Summoning my college French, I say, “Do you mean ‘pettiness’?”
“Yes, that’s it!” Emma says with a clap of her hands. “We may have tricked them into admitting us into their club, but we must make them welcome us into their fold.”
“Why on earth would we want to do that? After the way they treated you three?” Agatha replies. She still hasn’t moved from the doorway.
“Because the Detection Club is meant to be the champion of our mystery novels and the gatekeeper of the genre’s quality, and these women deserve to take a place alongside those men, miscreants though some of them may be,” I say. “I,in fact, had a huge hand in creating the club, and I will not let it devolve into yet another men’s organization. I will not let women be slighted in such a way.”
Reaching for Agatha’s hand, I pull her away from the door and toward the small lobby bar. “Come,” I call to the other women.
We settle into a booth in the far back, in a shadowy corner. The last thing we want is to encounter the other Detection Club members as they leave the drinks party. When the waitress comes round, we order sherries; none of us can face a frothy, festive cocktail. The mood simply doesn’t call for it.
The women’s eyes are upon me, telegraphing their expectations. I have only the inkling of an idea how to address this situation, nothing fully formed. But I feel compelled to present the scheme, harebrained though they may find it.
“Before I share my idea—which you may reject outright given how well my last plan went—I want to apologize. I should never have put you three in this position.”
“You could not have known the men would behave like cads,” Ngaio says.
“I could have guessed,” I say, lowering my gaze. Ngaio’s eyes are particularly intense.
“None of us could have predictedthisoutcome, Dorothy,” Agatha insists. “I’ve dined and worked with some of these men for years, and now I feel as though I don’t know them.”
“Tell us your idea, Dorothy,” Margery suggests.
Taking a big, fortifying gulp of my sherry, I say, “What if we solved a real-life murder?”
Agatha’s eyes look wary. “I’m not certain how that would rectify this situation.”
“Writers merely playact at detective work, resolving bloody crimes from the comfort of their desks and armchairs. What if we got our hands dirty and found an actual murderer? How could the male Detection Club members think us anything but eminently worthy? No one would dare slight us or question our place in the club then.”
“Questionourplace,” Ngaio says, gesturing at herself, Emma, and Margery. “You and Agatha are a breed apart, fully embraced. You don’t need to fight a battle on our behalf.”
“It is all of us or none of us,” I say, to which Agatha nods.
The women grow quiet, sipping their drinks and presumably mulling over my half-baked notion. Ngaio is the first to speak. “I can’t imagine you’ve got a murder just hanging about for us to solve.”
“As a matter of fact, I do.”
Agatha, Ngaio, and Margery pepper me with questions all at once, and even Emma raises one imperious, quizzical eyebrow. “How is it that you have a murder at the ready?” Margery asks as Agatha inquires, “Who would wantusto investigate a crime?” and Ngaio belts out, “What case are you talking about?”
I answer Ngaio’s question first because it’s the loudest. “Do you remember the newspaper articles last autumn about May Daniels?” The story about Miss Daniels had been widely reported in British and French newspapers last October, and I remember reading the pieces with interest. But afterward, when the coverage died down, I’m embarrassed to admit that I gave poor Miss Daniels very little thought. Until yesterday morning.
The other women’s faces are blank, but then Margery asks, “Wait—do you mean the nurse who went missing?”
“Exactly.” The case of May Daniels involves her vanishing, and I know how uncomfortably close another disappearance might be for Agatha. But Agatha’s face looks expectant, not abashed, so I continue. “That’s the one. She faded into thin air near the port in Boulogne-sur-Mer, in France. Miss Daniels stepped into a washroom at the train station, the Gare Centrale, at the end of a day trip she took with a fellow nurse from Chiswick and Ealing Isolation Hospital—and never stepped out.” The manner in which she entered the small washroom but never exited its only door almost seemed like a magician’s trick to me.
“I remember now,” Ngaio declares, still louder than the others. “The newspaper articles weren’t exactly on the front page, but the particulars stuck in my mind because they were so unusual.”
“Yes,” I say. “Her friend Miss McCarthy stood outside the washroom when Miss Daniels entered. But Miss McCarthy never saw her leave. She went inside after five minutes because their ferry back to England was scheduled to leave soon, and they still had to head from the train station to the harbor. Yet Miss Daniels was nowhere to be found.”
“Am I recalling correctly that there were no other exits?” Margery asks.
“That’s right,” I answer. “The police reported that there was only one way in and one way out. Supposedly not even any windows, because the washroom was in an enclosed part of the Boulogne train station, where the young women had stopped en route to thedock to board their ferry. Miss McCarthy never moved from her post outside the washroom. And Miss Daniels could not be located afterward.”
“It’s almost like a Murder Game scenario. Or the locked-room plot of one of our books,” Margery says, referring to the device many writers in our genre employ. In a locked-room story, a crime occurs in a place where a perpetrator could not have entered or exited without notice—and no one noticed. In the matter of Miss Daniels, not only the criminal but also the victim came and went through the “locked-room” washroom without the notice of the witness, Miss McCarthy.
“What would our role be in all this?” Ngaio asks. “Didn’t she disappear last October? I don’t recall reading that she’s been found.”
“My husband is a journalist, and his paper,News of the World,has assigned him to travel to Boulogne to cover the case, now that it’s more than a disappearance.”
