Inspector Queen’s Own Case

“Not one?” Jessie frowned. “That’s queer.”

“I thought so, too. You take sugar and cream, Miss Sherwood?”

“Neither, thanks,” Jessie said absently. “No pillowslips at all...”

“Well, you’re going to taste some of these sweet buns I just got from the bakery, or I’ll take it real unfriendly of you. But about those pillowslips. First thing I thought was that snippety upstairs maid of theirs had stuffed too big a bundle into one of the laundry chutes. She’d done it a couple times, and the laundry’d got stuck, and we had to go fishing for it in the chute with a plumber’s snake they have in the basement.”

A stopped-up chute!

“Do you suppose that’s what could have happened to the pillowslip they were looking for, Sadie?” Jessie asked excitedly. “A chute already stopped up, and the slip just didn’t go all the way down?”

Mrs. Smith shook her head. “Wasn’t no stopped-up chute. I took some clothespins and dropped one down each chute that morning to see if they was clear, and they was. Then I remembered. Friday mornings was the upstairs maid’s day to strip the beds and change linen, and the way things was in the house that morning she just didn’t get to do it. You eat one of those buns, Miss Sherwood.”

“Delicious,” Jessie said, munching. “You checked all the chutes, Sadie? The one in the nursery, too?”

“Well, not the nursery one, no. First place, they wouldn’t let me in there. Second place, never was any stopping-up trouble in the nursery chute, ’cause you always slid the wash down from that room.”

Could that be it? Jessie thought hungrily.

But she had been the only one who used the nursery chute. She always stripped and remade the baby’s crib herself. And she had always been automatically careful to throw one piece down the chute at a time, even though the sheets were only crib size.

Jessie sipped her tea hopelessly.

“—though there was that trouble with the nursery chute when they was installing it,” the laundress was saying. “I’d forgot about that. Maybe ’cause nothing ever happened.”

“What?” Jessie looked up. “What did you say, Sadie?”

“When they was installing it. Before you came to work there, Miss Sherwood. Wasn’t no nursery or room off it — the one you slept in — till just before Mr. and Mrs. Humffrey adopted the baby. That all used to be an upstairs sitting room. They had it made over into two rooms for the baby and a nurse, and that was when they installed the chute in the nursery. Hadn’t been one there before.”

“But you said something about some trouble with the nursery chute during installation—”

“And it only just come to mind,” Mrs. Smith nodded. “Mr. Humffrey was fit to be hogtied. Seems after the chute was put in and all, and the man was testing it, throwing things down it, he found out there was a defect in it — it had a little piece of metal or something sticking out some place down the chute — and every once in a while something would catch on it. The man poked some kind of tool down in and felt around till he found the snag, and sort of sawed away at it. I guess he smoothed it down, ’cause you never had nothing stick in that chute, Miss Sherwood, did you?”

No, Jessie thought, I never did.

But suppose that was just luck!

Suppose the night Alton Humffrey dropped the damning pillowslip down that chute... suppose that time it caught on what was left of the snag?

So Sadie Smith hadn’t found the slip, and Alton Humffrey thought Sadie Smith had found it and washed it out, and all the time it was stuck in the nursery chute... and it was still there.

Jessie hung up, collected her coins, and sat in the telephone booth nibbling her nails. Richard’s phone in New York didn’t answer, so he must be out after Henry Cullum. Taugus police headquarters said that Chief Pearl had left for the night, and there had been no answer at the Pearls’ house — they must have gone visiting, or out to dinner and a movie.

Jessie sat there, frustrated.

I’ve got to know, she thought. And not tomorrow, but tonight.

Suddenly she thought, I can do it myself.

She accepted the thought instantly, and without attempting to think through the difficulties. If I think about it, she told herself, I won’t do it. So I won’t think about it.

She left the drugstore, got into her coupé, and set out for Taugus.

The electrified ship’s lantern over the gatehouse looked lost against the black bulk of Nair Island.

Jessie drove across the causeway slowly. Did they maintain guards after the season? If they did, she was sunk. The closer she got to the gatehouse the more foolhardy the project became.

A burly figure in a uniform stepped out of the gatehouse and held up his hand.

And the gate was down.

So much for private enterprise, Jessie thought.

“Hey,” a familiar voice said. “It’s Miss Sherwood.”

Charlie Peterson!

“Why, Mr. Peterson,” Jessie said warmly. “What are you doing here? I thought you’d quit. At least you said you were going to.”