FURTHER INQUIRY
"Did you happen to notice, Mrs. Pierce, whether Miss Lloyd was wearing a yellow rose when you saw her in her room?"
Mrs. Pierce hesitated. She looked decidedly embarrassed, and seemed disinclined to answer. But she might have known that to hesitate and show embarrassment was almost equivalent to an affirmative answer to the coroner's question. At last she replied "l don't know; I didn't notice."
This might have been a true statement, but I think no one in the room believed it. The coroner tried again.
"Try to think, Mrs. Pierce. It is important that we should know if Miss Lloyd was wearing a yellow rose."
"Yes," flared out Mrs. Pierce angrily, "so that you can prove she went down to her uncle's office later and dropped a piece of her rose there! But I tell you I don't remember whether she was wearing a rose or not, and it wouldn't matter if she had on forty roses! If Florence Lloyd says she didn't go down-stairs, she didn't."
"I think we all believe in Miss Lloyd's veracity," said Mr.
Monroe, "but it is necessary to discover where those rose petals in the library came from. You saw the flowers in her room, Mrs.
Pierce?"
"Yes, I believe I did. But I paid no attention to them, as Florence nearly always has flowers in her room."
"Would you have heard Miss Lloyd if she had gone down-stairs after you left her?"
"I don't know," said Mrs. Pierce, doubtfully.
"Is your room next to hers?"
"No, not next."
"Is it on the same corridor?"
"No."
"Around a comer?"
"Yes."
"And at some distance?"
"Yes." Mrs. Pierce's answers became more hesitating as she saw the drift of Mr. Monroe's questions. Clearly, she was trying to shield Florence, if necessary, at the expense of actual truthfulness.
"Then," went on Mr. Monroe, inexorably, "I understand you to say that you think you would have heard Miss Lloyd, had she gone down-stairs, although your room is at a distance and around a corner and the hall and stairs are thickly carpeted. Unless you were listening especially, Mrs. Pierce, I think you would scarcely have heard her descend."
"Well, as she didn't go down,, of course I didn't hear her," snapped Mrs. Pierce, with the feminine way of settling an argument by an unprovable statement.
Mr. Monroe began on another tack.
"When you went to Miss Lloyd's room," he said, "was the maid, Elsa, there?"
"Miss Lloyd had just dismissed her for the night."
"What was Miss Lloyd doing when you went to her room?"
"She was looking over some gowns that she proposed sending to the cleaner's."
The coroner fairly jumped. He remembered the newspaper clipping of a cleaner's advertisement, which was even now in the gold bag before him. Though all the jurors had seen it, it had not been referred to in the presence of the women.
Recovering himself at once, he said quietly "Was not that rather work for Miss Lloyd's maid?"
"Oh, Elsa would pack and send them, of course," said Mrs. Pierce carelessly. "Miss Lloyd was merely deciding which ones needed cleaning."
"Do you know where they were to be sent?"
Mrs. Pierce looked a little surprised at this question.
"Miss Lloyd always sends her things to Carter & Brown's," she said.
Now, Carter & Brown was the firm name on the advertisement, and it was evident at once that the coroner considered this a damaging admission.
He sat looking greatly troubled, but before he spoke again, Mr.
Parmalee made an observation that decidedly raised that young man in my estimation.
"Well," he said, "that's pretty good proof that the gold bag doesn't belong to Miss Lloyd."
"How so?" asked the coroner, who had thought quite the contrary.
"Why, if Miss Lloyd always sends her goods to be cleaned to Carter & Brown, why would she need to cut their address from a newspaper and save it?"
At first I thought the young man's deduction distinctly clever, but on second thought I wasn't so sure. Miss Lloyd might have wanted that address for a dozen good reasons. To my mind, it proved neither her ownership of the gold bag, nor the contrary.
In fact, I thought the most important indication that the bag might be hers lay in the story Elsa told about the cousin who sailed to Germany. Somehow that sounded untrue to me, but I was more than willing to believe it if I could.
I longed for Fleming Stone, who, I felt sure, could learn from the bag and its contents the whole truth about the crime and the criminal.
But I had been called to take charge of the case, and my pride forbade me to call on any one for help.
I had scorned deductions from inanimate objects, but I resolved to study that bag again, and study it more minutely. Perhaps there were some threads or shreds caught in its meshes that might point to its owner. I remembered a detective story I read once, in which the whole discovery of the criminal depended on identifying a few dark blue woollen threads which were found in a small pool of candle grease on a veranda roof. As it turned out, they were from the trouser knee of a man who had knelt there to open a window. The patent absurdity of leaving threads from one's trouser knee, amused me very much, but the accommodating criminals in fiction almost always leave threads or shreds behind them. And surely a gold-mesh bag, with its thousands of links would be a fine trap to catch some threads of evidence, however minute they might be.
Furthermore I decided to probe further into that yellow rose business. I was not at all sure that those petals I found on the floor had anything to do with Miss Lloyd's roses, but it must be a question possible of settlement, if I went about it in the right way. At any rate, though I had definite work ahead of me, my duty just now was to listen to the forthcoming evidence, though I could not help thinking I could have put questions more to the point than Mr. Monroe did.
Of course the coroner's inquest was not formally conducted as a trial by jury would be, and so any one spoke, if he chose, and the coroner seemed really glad when suggestions were offered him.
At this point Philip Crawford rose.
