Free Secret Letters by Leah Scheier Page A

and in the seams. I found a single thread, of a dark blue color, adhering to the mattress. The seam was absolutely intact and was sewn together with the same blue thread.”
    “Oh, but—that is impossible. If the bed was turned and pounded, as you said, then the thread would have floated off. Unless—unless someone cut the mattress and searched through it before you got there. After Lady Rose was gone, and after the maid had cleaned the quarters.”
    “Exactly. Very good. You have a curious talent for this sort of thing, I see.” He looked away from me for a moment, and I saw his lips tense briefly. “One of your relatives used to be an officer, by chance? An investigator, possibly?”
    “No, of course not,” I retorted stiffly.
    “Ah, well. I thought perhaps—deductive skills are frequently hereditary, you know. Well, never mind. So what do you suppose I looked at next?”
    I sighed and silently scanned the imagined room. How I wished that I had been there! Would I have seen something that he had missed? Did I dare hope that I might one day be the eyes of the investigation, instead of a passive listener, like a child begging for a bedtime story? “Well, Mr. Cartwright, I would have opened all the dressers and the wardrobe first.”
    “Indeed. The latter was filled with clothing and trinkets, but the bottommost drawer of the dresser was empty. I asked Lady Hartfield what the drawer had contained.
    “‘My daughter kept all her correspondence, as well as her diaries there,’ she told me. ‘She must have emptied it and taken them with her.’
    “I did not say anything at the time, Miss Joyce, but it seemed strange to me: that bottom panel sagged very markedly in the middle, as if it had held the weight of many pounds of paper. Why would a girl take all her correspondence with her when she fled?”
    I shook my head. “And how could she scale a tree with so much weighing her down? Perhaps she hid her diaries somewhere before she went, or someone else took them after she had gone. But what did Mr. Porter think of all of this? What was he doing while you were crawling about the floor?”
    Cartwright took another sip of water and stuffed a bit of cinnamon pastry into his mouth. “Talking to Lady Hartfield, mostly. Lady Rose had a strange collection of clocks displayed on one of the bookcases, and they were discussing those, I think.”
    “Was there something special about the clocks?”
    “They were set to different time zones, actually, corresponding to the cities of their origin. Most were very beautiful and made of porcelain or silver. There was one old broken wooden one in the back that did not match the others, but there was nothing particularly interesting about them, no. Mr. Porter likes that sort of thing. I believe they would have talked about ceramics all that evening—if I had not fallen out the window.”
    “You fell?!”
    “All right, I jumped. Lady Hartfield and Mr. Porter got very excited.”
    “Oh, I see. You were trying to re-create Lady Rose’s supposed flight.”
    He rolled his eyes and slumped back against the sofa cushion. “You could at least attempt to be mystified, Miss Joyce. Just once in a while. It would really help my ego.”
    “You appear to mystify the rest of the world, Mr. Cartwright. I think that should be enough for you. But what I want to know is: Did you take a suitcase with you when you leapt courageously out the window? You should have done.”
    “Yes, of course. I stuffed it with the appropriate weight of clothing and tried to descend the tree outside her window. The branches were slick with rain and it was near impossible. I slipped, in fact, and might have broken my neck if Porter hadn’t caught me by the collar.”
    “Ah, so he is good for something, then. But you haven’t told me about the ground below. Were there any marks upon the soil?”
    “A pair of footprints, yes.”
    “No imprint of a suitcase?”
    “None.”
    “Then she could not have lowered her