She and Thornburg passed out of the office and the manager closed the door behind him. Baron could still hear their voices, now lowered to an angry whisper. Thornburg seemed to be speaking accusingly, but Baron could not catch the words.
Then this one sentence, in Thornburg’s voice, came sharply: “I tell you, you’ve worked me as long as you’re going to!”
Then the manager, flushed and excited, re-entered the office and closed the door angrily.
And in that moment Baron remembered: That was the woman who had stood in the theatre, talking in a tense fashion with the manager, the day he, Baron, had sat up in the balcony box with Bonnie May!
He had no time to ponder this fact, however. Thornburg turned to him abruptly. “Have you seen the Times to-day?” he asked.
“I glanced at it. Why?”
The manager took a copy of the paper from a pigeonhole in his desk. “Look at that,” he directed, handing the paper to Baron. It was folded so that a somewhat obscure item was uppermost.
Baron read: “Any one having knowledge of the whereabouts of the child calling herself Bonnie May, and professionally known by that name, will please communicate with X Y Z, in care of the Times.”
Baron dropped the paper on the desk and turned to Thornburg without speaking.
The manager, now strangely quiet and morose, gazed abstractedly at the floor. “I wish,” he said at length, “I wish she was in Tophet, or somewhere else outside my jurisdiction.”