FullReads

“Is she here?” asked Mr. Gubb with a hasty glance toward his avenues of escape.

“She just run in to borrow a book to read,” said Mrs. Canterby, “and she’s having some trouble finding one to suit her taste. She’s in my lib’ry sort of glancing through some books.”

“Does–does she glance through to about near to page fourteen?” asked Mr. Gubb nervously.

“Now that you call it to mind,” said Mrs. Canterby, “that’s about how far she is glancing through them. She’s glanced through about sixteen, and she’s still glancing. She thinks maybe she’ll take ‘Myra’s Lover, or The Hidden Secret,’ but she ain’t sure. She come over to borrow ‘Weldon Shirmer,’ but I had lent that to a friend. She was real disappointed I didn’t have it.”

Mr. Gubb wiped the perspiration from his face. He too would have liked at that moment to have seen a copy of “Weldon Shirmer,” and to have read what stood at the top of page fourteen.

“If it ain’t too much trouble, Mrs. Canterby,” he said, “I wish you would sort of fetch that Myra book out here without Miss Scroggs’s knowing you done so. I got a special reason for it, in my deteckative capacity. And I wish you wouldn’t mention to Miss Scroggs about my being here.”

“Land sakes!” said Mrs. Canterby. “What’s up now? Miss Scroggs she’s right interested in you, too. She made inquiries of me about you when you was working here. She says she thinks you are a real handsome gentleman.”

Mrs. Canterby laughed coyly and went out, and Mr. Gubb dropped into a chair and wiped his face again nervously. His eye, falling on the kitchen table, noted a sheet of writing-paper. It was the same style of paper as that on which the Anonymous Wiggle letters had been written. He bent forward and glanced at it. In blue ink evidently made of indigo dissolved in water, was written on the sheet a recipe. The writing, although undisguised and slanting properly, was beyond doubt the same as that of the Wiggle letters. When Mrs. Canterby returned to the kitchen with “Myra’s Lover” hidden in the folds of her skirt, the perplexed Mr. Gubb held the recipe in his hand.

“By any chance of doubt,” he said, “do you happen to be aware of whom wrote this?”

“Petunia wrote it,” said Mrs. Canterby promptly, “and whatever are you being so mysterious for? There’s no mystery about that, for it’s her mince-meat recipe.”

“There is often mystery hidden into mince-meat recipes when least expected,” said Mr. Gubb. “I see you got the book.”

He took it and turned to page fourteen. At the top of the page were the words, completing a sentence, “–without turning a hair of his head.” Then followed the first complete sentence. It ran: “‘A woman like you,’ said Lord Cyril, ‘should be loved, cherished, and obeyed.'”

“Goodness!” exclaimed Mr. Gubb, and handed the book back to Mrs. Canterby.

“Why did you say that?” asked Mrs. Canterby.

“I was just judging by the book that Miss Scroggs is fond of love and affection in fiction tales,” he said.

“Fond of!” exclaimed Mrs. Canterby. “Far be it from me to say anything about a neighbor lady, but if Petunia Scroggs ain’t crazy over love and marriage I don’t know what. She’d do anything in the world to get a husband. I recall about Tim Wentworth–Furnaces Put In and Repaired–and how hungry Petunia used to look after him when he went by in his wagon, but she couldn’t get after him because she hasn’t a furnace in her house, but the minute he hung up the sign ‘Chimneys Cleaned,’ she was down to his shop and had him up to the place, and I know it for a fact, for I took some of the soot out of her eye myself, that she courted him so hard when he got to her house that even when he went to the roof to clean the chimney she stuck her head in the fireplace and talked up the flue at him.”