Five Fatal Words by Edwin Balmer & Philip Wylie Page B

and opposite Melicent at the little, cozy table.

    "Was she asleep?" asked Melicent.

    "No, just resting. She's quite a woman, isn't she? She gets waked up in the middle of the night, finds her house is on fire, takes out the things she values most, and accepts the whole thing as calmly as you please. When I saw her just now, she was sitting on her bed checking over her insurance policies. She'd already made her mind up about everything "

    "About everything?"

    Young Cornwall nodded. "About you, for example, and even me. I personally think she was glad to get rid of Blackcroft. She never voluntarily would have moved out. Nobody could have budged her, but now that it's gone, it bucked her up. She's decided to do something."

    "What?"

    "Go abroad. Her sister Alice lives in Belgium, has a big house in the Domrey river valley. They haven't seen each other for years. Aunt Hannah has decided to go there and wants to take you and Granger and the car and she wants me to go along. Sort of family pilgrimage."

    "She wants to take me to Belgium?"

    He nodded. "Yep. She has a high opinion of you. Says you have plenty of nerve and intelligence."

    "It's nice of her--"

    "I am supposed to make the proposition and tell her the answer, so what do you say?"

    "You Cornwalls are a very strange people," said Melicent. She looked about. Her coffee and fruit had been brought her and the waitress had gone away. They were alone in the breakfast room of the inn, yet Melicent leaned nearer him across the table and whispered, "Did you understand what I told you last night?"

    "About the hole in the plaster," he replied without a change in his expression, "and about the message, too. In fact, I checked over the message with the telegraph company this morning. It was as you repeated it to me."

    "And it meant nothing to you?"

    "Of course it means something to me--and so does the hole in the plaster; so much that I want to be sure that my aunt goes away, leaves the country at once. I'm sure she will, if you go with her. She is more shaken than she seems, but she feels she can depend on you, and she likes Granger, too. So will you go?"

    "What are you going to do?"

    "I'm going abroad too. We will have services here for Uncle Everitt, of course. Meanwhile I'll have time to see to some obvious duties." His voice dropped but his expression did not at all change, and anyone looking in would think him conversing only casually. "I'm having the death of Uncle Everitt investigated fully--and privately. So tell no one else what you told me. You see why, surely. We must throw them off guard--they who thought up the copper spider. We must make it appear that we accept what happened as an accident--he was electrocuted touching a defective fixture. Any hope we have of catching them depends on that. You see it, surely."

    "Yes," agreed Melicent. "I see."

    The waitress was returning. "You've been to Belgium?" Donald inquired of Melicent easily.

    "Never."

    "You'll like it . . ." his voice ran on pleasantly and unperturbed.

    Later, away from him, Melicent felt she had acquiesced too readily. She liked him, he was utterly disarming of doubts when he was with her, and she knew from having seen the letter he had written following the death of his father that he must be thoroughly convinced now that the messages meant murder and that murder had been done.

    The burning of the house following the sudden death of Everitt Cornwall had made a sensation, of course, but Melicent found that it had aroused no suspicion in the little town. The same explanation sufficed for both events. The wiring in the old mansion had become very defective, so that a fixture had killed Everitt Cornwall when he touched it stepping into the bath; another defect in the same wiring had made a short circuit during the night and set fire to the house. The second circumstance seemed to confirm the original explanation of the first.

    Shortly before noon Mr. Reece arrived and was received by Miss