8

Tuesday, 2:45 P.M. to 4:15 P.M.

“Not again,” Pam North said. “This is getting to be ridiculous.”

All the same, Dorian said, there was a man. There had been for several blocks. If he was not following them, it was a very interesting coincidence. He was a tall man, sauntering on a pleasant afternoon. But wherever they went, he sauntered after.

“After all,” Pam said, “we’re walking down Madison Avenue. Lots of people do. Of course, we can always stop at a window.” She turned toward one, and said, “I’m getting sort of tired or looking in windows. Particularly such—”

She had taken the opportunity to glance back up Madison.

“For heaven’s sake,” she said. “Look hard, Dorian. It’s Mr. Sandford. He’s—”

But then, smiling with evident pleasure, Mr. Sandford turned toward them.

“Thought I saw someone familiar,” he said. “Said to myself, ‘Mrs. North.’ Been trying to catch up.”

Pamela North said, “Oh.” She said that this was Miss Hunt. Everyone was delighted.

But then Barton Sandford’s pleasure at the meeting seemed to drain away, and he became serious; worried. He said he understood the police still suspected one of Mrs. North’s aunts. He made sounds which deprecated this situation.

“We’re trying to do something,” Pam told him. “But we’re not getting anywhere. We thought you were following us.”

“Following you?” he repeated. “For God’s sake why?” He smiled. “In addition to the obvious reasons, of course,” he said.

“Because you’re FBI,” Pam wanted to say, but thought that she should not, since it would of course embarrass him. She said she didn’t know why.

“Except we were trying to follow Paul Logan,” she said, “and made a mess of it. I suppose it put the idea in our heads.”

Sandford looked at them and shook his own head.

“Because,” Pam said, “we thought he knew something about your wife’s typewriter.”

She explained, in part. She did not mention the suspicion Paul Logan had indicated feeling of Sally Sandford; she did ask whether Sandford was sure his wife was not at the country cottage. He had looked, she understood, and to this he nodded. But could Sally have, in any way, seen him coming—or known he was coming—and hidden until he left? He started to shake his head but then hesitated. What Pam suggested was, of course, possible.

“You suspect her too?” he said, and it was Pam’s turn to hesitate. She was about to say again that, still, she suspected everybody, and realized suddenly that that was not true. She suspected two more than the rest—Lynn Hickey, Sally Sandford. “You do,” Barton Sandford told her, when she still did not speak. He looked at her with eyes a little narrowed as if, so, he could see more readily into her mind. He said, “I’d hoped—” and broke it off. He pointed out, then, that they couldn’t talk there. He suggested he buy them a drink in a place where talk would be possible.

They found a place, uncrowded in this interlude between late lunch and early cocktails. Dorian and Pam sat on a banquette, with Sandford on a chair opposite them. After the drinks came he said, “Why Sally? Not only you. Everybody. Not coming out and saying so. The district attorney, this inspector whatever his name is. Everybody.”

“Not those two,” Pam told him. “They think my aunt.”

Sandford said that, two hours ago, they hadn’t acted like it. They had called him for questioning and most of the questioning had been about his wife. Was she—were they—in urgent need of the money Sally would inherit? What had been her attitude toward her aunt? And, as Mrs. North had just asked, was he certain she had not merely stayed in the country cottage, a scant two hours’ drive from New York? Didn’t he—this a question many times repeated—actually know where she was? Wasn’t he lying to protect her? (This last more indirectly phrased.) And that he had been aware of the further implications, although now he did not directly phrase them, was apparent from his attitude and his choice of words—had he and his wife not conspired to kill, for fifty thousand dollars? But the district attorney’s assistant had been polite, and had questioned politely. There had been no open suggestion that Sandford was himself under suspicion.

“Did they ask about your discovery,” Dorian asked him. “Invention, formula, whatever it was?”

He looked from one to the other of them and reddened slowly. He said, “Oh, you’ve found that out. Logan, I suppose?”

