Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/311

 it ‘Peter Pomeroy.’ To all practical purposes, Peter Pomeroy was dead.”

He was silent again for an instant. “As soon as he recovered sufficiently to be moved, still paralyzed vocally, still memoryless, I entered him in an asylum in the Middle West—you’ll know where it is, Mr. Pomeroy—and told the superintendent that he was my brother, though he suffered from the delusion that he was someone else, a dead man. I paid for his keep there. My idea was to get hold of his money—as we all know, his money was never kept in banks, and I thought I’d have no great difficulty in locating it. With his daughter abroad and no other member of his immediate family alive, it should have been easy—and it would have been if he hadn’t concealed the money so cleverly. As it was, Jessica returned and the money was still unfound.

“Slowly—by very gradual changes—his memory was beginning to come back to him, and he was able to talk a little, as I learned on my frequent visits there. His brain, I could see, was still not quite clear, and it was my hope that I’d be able to get the secret out of him—the hiding place of the money. I met with no luck until the last time I was there. He was incoherent, and fragmentary, but thoughts of his money seemed to be running through his mind, to the obscurity of almost everything else. He kept saying to me, in answer to my questions—‘It’s in the books Virginia!

The books’ didn’t mean much to me until, on the way back, I suddenly recollected that he had a couple of dozen of them in the house—and that he had seemed rather attached to them. Virginia, of course, was a live clew, but this is such a big place that one could