Читать книгу: «Dorothy Dixon and the Double Cousin», страница 6

Chapter XI
GRETCHEN

Dorothy awoke from troubled dreams to find that it was another day. Through the open window she saw the swirl of snowflakes driven in a high wind. The bedroom was cold and in the grey light of the winter morning it had lost its cheerful air.

She heard a knock on the door.

“Who’s there?” she called drowsily.

“It’s the maid, miss. Mrs. Lawson thought you might be wanting your breakfast now.”

Dorothy looked at her wrist watch. The hands marked ten-thirty. She jumped out on the rug, which felt cold and clammy under her bare feet, went to the door and unlocked it. Then she scampered back to bed and snuggled under the warm covers.

In walked a trim little figure wearing the small white apron and gray uniform of a chambermaid. Dorothy saw a round merry face, and a pair of big blue eyes beneath the white lawn cap, and thick flaxen braids were coiled round the neat head. She was surprised and somehow pleased to discover that this attractive member of the household staff could not be much more than sixteen, just her own age.

The little maid shut the door softly, crossed to the window and closed it, turned on the steam heat and came to the bedside. “Good morning, Miss Jordan.” She smiled engagingly. “I’m Gretchen, miss. Will you have your breakfast in bed?”

“Why, thank you, Gretchen – that will be cozy. But if it’s going to give you any trouble, don’t bother.” With the covers drawn up to her eyes, Dorothy smiled back at the girl.

“Oh, no, miss – it’s no trouble at all.” Gretchen was insistent. “It’s all ready now. I’ll run down and bring it up.”

She whisked out of the room and Dorothy rolled over for another cat-nap.

“If you’ll be good enough to sit up now, Miss Jordan – I have your breakfast here.”

Dorothy awoke again, yawned and stretched luxuriously. Gretchen stood beside her bed with the breakfast tray.

“If you’ll be good enough to sit up, miss?” she repeated.

Dorothy punched the pillows into position behind her, slipped the quilted gown about her shoulders and leaned back. Gretchen moved nearer – then almost dropped the tray.

“Why – why – miss – ”

Dorothy leaned over and steadied the tray. “What’s the matter, Gretchen?” The little maid was staring at her open-mouthed, her big blue eyes as round as saucers.

“Oh, I – I beg your pardon, but it’s – it’s the resemblance, miss – Miss Jordan.” She set the tray over Dorothy’s knees and drew back still with that astonished look. “I couldn’t see you very well before, miss, with the covers up to your eyes. But when you sat up, it sure did give me a start.”

“What do you mean, Gretchen? The resemblance to whom?” Dorothy, outwardly calm, fingered her glass of orange juice, but her thoughts raced toward this new complication.

“Why, you look so much like Dorothy Dixon – the flyer, you know, miss. She’s my hero – I mean, heroine, Miss Jordan. I’ve read everything the newspapers printed about her and Bill Bolton. You must have read about them too, everybody has?”

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard about them.” Dorothy hoped her tone sounded indifferent. “But you know, Gretchen, newspaper pictures are often very poor likenesses.”

The girl smiled and nodded. “I know that, Miss Jordan. I’ve got them all and there isn’t no two of the pictures that looks alike.”

“Then how – ?”

“You see, it wasn’t the newspaper pictures I was thinking of, miss, but Dorothy Dixon herself. You see I know Miss Dixon,” she went on proudly, “and you two are certainly the spittin’ images of each other, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

Dorothy minded very much, but it was not consistent with the part she was playing to admit it. Here was a contretemps not even Ashton Sanborn had foreseen. Yet, of course, New Canaan was only ten miles away. She had many friends in Ridgefield, and she’d been there hundreds of times. But she simply couldn’t remember having seen Gretchen in any of their homes. Her answer was but a feeble stall for time.

“So you know her then?” she said lamely.

“Oh, yes, miss. Not well, you understand. I saw her and Mr. Bill Bolton first when they finished the endurance test on the Conway motor this fall. Then a few days later, I drove over to her house in our flivver – over to New Canaan, you know, and I called on Miss Dixon. I wanted her to autograph a picture of herself I’d cut out of the Sunday paper.”

