The Plain Old Man by Charlotte MacLeod

to attach the note to the screen? It must have been done sometime today, in broad daylight. Otherwise Heatherstone would have found it when he drew the curtain this morning.
    Sarah mounted the ladder, wondering what sort of story she could make sound halfway plausible if some member of the group inside happened to spot her. (Jetting the note off the screen was no problem, anyway. It had merely been hung there by means of two paper clips linked together, one attached to the small sheet of paper, one bent to form a hook with its free end poked through the mesh. Carefully, she noted. It hadn’t made a hole.
    She must remember to hold the note by the paper clips in case of fingerprints. If Max were here, he’d know how to test for them. Sarah supposed she could make a stab at it herself, but what would be the good? Even if she didn’t ruin the evidence, she could hardly go around fingerprinting the cast for comparison without exciting remark, to say the ultimate least. Especially not now, with everybody so edgy over losing Charlie and having to break in a new Notary practically on the eve of the performance.
    Anyway, she had the note. Now to put away the ladder and sneak back to the rehearsal without attracting attention. That turned out to be a bit of a problem. There was a fairly stiff breeze now, and it was flapping the paper up around her hand. By the time she got the note back to the house, the only fingerprints would be her own. It would probably have made more sense to take the note in first and then carry the ladder down to the potting shed, but she hadn’t thought of that in time and wasn’t about to turn back now. She’d see if she could find two pieces of glass or something in the shed to lay the paper between.
    Sarah didn’t mind an excuse to stay and poke around. The potting shed had always been one of her favorite places. She’d spent whole mornings and afternoons here when she was little, watching the gardener mixing his soils and cleaning his tools. Mr. Hosbin had been getting on in years by then; she supposed he’d been happy enough to putter around entertaining a child instead of going outside and doing the work he was getting paid for. Sarah had never thought of him as a friend, though; their relationship had been polite but formal. British by birth, Mr. Hosbin had known his place and expected his employer’s niece to keep hers. That was all right. Sarah’s parents had treated her much the same way.
    The potting shed had a general flavor of mild decay about it nowadays. Sarah could see dust on the counters and cobwebs around the ceiling. She supposed the place didn’t get used much since the jolly men from the landscaping service had taken over. Aunt Emma had been in the habit years ago of going out with a green rubber kneeling pad, a big straw hat, and flowered gardening gloves with green thumbs to pull weeds from the rockery, but she probably didn’t bother these days. What with her committees and her blood pressure, she wouldn’t have much time for gardening. The jolly men would keep the area respectable with easily grown annuals and the rare plants would have gone to Emma’s son Walter and his nice wife, Cynthia, who loved to garden.
    It would be Young Bed who’d inherit this place, Sarah thought, and then who? Little Bed wouldn’t want it, his ambition was to own a cattle ranch in Wyoming. An odd profession for a Kelling, but then Kellings were often odd. Sarah herself knew she was considered to be among the oddest now that she’d turned her Beacon Hill brownstone into a boarding-house, turned the boardinghouse over to Cousin Brooks and his wife, and married out of the tribe. Brooks, to be sure, had picked a more unlikely spouse and so had Cousin Dolph but Theonia and Mary didn’t count so much. Wives took their husbands’ positions.
    That was fine with Sarah. She loved her new husband’s position. The relatives she cared about were accepting Max either for her sake or for his own, and