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

of the tub, dried her angular body, and donned a serge suit. Then she went to the top deck and knocked at the door which bore a brass plate—“Captain.”
    The master of every vessel, no matter what his age, is known on board as “the Old Man.” Today Captain Everett looked the part. He sat at his desk, his eyes circled with dark rings, and stared at those fateful words—“Unaccountably Missing.”
    His face did not light up at the sight of Hildegarde Withers in the doorway. “Well?” he rasped. In his hand was a wireless form which Sparks had just handed him, from the line’s moguls in New York.
    MAKE EVERY EFFORT CLEAR MYSTERY OF FRASER GIRL STOP PARENTS DISSATISFIED AND VERY INFLUENTIAL STOP UNFORTUNATE YOU DID NOT TURN BACK AND LOWER BOAT STOP MAKE FULL REPORT HERE AND TO LONDON.
    “I’d like to make a suggestion,” said Miss Withers hurriedly. “Wouldn’t it be a good idea to find out where various members of the passenger list were at the time Rosemary Fraser is supposed to have gone overboard?”
    “What?” Captain Everett had an unpleasant feeling that this meddlesome woman was implying something frightening and unthinkable. “You mean to tell me that you suspect—that you think somebody had a hand in—”
    “I’m not suspecting anything, yet,” Miss Withers told him. “But if we knew where the passengers were, we might learn something from someone’s hearing the splash—or not hearing it.”
    But Captain Everett shook his head. “It will only alarm the passengers,” he decided. “They’ll think they’re being asked for an alibi, and I’ve done enough asking questions for one day. Besides, if any of them had heard anything, they’d have come forward.” He turned back to his desk as a sign that the interview was over.
    “There’s more ways to kill a cat than by choking it with butter,” Miss Withers told him somewhat cryptically, and withdrew in injured pride.
    As she stood thoughtfully on the deck outside the captain’s door she heard the clanging signal of the luncheon gong. That gave her an idea. She hastened below, and such was her promptness that she very nearly, but not quite, got into the dining saloon ahead of Dr. Waite, who had just emerged from his combined office and sick bay at the foot of the stairs.
    Instead of avoiding discussion of the tragedy of the previous night, Miss Withers welcomed it. As the others straggled in, each contributed his own theory. Most of them agreed that it must have been a shame suicide, though Leslie Reverson surprised everyone, including himself, by venturing to suggest that perhaps Rosemary had fallen overboard.
    “I’ve got an idea,” said Miss Withers innocently. She was in a hurry to get this over before Candida Noring, the only absent member of the table group, should join them. “Suppose each of us tries to remember whereabouts on the ship he or she was between quarter of eleven and five after—which must have been the time the girl went over board? Perhaps the estimated hour is wrong—if one or more of us was near the right-hand rail—”
    “Starboard,” said Tom Hammond.
    “The starboard rail, thank you… and if that one did not hear a splash, as I did not, it will prove either that the girl went overboard at another time or from the other side of the ship!”
    The various individuals at the doctor’s table looked at each other. Loulu Hammond broke the silence. “I heard nothing,” she admitted. “Because I had gone to bed and was sound asleep.” She smiled. “And so was the pride and joy of the Hammond household, our darling Gerald.”
    Leslie Reverson tried to account for himself, but was very vague about it. He had wandered into the bar about that time, looking for a nightcap, but had found it unaccountably closed. He had taken a book from the ship’s library in the social hall and read himself to sleep in his stateroom. The Honorable Emily stated that at approximately eleven o’clock she had been down below decks