Mystery Cases of Letitia Carberry, Tish. Mary Roberts Rinehart
was partly down. I could only make out a sleeve of Mrs. Ostermaier's kimono. I was disappointed after all we had gone through.
She—Mrs. Ostermaier—came over the next morning after breakfast, while Aggie's foulard silk was hanging on the clothes-line. She had been down with the other cottagers, looking across to where the red leather of Tish's machine stuck up above water-level.
"Be careful," Tish said under her breath when she saw her; "she's got something' in her hand!"
"What a terrible accident, and how lucky nobody was hurt!" Mrs. Ostennaier began, holding the thing she was carrying against her skirt and staring from the three of us to Aggie's foulard. "The spots did run, didn't they? I told Mr. Ostennaier they would He thinks you are wonderful women, to go around the country as the three of you do at all hours of the night."
Just then the sunlight caught the thing she held in her hand, and I knew in a moment what it was—it was Mr. Lewis' silver cigarette case Tish saw it too, and ran her needle into her finger.
"We had an exciting night too," Mrs. Ostermaier went on. "Dear me, Miss Carberry, you've jabbed your finger!"
"An exciting night?" I asked, to keep her attention from Aggie Aggie had just seen the cigarette case and she had gone blue around the nose.
"Most exciting. About three o'clock this morning—about the time you three ladies were having such a dreadful experience—still, as couple came to our cottage and wakened Ostermaier. I think they threw gravel through the window. They wanted to be married."
Tish sat up and tried to look scandalized.
"I hope your husband didn't do it," she said. I had to pinch Aggie; she was leaning forward with her eyes bulging.
That put Mrs. Ostermaier on the defensive. "Why not?" she demanded. "They had a license, and they were of age. I believe in encouraging young love; Mr. Ostermaier says it is the most beautiful thing in the world. Cousin Maggie and I were witnesses, and we threw rice after them. It was barley, really, but we didn't discover that until this morning."
Aggie gave a sigh of relief; we had guessed, but it was the first time we had really known.
"I told Mr. Ostermaier that it gave me quite a thrill the way he looked at her as Harold pronounced them man and wife. "All the world loves a lover,' and Cousin Maggie has been reading Ella Wheeler Wilcox diligently all morning.
She turned to go and we breathed easier. Now that we knew they were safely married— Mrs. Ostermaier turned and started back.
"I nearly forgot what brought me," she called. "My Willie found this in the bed of your automobile, Miss Tish." She held out the cigarette case and Tish took it and dropped it into her work-basket.
"It belongs to my nephew, Charlie Sands," she said, looking Mrs. Ostermaier in the eye. Tish has plenty of courage, but I felt calamity coming.
"So I told Mr. Ostermaier,'' the creature said, with a smile. "But he insists on remarking the coincidence that the initials on the cigarette case are W. L. and that the young man's name on the license was Walter Lewis."
I have always thanked Heaven that at that moment her Willie fell off the dock, and although the child was not drowned, still, as Tish wrote to Maria Lee, her niece, "he had swallowed enough water to wash the initials off the tablets of his mother's memory." And so far as we know, although the papers came out with great headlines about the marriage, and another article about the post-office having been robbed—we had nothing whatever to do with that—and about three men disguised as women making their escape toward Canada in a red automobile and having run over a pig at Dorchester Junction—I told Tish at the time it was a pig, but she insisted it was a cow—although the papers came out with all this, nobody ever suspected the truth except Carpenter. He happened to find a menu from the Sherman House at Noblestown floating in the body of the car, and the good-for-nothing took a trip to the city and traced us.
He did not say anything, but about a week later he came to the cottage and put a package on the table in the kitchen.
"It's been puzzlin' me for four days. Miss Lizzie," he said, fumbling with the string of the bundle. "I sez to Mrs. C, sez I, 'It ain't possible,' I sez. 'She sez she lost her shoe when the automobile went into the water, and she's a truthful woman; and yet, two days after, the chambermaid at the Sherman House finds it high and dry under a bureau, forty miles away. It's spooky,' I sez."
Aggie was pouring hot water into the teapot, and she kept on pouring till it went all over the place.
"Nonsense," said Tish. "That shoe doesn't belong to Miss Lizzie,"
But I looked at Carpenter's face and I knew it was hopeless.
"You've been a good friend to us, Mr. Carpenter," I said "We've always felt we'-ve owed you something. Here's a little present, and thank you for the shoe."
He took the money and we looked each other straight in the eye. Then he grinned.
"For twenty dollars, Miss Lizzie," he said, "I'd be willing to swallow my tongue backward. And the shoe ain't the tongue kind."
Chapter II.
A Blue Runabout and a Bad Bridge
Both Aggie and I had objected when Tish talked of buying an automobile. But the more you talk against a thing to Tish the more she wants it. It was just the same the time her niece, Maria Lee, went to Europe for the whole summer and offered Tish her motor-boat. Aggie and I protested, but the boat came, and Tish had a lesson or two and sent to town for a yachting cap. Then, one day when we were making elderberry jelly and ran out of sugar, Tish offered to take me to the mainland in the boat. That was the time, you remember, when the stopping lever got jammed, and Tish and I circled around Lake Penzance for seven hours, with people on different docks trying to lasso us with ropes as we flew past, and Aggie in hysterics on the beach below the cottage.
People of Penzance still speak of that day, for we figured out that we had enough gasoline to run one hundred and sixty miles, and after Peter Miller, at Point Lena, had lassoed us and was dragged for a quarter of a mile before he caught hold of a buoy and could let go of the rope, we got desperate. I was at the wheel and Tish was trying to stop the engine, pouring water over it and attempting to stick an iron rod in the wheels. And just as she succeeded, and the rod shot through the awning on the top of the launch like a sky-rocket, I turned the thing toward shore where it looked fairly flat.
"I'm going to get to land," I said with my teeth clenched. "I don't care if it crawls up and dies in a plowed field; I'm going to get my feet on dry land again."
I had not expected it to stop so suddenly, but it did, and Tish and I and the granulated sugar landed some distance ahead of the boat and well above high-water mark; in fact, Tish broke her collar-bone, and that entire summer, whenever the doctor had to peel off the adhesive plaster, Tish would get ugly and turn on me.
Well, we should have known about the automobile. I had a queer feeling when I started out that morning. Tish had had the car out the day before by herself for the first time— both Aggie and I had had the good judgment to refuse—and she got home safely, although she had a queer-looking mark on her right cheek, and one of the mud-guards didn't look exactly right. She said she had had a lovely ride, and we helped her push the machine into the wash-house, where we had had Carpenter knock out a side, and then she went to bed and had a cup of tea. Aggie heard something moving that night, and she found Tish sitting up on the side of her bed, holding like death to the back of a chair and turning it around like a wheel. Aggie got her back to bed, but Tish only looked up at her and said, "Four chickens!" and went to sleep again.
The next morning her left leg was quite stiff from what she called the clutch, and she sat on the porch peacefully and rocked. But at noon she went to the wash-house, and when she came back she was pale but determined.
"I'm going to take it