“Don’t you worry, miss. We’ll get it out to him,” he said in a patronizing way now. Maybe I was just overwrought but I had a desire to slap him. Instead I gave him a curt nod and stepped back out into the street. Why were men so insufferable when dealing with women?

I found a church clock and checked the hour. Eleven thirty. That meant that even if Mr. Wilkie received my message instantly, he could not be in New York before five o’clock at the earliest. So I had some time to follow up on my other plan for the day, namely to find out what might have happened to the elusive Mr. Scarpelli and if he had really met a bad end, as the police believed. I wasn’t too keen about lugging that bag of books around for the rest of the day, but I didn’t have much choice. It was lucky that I’d grown up used to carrying sacks of potatoes and peat from the fields, wasn’t it?

As I stood outside Miner’s Theatre I found that my stomach was clenched in fear. There was danger inside those doors. People had died there. I hesitated on the sidewalk while the stream of pedestrians flowed around me, and it occurred to me that someone connected to the theater had to be involved. Of course it would have taken an illusionist to pull off the switching trunks trick so smoothly, but someone had to know exactly where the trapdoor was on the stage. Someone had to be able to help move a body without being noticed. And a thought crossed my mind. Mr. Irving the theater manager. He was there all the time, standing on the stage right in front of that little door behind the curtains that led to the area below the stage. And the passage that led to his office was on that side of the stage as well. Wilkie’s man could have been lured into the office, stabbed, and then taken down below in a trunk.

So did I really want to go back in there? I certainly wasn’t going to face Old Ted at the stage door again. He already thought I had ulterior motives and was up to no good. And to be honest, I didn’t want to find myself in the dark passages of backstage.

“Come on. Don’t be such a ninny,” I said to myself. They only knew of me as Bess’s friend and Houdini’s fill-in assistant. What did I have to fear?