The Fat Lady's Ghost by Charlotte MacLeod

Author:Charlotte MacLeod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2019-09-04T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Corin slept badly that night. Her mind would not relax. It was too full of huge, black question marks. Which of her fellow-boarders was a jewel thief?

If she had not been so ridiculously standoffish, she might know them all well enough by now to make at least an intelligent guess. She would feel safer about using the kitchen if she knew which of them she must be on guard against.

Could it be Angela? Would she get a chance to steal the jewels she modeled at fashion shows, perhaps? But did they allow the models to parade anything that valuable in public? And if they did, wouldn’t a store detective have his eye on them every minute?

What if they weren’t stolen at all? What if Angela had them given to her by a rich admirer? That made no sense. If Angela had a wealthy boy friend, why was she always hanging around the living room hoping to scrounge a dinner from one of the boys in the house? Anyway, girls like Angela could think of better things to do with diamond bracelets than poke them away in dark corners. She would either wear them or keep them in a safe-deposit box.

The twins? They might be able to work some kind of swindle based on the fact that they looked so much alike. Corin drifted off into a light doze, troubled by dreams of Jeanie and Jennie popping in and out of closets, tossing fabulous gems back and forth like beanbags. She woke up giggling. It was too silly. Such things happened only in dreams.

Could Jack Banks have taken the things? He didn’t need the money, of course; but he might have done it for kicks. That was as crazy an idea as the identical-twin scheme. In the first place, Jack was too nice. In the second, he was much too lazy.

That narrowed the field down to Will and Steve. She hardly knew either of them. They both seemed like ordinary, decent kids. That meant nothing, of course. A jewel thief would hardly go around all the time with a black stocking pulled over his face. The more ordinary he appeared to be, the less likely that anybody would spot him. She would have to find out more about those two from Alex.

But could she leave out Alex himself? What did she really know about the big artist? Only that he could paint like an angel and had an unpredictable disposition. According to his own story, he was desperately hard up. He had knocked around the country doing all sorts of odd jobs. Who knew what sort of characters he might have come up against; or what queer ideas and unlawful skills he might have learned from them?

“But he was the one who found the bracelet,” she argued with herself. “He could have pretended not to see it and tacked the molding back over it, and I’d never even have known it was there. He was more surprised than I was.”

So

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