Carson collapsed on the bed. He shook his head. “I don’t remember seeing anything about it in the scrapbook. She didn’t like to talk about it. But I know it’s all true. I can prove it easily enough.”
Shayne scowled. “I’m not worried about that. There was a particular clipping I wanted.” His voice trailed off. He had burned that other clipping in Windrow’s office.
His features tightened grimly. He turned slowly back through the pages and found a picture of Nora’s father with his whiskers — as near a likeness to the picture in the burnt clipping as he could find. He closed the book and put the picture in his coat pocket, said brusquely: “Get yourself in shape to meet me at the hospital at seven o’clock,” and went out.
Phyllis leaped up with a little cry of fright when he entered the room down the hall. “What’s wrong, Michael? Why are you looking like that?”
He set himself, and made an ironic smile come on his lips. He patted his breast pocket holding the deed to a tenth interest in the mine, and said, “We’ve bought ourselves into the mining business, angel. Whether we like it or not.”
Chapter eighteen
THE HAZE OF TWILIGHT was deepening toward the edge of darkness in the mountain gulch when Michael Shayne, accompanied by his wife and Mark Raton, arrived at Dr. Fairweather’s private hospital a few minutes after seven o’clock.
Most of the persons on the detective’s list were already gathered in the ground-floor parlor on the east side of the old house. Shayne stopped in the doorway and viewed the uneasy assemblage with grim satisfaction.
It was a gloomy, high-ceilinged room with wide bay windows looking eastward. Modern straight chairs from the doctor’s dining-room were ranged stiffly along the north and south walls, complementing two old-fashioned rockers and a leather settee which were practically museum pieces.
Christine Forbes sat erect in a straight chair in the corner at the right of the windows. Her hands were folded tightly in her lap, and her eyes were wide and unblinking — as though they had not been closed for a long time, and would never close again.