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I’d gone from killing time before I could call Tabby Warren to deciding another visit took priority. Pauline’s nocturnal visit to C&S had come shortly before Gil Tremain and the final version of what he’d been working on both went missing. A page from that work had turned up in her desk. A car that had followed me sat in a shed behind Pauline’s house. At last a few things were beginning to hook together.
Most places look better by daylight. The Meadows house was no exception. I could see now that it was better maintained than the shed in back. The white paint was still in good shape. Shutters on the second story gleamed dark green as did the rail surrounding the wide front porch. Rose bushes had been pruned to prevent winter kill. I rang the bell.
After a minute the door opened and I was face to face with Pauline. Her eyes were so swollen from crying they could only flinch a little at seeing me.
“Go away!”
Her voice was shrill. She tried to close the door. I had considerable experience at blocking such attempts. My shoulder was ready. It pushed the door wider, Pauline gave way and I stepped inside.
“We need to talk, Pauline.”
“No! I don’t want to talk to you. Go away!”
“My guess is that somebody else is at least partly to blame for the pickle you’re in. Tell me who, and I’ll do what I can to help you.”
“No! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Pauline, what is it?” A woman appeared from another room, wiping her hands.
“She’s some kind of detective! Mr. Collingswood hired her.”
“I think you better leave.” A man had come in behind the two women. “Our daughter doesn’t have a dishonest bone in her body. You go back and tell those men who fired her that.”
His neatly mended tan shirt and filled-out shoulders suggested a laborer with a good job, maybe at Frigidaire or as a plumber. He was pushing a sleeve up in a probably unconscious signal that nobody messed with his family. His wife had slipped an arm around Pauline. I held one palm out in an effort to diffuse their ire.
“Look, she seems like a nice girl. I think she may have gotten dragged into something she didn’t realize was serious. Somebody she trusted may have used her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s a good chance Pauline could end up in worse trouble than she’s in right now. I may be able to stop that from happening — but only if I get some answers. Starting with that car with the bunged up fender out back.”
“What does Bud’s car have to do with anything?”
Pauline spoke for the first time since her parents had joined us. She looked completely confused. Maybe my theory wasn’t as sound as I thought, but something was going on here. I waited for someone to say something that would nudge me in a better direction. They didn’t.
“Who’s Bud?” I asked.
“Our son,” said Pauline’s father. “Her older brother.”
Was I going to end up helping one of their children only to harm another?
“I need to talk to him too.”
“You can’t.”
“Why not?” I hoped they wouldn’t tell me he was dead. In jail or an excuse with holes enough for me to take a picture through would be better.
“He’s in Canada. Was, anyway. We got a letter yesterday saying they were shipping out to England.”
“He’s on an air crew.” Pauline’s pride overcame her anger at my presence.
“Maybe... maybe we should sit down,” her mother suggested. “Is that alright, honey? It doesn’t sound like this woman’s come to hound you. Maybe there’s been some sort of misunderstanding.”
Pauline resisted briefly, then nodded and took the nearest seat she could find, the end of the couch. Her mother sat next to her on the arm. She nodded with strained politeness toward a chair across from them.
“You too, Miss.”
“Maggie,” I said. “Maggie Sullivan.”
Pauline’s father stood protectively behind the two women. His arms were crossed.
“When did your son leave home?”
“Two months ago. He got tired of sitting and waiting for Washington to declare war, so he went up north and enlisted.”
“Who else drives the car?”
“Nobody. None of the rest of us knows how. At first we were lending it to his cousin — just until Bud came back — but the idiot didn’t have it a week before he smashed the front fender. That did it. Nobody touches that car until Bud gets back.”
“When did your nephew bring it back?”
His tongue traced the inside of his cheek in thought.
“Been a month at least. Maybe more. Why?”
“Daddy, I - I drove it once. After.”
“What?”
Pauline flinched at his thunderous tone. Even her mother’s face gave a small tic. Her arm crept around the girl’s shoulder.
“Bud had been teaching me how. To drive, I mean. He’d let me take the wheel a bunch of times. Not downtown or anything; we were being real careful. He was teaching me the rules, too, so I could get my license, only — only then he went off to Canada...”
“Pauline Veronica Meadows, what have you done?”
Her swollen eyes began to leak tears.
“Nothing bad, honest! But one day last week I was so awfully busy at work. They had two of us typing away on a report about some big project a group of them have been racing around like ants over since I started there. I’d hurried so on the last two pages, afraid I’d miss my bus, that on the way home I started worrying I might have missed a line or a word.”
She swallowed.
“I’d done that once before, left a word out. The men — they add things up above sometimes, or in the margin with an arrow. And another time I messed up a footnote. Mr. Collingswood’s so strict about that. I was worried I might lose my job if I made another mistake. So that night, after you’d gone to bed, I-I slipped out to the shed and took Bud’s car, and drove to work to check.
“I went really slow, Daddy, and there’s not much traffic at night. I know I should have told you, but I was afraid you wouldn’t let me. I’m sorry.”
He exhaled, accompanied by a sound in his throat. It was one I’d heard my own father make. It meant they wanted to shake you over your foolishness, but wouldn’t.
“So that’s where they got that fool idea about her taking something,” he said in relief. “Somebody, the watchman, I guess, saw her sneaking in at night—”
“I didn’t sneak!”
“It’s not unusual for the secretaries there to go in at night to work,” I soothed. “But I’m starting to think somebody may have used that fact to make Pauline a scapegoat.”
That was a long way from saying the girl was completely innocent. The fact her brother’s car had followed me had yet to be explained. I was, however, prepared to believe she honestly might not know how the page of calculations had come to be in her desk.
“Was anyone else at the building that night?” I asked.
Pauline dabbed at her eyes with a fresh hanky. I wondered how many she’d already gone through that morning.
“Mother, could I have some tea? With lots of sugar?”
The expression she wore as she turned to her mother was a plea for more than tea.
“Of course, honey. Miss Sullivan? No? You come too, Dad. You can get back to fixing that piece of linoleum.”
When the two of us were alone, I looked pointedly at Pauline, awaiting her answer.
“There’s a woman who comes in to clean. I didn’t know about her. She scared me to death.
“Then when I got into my car — Bud’s car — to leave and I turned on the headlights, I saw Mr. Scott in the parking lot. He was talking to somebody.”