After making a few guarded inquiries in the neighborhood of the store, Preston sought out the house where Gerard had boarded during his stay in Mount Clemens. There he found that the missing merchant, in order to allay suspicion, had paid the rental of his apartment for three months in advance, and that the place had not been touched since, save by the local authorities who had been working on the case.
"You won"t find a thing there," the chief of police informed Hal, in response to a request for information. "Gerard"s skipped and that"s all there is to it. We"ve been over the place with a fine-tooth comb and there ain"t a sc.r.a.p of evidence. We did find some telegrams torn up in his waste basket, but if you can make anything out of "em it"s more than I can," and he handed over an envelope filled with sc.r.a.ps of finely torn yellow paper.
"Not the slightest indication of where Gerard went?" inquired Preston as he tucked the envelope in an inside pocket.
"Not a bit," echoed the chief. "He may be in China now, so far as we know."
"Was he married?"
"n.o.body here knows nothin" about him," the chief persisted. "They do say as how he was right sweet on a girl named Anna Something-or-other who lived in the same block. But she left town before he did, and she "ain"t come back, neither."
"What did you say her name was?"
"Anna Vaughan, I b"lieve she called herself. You might ask Mrs. Morris about her. She had a room at her place, only a few doors away from where Gerard stayed."
The apartment of the man who had vanished, Preston found, was furnished in the manner typical of a thousand other places. Every stick of furniture appeared to have seen better days and no two pieces could be said to match. Evidently Gerard had been practicing economy in his domestic arrangements in order to save all the money possible for a quick getaway. What was more, he had carefully removed everything of a personal nature, save a row of books which decorated the mantel piece in one of the rooms.
It was toward these that Preston finally turned in desperation. All but one of them were the cheaper grade of fiction, none of which bore any distinguishing marks, but the exception was a new copy of the latest Railroad Guide. Just as Preston pounced upon this he heard a chuckle from behind him and, whirling, saw the chief of police just entering the door.
"Needn"t worry with that, young man," he urged. "I"ve been all through it and there ain"t nothin" in it. Just thought I"d drop up to see if you"d found anything," he added, in explanation of his sudden appearance. "Have you?"
"No," admitted the postal operative. "Can"t say that I have. This is the first piece of personal property that I"ve been able to locate and you say there is nothing in this?"
"Nary a clue," persisted the chief, but Preston, as if loath to drop the only tangible reminder of Gerard, idly flipped the pages of the Guide, and then stood it on edge on the table, the covers slightly opened.
Then, as the chief watched him curiously, he closed the book, opened it again and repeated the operation.
"What"s the idea? Tryin" to make it do tricks?" the chief asked as Hal stood the book on edge for the third time.
"Hardly that. Just working on a little theory of my own," was the response, as the post-office man made a careful note of the page at which the Guide had fallen open--the same one which had presented itself to view on the two other occasions. "Here, would you like to try it?"
and he handed the volume to the chief. But that functionary only shrugged his shoulders and replaced the Guide upon the mantelpiece.
"Some more of your highfalutin" detective work, eh?" he muttered. "Soon you"ll be claimin" that books can talk."
"Possibly not out loud," smiled Hal. "But they can be made to tell very interesting stories now and then, if you know how to handle "em. There doesn"t seem to be much here, Chief, so I think I"ll go back to the hotel. Let me know if anything comes up, will you?" And with that he left.
But before returning to the hotel he stopped at the house where Anna Vaughan had resided and found out from the rather garrulous landlady that Gerard had appeared to be rather smitten with the beautiful stranger.
"She certainly was dressed to kill," said the woman who ran the establishment. "A big woman and strong as all outdoors. Mr. Gerard came here three or four nights a week while she was with us and he didn"t seem to mind the mice at all."
"Mind the what?" snapped Preston.
"The mice--the white mice that she used to keep as pets," explained the landlady. "Had half a dozen or more of them running over her shoulders, but I told her that I couldn"t stand for that. She could keep "em in her room if she wanted to, but I had to draw the line somewhere. Guess it was on their account that she didn"t have any other visitors. S"far as I know Mr. Gerard was the only one who called on her."
