“Thank you, Mrs. Eames. I’m most grateful.” With this, Cadwalader disappeared along with the house servant. The sound of retreating footsteps was quickly replaced by the removed voice of Mr. Cadwalader speaking into the telephone in the library.
“The absolute nerve!” raged Rosalinda under her breath. “To come barging in here as if he were master of this house. The arrant presumptuousness!”
“Calm yourself, dear. It was not a burdensome request. Indeed, had we actually been in town, I have no doubt that Mary Grace would have done the proper thing and permitted use of the instrument without a moment’s hesitation.”
“That is beside the point.” Rosalinda sat back down and drew her hands together in her lap so that the fingers should interlace one another and twiddle and fidget with a sort of nervous energy commonly found among the constitutionally overstrung.
Not another word was exchanged between mother and daughter before Cadwalader reappeared in the doorway that led from the foyer into the drawing room. “Thank you again. My man Millard is on his way. Irony has won this day: I am to be towed by horses. May I sit here while I wait?”
“You may…with impertinence!” muttered Rosalinda.
“Sit as long as you wish, Mr. Cadwalader,” said Mrs. Eames in a louder, more accommodating voice.
Cadwalader nodded his gratitude and settled himself upon a cushioned settle across the room from the two women. After a silent moment, he said, “So, Miss Eames. Have you given any further thought to the question I put to you last night?”
“I beg your pardon. Are you addressing me?”
“I am. The question I asked you yesterday evening within this very room — have you an answer for me?”
“I have.”
“And do you intend to give me that answer today, or does my request require another day’s delay?”
“I’ll give you my answer right here and now if that is your preference, Mr. Cadwalader.”
The “Baby Mistress” collected herself.
“I will marry you, Mr. Cadwalader. I don’t know why but you shall have me.”
The young man beamed. He rose and crossed to Rosalinda. Bowing to her, he took her hand with mock chivalry and kissed it upon the knuckles. “I have no doubt that I shall be the happiest husband on Earth.”
“And I shall be the most miserable wife upon that selfsame planet. Don’t look at me that way.”
“What way?”
“As if I am some prized heifer you’ve won at the Dutchess County Fair.”
“But Miss Eames, you have it all wrong; I regard you — as I have always regarded you — with only the most heartfelt devotion.” A look of concern now betrayed the disparate thought that now crossed the young man’s mind. “I must check on the machine. There were some boys nearby who seemed the sort to engage in a bit of mischief in my absence. I’ll return shortly.”
Wilberforce Cadwalader departed the room with a gladdened spring to his step. The front door opened and then closed.
“The audacity of the man!” growled Rosalinda. “Thinking that I would so easily accede to his proposal of marriage.”
“And yet you have, my daughter.”
“And did you notice the way he took his leave? That look of smug entitlement — how it adulterated that most ruggedly handsome countenance. And the insolence in his words and in his bearing — at such odds with so fine a figure and such an appealing muscular form. I’ll live to rue this decision, Mother, you may be sure of it.”
“And I am equally certain that you will not, my dear,” said Mrs. Eames to her fretful daughter, as the elder of the two once again took up her knitting. “For you are looking for contradictions between complexion and character where none actually exist.”
“Piffle!” declared Rosalinda. She had returned to the window and opened the curtains to gaze out at her fiancé, her eyes clinched, her brow constricted. “Oh, just look at him — chasing after those boys like a clown at the circus.”
Then a sigh. The melodic sigh of a woman in love.
“The man absolutely appalls me!”
1903 DEDUCTIVE IN MICHIGAN
Elizabeth Ellsworth handed the revelatory letter to her husband, Thomas. She had found it on her daughter’s made bed, propped up against the bolster. It was addressed to My dear mother and father. Elizabeth had opened the letter then and there, and read it three times. Keeping her emotions in check, she had gone into the sitting room to share it with her husband.
There was another family member present in the room: Tad. Tad was twelve, a studious, spectacled boy who thought himself brilliant and therefore rejected the general rule that children should be seen and not heard.
“She must have left in the night,” said Thomas, looking up from the letter.
Tad shook his head. “It was at daybreak. I heard her go. He was with her. I could hear their whispers.”
Elizabeth frowned at her son. “And you didn’t wake us?”
“How was I to know that she was eloping! You know that Longnecker comes by early some mornings to visit with her before he goes off to work. Sometimes she’ll walk him all the way to the sanitarium. May I read the letter?”
Thomas surrendered the letter to his son with a sigh. “She’s twenty-one. She has the right to run away and marry whomever she pleases — even lowly hospital bedpan emptiers who have scarcely held their job for two months. It’s the twentieth century. Young women have rights now.”
“They don’t have the right to break their mothers’ hearts,” said Elizabeth, blotting her moist eyes.
“Sit, Elizabeth.” Thomas led his wife to the sofa. “Ethel knows that we don’t approve of the young man. We know hardly anything about him, but apparently she wants to marry him anyway. Elopement was the only course available to her. Where’s Tad?”
Tad had left the room.
“Tad! What are you doing? Bring that letter back!”
Tad returned to the family sitting room. He was wearing his Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat of plaid wool. Tad now had a magnifying glass in his possession.
“What’s this?” asked Thomas, irritation creeping into his voice. “Your sister has run away and you’ve decided to spend your morning play-acting?”
Elizabeth blew her nose. “He isn’t play-acting, dear. He’s going to solve the crime. But there is no crime, Tad, dear. It isn’t against the law to turn your back on the love of your family and run away with a man who will probably bring your life to ruin.” Elizabeth sighed. She looked out the window upon a beautiful spring morning that defied her dark spirits.
Tad sat down at the walnut escritoire where his mother kept track of the household accounts. He laid the letter down and began to scrutinize it closely with the magnifying glass. “Yes, yes,” he said to himself. Then he turned to address his parents. “The letter appears to be in Ethel’s hand.”
Thomas rolled his eyes. “That’s a relief, son. For a brief moment, I thought that it might be a forgery and your poor sister had been kidnapped.”
“I wouldn’t, as of yet, rule out the possibility that the young woman has been abducted, my dear Watson,” said Tad.
“I am your father, Tad. I’m not Dr. Watson.”
“Indubitably,” said Tad, lapsing into deep thought.
“Tad,” said Elizabeth, with deliberate patience, “perhaps you might want to see what Albertha’s preparing for breakfast. Are you hungry?”
“I can’t eat,” said Tad, his focus returning to his investigative work. “Not until I solve the ‘Case of the Disappeared Daughter.’”
Tad’s retort now elicited from his father a loud, inarticulate response seated largely in the throat.