Free The Shadow of Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer

went straight across to the safe. Resolutely he avoided looking toward Camille’s room to see if she had come back.
    From his ring he selected the safe key, and spun the dial. Not until he took out his big drawing board, and turned, did he see Camille.
    She stood right at his elbow, in shadows.
    Craig was really startled.
    “Good Lord, my dear!—I thought I’d seen a ghost!”
    Camille’s smile was vague. “Please forgive me. Didn’t you know I was here?”
    Craig laughed reassuringly.
    “Forgive
me.
I shouldn’t be such a jumping frog. When did you come in?”
    “A few minutes ago.” He saw now that she held a notebook in her hand. “There is this letter to Dr. White, at Harvard. I must have forgotten it.”
    Craig carried the board over to its place and fixed it up. Camille slowly followed. When he was satisfied, he suddenly grasped her shoulders and turned her around so that the reflected light from the drawing desk shone up onto her face.
    “My dear—er—Miss Navarre, you have, beyond any shade of doubt, been overdoin’ it. I warned you! The letter to Dr. White went off with the other mail. I distinctly recall signing same.”
    “Oh!” Camille looked down at her notebook.
    Craig dropped his hands from her shoulders and settled himself on the stool. He drew a tray of pencils nearer.
    “I quite understand,” he said quietly. “Done the same thing myself, lots of times. Fact is, we’re both overtired. I shan’t be long on the job tonight. We have been at it very late here for weeks now. Leave me to it. I suggest you hit the hay good and early.”
    “But—I am sorry”—her accent grew more marked, more fascinating—“if I seem distrait—”
    “Did you cut out for eats, as prescribed?”
    Craig didn’t look around.
    “No. I—just took a walk—”
    “Then take another one—straight home. Explore the icebox, refresh the tired frame, and seek repose. Expect you around ten in the morning. My fault, asking you to come back.”
    * * *
    Camille sat on the studio couch in her small apartment, trying to reconstruct events of the night.
    She couldn’t.
    It baffled her, and she was frightened.
    There were incidents which were vague, and this was alarming enough. But there were whole hours which were entirely blank!
    The vague incidents had occurred just before she left the Huston Building. Morris had been wonderfully sympathetic, and his kindness had made her desperately unhappy. Why had this been so? She found herself quite unable to account for it. Their entire relationship had assumed the character of an exquisite torture; but what had occurred on this particular occasion to make the torture so poignant?
    What had she been doing just before that last interview?
    She had only a hazy impression of writing something in a notebook, tearing the page off, and—then?
    Camille stared dreamily at the telephone standing on her bureau. Had she made a call since her return? She moved over and took up the waste-basket. There were tiny fragments of ruled paper there. Evidently she had torn something up, with great care.
    Her heart beginning to beat more swiftly, she stooped and examined the scraps of paper, no larger than confetti disks. Traces of writing appeared, but some short phrase, whatever it was, had been torn apart accurately, retorn, and so made utterly undecipherable.
    Camille dropped down again on the divan and sat there staring straight before her with unseeing eyes.
    Could it be that she had overtaxed her brain—that this was the beginning of a nervous collapse? For, apart from her inability to recall exactly what she had done before leaving the office, she had no recollection whatever, vague or otherwise, of the two hours preceding her last interview with Morris!
    Her memory was sharp, clear-cut, up to the moment she had lifted the phone on her own desk to make a certain call. This had been some time before eight. Whether she ever made that call or not, she had no idea. Her memory held no record