A Pinch of Poison by Frances Lockridge

explained. “The one you’re always reading about. They don’t keep any records! ”
    Mrs. North spoke as if this were a rather dreadful thing, which came, Weigand thought, oddly from Mrs. North. He thought of investigating, out of sheer personal curiosity, and pushed the thought away. He wondered whether Miss Crane could tell him how Miss Winston had spent the previous day; her last day.
    â€œAs far as her work here went, I mean,” he explained.
    Miss Crane nodded. She already had got out the assignment record, she said. Miss Winston had been on an investigation during the afternoon, talking with prospective foster parents. Earlier she had been making a routine checkup at the Municipal Building.
    â€œYes?” Weigand said. “How was that?”
    It was, it seemed, simple enough. One of the Foundation’s older wards—a girl of seventeen, who had not been adopted and was being partly supported by the agency—had made up her mind to get married to a boy of about her own age.
    â€œWe hoped she hadn’t,” Miss Crane said. “There were several reasons, none of which matter. We tried to reason her out of it.”
    They were not sure they had been successful and had suspected that the girl had got married anyway, falsifying her age. Miss Winston, with her own appointment several hours off, had volunteered to check at the Municipal Building on marriage licenses issued during the past week or two. That was what she had done Tuesday morning. Weigand, listening, said “Hm-m-m” with interest and the women looked at him.
    â€œThat hooks up with something,” Mrs. North challenged. “When you sound that way, it always hooks up with something. Doesn’t it?”
    Weigand admitted that it might, but volunteered nothing. Mrs. North commanded with her eyes and he shook his head. “Later, maybe,” he told her. He turned back to Mary Crane.
    â€œIn the afternoon,” she said, “Lois seems to have gone to see some prospective foster parents—a Mr. and Mrs. Graham who live”—she consulted a card—“up in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.”
    â€œWhere,” Mrs. North wanted to know, “is that?”
    It was, Weigand told her, the section the Henry Hudson Parkway ran through after it crossed the Harlem River. She looked puzzled.
    â€œBen Riley’s,” he explained.
    She brightened, and then clouded suddenly.
    â€œIsn’t that still Manhattan?” she said. “I always thought so.”
    Weigand told her it was the Bronx, all right. But not the Bronx one usually thought of. He broke off, thinking.
    â€œThis investigation,” he said. “This may sound foolish to you but—could there be anything dangerous in it? I mean, could she—or any worker—find out something that she shouldn’t and—well, antagonize people?” He saw that Miss Crane was smiling, and smiled back, rather apologetically. “I suppose,” he said, “I’m thinking of our kind of investigations—police investigations.”
    Miss Crane said he probably was. Investigations of possible foster homes would not, she said, be at all likely to lead the investigators into dangerous situations.
    â€œIt is a little difficult to explain to a layman,” she said. “Particularly against all the background of misinformation which has been built up in the layman. Our ‘investigations’ don’t include any prying. They are conversations, chiefly—the worker talks to the prospective foster parents and tries to get to know them; she looks over their house and gets an idea about their financial standing. She asks them questions which, when they first apply for children, they are told will have to be asked. She sees neighbors and friends and relatives whose names the foster parents supply for that purpose. You can see there are a good many things we have to know, before we trust a child