“And you met her?” Dorothy remembered the incident perfectly now. But the maid’s uniform – and her hair – when she had seen her, Gretchen had worn two braids over her shoulders, very much the schoolgirl. No wonder she hadn’t recognized her. But now what should she do? Would it be possible to keep up this camouflage with a girl whom she had met and with whom she would come in daily contact? Gretchen was talking again.

“Yes indeed, I met her. And she was just darling to me, Miss Jordan. She even gave me one of her own photographs and wrote on it, too. You see, us Schmidts came over from Germany about a hundred years ago, but we’re honest-to-goodness Americans just the same. Father was in the American army during the war. He was an aviation mechanic. He found one of them Iron Crosses of the Germans on some battlefield in France and kept it for a mascot. And would you believe it, miss, Father never even got wounded once, the whole time he was over there! Perhaps it was the little Iron Cross, and perhaps it wasn’t. Anyway, he thought a lot of his mascot. When I was ten years old, he had it fixed on a thin gold chain for me to wear around my neck, and gave it to me on my birthday. Well, when I went to see Miss Dixon this fall, I took it with me. She goes up in her airplane so much and does so many other exciting things, I wanted her to have it. She didn’t want to take the cross at first, but I persuaded her to, just the same. And you don’t know how nice she was to me, Miss! Took me out to see Will-o-the-Wisp – that’s her plane, you know – she calls it Wispy for short. And I had a perfectly grand time. She’s my heroine, all right. And you, miss – I hope you’ll excuse me for talking so much about it – but you look exactly like her, and your voices are just the same, too. It’s wonderful!”

“So you are Margaret Schmidt,” Dorothy said slowly.

“Yes, miss, that is so, though everybody calls me Gretchen. How did you know my given name, Miss Jordan? Is Miss Dixon a friend of yours? Did she tell you about me? But that’s silly – she wouldn’t remember me.”

Dorothy looked the little maid straight in the eyes. “She remembers you, Gretchen. Would you be willing to do something for her – to keep a secret, a very important and maybe a dangerous one? Do you think you could do it?”

Gretchen looked awestruck, then she smiled. “Mother says I’m the closest-mouthed girl she ever saw, miss. They could cut me in pieces before I ever let out any secret of Dorothy Dixon’s. I’d never tell – not me! You can trust me, Miss Jordan.”

“I’m sure I can, Gretchen. And I’m going to.” Dorothy slipped her hand into the V-neck of her pajamas. “Remember this?”

“Why – it’s – it’s my Iron Cross – that I gave Dorothy Dixon. How in the world – ?”

“I am Dorothy Dixon.” Dorothy broke into laughter at the bewildered expression on the girl’s face.

“But – but I don’t understand!” Gretchen stammered as though her tongue was half-paralyzed. “I knew the resemblance was wonderful – but – they said you were Miss Janet Jordan – and – ”

“You sit down on the end of the bed,” said Dorothy, “I’ll go on with my breakfast before it gets cold, and explain at the same time. We won’t be disturbed, will we?”

“Oh, no, miss.”

“How about your work, Gretchen? Will you be wanted downstairs?”

“Mr. Tunbridge told me to unpack your trunk, miss – Miss Dixon – and to make myself generally useful.”

“Fine,” smiled Dorothy, pouring out a cup of coffee. “But keep on calling me Miss Jordan – otherwise you’ll be making slips in the name in front of other people and that would be fatal.”

“Yes, Miss Jordan,” Gretchen grinned happily.

“After this beastly business is over,” Dorothy went on, “we’ll be Gretchen and Dorothy to each other.”

The other girl looked a trifle embarrassed. “But I’m only a chambermaid, Miss Jordan,” she said shyly.

“Don’t be silly!” Dorothy waved away the argument with a sweep of her spoon. “You’re proving yourself a real friend – and that’s that.”

“Very well, Miss Jordan.”

“Now pin back your ears, Gretchen.” Dorothy lifted the cover from her scrambled eggs. “I am taking my cousin, Janet Jordan’s place as Mrs. Lawson’s secretary. Nobody in this house knows who I am except Mr. Tunbridge, nor must they be given the slightest hint that I am anybody but Janet Jordan. As you’ve probably guessed, Janet and I look almost exactly alike. Our mothers were twins and that probably accounts for it.”

