The Clue in Blue a Connie Blair Mystery #1

  The Clue in Blue

  Connie Blair Mystery No. 1

  By Betsy Allen

  Grosset & Dunlap

  PUBLISHERS NEW YORK

  The Clue in Blue

  COPYRIGHT, 1948, BY GROSSET & DUNLAP, inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  CHAPTER I

  Fashion Preview

  For the tenth time in half an hour, Connie Blair peered out of the east window of the bedroom she shared with her twin sister.

  “Aunt Bet ought to be here!” she said impatiently. “It’s almost two o’clock.”

  A heat haze hovered over the quiet street, and not a leaf on the maples rustled. Connie pressed her nose against the screen and slid her eyes far to the right, so that she could see the corner, but there was no car in sight. There was not even a dog or a person to bring movement to the scene.

  “I asked the girls for two-thirty,” she said, turning back into the room.

  Kit, christened Catherine, who was twisting her pale, shoulder-length hair into a careless knot on top of her head, murmured, “You know Aunt Bet! She’ll come dashing in just in the nick of time.” Then her eyes rested for a second on Connie’s face and she laughed. “Look at your nose.”

  Connie stooped so that she could see over her twin’s shoulder into the dressing-table mirror, and the two fair heads, identical in contour, came together. The screen had made a crossbarred pattern of black on the tip of Connie’s nose, and she rubbed at it ruefully with the palm of one hand. Then her brown eyes brightened as brakes squealed outside.

  “There she is!” she cried.

  High heels were clicking up the cement walk even before the girls reached the first floor. As they burst out onto the comfortable porch, shaded by green-striped awnings, Elizabeth Easton, their mother’s youngest-and prettiest-sister, came running up the steps.

  Aunt Bet looked as cool as a mint frappe in a pale-green linen suit. She had the ineffable polish of a woman of fashion, but her smile was as warm and engaging as the twins’.

  “Fooled you!” she said. “I’m here ahead of time.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Mrs. Blair, plump and rosy in a ruffled apron, came through the screen door and laid her smooth cheek against her sister’s. Then she held her off with both hands. “Let me look at you. It’s been months since I’ve seen you. What is the fascination that keeps you in Philadelphia all the time?”

  Connie edged closer, scenting a romance, but Aunt Bet shook her head.

  “Work,” she insisted. “Nothing but work. Being a buyer was bad enough, but being a stylist is a full-time job and then some!”

  “But such fun,” Connie sighed, looking envious. “And doing fashion shows must be marvelous.” Her eyes took on the glow of a visionary. “Don’t you just love working in the city, Aunt Bet?”

  Elizabeth Easton nodded. “I do,” she admitted. “It’s right for me. But it wouldn’t be for some people.” She looked around at the stretch of garden beyond the porch and at the zinnias massed in a big stone crock by the door. “Small towns have their points.”

  Kit agreed. “I never want to leave Meadowbrook,” she said. “I want to stay right here and get married and have a big family and-”

  “Hey! Wait a minute!” Connie interrupted. “We only got out of high school in June.”

  Everybody laughed, and Mrs. Blair said practically, “What about this fashion show now? The girls will be here to try on dresses in half an hour.”

  Connie said, “We’ve two size twelves, and four size fourteens and Ruth Shaw and Ginny Anderson for the big ones.” She began ticking off the number of models on her fingers, trying to remember everyone she had invited to participate. “Kit and I tried to choose girls who look like the college-clothes type.”

  Aunt Bet grinned and nodded. “That’s fine,” she praised her young assistants. “I have some clothes with me that you’ll just adore.” She put her handbag and gloves on the wicker table. “Want to help me unpack the car?”

  “We’ll do it alone,” Connie said. “You go on in with Mother and cool off.” She pushed her aunt gently toward the door. Then, instead of following her twin down the walk, she ran to the side railing and, cupping her hands and directing her voice toward the rear of the house, shouted, “Toby!”

  It took five vigorous “Toby!s” to bring a tow-colored head into view from among the leafy branches of a black walnut tree.

