Polly sputtered something Miss Evangeline didn’t quite catch. “May I come in, dear? I’d like to talk to you a moment, if I may.”
Polly reluctantly stepped aside as Miss Evangeline pushed open the door and stepped into the shabby room. She promptly sat down and told Polly she was frightened nearly out of her wits. She told her about the flying saucer and about the Mulberry Mall Monster. “Now this,” she said. “I’m afraid for my life savings,” she added significantly.
“Your life savings,” Polly repeated.
“All fifty thousand dollars,” Miss Evangeline said, shocked at the enormity of the lie she had uttered. “Perhaps I really should put it in a bank—”
“You keep it at home?”
“Don’t trust banks. Never did.”
Polly’s eyes grew wider.
“Well, the reason I came,” Miss Evangeline said, getting down to business, “was that I wanted to ask you if perchance you had recognized the man who kidnapped Sonny, as a result of my description of him. If you have any idea who he is, it would make matters so much simpler for the police. I’m afraid they would never listen to me, but if you went to them and identified the—”
“No,” Polly said, shaking her head. “I got no idea who he is.”
“Well,” said Miss Evangeline, “that is a pity. I’d best be going, then.”
She was almost out in the hall when she heard the dog bark from inside Polly’s room. Polly was trying to shut the door, but Miss Evangeline held her ground. “Your... your poodle?” she prompted, opening the trap.
Polly nodded. “Yeah, I keep her shut in the bathroom. She’s messy. She was a gift from a guy I know.”
“Well, you take care of yourself, dear. You’ve had a terrible shock. Here.” Miss Evangeline extracted a bottle of aspirin from her knitting bag. “Take two of these and draw the shades and lie down with a cool cloth on your head. I’m so sorry to have disturbed you.”
She went out into the hall and, satisfied with her performance, walked to the elevator. Well, she guessed she knew where Mitzi was now. But where was Sonny Emory? In the bathroom, too? She had no time to speculate further. She had to hurry home. She was expecting guests later in the evening.
At eleven o’clock that night, Miss Evangeline darkened her house, put a wool shawl over her shoulders, and stepped out onto the porch. She shut the door, locked it, walked to her Packard, got in, and drove off into the night.
She parked the Packard just a block away and walked back behind the hedges growing on the lawns of the houses across from her own. The night was cool, but she found her shawl sufficient for it.
At eleven thirty, the guests she had been expecting arrived. They slid like shadows up the lawn and onto the porch, where they tried the front door and found it locked. The man opened a window. The girl climbed inside, and he followed her.
Miss Evangeline quickly crossed the street, and went around to the side of her house. She pulled up the slanting cellar doors and descended the steps into the furnace room. She could hear them moving noisily about upstairs. Inept, she thought. She hoped their ineptness would not cause harm to the Emory baby — or to Mitzi. Well, she would simply do what she had to do, pray a little, and hope for the very best.
She quietly mounted the steps that led to her kitchen and opened the door cautiously. They were still in the living room. She could see the beams of their flashlights flitting along the floors and up the walls.
“I looked upstairs,” Polly whispered. “She’s not in the house. Look, Jack. There it is!”
He swore softly, staring at the wall safe. “We’ll have to tear down the wall to get at the loot.”
Miss Evangeline stifled a gasp. She hoped they wouldn’t do that. The repair bill would be staggering. She’d never be able to afford it. She listened, peeping uneasily around the corner of the kitchen cabinets.
Polly was shining the beam of her flashlight on the wall safe. The man was fumbling hopelessly with the dial.
“Jack, look out!” Polly screeched in sudden alarm. “The wall’s caving in!”
Miss Evangeline clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle the giggle that almost escaped her lips.
“Well, will you look at that,” Jack exclaimed. “A secret room. I just touched the corner of the mirror there, and the fireplace swung out. Shine your flashlight in there.”
Polly did as she was told, and they both spotted the piles of money stacked in a far corner.
“Come on!” Jack whooped, stooping to enter the room, Polly right behind him.
Miss Evangeline scurried mouselike out into the dark living room, expertly dodging furniture. “It’s no good!” she shouted gleefully. “It’s Confederate money!” Then she slammed the fireplace back into position, flush with the rest of the wall.
The muffled shouts and the pounding from behind the wall gave her a keen sense of satisfaction. She switched on the lights and picked up the phone to call Sergeant MacReynolds.
“Drat!” she exclaimed in annoyance when she remembered that the instrument had been disconnected. She left the house and her helpless prisoners locked in the secret room and walked to where she had earlier parked the Packard. Conscientiously observing the speed limit, she drove to the police station.
The next day she sat in her rocker on the front porch and waited for them to come for her. It had all been so exciting. She didn’t sleep a wink the whole night through, after the police had come back to her house with her and had released Polly and Jack from the secret room behind the fireplace that had once served to hide runaway slaves when the house, which had been in Miss Evangeline’s family for years, had been a station on the underground railroad.
Sergeant MacReynolds had come back later and congratulated her, after taking Polly and Jack to the jail in the courthouse. She told him she had just been doing her duty. After all, she couldn’t tolerate such goings-on right under the nose of the mayor. It could ruin his career, and she wanted to see him elected for another term.
Ah, there they were, just pulling up in front of the house in their squad car. She got up and went down the drive to meet them.
Sergeant MacReynolds got out, and she took his arm and sat beside him in the back seat while Patrolman Carson drove them to Mulberry Mall and through the wrought-iron gates that led to the mayor’s mansion.
The mayor took Miss Evangeline’s hand and kissed it, precisely as she had known a gentleman of his stature would do under the circumstances.
“I wanted very much to meet you, Miss Evangeline,” he said, “after Sergeant MacReynolds told me all about you. He told me you were a staunch supporter of mine. He told me, too, how you caught the kidnappers—”
“They were dognappers, too,” Miss Evangeline interjected.
“Yes, that too. Well, thanks to your presence of mind and, if I may say so, your daring, Sonny Emory is back safe and sound with his parents once again. They found him, as you know, sound asleep in that terrible man’s room at the Queen’s Arms Hotel.”
“And Mr. Michelson and his little boy have Mitzi back.”
“Yes, Mitzi, too. You are a remarkable woman, Miss Evangeline.”
“A woman, yes,” Miss Evangeline said softly. “But remarkable? Oh, dear me, no.”
“Tush,” said the mayor. “You’re far too modest.”
Later, over tea served in the Robert E. Lee Room, the mayor informed Miss Evangeline that her antebellum home had been, at his direction, designated a city landmark. “I had no idea that your lovely house had a secret room or that the room had served as a station on the underground railroad. Now that just might raise a few eyebrows in this town, still—”