“Gee – ” breathed Gretchen. “It’s just like a story in a book!”

Dorothy bit into a slice of buttered toast. “Maybe it is,” she admitted, speaking with her mouth full. “But the point is that you and I are living this story and it may come to a very abrupt and unpleasant ending unless we’re both terribly careful. Let’s see – where was I? Oh, yes. Mr. Tunbridge and I are working together on this case, working for the United States Government.”

“Secret Service?” asked Gretchen in an awed whisper.

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll be working for the secret service too?” Dorothy could see that the girl was very much impressed with the idea.

“You will, Gretchen – that is, you are – under me. But don’t get too pepped up about it. The work we are on is serious and it is extremely dangerous into the bargain. I wouldn’t have brought you into it unless I had to. Right now I haven’t the slightest notion how you are going to be fitted into the picture. But I couldn’t have you going around, talking about how much Janet Jordan looks like Dorothy Dixon, could I? Doctor Winn and the Lawsons have no idea of either the resemblance or the relationship. If that came out and they got wind of it – well, there’s no telling what might happen.”

“Especially,” chimed in Gretchen, “after all the detective work you did in those three big cases over to New Canaan this summer and fall.”

“You’ve got it,” declared Dorothy, and sipped her coffee. “A robbery is being planned here, Gretchen, a robbery of some very valuable papers from Doctor Winn’s safe. The thieves will probably try to pull it off tonight. These papers, which have to do with an invention of the Doctor’s are worth a million dollars or more to any number of people. So you see the thieves are playing for big stakes, and I might as well tell you that they aren’t the kind that would let a thing like murder stop them. And now that you know the facts, are you willing to go on with it?”

Gretchen seemed horrified that Dorothy should doubt her. “Oh, Miss Jordan, I don’t want to get murdered any more than anybody else – but, I’m not afraid – honest I’m not!”

“I knew you were true blue,” smiled Dorothy. “So we’ll call it a deal, shall we?”

“You bet!” The two girls solemnly shook hands. “What do you want me to do first, Miss Jordan?” Gretchen asked eagerly.

“Move this tray onto the chair over there, please. Then while I’m taking a bath and dressing you might unpack Janet Jordan’s clothes. I’ll choose something to wear later.”

“Very good, Miss Jordan.” The little maid took the tray, then stopped short, her round blue eyes very serious. “But what about the secret service work?”

“Just carry on as usual for the present.” Dorothy slipped out of bed. “And remember – not a word to anyone about what I’ve told you – not even Mr. Tunbridge. I don’t know myself exactly what I’m to do yet. Mrs. Lawson expects me downstairs in about half an hour, so I’ve got to hustle. If I need your help later on, I’ll get word to you somehow.”

“I hope you will need me, Miss Jordan.” Gretchen was taking Janet’s frocks from the wardrobe trunk.

“And I hope I shan’t!” said Dorothy, and she disappeared into the bathroom.

Chapter XII
TESTS

Dorothy came down the wide staircase a few minutes before eleven-thirty. She wore a dark blue morning frock of her cousin’s, its simplicity relieved only by the soft white collar and deep cuffs. Except for being rather tight across the shoulders it fitted her as though she had been poured into it. She had selected this dress because she knew it was just the sort of thing a new secretary would be expected to wear.

She crossed the broad hall to the open door of the library, and there found Mrs. Lawson standing before a window staring into the storm. Although Dorothy’s footsteps made practically no sound on the thick pile of the handsome Bokhara rug, the woman turned like a flash at her entrance.

“Oh, good morning, Janet.” The frown on her face gave way to a pleasant smile. “I hope you were comfortable last night. Did you sleep well?”

“I dropped off as soon as my head touched the pillow,” she answered, taking Mrs. Lawson’s outstretched hand. Dorothy did not believe in telling a lie unless it was in a good cause; but when necessary, she invariably made the lie a good one.

“I hope the storm didn’t wake you,” smiled Laura, holding Dorothy’s hand.