They did not deny it.

He had not told at the district attorney’s office about that. He supposed they would find it out and make a lot of it. There wasn’t, he said, a lot to it. There was a formula, yes. It was too complicated to go into, and too technical. He thought it would have a certain usefulness in a certain field; he would like a laboratory in which to manufacture.

“Sally built it up in her own mind,” he said. “She—” Then he stopped abruptly, apparently disconcerted by what he had said. “She wouldn’t have done anything,” he said, after a moment. “I—I know she wouldn’t have.” But he did not sound assured.

“All the same,” Pam pointed out, “you didn’t tell the district attorney’s people about it.”

He hesitated more lengthily this time. Then he shook his head slowly, and by his attitude admitted an implication Pam North had left in her words.

“Sally—Sally’s a funny girl,” he said, finally. “To hear her talk you’d think—oh, a hell of a lot of things. That she could be ruthless for what she thought was important, was right. You remember when the fascists were teaching children to spy on their parents? Well—Sally didn’t defend it. But because she thought the fascists were wrong, not because the thing in itself would be wrong. She’d let people think that, if the fascists had been right, then betrayal of anybody for them would have been right. Of course, she didn’t really mean that. I know she didn’t.”

And again the reiteration of certainty lessened conviction.

It was true, he said—and now he talked without prompting, as if doubts and fears had long been bottled up and now poured out—it was true that she had been urgent that he try again to borrow from Grace Logan enough to get his laboratory equipped and started; it was true that the fifty thousand dollars she would inherit would have given them the start. It was true that much of the last night they had spent together she had argued this, and that his refusal again to apply to her aunt had seemed—

He didn’t, Pam thought, seem to realize he was talking to people he hardly knew. He was, she decided, talking to himself; arguing with himself against a possibility which had perhaps tormented him since Grace Logan died and now, during his questioning at the district attorney’s office, had been forced to the front of his mind.

“You’d have thought everything hung on this formula of mine,” he said. “The whole damn future of everything. Believe me, it doesn’t. I kept telling her that.”

But she hadn’t accepted that, had taken his disclaimers, it appeared, as merely further evidences of his lack of decisiveness of character. He had supposed, when the next day she would not return to town with him, that it was because she had, in view of her new—or newly confirmed—belief in his inadequacy, to, as she said, “think out” their future. He still thought that; he still thought she had gone off, as all the evidence showed she had, in the car to drive and, presumably, think.

“I’m damned sure of it,” he said, but again the tone did not match the words.

“Wherever she is, the typewriter is too,” Pam pointed out. “Since we know it’s the right typewriter. If she’s at the cottage, the typewriter is. Did you look for it when you looked for her?”

He hadn’t, specifically. He thought he would have seen it, and realized its importance, if it had been openly in sight. But it might have been anywhere—in a closet, under a table—and he would not have noticed. In a word, no—he hadn’t looked for the typewriter; he didn’t know it wasn’t there.

The return to a matter so specific as the typewriter apparently aroused Barton Sandford to his own loquacity. He said he had been talking too damn much; he apologized. He said he was keyed up. He suggested further drinks.

“I’ve got to go to the aunts,” Pam North said and added, to her own surprise, “I’m a sluggard.” She must, she decided, adopt a broader “a,” even in her own mind.

Barton Sandford paid for their drinks. It was exasperating, Pamela North thought, that when men want to pay, waiters appear with bills. Sandford said he didn’t think Pam needed to worry about her aunts. He thought, he had gathered distinctly, that they now were out of it.

He walked with them down Madison for a few more blocks, then went off east, apologizing once more for, he said, “having talked their ears off.” They went on to the Welby, and up to Aunt Thelma’s room, which had Aunts Thelma and Pennina in it and, surprisingly, Sergeant Aloysius Mullins.

“—blew up in their faces,” Mullins was saying, and stopped abruptly as Pam and Dorian came in. “Don’t say I said it,” he added, rather hurriedly. “Hello Mrs. North. Mrs. Weigand. Where’s the Loot?”

