“But what does she mean about the poetry?” Horace insisted.
Judy, however, would say nothing more. She turned her attention to the old lady now, endeavoring to engage her in a sensible conversation. “So you were at the funeral, Miss Grimshaw. I wondered why you hadn’t come in to the office. When did Sarah Glenn die?”
“Lord knows!” Emily Grimshaw answered. “But I went out there to pay my respects to the dead. Heard about it through friends. And there was that—that—that——”
Her voice trailed off in a groan. She was pointing again but this time not at Irene but at the vacant spot where the girl had stood.
“Good Lord! She’s gone again.”
“She went out quietly,” Judy explained. “Dale Meredith was with her. They’ll be back.”
“They’d better be,” the irate woman answered. “Those poems had better be back too or I’ll know the reason why. Ghost or no ghost, that girl can’t get away with stealing——”
“Your poems are here,” Judy interrupted, her voice quiet but firm. She lifted the stack of papers from the desk, and before Emily Grimshaw could get her breath, she had deposited them in the startled old lady’s lap. “Now,” she continued, “after you finish another cup of this nice strong coffee, I’ll call Dale and the girl back into the room and all of us can hear her story.”
“You mean Joy Holiday?”
“I mean the girl you call Joy Holiday. The real Joy Holiday is dead. You see, she didn’t vanish as you thought she did. She climbed down from the tower window and eloped with her lover. This girl is her daughter and she was wearing her mother’s yellow dress the day you saw her.”