“It was here at nine o’clock on the night of the tenth; it wasn’t here at six on the morning of the eleventh. What do you make of that?”
“It had been stolen!” she gasped, looking pale and perplexed.
“There might be one other explanation,” he interposed; “and we are bound to look at that carefully. Mr. Wing might have burned them. He had a fire that evening.”
“Yes,” she said, “he might.”
“I made sure on that point,” he then explained, “the morning of the murder. Not from any suspicion that papers were missing, but on the principle of taking note of everything, even the most trivial. I can assure you that there were no papers of any amount burned in the fireplace the night before. We could scarcely expect it; but it would have been a stroke of genius if the thief had burned some papers to throw us off the track.”
“The thief!” she repeated.
“You must see,” he said, “that the theft of the papers presupposes a thief. I have been certain from the start that some one was in the room after the murder. What he was after I haven’t known until now. He was at the safe, which he must have found open. Some one who wanted those papers wanted them enough to induce him to commit this murder, and then to enter the room and search the safe, while the dead man lay at the door. It was a terrible risk—as terrible as that of the murder itself. Suppose Oldbeg had been a half-hour later in coming home. He would unquestionably have found the murdered man with the murderers in the room. By just that narrow margin this perplexing mystery escaped proving a mere blundering crime.”
CHAPTER IX
“You are My Mother”
THREE men sat in conference in the small library at Henry Matthewson’s residence at Waterville, the morning after the bridge incident. These were Henry Matthewson himself, three years younger than his brother Charles, opposite whom was the man who had come from Millbank by the midnight train, Frank Hunter, brother of Charles Hunter and himself an attorney in the late Mr. Wing’s office.