Dorian said she did not know, and wished she did.

“The Loot had it right,” Mullins said. “Somebody planted the stuff. Anyway, the D.A.’s afraid they did.”

“Pam,” Aunt Thelma said, “the most ridiculous thing has happened. Sometimes I can’t believe she’s my own sister.”

Pam looked at Aunt Pennina.

“Lucinda,” Aunt Thelma said. “She’s—”

“Please, Aunt Thelma,” Pam said. “Everything’s getting so confused. What blew up, Sergeant?” Aunt Thelma looked at Pamela with severity. “Please, Aunt Thelma,” Pam said. Mullins waited for things to subside. “Please, Sergeant Mullins,” Pam said.

It was very simple. There were no fingerprints on the bottle one of the detectives working out of the District Attorney’s office had found in Miss Thelma Whitsett’s suitcase—none, at any rate, but his.

“The poor Joe,” Mullins said, “should of used something.”

And that, quite simply, made it blow up. There was, obviously, no reason why Miss Whitsett herself should have removed all fingerprints from a poison bottle and then have secreted it in her own suitcase—at least none anyone could think of, or would want to take to court. There was every reason why anyone who had put the bottle where it was found to incriminate Miss Whitsett would have been careful not to leave his own prints on it.

“He’d have to wipe it,” Mullins pointed out. “Trust to luck Miss Whitsett would touch it and leave prints. Or that nobody would be bright enough to notice. Or maybe he just didn’t think about it at all.” Mullins paused. “You’d be surprised the guys who don’t,” he added, out of long, if perhaps somewhat confusing, experience.

“The inspector tried to argue maybe Miss Whitsett did it that way to make it harder,” Mullins told them. “But this Thompkins wouldn’t buy it and after he thought it over, Arty—I mean the inspector, Mrs. Weigand—wouldn’t buy it himself. I gotta hand him that. Also, everybody they talked to in Cleveland pretty near died laughing.” Mullins’s own enjoyment, although properly muted, was nevertheless apparent. “So that lets you out of it, Mrs. North,” he said.

It did, Pam thought. She no longer had an aunt to protect.

“You don’t need to look so pleased, Sergeant,” Pam told him. “You—”

“Pamela!” Aunt Thelma said, in that certain tone. “Will you stop this nonsense and listen to me? Lucinda’s gone.”

“Gone?” Pam North repeated. “Gone where?”

“To the library,” Aunt Pennina said. “I keep telling Thelma—”

“Pennina!” Aunt Thelma said. “Show her the note. I was just about to tell this man.” She indicated Mullins. An expression of foreboding crossed Mullins’s broad face. It was going to be screwy again.

It was, certainly. They looked at the note Aunt Lucinda had left, confident that with it she made everything entirely clear. They read: “Gone to the library to find the place. Cripland not Gribland.”

“Obviously,” Aunt Pennina said, “she’s lost her place in some book or other and—” But then Aunt Pennina stopped and looked puzzled. “It really isn’t very clear,” she said.

Aunt Thelma should say not; she did.

“Gone to a place called Cripland or Gribland,” she said. “What-on earth?”

“Or where on earth,” Pamela said. “I never heard of it. Did you, Dorian?”

Dorian had not. Mullins had not. Mullins got the policewoman, who was just preparing to leave. He learned that Miss Lucinda Whitsett had gone out during the morning, ostensibly to get stamps, but wearing a hat. “A pink hat,” the policewoman said, and there was a kind of awe in her voice. “I had no instructions to detain her, Sergeant,” she pointed out. “Merely to caution her.”

It was then after three o’clock in the afternoon. Even without the note, it would have been apparent that Miss Lucinda had gone farther than the lobby, was in search of more than stamps. She had gone to a place named Cripland, not Gribland, which apparently could be found at the public library.

“Missing Persons,” Sergeant Mullins said, and went for the telephone.

