Bertha Cool said, “I’ll have to do some packing and unpacking. I’ll have to shift baggage around. I want to take just one trunk and one suitcase. Donald, do you suppose you could get that trunk up for me?”
“Sure,” I said.
The clerk obligingly gave us a key to the basement. We went down and snooped around. Within two minutes we found a trunk with the initials F.D. on it, and a tar: Property of Florence Danzer, Room 602.
We opened Bertha Cool’s trunk and between us managed to lift FIo’s trunk into place. There was quite a bit of room on the sides, and we wadded that with old clothes and newspapers. Then I closed and strapped Bertha’s trunk, got it on a hand truck, and got it to the elevator. Thirty minutes later, a taxicab had the trunk strapped on to a trunk rack, and we were headed for the Union Depot. We switched at the Union Depot just so we wouldn’t leave a back trail, and went to Bertha’s apartment.
The elevator boy dug up a hand truck, and we took the trunk up to Bertha Cool’s apartment. I couldn’t get the lock picked, but it only took a few minutes to cut off the heads of the rivets which held the trunk lock into position.
We found what we wanted before the trunk was more than half unpacked: a packet of papers and documents tied with a stout cord.
I untied the cord, and Bertha and I went over the papers together.
There was the Lintig marriage licence, some letters which Dr. Lintig had written during the courtship while he was still a student in college. There were newspaper clippings, and a photograph of Dr. Lintig and the bride in a wedding dress.
Dr. Lintig had changed somewhat in the twenty-odd years since that photograph had been taken. He was, of course, older, but the change hadn’t been as great as might be expected. He’d evidently been an earnest, studious youth who had looked ten years older than his real age.
I studied the face of the woman in the wedding dress. Bertha put my question into words. “Is that,” she asked, “the woman you saw at the hotel?”