The Desert Moon Mystery by Kay Cleaver Strahan

As I was trying to hurry past Gaby's door, Danny opened it, and asked me if I would come in and sit with her for a while.

I should have been there, long before. I went right in, apologizing, and trying to explain. But, when I saw that she meant for us to sit in Gaby's room, I suggested that we go somewhere else.

"No, please Mary," she said. "I don't want to be alone; but I do want to sit here. I feel as if here, with all her things around me, I might-get in touch-I mean-something might come to me. They say, you know, that people who have died-violent deaths, do not leave the earth sphere at once. I don't know whether I believe that or not. But, it could be true. If she is still on earth, she would come here. Wouldn't she? And she would try, I am sure, to give me a sign. Something to help me-to help all of us. If it should come, I want to be here to receive it."

"It won't come, Danny, dear," I said.

"No. I suppose not. " She leaned back in her chair and sighed, and her arms dropped straight down over the chair's arms-a position that showed how tuckered she was. The engagement ring that John had given her slipped from her finger and came rolling over toward me. I scrambled to pick it up. When I rose from the floor she had jumped to her feet. She was ashy, shaking and trembling as if she had a chill.

"Mary! Promise me that you'll never tell that, not to anyone. It didn't -- It couldn't mean anything."

"It means," I said, handing her the ring, "that you are wasting away. You'd better let me go down and bring you up some good, hot soup; or an eggnog."

She clung to me. "Don't leave me, Mary. I am afraid. I am dreadfully afraid. Promise that you won't tell about the ring. It-didn't mean anything."

I will admit that I did not like it any too well myself. There, just as she was asking for a sign, the ring, which had fitted snugly enough, I had thought, had dropped off. But, of course I had to put up a brave front to her.

"Nonsense," I said. "I won't tell anybody, because it is nothing to tell. All that it means is that the ring is too large for you."

"It is too large," she agreed. "I've been losing weight, lately. I have meant to ask John to send it to have it cut down-but I hated to be without it. Still-just as I was asking for a sign. Though it has dropped off several times before this. I shouldn't think it meant anything, this particular time, should I?"

"Of course not, dear," I said, relieved to hear that it had dropped off before. "You had your hands hanging straight down, that's all. You are all overstrung, and no wonder. Anyway, what could it have meant?"

How a person will babble along, seemingly for no reason. I had paid no attention to what I was saying; but, the minute I had said it, the question needed an answer.

It could have meant that Gaby did not want Danny to marry John. Or, since nothing in the house could have signified John's name as plainly as that ring could, it might have meant -- I refused to go on with it.

Danny must have been answering the question to herself, as I had been doing. She sat down in a deep chair, opposite me, her hands clasped on her knees, and leaned forward, and looked into my eyes.

"Definite things, Mary," she said, "are always so wise. A definite answer to your definite question proves, as nothing else might have, that this was a silly, futile little accident. The ring has dropped off, I suppose, half a dozen times this week. Gaby's last note to me was all affection. Living, if Gaby could have taken John away from me, for herself, she would have done it. Dead-she wants us to marry. I know that. As for any other implication -- " As I had done, and in spite of her talk about definite things, she refused that. "If only Uncle Sam were not so heartless," she finished.

"Heartless! " I spoke sharply in spite of myself. "If the Creator ever made a man with a bigger heart than Sam Stanley's, nobody ever saw him."

"He has been good to you," she said. "But you give him his own way about everything."

"Well, after all," I said, "he does own the Desert Moon."

"And everyone on it, body and soul," she said. "Sometimes I think he owns everyone in this county."