“This is beginning to sound pretty exciting, Charlie.”
“I got interested in the case, Billy, and I tried to do what I could for Zara’s father. He didn’t trust me much, and I had a dickens of a time persuading him to talk. And then, just as I was about on the point of succeeding, he shut up like a clam, fired me as his lawyer, and hired Isaac Brack!”
“That little shyster? Good Heavens!”
“Right! Well, she–Zara, I mean–seemed to have vanished into thin air. We couldn’t get any trace of her at all, until Bessie here dug up a wild idea that it was in Morton Holmes’s car she’d been taken off.”
“Holmes, the big dry goods merchant?” said Trenwith, with a laugh. “How in the world did she ever get such a wild idea as that? He wouldn’t be mixed up in anything shady!”
“Just what we told her,” said Charlie, unsmilingly, “but she insisted she was right. And, a little while later, after Miss Mercer had taken the girls to her father’s farm, Holmes came along, tricked her into getting in his car with another girl, and ran them over the state line. He met Weeks and this Jake Hoover–but Bessie was too smart for them, and got back over the state line safely. And the same day, putting two and two together, I found Zara, held a prisoner in an old house that Holmes had bought!”
“Good Lord!” said Trenwith, blankly. “So Holmes had been in it from the start?”
“I don’t know how long he’s been mixed up in it, but he was in it then, with both feet. He was hand in glove with old Weeks, and for some reason he was mighty anxious to get both the girls across the state line and into old Weeks’s care as guardian appointed by one of their courts over there.”
“But why, Charlie–why?”
“I wish I knew. I’ve been cudgelling my brains for weeks to get the answer to that question, Billy. It’s kept me awake nights, and I’m no nearer to it now than I was at the beginning. But hold on, you haven’t heard it all yet, by a good deal!”