Читать книгу The Philadelphia Murder Story: A Colonel Primrose Mystery - Leslie Ford - Страница 7

Mrs. Whitney and Myron were in her room. I could see her in the mirror just inside the door, but not him. She must have given him some signal, because his voice rose suddenly, expansively anecdotal with something about an Eastern ambassador. “. . . and I said, ‘Effendi——’ ”

He stopped so abruptly, seeing me, that I saw while he knew someone was coming he didn’t know it was to be his unwitting sponsor in the house. And it must have taken him all of a second to rally himself.

“Why, Grade!” he exclaimed cordially, and I hate to be called “Grade.” “How very nice!”

He came toward me and gave me an affectionate kiss on the cheek. I hadn’t, I guess, realized what close friends we were, and I don’t think Mrs. Whitney was fooled either.

“Yes, isn’t it Pleasant?” she said. “And didn’t you bring a Letter for our Friend, Dear Child?”

“Yes, I did,” I said. I’d forgotten it entirety in the press of interim business. I went over to the table where I’d left it with my bag when she’d dismissed Travis Elliot and me so peremptorily. “It’s from a fan; he thinks you’re divine.”

I picked up my bag, but Mr. Toplady’s letter wasn’t under it. I looked inside. It wasn’t there either.

“That’s very funny,” I said. “I thought I left it here.”

I knew I had, in fact.

“It must be Somewhere, Dear Child,” Mrs. Whitney said, without concern. “Or did you take it upstairs?”

I shook my head.

“Oh, well,” Myron said.

It was spoken as by a public favorite to whom another fan letter was as a drop to the ocean, a grain to the desert. He’d returned to the mantel and was standing there with his elbow on it, at ease with himself and the world.

“It was from Someone who wrote a Book, Dear Boy,” Mrs. Whitney said.

“No,” I said. “It was from a little man named Albert Toplady. I met him in a——”

I stopped, staring at him. It was unbelievable. He looked as if an invisible hand had landed him a paralyzing blow in the pit of the stomach. His face just in a fraction of an instant had turned a sickly gray-green, his mouth sagged open stupidly and there were beads of perspiration on his forehead and upper lip.

“Where is it? The letter!” he said.

His voice shook, and his body swayed as he took a step toward me. I thought he was going to grab the bag out of my hand and go through it himself.

“Grace, you’ve got to give it to me! Where is it?”

I stared at Mrs. Whitney, completely bewildered. She was resting back very calmly on her cushions, concentrating on Something Else, I supposed.

“I don’t know where it is, Myron,” I said. “It isn’t here where I left it. Maybe one of the others picked it up by mistake.”

“If they did,” Abigail Whitney said placidly, “I’m sure they will return it, Dear Boy. They wouldn’t open a sealed Letter addressed to anyone Else. It’s one of the things that isn’t Done.”

A dark flush came into Myron’s cheeks. “I wish you’d see if you took it upstairs, Grace,” he said. He had made an effort to get himself under control, but his hands were still trembling and his voice harsh.

“Do, Dear Child,” Mrs. Whitney said.

He followed me out of the room.

“Look, Myron,” I said. “That letter was under my bag, and that’s all I know about it. It is not upstairs.”

The look in his face was as near despair as I’ve ever seen in all my life.

“My God, it’ll ruin me,” he whispered.

I’d have felt very sorry for him if I hadn’t seen almost the same look in Laurel Frazier’s eyes, and for much the same reason.

“It’s sort of the biter bit, isn’t it?” I said.

He stood there for a moment without answering, haggard and terribly diminished, someway. His mouth was trembling and there were actually tears in his eyes.

“Who was in there?” he demanded suddenly.

“Elsie and Sam Phelps, Monk Whitney, Travis Elliot, Mrs. Whitney and myself.”

He nodded and went on up to his room.

I’d been standing facing him at the foot of the stairs. As I turned and started to go back into Mrs. Whitney’s room, I stopped. I was looking directly into the mirrored panel at the right of the shell-ceilinged recess. The long mirror inside in her door was reflected in it. I could see her lying back on her cushions, staring thoughtfully up at the ceiling. I could not only see her, I could see a series of other reflections from other mirrors, and in them the lower hall—the hall I was in—and a part of the upper hall too. Those mirrors weren’t just decorative detail in a modern interior architecture at all. They were placed, like the ones outside her window, with method and purpose. She could sit in her Empire swan-sleigh bed and see all approaches to her room. More than that, she could have seen Laurel Frazier go up to Myron’s room, and seen that Myron hadn’t either come in or gone up. Her sending Monk up, knowing Laurel was there, must have been a conscious and deliberate act.

The rattle and clack and ring of Myron’s typewriter starting up at full speed came abruptly down the stair well. I saw Mrs. Whitney move, and I went on into her room.

“Did you find Myron’s letter?” she asked, more to be polite than anything else, from her manner.

“No. What happened to it?” I asked, meeting her blue gaze directly.

“It’s so difficult to be Sure about things, isn’t it?” she said vaguely.

“Didn’t you see who took it?”

“I’ve got awfully blind with Advancing Years,” she said. “But you’ve got eyes, Dear Child. You should train yourself to use them.”

It could have meant a lot of things. At the moment, I would have bet anything she had it stowed away somewhere under her cushions.