Dorothy did not reply at once. Two long fingers were lightly pressing her wrist, and she saw that Mrs. Lawson’s eyes had strayed to the grandfather’s clock in the corner of the room. “Test number one,” she said to herself. “Mrs. du Val, alias Lawson is counting my pulse. Well, I’ve got a clear conscience, perhaps I can give her a shock.” She drew her hand away and answered the woman’s question in her normal voice. “Oh, the storm! No, I never heard it, Mrs. Lawson. If that hot lemonade had been drugged, I couldn’t have slept any sounder!”

“What makes you say that?” snapped her employer, and beneath the velvet tone, Dorothy sensed the ring of steel.

She dropped her eyes, and turning toward the open hearth, held out her hands to the crackling blaze. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said sweetly and like the clever little strategist that she was, opened her own offensive in the enemy’s territory. “I have the bad habit of occasionally walking in my sleep, Mrs. Lawson – and especially when I spend the night in a strange bed. Perhaps it’s nervousness – I don’t know.”

Mrs. Lawson threw her a sharp glance. “Sit down, Janet,” she suggested, pointing to a chair near the fire, and taking one herself across the hearth. “You’re – I mean, you don’t seem to be at all nervous this morning.”

“Good old pulse!” thought Dorothy. Then aloud – “No, I feel splendidly, thank you. But, you see, I didn’t walk in my sleep last night.”

“But surely you can’t tell when you do it!”

“Oh, yes, I can.” Dorothy’s manner and tone were those of the simple schoolgirl proud of an unusual accomplishment.

“You don’t expect me to believe that you know what you’re doing when you walk in your sleep, Janet. That’s impossible!”

“Not while I’m sleepwalking, Mrs. Lawson. That wasn’t what I said – but when I have been sleepwalking – there’s a difference, you see?”

“Well?” The lady of the house objected to being contradicted and took no trouble to hide it.

“It’s really very simple,” explained Dorothy, painstakingly, as though she were speaking to a rather stupid child. “I found out how to do it. You see, I’ve been walking in my sleep ever since I was a little thing. When I get in bed at night I leave my slippers on the floor beside it pointed outward – away from the bed. We all leave them that way, I guess. It’s the natural thing to do.”

“But what have slippers got to do with it?” Laura was becoming impatient.

“Everything, so far as I’m concerned, Mrs. Lawson. When I’ve been walking at night, I always find them in the morning beside the bed, but pointing toward it. I evidently slip them off before I get back into bed, and – ”

“I’m beginning to think you are quite a clever girl, Janet.”

“Oh, thank you,” said Dorothy with a guilelessness that was sheer camouflage. “Has anybody been saying I’m stupid? I’ve always stood high in my classes at school.”

“Oh, not stupid, child – but nervous – perhaps a little unbalanced, especially this past week.”

Dorothy raised her heavy lashes and looked Mrs. Lawson squarely in the face. This might be a test she was undergoing and it probably was; but here was a heaven sent chance to stir up discord in the enemy’s camp. She must work up to it gradually.

“I know that I was nervous and upset past all endurance.” She leaned forward, her hands on the arms of the chair. “How would you like your father to lock you in your bedroom for a week, without ever coming to see you, or giving you any explanation for such outrageous treatment? Am I a child to be handled like that? To be shipped up here to strangers, whether I wanted to go or not? How would you feel about it, Mrs. Lawson, if you were me? Don’t say you would submit to it sitting down.”

“But I am taking you on as my secretary,” the lady hedged. “Offering you a good position for which you’ll be paid twenty dollars a week. That’s not to be thought of lightly, especially in these times.”

“But it doesn’t seem to strike you that I might like to have something to say about it,” Dorothy replied calmly. “As for the salary – that’s no inducement. My mother left me five thousand a year. I came into the income on my last birthday, so you see I have nearly a hundred dollars a week, whether I work or not.”

“I didn’t know that, of course,” Mrs. Lawson admitted and none too graciously. “Your father wants you to be here while he’s away. I hope you aren’t going to be difficult, Janet.”

“I hope not, Mrs. Lawson. I shall be glad to stay here for a while and do the work you’d planned for me; but if I do, it must be as a guest and not as a paid dependant.”

