First Things — Edward Cline

It is late April, 1929. Cyrus Skeen has concluded his case in The Janus Affair involving the murder of a prominent commercial artist by apprehending the murderers of an advertising agency's office manager. He has just seen off his wife, Dilys, on a train to visit some relatives back East near Boston. She will be gone for about a week and a half, until early May. Skeen is visited in his office at Skeen Investigations one Monday morning by a seventeen-year-old boy, William Yeager, who asks Skeen to find his girlfriend, Darla Rampling, whom he last saw two weeks previously. What at first startles Skeen is that the boy is wearing the blazer and school tie of his old high school, Grafton Preparatory, in Rensselaer, upstate New York. Yeager tells Skeen that he admired him and thought he would be able to locate Miss Rampling. They had last met before Yeager accompanied his parents on a vacation. When he returned, the girl was gone and her adoptive parents said that she had run away. The boy did not quite believe them. After collecting some evidence, Skeen begins to not believe them, either. First Things is the sixteenth installment of the Skeen Mysteries. This case takes Skeen into the unfamiliar realms of human deception, fraud, and corruption: public charities.