Read Online Murder and Misdeeds by Joan Smith - Free Book Online

when no desk was available. The marquetry lid was done in woods of various colors forming a star pattern. Susan must have sat at this recessed window, gazing out at the park, as she wrote.
    Corinne lifted the lid and saw two of her own letters and a note from Luten sitting on top of the embossed stationery. Perhaps his birthday letter to her. Was this what he had been looking for? She resisted the temptation to open it, but did examine the envelope. The postmark was only five days old! Susan’s birthday had been a month ago. Luten had written to her that recently and not said a word about it!
    Had Susan replied to the letter? The lap desk gave no answer. Her wandering eye happened to fall on the wastepaper bin by the desk. It appeared to be full of discarded silver paper, wadded up in a ball. Corinne removed it and saw beneath some smaller papers. She took the basket and emptied it on Susan’s bed. A few sheets of stationery had been squashed up and tossed out. She began flattening them. Three of them held a date at the top, the date indicating they had been written a week ago. The salutation, “Dear Luten,” was followed by a few lines of script. The actual message was so brief, it was hard not to catch the whole at a glance. “I am writing to ask you ...” A blob of ink accounted for the letter’s having been cast aside. The other two were no more informative. “You must not scold me, dear Luten ...” and a drop of what looked like cocoa. The other said, “You said I could always turn to you if I had ...” There was no apparent reason why this one had been abandoned, no smear of ink or cocoa.
    Corinne puzzled over them, wondering what Susan had done that might merit a scold from Luten, before turning to root through the other discarded papers, mostly wrappers from the sweet shop in Burnham. Susan had a sweet tooth. This done, Corinne turned back to the lap-top desk and sorted through the loose papers there.
    There were two lists. These did not seem too personal, and she glanced through them. It seemed Susan had more interest in keeping up her house than Otto suspected. She had listed various items: carpets, window hangings, a Regency desk, and a chaise longue, with the price of each beside it. The other list was for articles of clothing: bonnets, gowns, silk nightgowns, a satin peignoir with lace panels, petticoats, various pieces of lingerie. The prices listed beside the nightwear were rather high. There was a strange emphasis on intimate apparel. It might almost be a trousseau.... Corinne glanced again at the abandoned letters to Luten, with a frown forming between her eyebrows. “You must not scold me, dear Luten ...” What could it mean? “You said I could always turn to you if I had ...” It was an ambiguous statement. Was Luten playing uncle or lover?
    She went to Susan’s dresser to see if she was actually short of nightwear. She had three lawn nightgowns and three flannelette ones. On the back of her door hung a quite nice woolen dressing gown, blue to match her eyes. There was no summer dressing gown. Her eye fell on the blanket chest, and she lifted the lid. There, carefully wrapped in silver paper, were some of the items on the list. A peach silk nightgown with ecru lace was there, along with an assortment of dainty lingerie, all packed in silver paper. And tucked amid the silken folds, a yellow tea rose, pressed between the pages of a book of poetry by Mr. Wordsworth.
    Corinne remembered Luten looking in that trunk last night and closing the lid hastily, implying there was nothing of interest there. Was it possible he and Susan were secretly engaged, that he didn’t want her, Corinne, to see the trousseau? That was surely what these items were. Luten had sent her Byron’s poetry—had he sent her the Wordsworth book as well? She opened the flyleaf, but there was no inscription. There floated through her mind Luten’s pale face when Prance told them of Susan’s kidnapping. He had said, “I