  “Whatdya want?” Connie’s ten-year-old brother finally asked.

  “Toby, come help us, like a lamb,” Connie invited. “Aunt Bet’s here, and we’re going to unpack the car.”

  A pair of skinny brown legs, bare to above the knee, appeared under the umbrella of leaves. Toby swung himself to the ground like a monkey and strolled amiably across the lawn.

  “Did you call for long?” he asked Connie as he joined her. “I was up in my tree house reading a book.”

  “A mystery, I’ll bet.”

  Toby nodded. “A neat one. All about atomic engineers.” He saw Kit coming back up the front walk with a stack of dress boxes balanced under her chin. “What’s going on?”

  “The Fortnightly’s having a garden party and fashion show,” Connie told him. “Tomorrow. Aunt Bet’s doing the show, and the girls are trying on dresses here this afternoon.”

  Toby stopped dead in his tracks and snorted. “And you got me down out of the tree for that?”

  Nevertheless he was persuaded to help his sisters, and within ten minutes Connie and Kit’s room was covered with a froth of white tissue paper, and both the twin beds and the bureaus were decorated with enough clothes and accessories to make any girl’s eyes gleam with envy.

  Toby, after sticking out a hand to greet his aunt with manly casualness, escaped the melee and returned to the platform in the walnut tree. From there he caught occasional glimpses of some of the twins’ friends arriving at the house, but he was out of the hurly-burly of feminine fashion and back in the safe haven of atomic intrigue, where he felt more at home.

  Within the twins’ bedroom, the collected models were busy trying on Aunt Bet’s wonderful clothes. Straight from the show windows of Campion’s, the smart woman’s apparel shop in Philadelphia where Aunt Bet worked, such costumes would have gladdened the heart of any girl, college bound or not. The suits and coats and sweaters and skirts and bags and gloves lived up to everything Miss Easton had promised the Fortnightly Club when she had been invited to put on a fashion show of college clothes in Meadowbrook. They were new and exciting, as vivid as the colors of autumn and as young as the girls who were to model them the following afternoon.

  Before the full-length mirror on the back of her closet door, Connie pirouetted in a soft tweed suit of quill brown. The color exactly matched her eyes, and against it her hair and skin were one shade, tawny gold.

  She felt like a debutante in a soap ad. She felt like an actress! She felt, in turn, like a cover girl on a fashion magazine and like the heroine of a novel.

  “It’s such fun to just change your clothes and get a whole new personality!” she cried.

  Her aunt looked at her from across the room, where she was buttoning one of the Size 12 models into a plaid jumper, and thought that nothing could change Connie’s own vivid personality, only enhance it, as this suit did.

  “That’s a French import,” she called, “the one really expensive thing in this collection. And just wait till you see the beaver beret that’s to be worn with it. You’ll feel like a glamour girl for sure-if you don’t die from the heat.”

  “Where is it?” Connie was eager. Then she added comfortingly, “We’ll have a storm toni
ght and it will cool off for tomorrow. You wait and see!”

  While her aunt searched through the stack of hat-boxes for the fabulous beret, Connie relinquished her position before the mirror, first to little Jane Trotter, in a pansy-colored sweater and skirt, then to Kit, in a polo coat that was bringing beads of perspiration to her upper lip. She admired each of them in turn, praising the way they wore the clothes with such wholehearted sincerity that they forgot the temperature was hovering in the high eighties and walked with their shoulders flung back and their heads held high.

  “You walk that way tomorrow,” Miss Easton said as she looked up from rummaging in the depths of a large carton, “and you’ll look enough like professional models to deceive your own mothers.” She pushed a damp tendril of hair off her forehead and got down on her knees in front of the carton. “Where is that hat?”

  “Can I help?” Connie asked, and her aunt sat back on her high heels and described the box that held the beret.

  “It was small.” She made a circle with her hands. “About so big. Pink and gray. And there was a pouch bag in with the hat. I remember it particularly because I packed the beret and bag myself.”