“Come on, Dorian,” Pamela North said. “The library to start.” She looked at the aunts. “You stay here,” she told them. “Both of you. Right here.”

“Pamela!” Aunt Thelma said, but the certain tone was wasted on a closing door.

The hills had grown taller as the little train chugged north. The trees were gold and red and green gold; the world burned gently, in beauty. The train had crept from Mount Kisco to Bedford Hills, shuddered and made Katonah. It had achieved Golden’s Bridge and seemed intent on resting on its laurels, but then gone grumbling on to Purdys and to Croton Falls. Then it had gone around curves, up-grade, and a few miles ahead a white church steeple had appeared among the soft-burning trees. “Brewster next,” a trainman said, hoarsely. “Brewster.” The train puffed uphill beside a lake, hooted its triumph and slowly subsided at the Brewster station. It had still some miles to go before achieving Pawling, but Miss Lucinda had not. She went down steep steps onto a sunny platform, a slight woman in the middle sixties, holding firmly to a purse and a copy of the Atlantic Monthly, wearing a quite remarkable pink hat. Several people said, “Taxi, lady?” and from them she chose a jovial man who said “where-a you wanna go-a, please?” or something which sounded rather like it.

Miss Lucinda no longer had her memorandum, but she did not need it. Mr. Brisco, the taximan, knew the place. He said, however, “They’re not home.”

“They asked me to have a look at the place,” Miss Lucinda said, firmly, and got into a very large car. There were two other passengers going in what Mr. Brisco chose to regard as Miss Lucinda’s direction, but it took time to catch them. It was almost three o’clock when they left the station. But, started, Mr. Brisco drove very rapidly, keeping one hand on the wheel and waving to passing friends with the other. Even with one hand, Miss Lucinda decided after a few moments, he was very expert. It was not nervousness about his driving that made her wish he would go a little more slowly. She hoped she had been entirely clear in the note she had left for her sisters.

“—and a pink hat,” Pam North said. “A very pink hat.”

“Oh, of course,” the young woman at the library information desk said. “I remember perfectly.”

“Thank God for millinery,” Dorian Weigand said. “Pam, I’ve got to see that hat.”

“It’s—” Pam began, starting to gesture a description. “It’s no use, Dor.” She turned back to the information girl, said, “It is the hat of my aunt. What did it—I mean, what did she—want?”

She had wanted to look at out-of-town telephone directories; specifically, at those which covered the area within a hundred miles or so of the city. Dorian and Pam, a good many hours later, followed Miss Lucinda’s trail, knowing that the pink hat bobbed far ahead of them.

It was to be assumed that Miss Lucinda’s interest in out-of-town telephone numbers was related to the death of Grace Logan; if it were not, if she were merely seeking to locate some suburban friend (named Cripland or Gribland?) the project was hopeless. Pam and Dorian had the obvious to go on, and went on it, wasting only a little time under the impression that Patterson, New York, was to be found in Westchester County; only a little more in finding that the Logan and Sandford country cottages, although presumably situated near Patterson, had Brewster telephone numbers. It was absurdly easy, then, since Miss Lucinda had made a pencil checkmark to identify the telephone listed under the name of Barton Sandford on Oak Hill Road. It was even easier, and more certain, when, on putting the book back in its stall, Pam dislodged from it Miss Lucinda’s memorandum, made because Miss Lucinda always remembered anything once she had written it down.

But then it was a leap in the dark. It was hard to believe that little Miss Lucinda, alone, had gone adventuring into the country to find—to find what? Cripland? Gribland? But, with the time which had elapsed, it was inevitable to believe that she had gone somewhere.

It was Dorian, in the end, who was most sure. She could look at the aunts, not knowing them, with detachment. She could point out that, were Thelma Whitsett her sister, holding so tight a rein, she would herself go anywhere, on any adventure. But she could not guess why she had, as it appeared she had, taken off for the Sandford cabin.

