“Rooms on this corridor are never assigned unless everything else is full up,” the maid explained.
Pausing at a door, the cleaning woman fitted a master key into the lock.
“There’s one thing more I’m rather curious about,” said Penny quickly. “It’s this Green Room I hear folks mentioning.”
The maid gazed at her suspiciously again. “I don’t know anything about any Green Room,” she replied.
Entering the bedroom with her cleaning paraphernalia, she closed the door behind her.
“Went a bit too far that time,” thought Penny, “but at least I learned a few facts of interest.”
Turning, she retraced her steps to Room 27, but she was afraid to linger there lest Ralph Fergus should discover her loitering in the hall. Miss Miller had not put in an appearance when she returned to the elevators. She decided not to wait.
Scribbling a brief note of explanation, Penny left the paper in a corner of the sofa and hobbled down the stairway to the first floor. She let herself out the back way without attracting undue attention. Safely in the open once more she retreated to her bench under the ice-coated trees.
“I need to give this whole problem a good think,” she told herself. “Here I have a number of perfectly good clues but they don’t fit together. I’m almost as far from getting evidence against Fergus and Maxwell as I was at the start.”
Penny could not understand why the hotel would have need for teletype machine service. Such machines were used in newspaper offices, for railroad communication, brokerage service, and occasionally in very large plants with widely separated branch offices. Suddenly she recalled that her father had once told her Mr. Maxwell kept in touch with his chain of hotels by means of such a wire service. Surely it was an expensive and unnecessary means of communication.