Nothing Can Rescue Me by Elizabeth Daly Page B

amateur at the typewriter, much as I’ve used it; and I couldn’t possibly have done this job.”
    Mason spoke suddenly from the other side of the room: “Of course whoever did it knew how to type and knew about books.”
    â€œThere,” said Gamadge, “I think you’re wrong. This person need not have known much about books; the literary end of the job required no more than patience, and the bare knowledge that pertinent material could be found in Poe, in the cryptic poems of the seventeenth or any other century—for poetry is a mine of the cryptic—and in the Elizabethan drama. A semi-literate person, I grant you, would have been more likely to resort to the Bible and Shakespeare; unless, of course, the attention of such a person had been called to these authors in some special way.”
    He ended with a rising inflection; then, after a pause, he went on:
    â€œBut I confess that I should have expected you all to know that the quotations were quotations. Miss Burt has forgotten how to use a typewriter, Miss Wing is not well acquainted with Marlowe’s Faustus, Mrs. Deedes thinks that the whole thing was the work of spirits, and so on; but I really should have thought that all of you—not to mention a literary man like Sylvanus, or an inveterate reader like Mr. Percy—”
    Sylvanus interrupted, flushing deeply: “I explained. One becomes an ostrich. One refuses to admit anything .”
    â€œWhy?” asked Gamadge.
    Evelyn Wing, her eyes on the fire, her elbows on her knees, spoke drily: “It was silly of me not to say they were quotations. I knew they must be, of course. But I knew they all thought I had typed them in myself, and when you’re in a jam you do silly things; at least I did.”
    Gamadge turned his eyes on Percy, who said, waving his cigarette in a gesture of negation, “Absolutely none of it was any of my business. I kept quietly out of it.”
    Miss Burt laughed—shrilly. Gamadge, his eyes once more on Page 83 of Chapter Nine, went on without emphasis:
    â€œMiss Wing is of course the logical suspect, if one can imagine a motive for her. She is highly educated, she must know the books in this library pretty well—and I may say now that all our four authors are to be found in it—she is familiar with the typewriter’s art, and—as I intimated before—she had the supreme advantage of knowing where she was going to stop; or, perhaps I should say, of stopping where Mrs. Mason’s line would fit a line already chosen from the classics. Miss Wing, and Miss Wing alone, could adapt the text to the quotations instead of laboriously adapting the quotations to the text.”
    Percy, his cigarette in mid-air, said almost gaily: “Such an intelligent man! Is he going to disappoint me, or is he going to demolish this airy structure in the logical way?”
    â€œIt has been demolished,” said Gamadge. “Mrs. Mason was at first inclined—for her own reasons, no doubt—to imagine that her secretary had made a mockery of their work together. But before I pointed out the obvious to her she had had it pointed out by someone else: Miss Wing herself would not have played a trick that she might readily be suspected of playing.”
    â€œMrs. Mason ought to have seen something more obvious than that,” said Percy, with a smile, “and seen it for herself. Miss Wing would never play such a trick at all.”
    â€œIn fact,” asked Gamadge, “you agree with me that the trick may possibly have been played by someone less highly qualified to play it than Miss Wing, but endowed with natural cunning, and perhaps assisted by an intelligent friend?”
    â€œI agree with you,” said Percy, looking amused.
    Susie Burt sprang to her feet. “Well, I don’t!” she exclaimed. “I don’t agree with anything you’ve been saying. You think Evelyn Wing wouldn’t do such