A Tall Dark Stranger Read Online Free Page B

expect it was the man’s lying about Bath that had prejudiced their view.
    “Perhaps he was an English spy trying to buy French secrets from his murderer,” Lollie suggested. He didn’t like to admit that an English spy would sink to murder.
    “We don’t know that it had anything to do with spying or even with that note,” I insisted. “It could be that Stoddart was buying stolen goods, or something of that sort.”
    “A fence,” Lollie said, nodding importantly at knowing the cant term. “But I haven’t heard of any big robberies hereabouts.”
    “I wager both men were from London,” Aunt Talbot decided. “Much wiser to sell stolen goods away from where they were stolen. What a villain the murderer is, and to think he’s running about the countryside, unknown.”
    She watched from the front window as McAdam rode up on his bay mare, then went to the door to speak to him. When she returned, she said, “He’s going directly to the water meadow. No word of any robbery in town. He wants that note, Lollie, It is evidence.”
    Lollie decided to put it in the oven with the door open to dry it. Unfortunately, Betty closed the door, and it was dark brown by the time the mishap was discovered. When Lollie tried to pick it up, it fell to pieces. McAdam stopped in for a word after viewing the corpus delicti.
    McAdam is a short, balding little man with sharp brown eyes. We tease Auntie that he has a tendre for her because he once carried her parcels two blocks to the carriage in Chilton Abbas.
    We told him all we could remember of our first meeting with Stoddart and of seeing him with Maitland before we spoke to him. He said he’d have a word with Maitland. Lollie told him about finding the body that morning. McAdam chided Lollie for searching the man’s pockets and was, of course, not happy to learn the note was now a pile of ashes. Lollie was able to give him the message word for word and even duplicated the printing, which did much to mitigate McAdam’s wrath.
    That is how we passed the morning. Immediately after lunch Auntie remembered she needed a few yards of muslin and put on her bonnet to go to Chilton Abbas. The muslin, of course, was a pretext for going to the drapery shop to retail our adventure to her friends and to learn of any new developments. You have no notion of the importance of gossip in the parish if you imagine for a moment the carriage got away without Lollie and myself in it.
    Chilton Abbas is a typical Hampshire village, built around a crystal-clear chalk stream, with a common green complete with duck pond, a High Street, a church, an inn, a tavern, a cluster of shops and houses, and a manor house (occupied by the Murrays) at the end of High Street.
    We stabled the carriage at the inn. Lollie went to the tavern and Auntie and I headed to Mulliner’s Drapery Shop. We hadn’t gone six feet before we were stopped by Mrs. Davis, the vicar’s wife and most arrant gossip in the parish.
    “I hear you’ve had a busy morning, Maude!” she exclaimed, her cabbage green eyes aglow.
    She invited us in for tea, but Aunt Maude wanted a larger audience and opted for the drapery shop. There, in a dark aisle between the ells of muslin on one side and ribbons and buttons on the other, the ladies of the parish clustered like birds in a treetop, chattering.
    Miss Addie Lemon, my particular friend, drew me toward the window. Being unattached ladies, we wanted to keep an eye out for gentlemen passing on the street while we gossiped. I, having firsthand information, opened my budget first. Addie listened eagerly, blue eyes wide open as she gasped and exclaimed at all the proper places.
    “Oh, my! What a turn it must have given you. Was it horrid?” And later, “Betty baked the note! Well, I never. What had McAdam to say about that?”
    She was not without information of her own to impart. “You heard about the money, of course?”
    “Only a mention of it in the note,” I replied.
    “Five hundred pounds!