The S. P. Mystery

by Harriet Pyne Grove

Greta wakened to the sound of rain, beating upon the old roof and leaking into her attic. The first drops beat a tattoo within the old tin pan that she kept under the worst leak. What had happened? Oh, yes. She remembered, though her head had stopped aching. It was sore, though, under the bandage. She heard the children downstairs only faintly. Why, they must be up and about, all of the family,—and no one had called her. What Greta did not know was that the “horse-doctor” had warned Mrs. Klein in no uncertain words that Greta had had a dangerous fall and must be allowed to rest for fear of serious consequences. “And you know that it might be looked into, how she got it,” he had said, for he thought that he noted suspicious anxiety on her part. Jacob Klein’s character was not unknown in these parts.

With her foot Greta felt that her precious book was safely there. She wondered if she could think of a better place. How soon would she be called? It was so cloudy that she had no way of knowing what time it was. The old clock downstairs did not strike and half the time it did not even go.

After a little she heard her mother telling the children to go back and coming, lumbering, up the attic stairs. Greta’s big eyes were fixed on her as she came into the low room, complaining in voluble German that it had to be a rainy day and that the doctor had said Greta could not work. She would have the washings to start herself. A cup of coffee and a piece of bread, broken from a loaf, were put down on a chair by the bed.

Greta expected to be ordered up then, but no, her mother turned to go, telling her to do what the doctor said about the medicine. “He hit you?” she asked, and Greta answered that “he” had.

Greta could scarcely believe her good fortune. She was not even to take care of the children, poor little things, kept in by the rain. As soon as her mother had gone downstairs, Greta sat up and unpinned the bandage on her head. She was a little dizzy, but she poured some water from her old pitcher into the tin basin which was her lavatory and bathed the cut. She anointed it and tied up her head again, as the doctor had directed, taking a tablet, too, to swallow down with the black coffee. A whole day to herself! A book to read.

Something was queer. Oh, yes, what they had said. She was not Jacob Klein’s daughter. How had she learned to speak English as well as the summer cottagers did, and better than some of them? Why had her German been “forgotten,” as they had said, when she was so sick with brain fever? She tried to remember those first days, four years before, when she found herself getting strong enough to sit up and then to walk. Mrs. Klein had been kinder then. “Why, I can, too, remember,” she said to herself, as a scene rose before her of herself in a dark woods, frightened and running. Then someone picked her up. Oh, it was coming back! But she grew dizzy again as she sat up in her desire to remember and the excitement of it. She would not think till she was better.

Of course it had always seemed funny that she knew English; but Mrs. Klein had always told her that she went to school with English children. “Maybe you would ferget one t’ing, maybe another,” Jacob Klein had said to a frightened little girl. “Dis time it vas German dot you fergot, und don’t ferget vat ve tells you some more!” Greta could remember the threatening look and the ugly tone with which he had bent over her bed and said this.

For another half hour Greta rested and tried not to think at all. Then she drank the rest of the cold coffee and ate the bread, at last reaching down under the old quilt for her precious book, in which she was absorbed immediately.

The book wore a bright cover with pictures of girls about her own age, but how different they appeared! There were pretty, stylish dresses, happy faces, and yet some of the pictures found them in a woods like hers. At first they were in a boarding school and what good times they had in between lessons. There was one that she liked especially, but she loved them all. And she had seen things like that. Why, of course she had been to school.

Greta read the book through and began to read it again, though she had hastily thrust it under the covers when she heard her mother coming upstairs again. A glass of milk and a hard-boiled egg with a spoonful of mush made a marvelous meal, for Greta was hungry by the middle of the afternoon; and her mother explained that as the doctor had said she was not to eat much, two meals were enough and this was the last. Karl had almost scalded himself from a kettle on the stove and Minna had bluing all over her. Greta was to get up early the next morning to do another washing and to iron. With this cross ultimatum, Mrs. Klein left the room.