CHAPTER ELEVENPatchwork
When Gamadge returned to the Stratfield Public Library he found Clara where she had promised to be—among the stacks, reading. He looked over her shoulder. “Brushing up on early Henry James, are you?”
“I thought I dimly remembered—” she looked up at him.
“But you found that The Romance of Certain Old Clothes isn’t really the source of this romance of old clothes, didn’t you?”
“I just dimly remembered that there were old clothes, and that somebody got strangled.” She closed the book.
“Motive, characters and setting all wrong, aren’t they?”
“And the social background is wrong. Our characters are just country people.”
“Er—some of them.”
She got up to search his face anxiously. “Did Gilbert Craye tell you anything about Miss Radford?”
“He says you’re mistaken, t
