“Must have been — then you think what I do! Rose never ran away, Mr. Parsons. She’d no reason to, winding me ’n’ her uncle around her finger as she did. I thought of that first off. And if she’d run away she’d never have left all her good clothes, her savings, like she did.
“And who’d she run away with? She liked George Link best of all the fellows she had hangin’ around. But she didn’t like him well enough for that — a fickle, changeable girl was Rose! Besides, he’s as worried as I am. Clean crazy about her, George is.”
Nem grunted, passing an enormous hand tenderly over the graying fluff that fringed his baldness and made him look like an elderly cherub.
“George Link, who has the garage, corner of State and Elm? Nice looking young fellow.”
He hadn’t been on Bridgehaven’s police force for twenty-seven years without knowing a good deal about every one in the small manufacturing city and its environs. Link, he knew, was a hard-working, efficient young mechanic, who had become owner of the garage he had spoken of, in spite of his wild ways.
For George Link was wild, in the parlance of Bridgehaven; attractive to women, with his black hair and ruddy coloring and splendid physique; attracted by them; able to hold a vast amount of bootleg liquor after a grilling day’s work, and still beat all comers at Kelly pool.
Nem felt a sudden prescience of tragedy. The instinct that made him as good a detective as he was told him that Rose Miller was in sore need of aid — or possibly beyond it.
“Yes,” her aunt in law said dully. “If only she hadn’t played fast and loose with him she’d be better off now. Something’s happened to her, Mr. Parsons — something terrible!”
Nem patted her shrunken shoulder reassuringly.
“Now, don’t go imagining things, Mis’ Miller. I’ll go see Link, and then I’ll drop in on the Suttons, where she works. They might know something they didn’t think to tell you over the phone.”
Nem regretted, as he heaved his vast bulk up out of the chair that encompassed it, that Arthur Sutton and his wife had to be involved in the affair, and all that it foreboded.
For the Suttons had had their share of tragedy already. Sutton had brought his wife to Bridgehaven seven years before, when he became professor of economics at the Industrial College on the outskirts of the city. They had not occupied the pretty timbered-brick bungalow two years when an automobile accident left Alice Sutton a cripple for life, paralyzed from the waist down, chained to bed or wheelchair.
Sutton had dedicated his life to the care of the invalid; and, whatever the cost to the man, he had fulfilled his tragic obligation beyond the letter.
When Nem had parted from the troubled little woman on the steps of the red brick building that was headquarters he turned up State Street toward Link’s garage.
During the short walk in the April sunshine he checked off all that he had been told, all that he had gleaned, from Rose Miller’s aunt. And when he faced handsome George Link as that individual crawled out from under a truck, it was with conviction.
“My name’s Parsons,” Nem began, mildly. “Rose Miller’s aunt came down to headquarters this afternoon, feelin’ real worried about Rose—”
Link flung down the greasy wrench he held, wiped his hands on his overalls.
“If she hadn’t, I would have.” His dark eyes glittered. “Want to step into the office? We’ll be more private there.”
He preceded Nem into a cluttered, dingy little room, cleared off one of the two chairs with a sweep of his elbow for his caller, and dropped into the other.
“I suppose you think I know something about her. Ask any one who was at Riordan’s pool parlor last night if I wasn’t there from half past nine till midnight, missing most of my shots, waiting for her!”
He ripped out the words savagely.
Nem dug a leisurely thumb into the bowl of his veteran pipe, waited for Link to vent that which was boiling up within him.
“A little after ten I called up Sutton’s house, and Mr. Sutton said she’d just left. Wherever she went she didn’t come here, as she said she would. And that’s all I know — except—”
His brown jaw clamped in a sort of violent indecision. Nem spoke:
“Except that you’ve got some idea of what might have happened to her.”
The young man’s black eyes flickered, fell. He was obviously ridden by fear; not for himself, but for the girl. Ridden too with a gnawing uncertainty.
“Just that, Mr. Parsons; I’m not saying it did happen — God knows! But the housekeeper where Rose works — Rose is sort of companion nurse to Mrs. Sutton, who can’t walk — has it in for Rose, and on my account.” He hung his dark head, struck the battered oak desk with the flat of his hand.
“Reckon I’d better come clean with you. The housekeeper up there — Ellen Clarke her name is — and I, well, we kept company until Rose came along. Ellen’s older than I am; she’s forty anyway, and I guess she likes me a lot. Women her age get sort of batty about a man, sometimes.
“I’m not holding any brief for myself, but it wasn’t all my fault. Then when I met up with Rose, it was all off. Ellen took it hard, all right. But she soon saw that her ranting around wouldn’t do any good. So she took it out in being nasty to the girl.”
Nem, squinting through his smoke, filled in to his own satisfaction the gaps in the jerky, sordid story.
“And last night — Ellen’s night off it was — she came down here to the garage right after supper, and made an awful rumpus. She was wild, all right. She cried, and raged, and — threatened.” Link’s voice was low, toneless as he recounted the scene. “She swore she’d kill Rose if I didn’t stop seeing her, even if she had to swing for it! I laughed, and she took herself off. And Rose never showed up. That’s all I know.”
II
Nem drew on his pipe, mammoth hands resting idle on his knees.
“Weren’t you kind of uneasy?” he asked meekly.
Link made a vicious stab at the scarred desk with the penknife he was playing with.
“Not then.” A sullen red crept up to his temples. “Rose doesn’t keep all her dates with me, you see. She’s got me coming and going, Mr. Parsons. I... I take a lot from her that I wouldn’t take from any other girl in town.”
There was pathos in his look, and Nem remembered the challenging coquetry of the sepia photograph. But he was too anxious to take the next trolley out to the Sutton’s home on Golden Hill Avenue and interview Ellen Clarke to offer more than brusque solace.
“She may turn up any time. Don’t worry, and keep quiet until you’ve heard from me.”
He saw the street car lurch around the corner, and lumbered toward it. His flapping gray clothes, his clumsy girth and gait, made him elephantine, ludicrous. But he swung on to the trolley ahead of the men who had been waiting for it, and seated himself far up in front, close to the motor-man.
He nodded to the scattered handful of passengers.
“Business kind of dull this time of day, isn’t it?”
The motorman chuckled, not averse to breaking the rule placarded above him.
“It’s lively compared to what it is later on; lots of times I make the run from Golden Hill into town with the car empty. Easy shift, mine. From four to midnight.”
“Guess you know most everybody that gets on and off then?” Nem mused, and leaned forward confidentially to put a question on whose answer hung more than the public employee could guess.
When he got off the street car at the foot of Golden Hill he contemplated the climb ahead of him. The last rays of the April sunshine illumined the hill, cast a sort of glamour upon the modest dwellings that dotted the avenue sparsely. For Golden Hill had never been developed as much as other outlying sections of Bridgehaven. Ten minutes’ walk brought Nem to his destination — the last house on the thoroughfare, just over the crest of the hill.