“And there’s something else,” she said. “I heard you tell my Nephew I was a scheming, Worldly Old Woman.”

I was so taken aback that I wasn’t sure whether she said, “I heard you tell” or “I hear you told.” If it was the first, she must have had very keen ears, because I couldn’t now hear the sound of Myron’s typewriter. If the other, it meant, of course, that Monk had repeated it to her. I’d have thought better of him, but, after all, I had no way of knowing what he would do.

She was looking at me with a faintly amused gleam in her old blue eyes.

“Well,” I began, by way of apology.

“Not at all, Dear Child, not At All,” she said promptly. “I thought it was very Intelligent in you, and not Unworldly in itself. My nephew would never have thought of it. But you will understand I won’t need your Policeman now. Their methods are tedious and long-drawn-out; I’m sure my Own are better.” She looked past me at the mirror beside the door. “Myron is going out. I thought he was Most Disturbed, didn’t you?”

I was finding it rapidly more difficult to think at all. I was appalled. I just stood there staring at her, blankly.

“Don’t be Naïve, Dear Child,” she said. “What I have suggested is the Best Possible Solution for everybody.”

“For everybody except Laurel Frazier,” I said, with some warmth.

“For Everybody,” she repeated. “If Laurel marries Travis, she’ll be buried alive out on the Main Line. She’ll take him to the eight-thirty train every morning, and meet him again at five-thirty. She’ll take the children to school, and she’ll pick them up. She’ll play tennis and bridge and go to Meetings, and in five years she’ll be just like Elsie Phelps, a typical suburban matron. It is a Living Death. If she marries Myron Kane, she’ll live in New York and Washington and abroad. Laurel is perfectly aware the only thing wrong with Myron Kane is a sense of Social Inferiority. Her background is excellent Philadelphia, all Myron Kane needs to make a Powerful Person of him. He needs her, Travis does not. Any nice girl, preferably one not so bright as Laurel is, is all dear Travis needs.”

“It doesn’t matter whether she’s in love with Myron or not, I take it,” I said, as calmly as I could.

Her hands moved slightly on the green cover. “Love has very little to do with marriage, in my opinion, and I’ve had sufficient Experience to speak with Authority. Actually, the nearest to love Laurel has ever come is her Blind Hero Worship for my Brother. She was attracted to Myron in London. Money, I think, has more to do with marriage than Love has, and I’m prepared to underwrite that aspect of Myron and Laurel’s life, even though he has a handsome income of his own from his Writings.”

“Why,” I asked, “don’t you just buy him off, and leave Laurel out of the picture?”

She looked at me placidly for an instant, and when she spoke, Colonel Primrose himself couldn’t have been more suave. “The Dear Boy can’t be bought with money. I would have failed if I had attempted anything as unpolitic as that. I have a very simple Code of Ethics, Dear Child. I believe a single Mistake, however Serious, should not be held against a man who has Repented it and become a Respected Citizen. I think the Dead Past should be allowed to stay Buried.”

Her voice was firm and clear, and the only sign of agitation was her hand fiddling with the dial of the small radio on the table beside her.

“I am sure Elsie is right in saying that if it had not been that Laurel and Myron Kane were attracted to each other in London last summer, he would never have come here to write a Profile of my Brother. He would not have had the opportunity to dig up the Past. If by marrying him, Laurel can undo the Harm she has done—however much my Brother would pretend to be opposed to it—I feel she should do it. But I would be the Last to attempt to Force her to do it or even allow her to know I thought it her Duty.”

What she called everything she’d been saying up to that point, I had no idea.

“You ask me very legitimately, I think, what there can be in my Brother’s life that cannot be published in The Saturday Evening Post,” she went on. “You have never met my Brother?”

I shook my head.

“They complain that dear Monk Whitney is wild and untractable, and had to have a War to Come of Age,” she said. “My brother didn’t have a War, and his son is a pale and docile Lamb compared with him. Women adored him. He married, because it was expected of him, the way his son will no doubt do—before he met the woman he adored. He paid for that, and so did she. That is what Elsie wants kept out of The Saturday Evening Post.”

She stopped for a moment, looking very steadily at me. “It is not what I want kept out. My Brother killed a man. That is what I want kept out. That is why I don’t see my Brother. He doesn’t know I know it. That man is dead. I loved him, but I want him to stay dead. I don’t want another Useful Life destroyed because of one Mistake.”

Her voice was vibrating, her eyes a burning vivid blue under the preposterous fuzz of henna hair. I’d hardly noticed that she had dropped all but the emphasis of her usual roundabout speech, and all her vagueness.

“That, Dear Child, is why I would be happy to see Laurel marry Myron Kane,” she said. “And now, I’m Very Tired. Will you close the door as you go out? One can’t always be sure, my dear. We may still need your Policeman.”

I was too torn by conflicting ideas and emotions and too bewildered by the whole thing to think very clearly or even think at all. I pulled the door shut behind me and stood there for a moment, my hand still on the knob. Then I sort of came to, and blinked my eyes without quite believing I was seeing properly.

The girl with the copper hair and the wood-hyacinth eyes was sitting as motionless and white as marble in the needlepoint armchair beside the shell-ceilinged recess. Mrs. Whitney had not been talking to me. Every word she’d said she’d said to Laurel Frazier.