“Because Emily Grimshaw thinks someone named Joy Holiday took those poems that were lost.”
“What poems?” asked Pauline.
“The ones Irene and I were reading this morning. Something happened to them. They aren’t anywhere. Of course someone took them, but the strange part of it is, we were the only ones in the office.”
“And you missed them right after Emily Grimshaw had that queer spell and collapsed?” Dale asked.
“Pretty soon afterwards.”
“I thought there was something fishy about that at the time,” he declared, “and I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if the old lady made away with them herself.”
“But why should she? What would be her object in taking poems she expected to publish and then pretending not to know what happened to them?”
“It’s beyond me! Maybe she didn’t. They might have been accidentally brushed off the table when someone passed.”
“In that case they would have been on the floor,” Judy replied.
Dale Meredith was coming to some rapid conclusions, she thought—too rapid to be sincere expressions of his opinion. But what use could a successful young author make of faded manuscripts of melancholy poetry. A plot for a story, perhaps. That was pure inspiration! Those queer old poems might furnish plots for a great many mystery stories if anyone had the patience to figure them out. Ghosts ... towers ... thrills ... shivers ... creeps.... Dale Meredith could do it, too. All he needed was a little time to study the originals. The revised poems with corrections and omissions, Judy could see, wouldn’t do half so well.