Miss Dimple Suspects Read Online Free PDF Page A

however, was surprisingly unlined and her cheeks, pink from the cold.
    She winced in spite of herself when her icy feet and hands met the warmth of the fire, and the woman named Mae Martha gave her shoulder a comforting pat. “You’ll feel better after you soak your feet in warm water. I’ll put on the kettle.”
    Miss Dimple started to rise. “Peggy?”
    “She’s right here. I’m afraid she’s very sick.” Miss Dimple turned to find the younger woman on the settee behind her, stripping off the little girl’s clothing. “Her fever’s high and we have to get it down or she could go into convulsions.” Peggy shivered as the woman laid her gently on the couch and covered her with a light blanket.
    “What can I do to help?” Dimple asked.
    “Just watch her while I heat some water in the tank. We’ll start her off in warm water and gradually add cool. It would be too much of a shock to immerse her in cold right away.”
    The young woman, whose name Dimple assumed was Suzy, certainly seemed to know what she was doing. She was small and lovely with straight black hair worn in a short bob styled just below her ears and there was no doubt she was of Asian descent.
    While Dimple obediently soaked her feet in a pan of warm water, she heard her moving about the next room, which she assumed was a bedroom, and she soon emerged carrying a large tin tub much like the kind Dimple had bathed in as a child. “We have a tub in the bathroom, but it might be more comfortable here by the fire,” she said.
    Sitting with Peggy while the water heated, Miss Dimple sang to her the songs her mother had sung so many years before: a Stephen Foster favorite, “Oh! Susanna,” and the one she always loved best, “The Riddle Song” her mother claimed came from the Kentucky mountains, although she learned later it probably originated in fifteenth-century England.
    Peggy’s face was flushed and her eyes puffy with fever. Dimple touched the child’s neck and found her glands hard and swollen. Could Peggy have scarlet fever? Usually the rash began on the abdomen, and she folded back the blanket to look but, although Peggy’s skin was hot and dry, she didn’t see redness there. Yet.
    Dimple looked up to see Suzy standing over her. “It looks like tonsillitis,” Suzy said. “With your help, I’d like to get a better look at her throat.”
    Using a flashlight and the flat handle of a spoon as a tongue depressor, Suzy managed to get a brief look at the child’s throat while Dimple held the light. Peggy gagged and cried and Miss Dimple wished more than ever they could pick up the telephone and call Ben Morrison, the local doctor. She had noticed him earlier with the group who went to search the area around Etowah Pond.
    “I couldn’t get a good look,” Suzy said, “but there’s a lot of inflammation in there. Has she had trouble with her tonsils before?”
    Of course Miss Dimple couldn’t give her a definite answer, but she did remember Peggy’s being absent from school several days the month before.
    While Suzy filled the tin tub with warm water, Dimple explained to the two women how she and Peggy happened to follow Max into their dooryard. “We were most fortunate to find you,” she added, “as I really don’t know if I would’ve been able to make it all the way back carrying Peggy. I just wish we could get in touch with her parents, as I know they must be frantic.”
    Mae Martha frowned. “It fretted my grandson—God bless him—that I don’t have a telephone, but I told him I’ve done all right without one so far. My nephews live a couple of miles away and Bill’s around more often than not—he does errands and odd jobs for me.”
    Dimple noticed Mae Martha didn’t mention the reason for Suzy’s presence. Perhaps, she thought, she was there as a companion or nurse to the older woman, as it was plain to see that she had some kind of medical training. She watched as Suzy lowered Peggy into the warm water. They had