“But you are a guest, Janet.”

“I shall not accept a salary, Mrs. Lawson.”

“Very well, my dear, if you wish it that way.”

“Thank you very much.”

“To get back to our former topic,” Mrs. Lawson said, and lit a cigarette. “I can understand that your father’s conduct in confining you to your room might be exasperating – but why should it make you nervous? And my husband tells me that when he visited you in your room you acted as though you were in deadly fear of something or somebody every time he saw you. What was the trouble, Janet? Was anything worrying you?”

“Yes, there was, Mrs. Lawson.”

Dorothy looked down at the andirons, and her hands on the chair arms twisted embarrassedly. From the corner of her eye she saw a smile of satisfaction light up the older woman’s face. She knew she was playing with fire and that Mrs. Lawson was watching her as a hawk watches its defenseless prey before it strikes. But all unknown to her inquisitor, Dorothy had been leading her into this trap as a move forward in her own game. Genuine dislike for the woman as well as a mischievous impulse on her part drew her to make the scene as dramatic and convincing as possible.

“Yes – I – I – was afraid,” she went on, dragging out the words slowly.

“Then don’t you think you’d better tell me about it, Janet? I’m nearly old enough to be your mother. Let me take your mother’s place, dear. Give me your confidence. I feel sure I’ll be able to help you, child.”

This reference to Janet’s dead mother by a woman who was the vilest kind of a hypocrite swept away Dorothy’s last compunction. She herself was going to commit justifiable libel. Mrs. Lawson, on the other hand, was attempting to lead Janet Jordan into a confession of shamming sleep at the fateful meeting a week ago. And such a confession meant a sentence of death from this beautiful siren who gazed at her so winningly, who puffed a cigarette so nonchalantly while she waited for an unsuspecting girl to commit herself.

“Well, I don’t know – I can’t help hesitating to tell you, Mrs. Lawson,” Dorothy began timidly.

“There’s no need to be afraid of anything,” replied the woman, only half veiling the sneer that went with the words.

“Oh, but you see, there is, Mrs. Lawson!” Dorothy’s manner was still indecisive. “I don’t want – in fact, I hate awfully to hurt you this way.”

“Hurt me!” Mrs. Lawson’s cigarette snapped into the fireplace like a miniature comet. “Hurt me, child? What in the wide world are you talking about?”

“Just what I say, Mrs. Lawson.”

Mrs. Lawson sniffed. “Don’t be ridiculous, Janet. Out with it now. What did you fear when you were locked in your room?”

“Your husband, Mrs. Lawson.”

“My husband!”

“Yes.”

“But – why – I don’t believe you.”

“Oh, very well. You asked the question, I was trying to answer it, that’s all.”

Mrs. Lawson bit her lip. She was furious. “As long as you’ve said what you have, you’d better go on with it,” she said acidly.

“There isn’t any more,” returned Dorothy. “That’s all there is.”

“But surely he must have given you reasons for your assertion.” Mrs. Lawson had walked beautifully into Dorothy’s trap. Her own plan to snare an unsuspecting girl had been blotted out by the shadow of the Green Goddess, Jealousy. “Tell me what my husband did or said to make you fear him, and tell me at once.”

“It wasn’t what he did, Mrs. Lawson – it was the way he looked.”

“What do you mean – the way he looked?”

Dorothy had thrust a painful knife into the mental cosmos of her adversary. Now she deliberately turned it in the wound. “Very probably,” she said quietly, looking her straight in the eyes, “you can remember how Mr. Lawson looked when he first made love to you. I don’t want to be made love to, and I don’t like him, Mrs. Lawson.”

“What did you do?”

“I told him to leave me – and when he would not go, I simply walked into my bathroom and locked the door.”

“But what happened the next time he came? Martin went in to see you every day, didn’t he?”

“He did. But he talked to me through the bathroom door. Just as soon as I heard the key turn in the lock I’d hop in there.”

The man she had been talking about must have been listening just outside in the hall, for now he strode into the room and up to Dorothy. “That,” he said menacingly, “is a deliberate lie, Miss Janet Jordan!”