The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan

"Someone," she went on, "has been to my desk and has stolen the code letter."

I could manage nothing but an echo. "Fortunate! " I said.

"I had a careful copy of it, locked up, of course. I have been leaving the letter in plain sight on my desk for bait. Don't you see, Mary," she forgot her formality in her excitement, "this is the mistake I have been hoping for. I have found a beginning-at last. It is bound to be easy from now on. Oh, Joy!"

She was almost doing dance steps. I wasn't. I was thinking, hard, in the tidy space in my mind; trying not to get it cluttered with her excitement, trying to cook up some common sense.

"The letter," she went on, "could not have concerned anyone in this house except Miss Canneziano, her father, and, possibly, not probably, young Mr. Stanley."

"I guess," I said, "that was likely what you were wanted to think."

Her gray eyes questioned me.

"Supposing," I answered, "that Mrs. Ricker, or Hubert Hand, or anyone of us, wanted to get you clear off the track, suspecting especially Danny, could one of us do better than to steal the code letter?"

"My word! " she said. "And you, with a mind that works like that, spending your life doing cooking."

"Doing cooking," I told her, "is how my mind comes to work like that. If anyone ever told you that it didn't take brains to cook, he was making a big mistake."

"But such quick, sure thinking," she said, "is marvelous."

She laughed. "Listen to me doing a Dr. Watson for your Holmes," she said. "Golly, but I'm lucky to have you at hand, though."

I love to be flattered. I sat and preened myself.

"All the same," she went on, "it does prove one thing. That the murderer, or his close accomplice, is right here on the place, now."

"Chad's confession proved that. The key in the fireplace proved it, too."

"Dear me, no. Not conclusively. Now, let me see. " She took a folded paper from the front of her dress. "Here is my copy of the letter. It does look a mess, doesn't it?"

I looked at the paper and read, as before:

"Paexzazlytp! f-y nyx ogrgrsgo, rn fgao atf jan j-asn, ahzgo zkg c. ahhalo, vkgt nyx clplzgf rg lt zkg kypulzae, zkaz nyx. ."

It surely looked a mess.

"The fact that it was written on the typewriter," she said, "makes me suspect that the typewriter may unwrite it for us."