She pretended ignorance of his designs upon the bonds. Maybe she hadn’t known. Anyhow, she had carried out her part of the plan, but Rathbone had failed to show up in New Orleans. She hadn’t shown much care in covering her trail and private detectives employed by her husband had soon found her. Her husband had arrived in New Orleans and, apparently not knowing that there was another man in the deal, had persuaded her to return home.
She wasn’t a woman to take kindly to the jilting Rathbone had handed her, so she hadn’t tried to get in touch with him, or to learn what had kept him from joining her.
Her story rang true enough, but just to play safe, I put out a few feelers in the neighborhood, and what I learned seemed to verify what she had told me. I gathered that a few of the neighbors had made guesses that weren’t a million miles away from the facts.
I got the Pullman Company on the telephone and was told that lower 4, car 8, leaving for New York on the twenty-eighth, hadn’t been occupied at all.
Zumwalt was dressing for dinner when I went up to his room at the hotel where he was staying.
I told him all that I had learned that day, and what I thought of it.
“Everything makes sense up until Rathbone left the Golden Gate Trust Company vault on the twenty-seventh, and after that nothing does! He had planned to grab the bonds and elope with this Mrs. Earnshaw, and he had already drawn out of the bank all his own money. That’s all orderly. But why should he have gone back to the office? Why should he have stayed in town that night? What was the important business that held him? Why should he have ditched Mrs. Earnshaw? Why didn’t he use his reservations at least part of the way across the country, as he had