  Kit, who had laid the heavy polo coat on the bed and was standing around in a brief, lace-trimmed slip, joined in the search. The three of them ransacked the room, but no small, round box with the Campion name scrawled on it in elegant pink script could be found.

  “Maybe you left it in the car,” Connie suggested, and ran down to investigate, but neither in the trunk nor inside the car was there so much as a scrap of tissue paper that had been overlooked.

  “I just must not have brought it,” Aunt Bet said, while a small frown of annoyance appeared between her eyes. “But it was on my desk this morning. I know it was.”

  “Was it expensive too, like the suit?” Connie asked.

  Miss Easton nodded. “Fur hats always run into money,” she said. “Especially beaver or mink.”

  Jane Trotter, who was going to the state university in the fall, looked at the twins’ aunt curiously. “But are there many college girls who can afford to buy things like that?”

  Miss Easton smiled. “That’s a sensible question. No, there aren’t,” she told Jane. “Our millinery buyer thought the beret was simply irresistible with the suit Connie’s wearing. It was she who really insisted that I bring it along.”

  Kit, who had given up the search, said, “Oh, well, you’ll probably find it right on your desk when you get back to the store.”

  But her aunt didn’t take the matter so lightly. As she folded away the clothes and replaced the bags and scarfs and gloves in their boxes, for transportation to the clubhouse, in the garden of which the fashion show was to be held, she checked every item against an inventory list. Not another thing was missing, just the small, round box with the beret and bag.

  Finally even she was forced to accept Kit’s conclusion, that the box must have been left in Philadelphia. “And it had better be there when I get back,” Miss Easton said, biting the end of her pencil. “It would cost me considerably more than a week’s salary to replace two items like that.”

  “Oh, but if a thing is lost, would they hold you responsible?” Kit asked naively.

  “They’ve got to hold somebody responsible,” Aunt Bet told her. “Business is business, after all.”

  To associate their fashionable young aunt with such a workaday statement was a new thing for the twins. They had always considered her rather a butterfly, who fluttered in and out of their lives to give them occasional glimpses of color seldom seen in Meadowbrook. Connie looked at her quizzically and decided that Aunt Bet was more down-to-earth than she had ever suspected. For the first time she recognized the sisterly similarity to her own mother, in spite of the difference in their years and in the lives they led.

  “Girls!” Her mother’s voice cut into Connie’s musing. “If you’re finished up there, I have some iced tea and cakes you might be interested in.”

  “Would we ever!” Ginny Anderson, who never could remember that a Size 16 should be a little cautious about her figure, led the way downstairs. On the porch Mrs. Blair had a tea table spread, and within five minutes everyone was busy with tall, ice-filled glasses and the tender cupcakes which Aunt Bet admiringly called the ”specialite de la maison.”

  “What’s that mean?” Toby, who had braved the assembled company to rustle a couple of cakes, turned back to ask.

  Aunt Bet laughed. “It means your mother’s a marvelous cook!”

  “You said a mouthful,” Toby replied inelegantly, suiting action to words.

  For the rest of the afternoon the discussion of the fashion show was interrupted only to talk about the various colleges to which the girls were planning to go. The girls were thrilled by the clothes they were to wear, and Jane Trotter was already planning to cajole her mother into buying the plaid jumper with the pale-green shirt.

  “They say it’s awfully important for a freshman to make a good impression,” she said with great seriousness. “Don’t they, Miss Easton?”

  Miss Easton chuckled but refused to commit herself. She turned to Connie. “Are you getting excited about going away?”

  The twins were entered at a college about a hundred miles upstate. Connie hesitated, but Kit answered promptly.

  “I am! I’m a little scared, too. I don’t make friends as easily as Connie does.”

  “You do too!” Connie insisted. Then she turned to her aunt. “Kit’s going to adore college, but for myself-I don’t know. To be perfectly honest, I’d sort of like to skip it and get a job instead.”

  “Connie!” Kit sounded shocked, but Connie raised her head defiantly. “Well, I would! I’d give anything if I could land a job in the city-maybe in advertising.”

