Tell Me, Pretty Maiden (Molly Murphy Mysteries, #7)

“Do you happen to know if Annie had a date that night?”


“She did.” The older, sharper-looking one said, “She had a dress with her, to change into after the show. She said she was going out for supper. We didn’t think much of it. She was always going out with some guy after the show.” She lowered her voice. “Mrs. Stubbs locks the front door at midnight and Annie often doesn’t show up until breakfast next day. You can guess what she’s been doing.”

“So Annie definitely went on a date that night, but nobody saw her leave with a man?”

The younger one frowned. “Well no. She went off with Jessie that night, didn’t she?”

“Jessie?”

“The other girl that’s gone missing. Jessie Edwards.”

I gasped. “Another girl went missing that night too?”

“Oh yes. Annie took Jessie with her. I think they were going out to supper with a couple of guys. And they didn’t show up for breakfast next morning. That must have been some supper, we said. We were kidding around, you know. Only when they didn’t come back for the show that night, there was big trouble. We thought maybe they’d run off with the rich guys and they didn’t need to be in no stinking chorus anymore.”

“Tell me about Jessie,” I said.

“Jessie? She was different from Annie,” the older girl said. “I don’t know why Annie liked her so much. She was fairly new. Came from somewhere out in the boonies—Massachusetts I think. And she was real shy. A good dancer, though. She’d studied classical ballet, she said. And she and Annie really hit it off. They became bosom buddies. Did everything together. So sometimes Annie would take her on dates with her and introduce her to guys. ‘She’s never going to hitch a guy by herself,’ Annie would say. Although she was pretty enough.”

“What did she look like?” I asked although I thought I already knew.

“Skinny, petite, dark hair . . .”

“Little elfin face, pointed chin?”

“That’s right. Do you know her?”

“I think I do,” I said. “And she and Annie went off together. Did anyone happen to see a swank red automobile that night?”

“I didn’t, but Lizzie said she’d seen that auto again and I guess that was the one she meant.”

“So it was possible that Annie and Jessie went off in the automobile. Could we ask the other girls to find out if anyone saw them leave?”

The older one shook her head. “The police already asked everybody that. They showed us a picture of the automobile. Real nice it was. But you know those two rushed out that night. They were off and away before we’d finished taking our makeup off.”

“Did Jessie wear a white dress that night?”

The younger one screwed up her face, thinking. “I believe she did. Yeah, because some wisecracker made a joke about looking like a virgin and that Annie had given up wearing white at her christening.”

“I presume the police have been through Annie’s and Jessie’s things? Have they contacted their families?”

“I don’t think they had families to contact,” the older one said. “I know that Annie ran away from home when she was a kid, and I believe that Jessie grew up in an orphanage.”

“Would you happen to have a picture of them that I could take with me?” I asked.

The younger one got to her feet. “We’ve got some playbills out in the hall. That shows all of us.” She flopped out in her slippers and came back holding out the playbill we’d seen in the manager’s office. I looked at it again, Annie, front and center, and now, as my eyes scanned the rest of it, my girl from the snowdrift smiling demurely from the back row.





THIRTY-EIGHT

I was so mad at myself that I could scream. If only I had studied that photograph carefully when I had seen it in the manager’s office, instead of just looking at Annie, I’d have spotted Jessie then and I could have stopped those men from taking her away. An awful fear clutched at the pit of my stomach. Who were they? Why had they pretended to be her relatives? With a name like Jessie Edwards she certainly had no links to Hungary. And more to the point, what could I do now to get her back?

I visited the local New Haven police station and reported everything that I had found. They were polite enough but I got the feeling that they weren’t taking me too seriously. “Oh yes, miss?” one of them said, barely stifling the grin. “You say she was found in a snowdrift and then kidnapped by Hungarians? Are you sure you haven’t been reading too many novels?”