Kleptomaniacs simply cannot resist the impulse to take things which don’t belong to them... Well, anyway, Aunt Sarah was up at the office on Sunday, getting things lined up for this morning. She came back to the house yesterday afternoon, and said she’d been seized with a very peculiar dizzy spell while she was at the office; that her mind had gone completely blank for a period of what must have been half an hour; that she didn’t have the faintest recollection of what she was doing. She thought it must have been her heart. I wanted her to call a doctor. She wouldn’t do it. She said that when she regained consciousness she had the most peculiar feeling of having done something she shouldn’t. She felt as though she’d killed someone, or something of that sort.”
“Did you get a doctor?” Mason asked.
“No, she went to her room and slept for a couple of hours, and then said she felt better. At dinner, she seemed to be very much her normal self.”
“Well,” Mason said, “I don’t know just what you want me to do. As I see it, you’d better find your aunt and take some steps to locate your Uncle George. His haunts should be fairly well defined. A man who goes on these periodical drinking sprees usually...”
“But,” she said, “Mrs. Bedford wants her stones back.”
“Since when?” Mason asked.
“She rang up at noon, while I was out, and said that she’d changed her mind that she didn’t want anything done to her stones that she had a prospective buyer who was interested in antique jewelry, and she was going to offer the stones and settings to this buyer.”