Alan’s arms were around her, his lips against hers. “You are loved,” he whispered. “Does not that cover all?” and he led her from the room.
Martha intercepted Miriam as she was on her way to her own room an hour later.
“He’s waiting downstairs,” she said, pointing in the direction of the living room.
“He?—Who?”
“Mr. Trenholm.” And Martha who, since Corbin’s arrest for complicity in Paul’s murder and for having narcotics concealed in his cache in the suicide’s grave, had kept carefully hidden in the kitchen closet, stole softly to bed.
Trenholm dropped the paper he was reading as Miriam paused in front of him, and sprang to his feet.
“I hoped that you would come,” he said. “Betty and Alan are in the sunparlor. In our talk they have cleared up the last threads of the mystery. It seems that Betty’s telegram to Paul was telephoned out from Upper Marlboro and Alan wrote it down on a slip of paper and gave it to him. It was to secure that paper, Betty thinking it a regular telegraph blank, that they both tried to search this house and my bungalow.”
“Mr. Abbott had a paper in his hand when he told me that Miss Carter would be here,” broke in Miriam.
“Ah, then he must have carried it with him into the sitting room, and dropped it on the way there,” replied Trenholm. “Pierre found it and took it to Mrs. Nash.”
A ghost of a smile hovered about Miriam’s lips. “I cannot help but like Mrs. Nash,” she confessed, then changed the subject swiftly. “What took Mr. Abbott into the sitting room when I went downstairs to admit Miss Carter and Doctor Nash?”