The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan

When it came to helping in the kitchen, that girl was more help in five minutes than Belle, Sadie and Goldie, all three of them together, had been in half a day. She didn't ask questions. She didn't say where is this, and how do you do that? She pitched in as if she had been working in that kitchen with me for the past twenty years. How she knew where I kept the potatoes, where the best paring knife lived, and the particular kettle that was best for cooking the potatoes in, I don't know, and I never shall know. Most mystery stories, especially of late, have an element of the supernatural in them. I tell you, that girl's knowledge of my ways, and the manner in which she took hold in the kitchen, are as supernatural as anything ever brought to my notice. The first thing I knew, she was peeling the potatoes, and peeling them thin and clean. She didn't ask how many would be enough. When she got them peeled and washed, she put them on, in boiling water, with no inquiry as to where I kept the salt. She did not talk as she worked. I was glad of that; for, after three solid hours of conversation, I needed, badly, a silent space. I wanted to think. Those last words of hers, "utter nonsense," in answer to Sam's statement, kept ringing in my ears.

I tried to think whether there was any way a person could get upstairs without coming through the house. We had no fire escapes. There were no trees close enough to the house so that even Douglas Fairbanks could swing to an upstairs window from one of them. There were no vines growing on the house. Without about a twenty foot ladder, which we didn't have on the place, and which would be hard to go conveying about, to say nothing of disposing of it afterwards, there was not any possible way for anyone to get to the second floor of our house, except by means of the back or the front stairway.

Since Gaby had been killed on the attic stairway, and since all who knew about that sort of thing agreed that she had been dead at least two hours when we found her, she must have returned to the house sometime between four and five o'clock, and have stolen upstairs with none of us seeing or hearing her. Since she could do that, there was no reason to suppose that someone else could not have done the same thing; either coming in with her at the time, or coming before or after she did. I had to conclude that another person certainly had done just that; had entered the house and had gone upstairs during that hour. Who? The person whom she had been fearing? Not one of us, that seemed a certainty. And yet, Miss MacDonald had said, "nonsense."

I remembered, again, her strange, mad actions immediately after she had received the code letter. I remembered how she had looked in the hall that day, when I had told John that I thought I had seen the ghost of Sin. In Gaby's note to Danny she had written that she had purposely kept her fears and her danger a secret from Danny. Undoubtedly, the secret was written in the code letter. Had she told Danny partly the truth about the contents of that letter, or had she told her falsehoods from beginning to end? Or had Danny told us only a part of the truth? Why did we all keep forgetting how Danny had tried to call Gaby back, when Gaby had started on that fatal walk?

I have said before, and I say again, I knew that Danielle Canneziano had not murdered her sister. But I knew, too, that if she had some reason, some better reason than I could conceive, for keeping quiet, for not telling everything she knew, Danny was capable of so doing. I remembered our talk in her room on the morning of the fifth of July. I remembered how she had acted when her engagement ring had slipped from her finger-and I tried to turn my thoughts into different channels.

There was Chad's suicide and his confession. It could be possible that he had killed himself because he had loved Gaby. But that would not account for his confession to the crime. It could mean but one thing-a desire to shield someone. Would he have cared about shielding some unknown scoundrel who had crept into the house and killed the girl whom Chad loved? Had Chad, then, mistakenly suspected Martha, or Sam, or John, and killed himself and left the note to aid one of them? Not likely. Men do not kill themselves, leaving a written confession to a crime of which they are innocent, because of some mere suspicion.

I remembered my conversation with Hubert Hand in the hall that morning. What was it that he had thought I had overheard in the cabin and had bribed me not to tell? It was reasonable enough to suppose that, at that time, he had hoped to keep his entire story, his prison records, his reason for coming to the Desert Moon, his relations with Mrs. Ricker and Martha, a secret; just as I had hoped to keep the fact of finding Sam's pipe ashes a secret.

Sam's pipe ashes, again. If someone had put them there, in an effort to implicate Sam, it would have had to be someone who knew Sam's ways. My thoughts were off again. You can't, I told myself, get shed of a following shadow by running away from it. You have to turn and face it, before you can go the other way. I faced it.