"Shipton must have been smart enough to notice the different color inks. Buying fountain pen ink now-a-days is a little tricky. Nearly everyone uses ball point pens. Besides, Edith had the pen in her possession so he lacked any opportunity to change it back to the color she used years earlier when she wrote the suicide note. Better to have the pen missing than to have the wrong color ink someone might notice."
"Couldn't the CBI guys over in their Denver lab tell the suicide note was written years before?" Fred asked. "I've read up on some of the stuff those fellas can do. Pretty amazing. And that ain't just fiction."
"You'd have to ask them, but I'm sure they could. However, someone would have to question the note in the first place. Who would ever bother to check? A woman is dead. There's a note in her handwriting. The whole business with Annie Quincy leads up to a similar suicide. End of case. We bought it, didn't we? Granted, Shipton was taking a slight chance, but a mighty slim one."
"So you're guessing he was the one who took the Annie papers, the ones Donnie lost?" Cynthia asked. "But how could he translate them?"
"By the time we got to the end of Annie's notebook, there was more than enough pages transcribed that anyone could decipher the last few pages. I think Shipton found the pages and decided to follow Annie's method of death."
Cynthia shuddered. "What about the missing underwear? Did Shipton steal that, too?"
"Yes," Dean answered. "I'm pretty sure he did."
"Why? Why not put them on her, too? He must have put Annie Quincy's white dress on her. You said she came back upstairs naked and he probably killed her as soon as she entered the room." She thought out loud. "Then he dressed the naked corpse, and pulled her up on the drapery cord. God! It sounds so gruesome! What a monster!"
"It was gruesome, but that's what he did. Annie's white dress would easily slip over her head. It was readily available. Edith was carrying it when she came into the room but he probably didn't want to take time to search for underwear. Or shoes. She was barefoot too, remember?"
"But why would he take the underwear?" Cynthia repeated.
"A sick souvenir?" Fred asked, disgusted.
"Do you want another guess?" Dean asked. They nodded. "Think what those hundred-year-old drawers looked like to someone who didn't know what they were. An old cotton rag. I wouldn't be surprised he used them to mop up something, blood perhaps. She must have struggled and may have hurt him. Even if it was just a scratch or a bite it wouldn't do to have blood at the scene, especially someone else's blood." Then he added, "Or, perhaps he used it, to stuff it in her mouth and silence her while he choked her to death."