“I know that.” The lieutenant was confused. “She didn’t tell us she was having a houseguest.”
The woman in the doorway nodded knowingly. “Isn’t that just like Lois? Excuse me, I can’t stand that noise.”
As Lieutenant Durkin watched, Lois Bellamy’s houseguest reached over to the alarm buttons, pressed a sequence of numbers, and the sound stopped.
“That’s better,” she sighed. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you.” She laughed shakily. “I was just getting ready for bed when the alarm went off. I was sure there were burglars in the house, and I’m all alone here. The servants left at noon.”
“Do you mind if we look around?”
“Please, I insist!”
It took the lieutenant and his partner only a few minutes to make sure there was no one lurking on the premises.
“All clear,” Lieutenant Durkin said. “False alarm. Something must have set it off. Can’t always depend on these electronic things. I’d call the security company and have them check out the system.”
“I most certainly will.”
“Well, guess we’d better be running along,” the lieutenant said.
“Thank you so much for coming by. I feel much safer now.”
She sure has a great body, Lieutenant Durkin thought. He wondered what she looked like under that mudpack and without the curler cap. “Will you be staying here long, Miss Branch?”
“Another week or two, until Lois returns.”
“If there’s anything I can do for you, just let me know.”
“Thank you, I will.”
Tracy watched as the police car drove away into the night. She felt faint with relief. When the car was out of sight, she hurried upstairs, washed off the mudpack she had found in the bathroom, stripped off Lois Bellamy’s curler cap and nightgown, changed into her own black coveralls, and left by the front door, carefully resetting the alarm.
It was not until Tracy was halfway back to Manhattan that the audacity of what she had done struck her. She giggled, and the giggle turned into a shaking, uncontrollable laughter, until she finally had to pull the car off onto the side of the road. She laughed until the tears streamed down her face. It was the first time she had laughed in a year. It felt wonderful.
17
It was not until the Amtrak train pulled out of Pennsylvania Station that Tracy began to relax. At every second she had expected a heavy hand to grip her shoulder, a voice to say, “You’re under arrest.”
She had carefully watched the other passengers as they boarded the train, and there was nothing alarming about them. Still, Tracy’s shoulders were knots of tension. She kept assuring herself that it was unlikely anyone would have discovered the burglary this soon, and even if they had, there was nothing to connect her with it. Conrad Morgan would be waiting in St. Louis with $25,000. Twenty-five thousand dollars to do with as she pleased! She would have had to work at the bank for a year to earn that much money. I’ll travel to Europe, Tracy thought. Paris. No. Not Paris. Charles and I were going to honeymoon there. I’ll go to London. There, I won’t be a jailbird. In a curious way, the experience she had just gone through had made Tracy feel like a different person. It was as though she had been reborn.
She locked the door to the compartment and took out the chamois bag and opened it. A cascade of glittering colors spilled into her hands. There were three large diamond rings, an emerald pin, a sapphire bracelet, three pairs of earrings, and two necklaces, one of rubies, one of pearls.
There must be more than a million dollars’ worth of jewelry here, Tracy marveled. As the train rolled through the countryside, she leaned back in her seat and replayed the evening in her mind. Renting the car…the drive to Sea Cliff…the stillness of the night…turning off the alarm and entering the house…opening the safe…the shock of the alarm going off, and the police appearing. It had never occurred to them that the woman in the nightgown with a mudpack on her face and a curler cap on her head was the burglar they were looking for.