“Don’t worry, Mr. Cray. I’ll see to it, that this young woman does not succeed in evading justice, if she tries to do so.”
At which Miss Mystery gave her a smile that was so patronizing, even amused, that the spinster was more irate than ever.
“And, now, Miss Austin,” the attorney said, “I’ll take your finger prints, please, as they may be useful in proving what you did not do.”
He smiled a little as the girl readily enough gave her consent to the procedure.
“And,” he went on, more gravely, “I will ask you for one of your shoes—one that you wore on Sunday.”
Surprised into a glance of dismay, Miss Mystery rose without a word and went upstairs for the shoe.
She returned with the dainty, pretty thing, and merely observed, “I’d like to have it back, when you are through with it.”
Putting the shoe in his overcoat pocket, Cray went away.
“Miss Bascom,” Anita said, turning to her enemy, “may you never want a friend as much as I do now.”
“The nerve of her!” Liza Bascom muttered to herself, as Miss Mystery went upstairs to her own room.
“There’s a very deep mystery here!” Cray soliloquized, as he returned to the Waring house. “But I’m getting light on it.”
Cray was far from lacking in ingenuity, and he proceeded at once to compare the finger prints he had of Anita Austin with the prints on the small black-framed chair that had been found drawn up to the desk chair of John Waring.
They were identical and Cray mused over the fact.
“That girl was here that night,” he decided; “there’s no gainsaying that.” He called the butler to him.
“Ito,” he began, “did you let in any one late Sunday night—after you came home?”
“No, sir,” the imperturbable Jap declared, thinking the question foolish, as all the inquirers knew the details of his Sunday evening movements.
“Do you remember seeing this chair, Monday morning?”
“Distinctly. I saw Mr. Lockwood smoothing its back.”
“I looked through from the dining-room window, to see if Mr. Lockwood was coming to breakfast, and I perceived him carefully smoothing the plush of the little chair, sir.”
Cray meditated. Here was a point of evidence. Lockwood was not the sort to absent-mindedly paw over a chair back. He was doing it on purpose. For what reason? What reason could be, save to erase some evidence?