The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan

As indicated by her notes for July eleventh, on that afternoon Miss MacDonald had cleaned the attic, thoroughly, and had found nothing to pay her for her trouble. Keeping me in the dark, as she had, I supposed, when she said early the next morning that she wanted to clean the living-room, that she had got at least a hat full of clues from the attic.

Land knows, the way I had been neglecting things, the living-room was badly in need of a good cleaning. I wanted her to allow me to help her, but she would not. It was luck that I happened to come in with the floor wax just as she was looking at something that she had dug out of the ashes in the fireplace.

"What's that? " I questioned.

"I believe," she answered, "that it is the missing key to the attic door."

She got up, shook out her skirts, and went straight upstairs. I trailed along. I stood by and watched her while she fitted the blackened key into the lock. It turned both ways, as smoothly as you please.

Without bothering to say anything to me, she went up and down the hall, trying the key in the locks of the other doors. It fitted none of them. She went downstairs again, with me trailing after her, and tried the key in all the locks downstairs. It fitted none of them, either.

"Do you know," she asked, showing at last that she was conscious of my presence, which I was beginning to doubt, "when you last had a fire in that fireplace?"

I thought a minute, and then told her on the night of the fourth of July, during the storm.

"Do you remember who kindled the fire?"

"It had been fixed there, ready for the match, for weeks. Things have gone to rack and ruin here lately; but I always used to see to it that the fire was set in the fireplace, ready to light when needed."

"Do you happen to know who applied the match to the fire that night?"

"Sam did."

"But surely, even though the rain had come up, a fire on the fourth of July could not have been necessary?"

"We don't have fires here when they are necessary," I told her. "We have them when they are possible without absolute suffocation. Half a pint of rain is plenty of excuse for Sam to light a fire at any time, even if he has to open all the doors and the windows to cool off."

What I was saying was the honest truth; but I had a mean feeling that she didn't believe me.

Right here, with apologies to Miss MacDonald and others of her profession, I want to say that if they would just remember that nine times out of ten a person who pretends to be telling the truth is telling it, it would save them a lot of mistakes, and a lot of worry. The man who spends his time biting his money to see whether or not it is genuine doesn't, usually, have much of it to bite; to say nothing of the wear and tear on his own teeth, which would be considerable.

I was standing by the living-room windows, trying to keep my temper down with some such consoling thoughts as these, when I saw a car drive up and the coroner and the undertaker getting out of it.

I told Miss MacDonald the news, and asked her what in the world she supposed they were coming here for, at this time in the morning.

"I needed to see them again," she answered. "Mr. Stanley telephoned to them last evening."

"Well," I said, "that means that I've got about half an hour to disguise a family meal as a company dinner -- "