“I always thought it was a very attractive name. The girl’a mother chose it because she claimed it was the prettiest word in English.”
“That’s what some broken-down Russian noble would think!” Eleanor turned angrily to Duff. “Go ahead! Fall for that towering twerp! Have a marvelous time with her!
Everybody does!”
“Eleanor!” said Mrs. Yates reproachfully.
The phone rang again at that point. Eleanor seized it, and instantly her voice became honey-sweet. “Of course,” she smiled. “I’ll manage, somehow! I’ve got to appear at the Watercade at four. And then there’s a cocktail party for me on the beach. And the ball. But I could spare a few minutes, maybe, between eight and nine.”
Charles came through the swinging door. “Is anybody getting lunch? Or do we just starve to death quietly?”
After lunch, Duff appointed himself a task that the Yateses had avoided. Harry Ellings’ room had been examined by the police, but his possessions had not been packed and the room had not, of course, been prepared for a new boarder. Nobody had even spoken about a new boarder. But the Yates budget meant that one would have to be found, and very soon.
Duff first packed Harry’s clothes in his suitcases. Then he put Harry’s letters, papers, pictures, books and personal knickknacks in cartons. These he moved to the barn and stored in its loft until they should learn what to do with them. The men who had gone through his effects and read every word of his correspondence had found no will. Mrs. Yates knew of none. He’d had, apparently, no relatives with whom he had kept in touch.
When all of Harry’s belongings had been removed from the room, Duff commenced to clean. There was dust beneath the bed which showed that the police, though they might have looked there, had not moved it. Duff presumed, however, that they had probed every square inch of the mattress, and when he stripped it off he thought he could see, here and there, tiny openings that long pins might have made. He carried the mattress outdoors. He went back and commenced, with the Dutch-wife neatness on which his mother had insisted, to dust the bed frame.
It was on the inner edge of a steel angle iron that he found the capsule. He presumed it to be one of the large, pliant kind in which liquid vitamins and other medicines are commonly administered. Something Harry had used long ago, dropped and lost track of. It must have fallen between the mattress and the wall and rolled onto the bed frame. But the capsule wasn’t dusty. And wetness showed at the ruptured edge. Also, Duff could see dents where teeth had recently come down on it to bite it open.