“Not that there isn’t reason to go there,” she said. “To find out whether Mrs. Sandford is really there, or whether her typewriter is there. But how did your aunt get the idea? What does she know about it?”

The questions were unanswerable. So was the matter of Cripland or Gribland.

“All I’m sure of,” Pam said, “is that it comes out of something she’s read. You see, she is convinced that life repeats literature, just as she’s sure everybody has a listed telephone number.”

Perhaps, Dorian suggested, everybody did in Cleveland.

But Dorian stopped, then, because Pam was not listening. She was staring at the rank of telephone books, and her eyes were wide.

“Dor!” Pam said. “We were all wrong. Terribly wrong. We’ve got to go!”

She turned to go, and Dorian turned with her.

“Go where?” she asked.

“To Patterson or wherever it is,” Pam said. “We’ve got to get there first. It’s all upside down.”

Mr. Brisco’s concept of similarity in destination, as concerning passengers in his taxicab, had proved rather remarkably flexible. Knowing the area not at all, Miss Lucinda had at first no more than wondered vaguely about this. Perhaps, she had thought, it only seemed as if, after going five miles or so in one direction to deposit a man known as Jim—“be-a-seea-you-Jim”—Mr. Brisco had turned the car around in a narrow road and more or less driven the five miles back again. It had seemed to her, then, that it was stretching a point to think that Jim’s destination had been on the way—“onaway”—to hers. It had merely, she began to suspect, been in the same part of the country. She was not even sure about the county.

The second passenger was a young woman named Mizza Snyduh (which seemed improbable) and her destination was at least ten miles in what seemed to Miss Lucinda (but of course she didn’t know the country) to be almost the opposite direction. This, then, was the way to Oak Hill Road; Jim had been merely a side issue. But do I, Miss Lucinda wondered, have to pay for all of this very considerable distance we are traveling? Mr. Brisco’s taxicab did not have a meter; it was merely a car like any other car, although with a sign saying “Taxi” against the windshield, so there was no way of telling and she had not, before they started, thought to have any discussion of the fare. One didn’t, in taxicabs; the meter told one. At least, it had been so in Cleveland. Miss Lucinda, riding rapidly if bewilderingly through a green and gold countryside, began to wonder if she had brought along enough money.

If she had—and if she had not, surely Mr. Brisco would understand, and probably take a check—there was, she began to feel, nothing immediate to worry about. Mr. Brisco was easy to trust, if not always to understand—he talked contentedly in his front seat, presumably to Mizza Snyduh, who did not, to be sure, answer, but perhaps to Miss Lucinda herself. The wind which swept into the open window on the driver’s side presumably blew Mr. Brisco’s words to pieces before they reached the rear seat. Certainly they arrived there in pieces. The countryside was beautiful and—this secretly felt, but best of all to feel—they were not reaching her destination with undue celerity. She was having time to think things out. This was one way of putting it. She was postponing an hour which might, which almost surely would, be evil. That was another way of putting it.

I have put my hand to the plow, Miss Lucinda told herself, bobbing up and down as the big car hit uneven road, the pink hat a tossing banner. Darned be he who first cries hold enough. And of course when they get my note, someone will come to help; there will be someone to do the really difficult part. Miss Lucinda’s mind winced away from the difficulty she expected. I wasn’t foolish to come on alone, she told herself. Anyway, anyway—I can’t always just sit and let Thelma—It is later than I think, Miss Lucinda thought. There is so little time. Dear Mr. Marquand; such a wonderful writer. It is my little fling.

The car turned off the main road into a much less considerable road, and from it into an even less considerable one—a dirt road, or almost. Surely, Miss Lucinda thought, this isn’t Oak Hill Road. Surely Mr. Sandford doesn’t—

“I bringa quick lika say,” Mr. Brisco said, in triumph, and Miss Lucinda moved to get out. “Nota yet,” he told her. “Thisa Mizza Snyduh. Youa next.”

