“That’s why it’s such a pity you can’t come with me tomorrow. My mother is a dab hand with a needle. If you stay up with her for a while, she’d be happy to help you with the wedding dress and all the rest. You won’t even need to pay a dressmaker.”

Oh, Lord—he’d reminded me of my fitting with the other Daniel in the morning. Wouldn’t this Daniel be surprised if he knew that I had already hired a top-notch dressmaker to make me something that involved spangles and a lot of whalebone? I suppose I must have grinned.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Me, picturing myself making a wedding dress,” I said hastily. “I must go, Daniel. Please give my fondest regards to your mother and tell her I hope to see her soon.”

He nodded and gave me a perfunctory peck on the cheek.

“Don’t be so grouchy when you can’t get your own way,” I said. “I would enjoy staying with your mother when the weather is like this and I’d even be prepared to learn how to sew and cook. There, I can’t say fairer than that, can I?”

“I suppose not.” He managed a smile.

“Now I have to get to work. I don’t want to be fired from my last case.”

“Oh, and Molly,” he said, grabbing my arm as I turned to go. “You read the postscript to my note, didn’t you? I don’t know what you thought you were doing at that theater against my express wishes, but I don’t want you going near it again. It was highly embarrassing to have one of my men report that a theater stage doorkeeper had described a certain Miss Molly Murphy as lurking about suspiciously and up to no good.”

He waited for me to say something. Wisely I stayed silent, so he continued. “Just exactly what made him suspicious of you?”

“Daniel, it’s a storm in a teacup,” I said. “I told you that Bess Houdini invited me to see the show from backstage. What is so strange about that?”

“And then when the second accident happened—to the Houdinis this time, you thought you’d come back and ask a few questions?”

“I may have asked one or two.” I gave a nonchalant shrug. “I was worried about poor Bess. So I actually went back to the theater to find out where she was staying so that I could go and see if she was fully recovered.”

“Hmmph,” Daniel said. “Go and see if she was fully recovered in your case means go and do some snooping, I suspect.”

“Not at all. It was an act of mercy.”

“There must have been something more than that to make the stage doorkeeper suspicious enough to report you to a policeman.”