This time both of Harriet Penny’s parents gasped. “That’s impossible!” her father exclaimed angrily. “We know her disappearance could not have been voluntary.”
“Not only was it voluntary, it was carefully planned. Shall I explain?”
“You had better, before I throw you out of my house!” Penny said, his handsome face mottled with fury.
“First of all, Miss Penny had arranged to be alone at the church that morning.”
“How could she have done that?” Mrs. Penny asked.
“She had told the other two ladies they were to meet the following day, thereby ensuring they would not be at the church that morning. Then she suggested to you, Mrs. Penny, that you should return home and spare yourself the unpleasant task of sorting old clothes. No doubt she knew you could be easily persuaded to do so.”
Mrs. Penny had no reply to this. She just stared at Holmes in silent outrage.
“When she was truly alone and unobserved, perhaps for one of the few times in her life, she left the church, walked to Union Station, and boarded a train for San Francisco.”
The Pennys both protested vigorously, and even Malloy had to disagree.
“Nobody saw her leave the church,” Malloy informed Holmes. “We asked everybody in the neighborhood.”
“What exactly did you ask them?” Holmes asked.
“If they had seen a young woman leaving the church with a man.”
“But she didn’t leave with a man, and she wasn’t forced or doing anything to call attention to herself. She would have walked calmly out and disappeared into the crowd. No one in that alley would have paid the slightest heed to her, just as they paid no heed to us yesterday.”
“My daughter would never have left her home and family, much less boarded a train to anywhere at all!” Penny insisted. “She would never have caused her mother and me so much concern!”
“And why would she go to San Francisco?” Mrs. Penny asked. “We don’t know anyone there at all!”
“Yes, you do. Mr. Etheridge lives in San Francisco. He accepted a call to a church there after he left Princeton.”
“Etheridge? How would Harriet have known he was there? And why would she even have cared?” her father scoffed.
“I believe Miss Penny had developed a fondness for Mr. Etheridge, and he for her.”
“Impossible!” Penny insisted.
“And they had corresponded in the months since he returned to the seminary.”
“I would have known if she was corresponding with anyone!” Mrs. Penny wailed.
“Mr. Penny himself told us she corresponded with missionaries,” Holmes reminded them. “She could have easily included her letters to Etheridge in those mailings and received replies in the same way.”
“But… ” Mrs. Penny cast about desperately for another argument to refute Holmes’s claims. “She couldn’t possibly have left voluntarily. She didn’t take so much as a hairpin with her!” she tried.
“You yourself told me she was carrying a bundle of clothing when you left the house that morning,” Holmes reminded her.
“Secondhand clothing,” Mrs. Penny explained. “She collected it from our neighbors. I saw it myself!”
“But you told me you didn’t see her sorting the clothes in that particular bundle. Would you ring for your maid, please?”
Startled at the seemingly incongruous request, Penny pulled the bell rope. The maid appeared almost instantly, her eyes still wide with amazement.
“Before we left yesterday,” Holmes said, “I asked your maid to go through Miss Penny’s clothing to see if anything was missing. Were her drawers empty?” he asked the girl.
“No, sir, they were all full, just like they should be.”
“You see,” Mrs. Penny said. “I told you!”
“Did you notice anything unusual?” Holmes asked the girl, ignoring Mrs. Penny.
“Yes, sir,” the maid said, nodding her head vigorously. “None of the clothes in the drawers was hers!”
“Whose were they?” Holmes asked.
“I don’t know,” the girl said, “but they was all raggedy and old, like something you’d throw out.”
“Or send to the missionaries in foreign lands,” Holmes said.
“What are you talking about?” Mrs. Penny cried.
“Miss Penny had packed her belongings in the bundle that was supposed to be clothing for the missionaries and left the old clothing she had collected in her drawers. I am guessing she had secreted a carpetbag in the church at some time in preparation. When you left the church that morning, she put her own belongings that she had carried from home into it, and took it with her to the train. Then she used the ticket Mr. Etheridge had sent her and went to join him.”
“This is all conjecture,” Mrs. Penny exclaimed, her face now crimson with outrage. “I refuse to believe a word of it.”
But Mr. Penny had calmed down a bit, and he was studying Holmes with a contemplative frown. “I believe, Mr. Holmes, that you have concocted this wild tale with the best of intentions, to reassure Mrs. Penny and myself that our daughter is safe on the other side of the country when you really believe her to be a fallen woman held captive someplace where we will never find her. If this is the case, I assure you, we are strong enough to hear the truth, whatever it may be.”
Mrs. Penny’s cry of anguish proved she wasn’t as strong as her husband claimed, but Holmes ignored her. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the telegram he had received earlier today. “I took the liberty of telephoning Princeton Seminary yesterday. They were kind enough to give me Mr. Etheridge’s direction in San Francisco, and I sent him a telegram informing him that Miss Penny’s disappearance had caused a sensation in New York. He was completely ignorant of this unfortunate development. Most probably he and Miss Penny felt certain no one but her parents would even notice she was gone. Under the circumstances, they wish you to know that your daughter and Mr. Etheridge were married three days ago in San Francisco. I believe congratulations are in order.”
Holmes held out the telegram, and Malloy snatched it from him before the Reverend Mr. Penny could gather his wits.
“It’s true,” the detective confirmed when he had scanned it.
“The ungrateful baggage,” Penny snapped. “How dare she be so selfish? Frightening her mother and me so terribly and all for her own purposes!”
“Why, she asked me only a few weeks ago what I would say if someone wanted to marry her,” Mrs. Penny recalled furiously. “I told her not to be ridiculous, that no one was going to marry her, and besides, her duty was to care for her father and me. Yet still she chose to desert us!”
“I’ve got some friends at the newspapers,” Malloy said. “I’ll give them the word. The real story will be in tomorrow’s papers, and that should calm the city down again.”
“You should also put an announcement of the marriage in the society pages,” Holmes suggested. “To at least give the illusion that you approve the match. That will go a long way to stopping the gossip.”
We left the Pennys still in shock at the treachery of the daughter they had believed to be without a mind or spirit of her own.
“Who would’ve believed Harriet Penny had so much gumption? How did you figure it out?” Malloy asked as we strolled down the tree-lined street in search of a cab. It was as close as he would come to complimenting Holmes.
“When you told me Miss Penny was as plain as an old boot,” Holmes recalled with a small smile, “I wondered why one of those young men who work for the madams… What did you call them?”
“Cadets,” Malloy supplied.
“I wondered why a cadet would select such an unattractive girl-who was already a bit old for the trade, by the way-when the city abounds with much more likely prospects. So the theory that she had been kidnapped to a brothel seemed unlikely. As I mentioned, when a young woman disappears, there is usually a man or a theater troupe involved. Since the minister’s missing daughter never attended the theater, I simply had to identify the man, no matter how unlikely a candidate he might seem.”
“She was clever,” Malloy said.
“She had to be to escape from those two,” Holmes said.
But not more clever than Sherlock Holmes.
