All for the Love of a Lady: A Col. Primrose Mystery. Leslie Ford

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СКАЧАТЬ U.S.A., also retired, it will be Colonel Primrose. There really ought to be a Fifth Freedom—For Men Only. Though frankly it’s got to the point where I almost wish he really would ask me to marry him, so I could settle it for everybody . . . one way or the other.

      2

      I went out through the rose-and-white marble-paved hall, bare of rugs for the summer, and down to the street. In ordinary times the narrow road leading out to Connecticut Avenue would have been lined with cars. There were only two there now. One had a diplomatic marker, and the other was a long sleek black job with a tiny troglodyte of a man leaning against the fender, fanning himself with a panama hat. I looked around, because it was like seeing a shadow without its substance. Then I saw the substance. He was standing by the luminous white board with diagonal black stripes that marks the dead end of the road where it falls sharply off down into the Park. He was leaning on his stick, looking up into the sky . . . as intently, it seemed to me, as Molly Crane had done.

      As I got almost to the sidewalk, Achille, the little dwarf of a chauffeur, opened the door of the big car and turned on the lights. D. J. Durbin still stood there for a moment as though listening, then started toward the car, the dull thub of his rubber-capped stick punctuating the drag of his lame foot and the staccato clack of his good one on the cobblestones. And suddenly the most weird and extraordinary sound came out of the little creature by the car. I drew back as instinctively as if I’d heard a rattlesnake warning me from the grass. But the warning was not for me. Mr. Durbin halted abruptly, fell back a step and flung up his stick, beating the air wildly with it. Achille leaped forward across the walk. A black cat, blinded by the sudden glare of the headlights, was in the act of jumping off the wall to cross the road. Faced with the thrashing stick and the driver’s waving arms, it turned tail and lit back up through the shrubbery the way it had come.

      D. J. Durbin leaned heavily on his stick, pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead, and I stood gaping at both of them until I caught myself and hurried on up the street. The motor whirred then, and the car shot past me over the hump toward Connecticut Avenue as if the devil were still after it. Then, as it disappeared, in the empty stillness of the street I heard the heavy drone of a plane overhead. It was still high, its red light looking like an outlaw star, disembodied as if the plane itself had dissolved against the luminous backdrop of the vacant sky.

      I know spotters who can tell what a plane is by the sound of its motor, or say they can. Perhaps it’s true, because Sheila, my Irish setter, never disturbs herself, lying in the hall half asleep, for any car hut mine pulling up at the curb. Whether D. J. Durbin or Achille knew what plane that was, before the business of the black cat, I don’t know. It may have had nothing to do with their abrupt departure at all. It certainly had something to do with Molly’s.

      I heard her heels clicking up the walk behind me and her voice calling my name. She was running up the narrow pavement, turning from silver into gold as she came out of the phosphorescent moonglow into the murky yellow cone under the old street lamp, and to silver again as she came through it. Randy was pounding along behind her. It seemed to me that all I could see for an instant as she stopped was a couple of hot liquid blobs in her face where people normally have eyes. There were tears in them, and she was batting them back, trying not to let us see them. But in that pale light tears glisten, even when a face is indistinct.

      “Grace,” she said abruptly, “—have you got company?”

      I shook my head a little blankly. “Why?”

      “Then would you let me stay all night tonight?”

      “Now wait a minute, Molly!”

      I didn’t have to look at Randy’s African sun-scorched face under the thatch of burnt-up hair that used to be brown to see that he was taking the whole business as hard as Molly was. His voice was enough.

      “I’m not staying in that house tonight,” Molly said quietly. “I said I wouldn’t, and I’m not. If Grace won’t let me stay with her I’ll . . . I’ll go to a hotel.”

      “They’re all full,” Randy said. “Don’t be a dope. Give the guy a break, won’t you? He’d have let you know if he could have.”

      “He let Courtney know, didn’t he? If he could get word to her, he could to me—if he’d wanted to.”

      “Maybe she just heard it tonight. If you’d been home you——”

      She shook her head. “Courtney’s known it the last four days. I knew there was something, the way she’s been acting. I’ve been wondering what it was.—And don’t tell me I’m crazy. I’ve had just all I can take.”

      Her voice quivered a little.

      “Can I stay with you, Grace?”

      “Of course,” I said.

      Randy shrugged. “No use standing here till we draw a crowd. I’ll get a taxi. You can do as you please.”

      He strode on toward Connecticut Avenue, and I started on as Molly stood there for an instant fishing around in her bag for her compact.

      It was hard to know what to do. If she’d been married to anybody but Cass Crane, if he’d let anybody but Courtney Durbin know he was coming back, it might have been easier. Any other man coming home to a girl he’d married and left a week afterwards, to be gone four or five months heaven knows where, would have deserved every benefit of the doubt. But somehow not Cass. It may all just have gone back to the fact that Cass was the man every gal who’d come out in Washington for the last five years had decided she wanted to marry. But he’d belonged to Courtney, and nobody could get him away. When she married D. J. Durbin and it was assumed he was on the block again, the postman literally staggered up his front steps. But he was at the Durbins’ just as he’d been at Courtney’s own house before, and he and Courtney were at all the same parties together, because D. J. Durbin didn’t go out and Cass went in his place. Then he was sent to South America, and came home one Thursday. He and Molly were married on Saturday, and he was gone the next Saturday. And now . . .

      She’d caught up with me on the narrow sidewalk.

      “—Do you suppose he’s forgotten he married me?”

      “I . . . think he’d remember, darling,” I said. “At least, it’s customary.”

      “I mean, seriously. He might have got a fever, or . . . something. I mean . . . well, I haven’t heard from him for a long time, and Courtney told somebody he wouldn’t have married me if he’d——”

      “You mean he had a fever when he married you,” I said. “And now he’s over it, and he’s forgotten, the way you’d forget a delirium?”

      She didn’t say anything for a moment.

      “I know it doesn’t make any sense. Anyway, I don’t want to stay at home tonight, Grace.”

      There was a catch in her voice again.

      “I’d just make a scene . . . or I’d act as if it didn’t matter. And—it’s got to be either me or Courtney. It can’t be both. It just won’t work that way. I’m not that . . . that smart.”

      “All right, Molly,” I said. We were at the top of the slope and Randy was waiting on the corner with a taxi. “You come to my house tonight, and tomorrow you can see.”

      It wasn’t to СКАЧАТЬ