  She glanced at her aunt to see how this attitude seemed to strike her, but Miss Easton’s attention apparently was turned elsewhere. Connie noticed that for the next half-hour her aunt seemed preoccupied, and she wasn’t surprised when Miss Easton slipped into the house to put in a long-distance call to Philadelphia. She knew that the fur beret was still on her aunt’s mind, and that she probably was checking with Campion’s to make certain that the small, round hatbox really was safe on her desk.

  Refilling the plate of cupcakes, Connie heard part of the conversation that ensued.

  “Campion’s? Miss Easton speaking. Connect me with the advertising department, please.” There was a pause, then Aunt Bet said brightly, “Jean? This is Bet. Do me a favor and see if I left a hatbox on my desk, will you? I’ll hold the wire.”

  The screen door shut behind Connie as she again emerged to the porch, and Aunt Bet’s further discussion was drowned in the chatter which greeted her. The cupcakes on the plate disappeared like magic, and she thought with amusement that the girls weren’t very different now than they had been eight or ten years ago, when they used to come to the Blair twins’ birthday parties. They still got ecstatic and ravenous at the sight of her mother’s marvelous food.

  It was several minutes before Aunt Bet reappeared, and just as the screen door slammed behind her, Jane glanced at her watch and cried, “Look at the time! We’ve simply got to go.”

  There was the usual flurry of leave-taking, accompanied by last-minute arrangements for the fashion show and profuse thanks to Mrs. Blair. Connie glanced once or twice at her aunt, but her face revealed nothing of the outcome of the telephone call. It wasn’t until they had gathered up the tea things from the porch and were all out in the kitchen that Connie had a chance to put a direct question.

  “Was it all right about the box?”

  “It wasn’t there,” Aunt Bet replied, and her voice sounded puzzled rather than surprised. She started to add something else that piqued Connie’s curiosity. “You know, it’s the funniest thing. It isn’t the first time-”

  “I wonder if Toby knows anything about it,” Kit interrupted. “He was helping unpack the car, you know, and he might just have thought it would be smart-”

&n
bsp; She crossed the waxed linoleum floor to the kitchen door and shouted Toby’s name, then almost dropped the glass she was drying, as a voice from directly beneath her on the back steps answered.

  “Don’t strain yourself, sis. I’m right here.”

  It was a typical Toby retort, a little rough and arrogant, as though the youngest member of the Blair household were beginning to feel the need for expressing his masculinity. Hearing it, Mrs. Blair glanced at her sister, bit her lower lip and silently shook her head.

  Aunt Bet was amused. She smiled, but restrained a chuckle, and walked over to stand beside Kit at the door.

  “Toby,” she said with forthrightness, “we’ve lost a small hatbox, a pink-and-gray job.” The word “job” brought her right to Toby’s own level and he looked up alertly. “Did you see anything of it when you were helping unpack the car?”

  “Who, me?” Toby’s voice rose on the personal pronoun. “I didn’t even look at the stuff. I just helped carry it in.” There was scorn for all feminine frippery in his tone.

  Over Aunt Bet’s shoulder Mrs. Blair asked, “You didn’t hide it somewhere, just for fun?”

  Toby held his head and groaned. In his eyes, as he looked up, were mingled honesty and disgust. “Of course not,” he sighed, and not a person who saw him could doubt his sincerity. “What would be the point?”

  His mother smiled back at him. “All right, Son,” she said, satisfied. Then, as she was turning away, she called back, “Have you fed Ruggles, Toby? If you haven’t, why don’t you do it right now?”

  Ruggles was the family cocker, named, because of his color, for Ruggles of Red Gap, and the preparation of his dinner was one of Toby’s daily chores. He came in now with the spaniel at his heels and began measuring out kibble biscuit from a stone crock near the stove.

  “Women,” he said to no one in particular, “are the limit. Always after a guy to do some sort of work.”

  His words fell into one of those sudden little silences that occur for no reason at all, and a deep, masculine chuckle answered them.