14                                 IJllian G. Gilkes

Nor were they found among the personal effects left outright in
her will, together with all of her real estate, to her friend and ex¬
ecutor Ernest Christie Budd, a Jacksonville businessman who had
wanted to marry her. No mention of them, either, appears in the
inventory of personal property which has since disappeared from
public records on file in the Duval County Courthouse, but which,
fortunately, was copied by a collector of Crane memorabilia,
Ames W. Williams, on one of his visits to Jacksonville. Mr.
Williams' copy is preserved in the Arents Crane Collection at
Syracuse University, together with other missing documents he
had copied at the same time, pertaining to Cora's estate.

There can be no doubt, 1 think, as was suggested in my Cora
Crane (Appendix iii, p. 378. Indiana University Press, i960),
that sometime between Cora's death, 4 September 1910, at Pablo
Beach, and the filing of her will for probate four days later, the
whole boodle was stolen out of her rooms in the Court Annex at
118 Davis Street. But the thief was not one of the three principals
in this remarkable charade, nor Cora's legatee Budd, but someone
else whose identity still cannot be positively affirmed.

Broken by McNeil's treatment of her in the divorce case, and
in ill health from a stroke, Cora had moved into two rooms in the
Annex after relinquishing the management of her establishment to
a housekeeper, Edith Gray. The last year of her life was spent in
retirement at her beach cottage "Palmetto Lodge," during which
time she rarely came up to town, except to see her doctor or to
consult her attorney. The records show that Edith Gray, and the
girls at the Court, were living high off the hog. They ran up stag¬
gering bills for meat and groceries which remained unpaid—to say
nothing of "extras" such as S926.50 to an Atlanta firm for silk lin¬
gerie! The ill woman was being fleeced by those to whom she had
entrusted her affairs.

In Jacksonville, researching the biography, I interviewed a gen¬
tleman who claimed friendship with Cora. However, from what
he told me, he was certainly more closely identified with an indi-