“Let me get the door unlocked.” Annie fumbled with her key and finally turned the lock. “Go on in the kitchen. Start some coffee, please, if you don’t mind. Let me check my messages and feed Boots, and then I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Now you’re torturing me,” Alice complained, but she hurried toward the kitchen. “You did find something, though, didn’t you?”
“Just hang on. I’ll be right there.”
The only message on Annie’s voicemail was a portion of an automated political survey. She promptly pressed the delete key and went into the kitchen. Boots was already pacing by her empty food bowl. Annie put her purse in a chair and opened the cabinet where she kept the dry cat food.
“OK, OK, Miss Boots. I’m coming.”
“She probably just wants to know what happened at Mary Beth’s too,” Alice said as she filled the coffeepot with tap water.
Annie dumped a scoop of crunchy seafood-flavored cat food into Boots’s bowl and then got two large coffee cups out of the cabinet on the other side of the coffeemaker.
“I’ll do that,” Alice said, shooing Annie toward the big table in the middle of the kitchen. “You start talking.”
“OK. The key did open up the pedestal of her antique table, and there was this note inside.” Annie took her copy of the clue out of her purse and spread it out on the table. “We think it’s from sometime around the Civil War.”
Alice lifted one dark brow. “They had bright orange note paper during the Civil War?”
“Very funny. This is what I copied down. Mary Beth has the original.”
Alice scanned the page. “Angeline and Geoffrey?”
“Angeline was Mary Beth’s great-great-grandmother, but Geoffrey wasn’t her great-great-grandfather. We think he was the one who signed her dance card in 1861—the dance card she kept all her life. He had to have meant something to her.”
“And he sent her this clue to something: ‘A letter brought you here and now you must find more.’ What other letters was she supposed to find?”
“I guess that’s what the clue will tell us.”
“Hmmm.” Alice leaned down, her elbows on the table, her forehead wrinkled. “They use the metric system in England, don’t they? How many centimeters is forty-five inches?”
“Don’t forget this is from 1861 or so. I don’t think England used the metric system until about a hundred years later.”
“OK, then what did they use for forty-five inches back then, smarty?”
“We’ll come back to that one. What about the next clue? ‘Twice indebted.’”
Alice finally pulled out a chair and sat down. “Double indemnity?”
“I don’t think that’s the same thing. There are two other ‘twice’ clues in here besides this one. Indebted, beholden, obliged, they all mean kind of the same thing, but they’re somewhat different.”
“Didn’t you and Mary Beth work any of this out at her place?”
“Not really. We looked at it, but as excited as she was about this, Mary Beth seemed like she was really tired. I told her she should sleep on it and that I’d let you have a look too. Between the three of us, I’m sure we can figure it out.” Annie tapped her pencil on the page. “How about this one. ‘Katherine at home.’”
“Do you suppose Katherine was a friend of Mary Beth’s great-great grandmother?”
“Could have been. She’s in here twice. ‘At home’ and ‘to her friends.’”
Alice frowned, thinking. “Maybe she had a nickname. I mean, that’s what you’d use at home or with friends, right?”
“That seems logical. A Katherine would be called what? Kate? Katie?”
“Kit, maybe. Or Kay.”
“Slow down.” Annie started jotting down names next to the clue. “Kate, Katie, Kit, Kay. Maybe Kitty? Any others?”
“I’ll keep thinking, but at least we have a start.” Alice went over to the coffeemaker and filled both cups. “Where’s your sugar?”
“Oh—I left it by the stove.”
Alice added sugar and cream to both cups and brought them back to the table. “Did you and Mary Beth talk about anything?”
“You mean did we talk about her business problems? Not really. She pretty much cut me off when I tried to get the conversation turned that way.”
“That means there is something going on with her. I wish she’d just tell us.”
Annie took a sip of her coffee. “It’s really not our business, you know, but I do want to help. I just wish I knew what else to do.”