Puzzle of the Silver Persian by Stuart Palmer Read Free Book Online

if to reassure himself. “Why, she was so gay at the dinner tonight—you were all laughing and having high jinks.”
    Candida said softly that she hadn’t mentioned suicide, but he did not hear her. “Mark my words, the Fraser girl is safe and sound somewhere. According to what I hear, she has a habit of hiding away in strange places…”
    He led the way down to the promenade deck, the two women following close behind. “We’ll just have a bit of a look-see,” said Captain Everett. “No need to alarm the passengers. We’ll find her, never you fear.”
    The captain had a look-see until the sun was well above the horizon, with picked detachments of his officers scouring the ship, but Rosemary Fraser was not to be found. This time she had not crept away for a love tryst in any secret place aboard the American Diplomat.
    “Rosemary Fraser, aged nineteen,” Captain Everett wrote painstakingly in his log, beneath the date “September 21st.” He added the fateful words, “Unaccountably Missing,” and laid aside his pen.
    Miss Hildegarde Withers sat up for a long time with Candida. “I can understand that her shame over a real or fancied sin of that kind could have driven her to suicide,” the school teacher finally agreed. She was holding in her lap the leather-bound diary which had been Rosemary Fraser’s. “But I don’t understand why she should have gone without leaving a suicide note behind—or why she should tear half the pages out of this little book.”
    Candida Noring knew. “Rosemary took with her everything she had written,” she said calmly. “Of course she would. She didn’t want anyone to know what she had put down, to search out the secrets of her silly girlish heart. She didn’t want anybody to know who was the man over whom she had lost what people would call ‘her good name.’”
    Miss Withers turned her keen blue eyes on the girl with the tanned face. “Do you know who he was?”
    But Candida only shook her head. “I could guess,” she said. “But I won’t.”
    At that moment Tom Hammond raised his rumpled head from the pillow and saw his wife Loulu standing, fully dressed, in the doorway.
    “I didn’t hear the breakfast gong,” he said cheerily. He stopped short as he saw the look on Loulu’s face.
    “You may as well know,” she said, in a voice that was not her own, “that Rosemary Fraser went overboard last night.”
    Tom didn’t say anything for a moment. “I thought you might be interested,” his wife finished, and closed the door forcibly on his torrent of questions. Hammond slid out of bed, doused his head in cold water. He dressed quickly, without his bath. This morning, through some beneficent miracle, the Vesuvius of bedclothing on the settee did not erupt. It was a lucky thing for the demon Gerald that he still slept, for his father was in a mood to answer no questions.
    The news came to the Honorable Emily via her steward, who rapped at the door at nine o’clock bearing a fearful and wonderful bird cage which the carpenter, true to form, had contrived out of light wire and a rusty oil tin. The Honorable Emily was so busy moving her new pet into its improvised cage that she did not at first grasp the meaning of what she heard.
    Tobermory stared sulkily from the pillow, his eyes never leaving the bird, which was, by every right, his. The robin waited patiently for his certain doom.
    The Honorable Emily then gave her attention to thoughts of Rosemary Fraser. Unconsciously she repeated her remarks of the previous evening. “Poor girl!” she said aloud. Then, “These Americans!”
    She repeated them again as she went down to breakfast with her nephew Leslie Reverson. “I’m glad you weren’t mixed up with a girl like that,” she added.
    Young Reverson told her that if he hadn’t been mixed up with Rosemary that was Rosemary’s fault and not his own. Neither one of them was able to eat much breakfast.
    Dr. Waite was entirely unable to eat breakfast. He