Who's sorry now?

good at bookkeeping from her experience working with Mr. Prinney on estate matters. Maybe she could also be good at something else. There was no way she could attend college, however, to learn more. Great-uncle Horatio’s will clearly stated that neither of his heirs could be away from Voorburg for more than two months a year, and they must make their own living in Voorburg. Obviously there wasn’t a college in Voorburg. They were lucky to have a grade school. She’d have had to move into a dormitory somewhere else, which wasn’t an option.
    She wondered if there was a way to take classes by mail and only go in for tests a couple times a semester. How could she find out about that? Oh, she thought, almost slapping her forehead. At the town library.
    Miss Exley was an expert in researching almost anything. She would certainly have reference books, however outdated, about colleges.
    Lily gave Miss Exley a warning call about what she needed.
    ”I might be able to find something. I’ll start with Vassar,” Miss Exley said. ”Just because it’s the closest to you. But I doubt they care about educating women to be anthropologists.”
    ”Probably not. Certainly some school in New York City would know. And I think I can find the telephone number of an anthropologist who might know where they have a course by mail, so I’d only have to go to the city to take tests.”
    ”Why are you suddenly interested in this, if I may ask?”
    ”Haven’t you heard about the skeleton we found at Grace and Favor?”
    ”No. Who was it?”
    ”A young Indian girl.”
    ”Oh, how sad to die young. I’m afraid I’ve been too busy still working on getting all the old newspapers in order to read recent ones.”
    ”I don’t think Jack Summer has reported it yet,” Lily said.
    Miss Exley said, ”I will watch for his next issue. I’m beginning to fear it’s going to take me the rest of my life to get the old newspapers in order. And I’ve decided that anyone who wants to see a newspaper has to read what they find in front of me, so I can stop them if they try to cut out an article. You have no idea how many of the newspapers look like grubby lace.”
    She went on, ”If you can wait until tomorrow, I’ll be glad to see if we have any books here on the subject that are less than fifty years old. But I can see why you’re interested. Meanwhile, if you give me the town where your source of information is, I can look him up in the most recent New York City telephone book.”
    ”I think we have a fairly recent one somewhere at home,” Lily said. ”Let me try that first. I hate to put you to that much trouble and expense.”
    ”Do you really want to be an anthropologist?” Miss Exley asked.
    ”Not exactly. For another reason, I couldn’t go out in the field and investigate finds for another eight years anyway. Our great-uncle’s will demands that we make our living for ten years without being out of Voorburg more than two months of any year.”
    Miss Exley said, ”I’d heard two women checking out romances talking about that, but I chalked it up to plain old gossip. It’s really true?”
    ”It is. But I’d just like to get more information.” When she got back to Grace and Favor, she called Dr.
    Toller’s office but was told by a receptionist at the college in New York City that he was out of the office for the day. But she’d give him the message to call Miss Brewster back. He’d mentioned to her when he’d returned from Voorburg how interested and useful Miss Brewster had been by helping with the successful excavation of the skeleton.
    Chief Howard Walker assumed that Mrs. McBride would call on Friday or Saturday the other ”boys” who’d been pals with Edwin. Howard would try to find as many of them as he could on Sunday, when they were most likely to be home. It was a shame he wasn’t getting Deputy Parker until the next Tuesday. It would have been good for the young officer to sit in on the interviews. He managed to find all of them at home, and one of them even knew where the ”hanger-on” currently lived.
    He couldn’t help being surprised that all of the ”boys” were older than he. But to Mrs. McBride they were still nice children who’d happened to grow up.
     

CHAPTER TEN
     
    MONDAY, MAY FIRST WAS LILY’S BIRTHDAY.
    Robert had gone early in the day to fetch the books he’d left with Mrs. Smithson.
    ”I assumed that a man who doesn’t know how to make coffee also doesn’t know how to