The Window at the White Cat | Page 3

"And he left without giving you any warning?"
"Yes. He served luncheon the day after father went away, and the
maids say he went away immediately after. He was not there that
evening to serve dinner, but--he came back late that night, and got into
the house, using his key to the servants' entrance. He slept there, the
maids said, but he was gone before the servants were up and we have
not seen him since."
I made a mental note of the butler.
"We'll go back to Carter again," I said. "Your father has not been ill,
has he? I mean recently."
She considered.
"I can not think of anything except that he had a tooth pulled." She was
quick to resent my smile. "Oh, I know I'm not helping you," she
exclaimed, "but I have thought over everything until I can not think any
more. I always end where I begin."
"You have not noticed any mental symptoms--any lack of memory?"
Her eyes filled.
"He forgot my birthday, two weeks ago," she said. "It was the first one
he had ever forgotten, in nineteen of them."

Nineteen! Nineteen from thirty-five leaves sixteen!
"What I meant was this," I explained. "People sometimes have sudden
and unaccountable lapses of memory and at those times they are apt to
stray away from home. Has your father been worried lately?"
"He has not been himself at all. He has been irritable, even to me, and
terrible to the servants. Only to Carter--he was never ugly to Carter.
But I do not think it was a lapse of memory. When I remember how he
looked that morning, I believe that he meant then to go away. It shows
how he had changed, when he could think of going away without a
word, and leaving me there alone."
"Then you have no brothers or sisters?"
"None. I came to you--" there she stopped.
"Please tell me how you happened to come to me," I urged. "I think you
know that I am both honored and pleased."
"I didn't know where to go," she confessed, "so I took the telephone
directory, the classified part under 'Attorneys,' and after I shut my eyes,
I put my finger haphazard on the page. It pointed to your name."
I am afraid I flushed at this, but it was a wholesome douche. In a
moment I laughed.
"We will take it as an omen," I said, "and I will do all that I can. But I
am not a detective, Miss Fleming. Don't you think we ought to have
one?"
"Not the police!" she shuddered. "I thought you could do something
without calling a detective."
"Suppose you tell me what happened the day your father left, and how
he went away. Tell me the little things too. They may be straws that
will point in a certain direction."
"In the first place," she began, "we live on Monmouth Avenue. There

are just the two of us, and the servants: a cook, two housemaids, a
laundress, a butler and a chauffeur. My father spends much of his time
at the capital, and in the last two years, since my old governess went
back to Germany, at those times I usually go to mother's sisters at
Bellwood--Miss Letitia and Miss Jane Maitland."
I nodded: I knew the Maitland ladies well. I had drawn four different
wills for Miss Letitia in the last year.
"My father went way on the tenth of May. You say to tell you all about
his going, but there is nothing to tell. We have a machine, but it was
being repaired. Father got up from breakfast, picked up his hat and
walked out of the house. He was irritated at a letter he had read at the
table--"
"Could you find that letter?" I asked quickly.
"He took it with him. I knew he was disturbed, for he did not even say
he was going. He took a car, and I thought he was on his way to his
office. He did not come home that night and I went to the office the
next morning. The stenographer said he had not been there. He is not at
Plattsburg, because they have been trying to call him from there on the
long distance telephone every day."
In spite of her candid face I was sure she was holding something back.
"Why don't you tell me everything?" I asked, "You may be keeping
back the one essential point."
She flushed. Then she opened her pocket-book and gave me a slip of
rough paper, On it, in careless figures, was the number "eleven
twenty-two." That was all.
"I was afraid you would think it silly," she said. "It was such a
meaningless thing. You see, the second night after father