Bertha said, “Because there’s ten thousand dollars missing.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“Are you,” Mrs. Cranning asked, “accusing us of taking ten thousand dollars?”
“I’m not accusing anybody,” Bertha said, then waited a moment and added significantly, “yet.”
“Would you kindly explain exactly what you mean?” Eva Hanberry demanded.
Bertha said, “When Harlow Milbers died, he had ten thousand dollars in his wallet.”
“Who says so?” Paul Hanberry asked.
“I do,” Christopher Milbers announced, coming forward a step so that he was standing at Bertha Cool’s side, “and I happen to be in a position to prove my statement. My cousin was intending to negotiate for the purchase of some very rare contemporary historical books: Because of certain considerations which needn’t enter into the discussion, the purchase was to be for currency. He had ten thousand dollars in currency in his possession the day he died.”
“Well, he hid it somewhere, then,” Mrs. Cranning said, “because it wasn’t in his wallet when he died.”
“No, he didn’t,” Christopher Milbers said. “He always kept five—”
Bertha Cool brushed him backwards and into silence with a sweeping gesture of her arm. “How do you know it wasn’t in his wallet when he died?” she demanded of Mrs. Cranning.
Mrs. Cranning exchanged glances with the others, and failed to answer the question.
Eva Hanberry said indignantly, “Well, good heavens, I guess if we’re responsible for things here, it’s up to us to look through the things a dead man leaves, isn’t it?”
Paul Hanberry said, — “We had to find out who his relatives were.”
“As though you didn’t know,” Christopher Milbers said.
Bertha Cool said belligerently, “I didn’t come out here to waste time in a lot of arguments. We want that ten thousand dollars.”
“He might have concealed it in his room,” Nettie Cranning said. “I’m quite certain it wasn’t in his wallet.”
“It most certainly wasn’t in his wallet by the time I got it,” Milbers said, growing bolder as Bertha Cool’s direct tactics got the others on the defensive.
“All right,” Bertha observed. “That’s a starting point. We’ll go look at the room where he died. How about the other rooms? Did he do any work here in the house?”
“Good heavens, yes. Lots of it in the library,” Mrs. Cranning said. “He worked there until all hours of the night.”
“Well, let’s take a look in the library. Which is closer?”
“The library.”
“Let’s go there first.”
“The bedroom’s been searched anyway,” Paul said. “He—”
Mrs. Cranning silenced him with a glance of savage disapproval.
Eva said in a low voice, “Let Mother do the talking dear.”
Mrs. Cranning, with considerable dignity, said, “Right this way,” and led the way into a spacious library. In the doorway, she made a little sweeping gesture with her hands as though turning the room over to the visitors and, incidentally, disclaiming all responsibility for herself.
Paul Hanberry looked at his watch, suddenly jerked to startled attention, said, “Gee, I forgot a telephone call,” and walked hastily toward the back of the house.
Almost instantly the attitude of the two women changed. Mrs. Cranning said in a more conciliatory voice, “Are you absolutely certain that he had the money with him?”
“Probably in his wallet,” Milbers said. “The banker is positive that’s where he put the five thousand dollars he drew out Thursday.”
Nettie Cranning and her daughter exchanged glances. Eva said defensively, “He wasn’t ever alone in the room with Mr. Milbers. You know that as well as I do. Mother.”
“Not before he died,” Mrs. Cranning said, “but—”
“Mother!”
“Oh, all right! But you were the one who brought the matter up.”
“Well, you as good as accused—”
Mrs. Cranning turned to Bertha with a smile. “Of course, Mrs. Cool, this is a great shock to us and a great surprise. We want to do everything we can to help you — if you want our help.”
“Oh, certainly,” Bertha said dryly. “And you’ll really be surprised to find how much I can do.”
The library was a huge room lined with shelves of books, many of them bound in a leather which had turned a dark, crusty brown with age. In the centre of the room was a long table, and this table was fairly littered with books lying open, piled one on top of the other. In the centre was a writing pad and a pencil. The top page of the pad was scrawled with notes written in an angular cramped hand.
Mrs. Cranning said, “I don’t think anyone’s looked through here except Mr. Christopher Milbers, who asked to look through the whole house. It’s just the way poor Mr. Milbers left it. He gave orders that no one, under any circumstances, was to touch any of the books or things in this room. They were all to be kept just as he left them. Sometimes there would be days on end when I couldn’t get at the table to dust it because it was so littered with things that I couldn’t touch.”
“It’s hardly a place where a person would leave ten one-thousand dollar bills,” Bertha observed.
Mrs. Cranning’s silence showed that she felt the same way.
Christopher Milbers said, “I have already examined the notes that are on that pad of writing paper. They have to do with one of the campaigns of Cesar. They have no bearing whatever on the subject under discussion. In fact, I found then singularly uninteresting—”
Bertha Cool moved away from him and swept through the room in a hurried search.
“I feel,” Milbers said, “that we may concentrate our search in the bedroom. However, I think we are all agreed that the search is destined to be fruitless. So far as I am concerned, it is merely a necessary preliminary before lodging a formal charge.”
“Against whom and for what?” Eva Hanberry demanded with swift acerbity.
Christopher Milbers detoured the suggestion very adroitly. “That,” he said, “is entirely in the discretion of the detective.”
“Just a private detective,” Mrs. Cranning sniffed. “She has no authority to do anything.”
“She is my representative,” Milbers announced, managing to put great dignity into the statement.
Bertha Cool ignored this discussion. On the trail of money, she was as eager as a hound on a scent. She walked over to the library table, glanced at the open books, riffled the closely written pages of the pad, paused halfway through to read what had been written there, and said, “Who gives a damn about that old stuff?”
After a moment’s silence, Christopher Milbers said defensively, “My cousin was interested in it.”
“Humph!” Bertha said.
Once more there was an interval of silence.
“Any drawer in this table?” Bertha asked.
Quite apparently there was none.
“I think we may as well adjourn to the bedroom,” Milbers said.
Bertha once more regarded the pad of paper with so many of the pages filled with scrawled notes.
“What becomes of this stuff?” she asked.
“You mean the notes?” Mrs. Cranning asked.
“Yes.”
“They were given to his secretary to be transcribed; then Mr. Milbers would read them and correct them for final revision. After that, they’d go into his notebook. He had dozens of notebooks filled with data, and when he’d get—”
“How about these pads?” Bertha asked. “The way he wrote, a pad didn’t last him very long.”
“I’ll say it didn’t. Sometimes I’ve seen—”