Phoebe Atwood Taylor once again embroils her scholarly sleuth Leonidas’ Witherall in enough foul play to challenge his wits to their limit. Returning to the Cape after a trip around the world, Witherall investigates some odd doings on the train: he is knocked unconscious and kidnapped. When he finally manages to get home, he discovers the body of Miss Medora Winthrop in his garage. Even the amazing Witherall is hard put to solve this one.
© Copyright 1939, by Phoebe Atwood Taylor
All rights reserved
This edition published in 1980 by Foul Play Press, a division of The Countryman Press, Woodstock, Vermont 05091, distributed by The Independent Publishers Group, 14 Vanderventer Avenue, Port Washington, New York 11050.
ISBN 0-914378-54-6
Printed in the United States of America
For
K. B.
COLD STEAL
CHAPTER 1
A TIDAL WAVE of gray flannel dressing gown streamed out behind Miss Chard as she bolted like a bewildered mouse across the vestibule platforms from Car Ten into Car Nine.
Once inside, she huddled against the cold metal of the parlor car wall, her eyes glued to the door, and her ears strained for the sound of footsteps that never came. While mile after mile of snow-spotted fields, drab and leaden in the chill New England dawn, rushed past the corridor windows, she stood there watching and listening and trembling, and clutching at the brown paper package in her dressing gown pocket.
In the face of her apparently overpowering fear, the fact that she could still remember her immediate objective stood out as a tribute to her tenacity. That she could actually force her felt-slippered feet to start moving on down the narrow corridor was an achievement, a positive triumph of will power and strength of mind.
Only her strong will, Miss Chard thought as she stopped in front of the water cooler, accounted for her being alive and on the train. Her “body was simply an innocent and panic-stricken bystander that since seven o’clock the previous evening had been shoved hither and yon through a suddenly tumultuous and chaotic world.
Her dangling gray braid bobbed from side to side at the recollection of the last twelve hours, of those Dalton policemen and their guns, the sirens screeching, and then the airplane trip to New York. Then, practically before she got the cotton out of her ears and the gum taste out of her mouth, she was on this train and going back home again. And throughout it all there hadn’t been a single moment when Miss Chard was not terrified to the core.
She still was.
But now she had only this final gesture to make before turning Leslie Horn over to her aunt. Once Leslie Horn was placed, figuratively speaking, in the arms of Medora Winthrop, Miss Chard’s nightmare would be over.
Resolutely, she drew from her pocket the brown paper package of whose contents she stood in such mortal fear. Before Leslie Horn waked up, that package had to be thrown away, a task made unbelievably formidable by the tightly fitting Pullman windows that remained unmoved in response to her tuggings. She had considered disposing of the package by way of an open vestibule door, but to open one seemed to her dangerous, and besides, the sign said that passengers mustn’t.
Miss Chard peered beyond into Car Nine and its still slumbering occupants, and then over her shoulder in the direction of Car Ten.
Then, hastily, she buried the brown paper package deep down out of sight in the bottom of the receptacle for used drinking cups, at the base of the water cooler. For good measure, she yanked a handful of clean cups from the wall container and strewed them on the top layer, above the package.
“There!” Miss Chard whispered. “There!”
Her feeling of relief at completing her little mission, as she turned from the water cooler, gave way to a gasp of acute dismay.
Framed in the doorway of Drawing Room A, and observing her interestedly, stood an elderly man with a small pointed beard.
He looked like Shakespeare. He looked so much like Shakespeare that it seemed as if some library bust or engraved frontispiece had come suddenly to life.
“I hope,” Leonidas Witherall began courteously, “that I didn’t frighten—”
But Miss Chard was already in flight.
Leonidas Witherall sighed in annoyance as the gray dressing gown streamed past him up the narrow corridor and out of the car.
He didn’t mind the woman’s gasp. A,gasp was not at all an unusual reaction from someone beholding him for the first time. He was thoroughly accustomed to being gasped at and gaped at and stared at. Dozens of people did so daily, and fully half of them asked excitedly if anyone had ever told him that he looked like Shakespeare. Occasionally some ardent Shakespeare lover went so far as to prod him to see if he was real.
All that was routine, and Leonidas accepted it. But a flight was different. He resented having mousy women stampede at the sight of him, as if he were a monster. This was the third fugitive within a month, and every last one had been a grayish, mousy woman who scuttled.
Leonidas stepped across the corridor to survey the dreary, snow-heaped landscape flashing by.
He was amazed and a little discouraged at the number of mousy women who seemed constantly traveling. On the trip arbund the world which he was just concluding, he had been haunted from the start by throngs of mousy women. Wherever he went, he was confronted by mousy women taking snapshots, or buying wicker baskets and never-ending strings of beads, or writing the dates and dimensions of things in little black notebooks.
They worried about fleas, and crawling insects, and where the lettuce came from. They lost trunks, and that worried them. They lost pocketbooks, and that worried them more. And only those things they worried about were allowed to creep into their conversation. But he could forgive their dullness, Leonidas thought. He could even