"When did Miss Vaughan leave?" Hal inquired.
"Mrs. Vaughan," corrected the woman. "She was a widow--though she was young and pretty enough to have been married any time she wanted to be.
Guess the men wouldn"t stand for them mice, though. She didn"t stay very long--just about six weeks. Left somewheres about the middle of July."
"About two weeks before Gerard did?"
"About that--though I don"t just remember the date."
A few more inquiries elicited the fact that Mrs. Vaughan"s room had been rented since her departure, so Preston gave up the idea of looking through it for possible connecting links with the expert in bankruptcy.
Returning to the hotel, the operative settled down to an examination of the sc.r.a.ps of torn telegrams which the chief had handed him. Evidently they had been significant, he argued, for Gerard had been careful to tear them into small bits, and it was long past midnight before he had succeeded in piecing the messages together, pasting the sc.r.a.ps on gla.s.s in case there had been any notations on the reverse of the blank.
But when he had finished he found that he had only added one more puzzling aspect to the case.
There were three telegrams, filed within a week and all dated just before Gerard had left town.
"Geraldine, Anna, May, and Florence are in Chicago," read the message from Evanston, Illinois.
"George, William, Katherine, Ray, and Stephen still in St. Louis," was the wire filed from Detroit.
The third message, from Minneapolis, detailed the fact that "Frank, Vera, Marguerite, Joe, and Walter are ready to leave St. Paul."
None of the telegrams was signed, but, merely as a precaution, Preston wired Evanston, Detroit, and Minneapolis to find out if there was any record of who had sent them.
"Agent here recalls message," came the answer from Detroit the next day.
"Filed by woman who refused to give her name. Agent says sender was quite large, good-looking, and very well dressed."
"Anna Vaughan!" muttered Preston, as he tucked the telegram in his pocket and asked to be shown a copy of the latest Railway Guide.
Referring to a note which he had made on the previous evening, Hal turned to pages 251-2, the part of the book which had fallen open three times in succession when he had examined it in Gerard"s rooms, and noted that it was the Atchinson, Topeka & Santa Fe time-table, westbound.
Evidently the missing merchant had invested in a copy of the Guide rather than run the risk of leaving telltale time-tables around his apartment, but he had overstepped himself by referring to only one portion of the book.
"Not the first time that a crook has been just a little too clever,"
mused Preston, with a smile. "If it had been an old copy, there wouldn"t have been any evidence--but a new book, opened several times at the same place, can be made to tell tales--his honor, the chief of police, to the contrary."
It was clear, therefore, that Preston had three leads to work on: Anna Vaughan, a large, beautiful woman, well-dressed and with an affection for white mice; the clue that Gerard was somewhere in the Southwest and at least the first names of fourteen men and women connected with the gang.
But right there he paused. Was there any gang? The dates of the various disappearances tended to prove that there wasn"t, but the messages received by Gerard certainly appeared to point to the fact that others were connected with the conspiracy to defraud.
Possibly one of the clerks who had been connected with the Gerard stores would be able to throw a little light upon the situation....
It wasn"t until Hal interviewed the woman who had acted as cashier and manager for the second store that he found the lead he was after. In response to his inquiry as to whether she had ever heard the missing proprietor speak of any of the persons mentioned in the wires, the cashier at first stated definitely that she hadn"t, but added, a moment later:
"Come to think of it, he did. Not as people, but as trunks."
"What"s that?" exclaimed the operative. "Trunks?"
"Yes. I remember sometime last spring, when we were figuring on how much summer goods we ought to carry, I mentioned the matter to Mr. Gerard, and almost automatically he replied, "I"ll wire for Edna and Grace."
Thinking he meant saleswomen, I reminded him that we had plenty, particularly for the slack season. He colored up a bit, caught his breath, and turned the subject by stating that he always referred to trunks of goods in terms of people"s first names--girls for the feminine stuff and men"s for the masculine. But Edna and Grace weren"t on your list, were they?"
"No," replied Preston. "But that doesn"t matter. Besides, didn"t the two trunks of goods arrive?"
"Yes, they came in a couple of weeks later."
"Before Mrs. Vaughan came to town?"