Part 28

“No, not next.”

“Is it on the same corridor?”

“No.”

“Around a corner?”

“Yes.”

“And at some distance?”

“Yes.” Mrs. Pierce's answers became more hesitating as she saw the drift of Mr. Monroe's questions. Clearly, she was trying to shield Florence, if necessary, at the expense of actual truthfulness.

“Then,” went on Mr. Monroe, inexorably, “I understand you to say that you think you would have heard Miss Lloyd, had she gone down-stairs, although your room is at a distance and around a corner and the hall and stairs are thickly carpeted. Unless you were listening especially, Mrs. Pierce, I think you would scarcely have heard her descend.”

“Well, as she didn't go down, of course I didn't hear her,” snapped Mrs. Pierce, with the feminine way of settling an argument by an unprovable statement.

Mr. Monroe began on another tack.

“When you went to Miss Lloyd's room,” he said, “was the maid, Elsa, there?”

“Miss Lloyd had just dismissed her for the night.”

“What was Miss Lloyd doing when you went to her room?”

“She was looking over some gowns that she proposed sending to the cleaner's.”

The coroner fairly jumped. He remembered the newspaper clipping of a cleaner's advertisement, which was even now in the gold bag before him. Though all the jurors had seen it, it had not been referred to in the presence of the women.

Recovering himself at once, he said quietly “Was not that rather work for Miss Lloyd's maid?”

“Oh, Elsa would pack and send them, of course,” said Mrs. Pierce carelessly. “Miss Lloyd was merely deciding which ones needed cleaning.”

“Do you know where they were to be sent?”

Mrs. Pierce looked a little surprised at this question.

“Miss Lloyd always sends her things to Carter & Brown's,” she said.

Now, Carter & Brown was the firm name on the advertisement, and it was evident at once that the coroner considered this a damaging admission.

He sat looking greatly troubled, but before he spoke again, Mr. Parmalee made an observation that decidedly raised that young man in my estimation.

“Well,” he said, “that's pretty good proof that the gold bag doesn't belong to Miss Lloyd.”

“How so?” asked the coroner, who had thought quite the contrary.

“Why, if Miss Lloyd always sends her goods to be cleaned to Carter & Brown, why would she need to cut their address from a newspaper and save it?”

At first I thought the young man's deduction distinctly clever, but on second thought I wasn't so sure. Miss Lloyd might have wanted that address for a dozen good reasons. To my mind, it proved neither her ownership of the gold bag, nor the contrary.

In fact, I thought the most important indication that the bag might be hers lay in the story Elsa told about the cousin who sailed to Germany. Somehow that sounded untrue to me, but I was more than willing to believe it if I could.

I longed for Fleming Stone, who, I felt sure, could learn from the bag and its contents the whole truth about the crime and the criminal.