Face to Face by Ellery Queen Read Free Book Online Page A

relative, a younger sister, had married a British dairy farmer and gone to live in England. Both the sister and her husband had been killed in a plane crash many years before, during a summer holiday; they had left an only child, a daughter, who would now be in her early twenties.
    â€œIt seems that Glory was never very close to her sister,” Burke said, between spurts of pipe smoke, “according to what she told me—disapproved of the sister’s marriage, that sort of thing—and she simply lost track of the sister’s daughter. Now she wanted to find the girl.”
    â€œJust like that,” Ellery murmured. “Sounds as if she were looking for an heir.”
    Burke took the pipe out of his mouth. “You know, that never occurred to me. It might have been her reason at that.”
    â€œHow did Glory communicate with the Yard?”
    Burke stared. “By letter. Vail turned it over to me. For heaven’s sake, what difference does it make?”
    â€œAirmail?” asked Ellery.
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œWhen did the letter come in, do you recall?”
    â€œIt arrived on the fourth of December.”
    â€œEven more interesting. Possibly significant. The page with the hidden word ‘face’ in the last diary is dated December first, and Glory’s letter about finding her niece got to the Yard on the fourth. Which means she must have written that word invisibly about the same time she wrote to England.”
    â€œYou mean there’s a connection between ‘face’ and the niece?”
    â€œI don’t mean anything, unfortunately,” Ellery said sadly. “I’m just scrounging around among the possibilities. Did you find the girl? I take it you did.”
    â€œOh, yes.”
    â€œWhere?”
    Burke grinned. “In New York. Ironic, what? I traced Lorette Spanier from an orphanage in Leicestershire—in the Midlands—where she’d been brought up after her parents’ death, to a flat on your West Side, just a couple of miles from her aunt! And I had to come all the way from England to find her.
    â€œThe only difficulty I had was on the home grounds—it took me several weeks to trace her to the orphanage. There they told me where she had gone, although they didn’t know her specific address or what she was doing—having reached her majority she was a free agent, and the orphanage people had no further control over her movements.
    â€œWhen I got to New York I promptly enlisted the aid of Centre Street, which shunted me off to your Missing Persons Bureau, who could do nothing for me because the girl wasn’t listed as missing anywhere in the States. And then, somehow, I got to your father. Does Inspector Queen have a finger in every New York police pie? He seems more like an omnibus than a man.”
    â€œHe’s a sort of all-purpose vacuum cleaner,” Ellery said absently. “Lorette Spanier. Is that spelled with one n or two? And is she married?”
    â€œOne. And no, she’s quite young. I think twenty-one. Or—no. By now she’s twenty-two. Old enough to be married, I grant you, but there’s something awfully virginal about her. And anti male, if you know what I mean.”
    â€œI don’t.”
    â€œI mean she has no time for men.”
    â€œI see,” said Ellery, although he didn’t, quite. “What does she do for a living?”
    â€œWhen she first got to the States she took a secretarial position—there was a vogue in your metropolis about that time, I understand, for pretty young English secretaries. But that was merely to keep body and soul together. What Lorette really wanted was to get into show business, she told me. She has a good voice, by pop standards, with a rather distinctive style.”
    â€œAnything like Glory’s?” Ellery asked suddenly.
    â€œA good deal like it, I’m told, although I don’t qualify as a pop music buff.