It was a letter, written with blue ink in a firm, angular and unmistakably feminine hand on heavy white note paper.
Dear Dannyboy:
If it isn’t too late I’ve changed my mind about going. If you can wait another day, until Tuesday, I’ll go. Call me up as soon as you get this, and if you still want me I’ll pick you up in the roadster at the Shattuck Avenue station Tuesday afternoon.
It was dated the twenty-sixth—the Sunday before Rathbone had disappeared.
“That’s the thing that made him lay over another day, and made him change his plans,” one of the police detectives said. “I guess we better run over to Berkeley and see what we can find at the Shattuck Avenue station.”
“ Mr. Zumwalt,” I said, when he and I were alone in his office, “how about this stenog of yours?”
He bounced up from his chair and his face turned red.
“What about her?”
“Is she—How friendly was she with Rathbone?”
“Miss Narbett,” he said heavily, deliberately, as if to be sure that I caught every syllable, “is to be married to me as soon as my wife gets her divorce. That is why I canceled the order to sell my house. Now would you mind telling me just why you asked?”