Miss Lucinda said, “Oh,” and sat back. Mizza Snyduh got out and said, unexpectedly, “Goodbye now,” having previously said nothing whatever. She paid Mr. Brisco and Miss Lucinda wondered how much, but felt it would be rude to try to see. Mr. Brisco backed the big car off the road, pulled it back on again, and started back the way they had come. “Notta far now lady,” he said. “Pretty day.”

They returned to the main road, turned back on it—Miss Lucinda was almost certain—the way they had come, and progressed gayly for several miles, Mr. Brisco happily waving at friends in passing cars. Then, without interrupting the salutation of the moment, or particularly slackening pace, he turned right abruptly into another secondary road, said, “Oaka Hill,” and began resolutely to sound his horn. The reason was evident; most of the turns were blind and the road was narrow. Oh dear, Miss Lucinda thought. Oh dear me!

They went up a hill for what seemed another several miles, turned off it into a patch of what was almost lawn, and stopped. Beyond the lawn there was a pleasant, small but sprawling house.

“Bringa quick,” Mr. Brisco said, in pride of crafts-manship.

“This is it?” Miss Lucinda said.

“Thisa it,” Mr. Brisco assured her. “You wanna wait?”

“Wait?” Miss Lucinda said. “Oh, no, I don’t think you need wait. I’ll—I’ll telephone you when I want to leave.”

Mr. Brisco looked back at her with apparent doubt. He looked with interest at her hat, which seemed to distract him, or perhaps to reassure him.

“Youadoc,” he said. “Maybe she cutta off no?”

“No indeed,” Miss Lucinda said politely. “How much is it, please?”

“Twoa doll,” Mr. Brisco said. She paid him; she tipped him a quarter. She got out of the cab. It was not until the cab had backed, cut, backed once more and departed that it occurred to Miss Lucinda that Mr. Brisco might have meant to suggest that the telephone had been disconnected which would, certainly, make it difficult for her to telephone to be picked up. She had heard, she now remembered, that people sometimes had disconnected the utilities in country places which were closed up for the winter.

There was little now to suggest winter. The air here, fresher than it had been in the city, still was balmy and the breeze was gentle. It was true, of course, that the sun was already very low in the west; looking at her watch, Miss Lucinda was surprised to learn that it was only about four o’clock. She recalled to herself that the days were drawing in; that in another two hours or so it would be almost dark. She would want to start home before dark. Now—where should she begin? Inside, or out? She decided that inside would be most probable, if she was right at all. And oh, I hope I’m not, Miss Lucinda thought. But somebody has to make sure.

Getting inside a locked-up country cottage would have seemed, had she thought of it at all before this moment, a bridge to be crossed when she came to it, but now she had come to it unexpectedly and without plans. She went to the front door, as the most probable—and certainly most proper—place to start and, since it was not her house, she knocked. There was no response; she waited and knocked again, gently, since she was a gentle woman, but still with some decision—although not, as she thought to herself, loudly enough to wake the dead. Only after waiting again, did she try the door. It was, of course, locked. She had thought it would be.

She then, the pink hat bobbing, circled the house, trying first one window and then another. All the windows on the first side she tried were locked, and then she began to try those on the rear. They seemed to be locked too, and shades were drawn over them. All at once, Miss Lucinda began to feel forlorn. She had really been very foolish, now that she thought of it; no amount of understandable desire to help dear Thelma, or to escape momentarily from dear Thelma—and both things had, she realized, entered into it, together with whatever it was in her which had made her buy the pink hat—could exonerate her of having been foolish. Foolish, it now appeared, to no purpose. The back door was locked, as the front had been.

An electric meter was on the outside wall near the door and a little wheel was turning in it, as little wheels turn in electric meters. It was odd to be consoled by a little wheel, but Miss Lucinda momentarily was. Somehow, it seemed to bring the world closer. Miss Lucinda went on around the next corner and—the little wheel had been a token after all—found a window several inches open from the bottom. She tugged at it, and it opened fully.

Miss Lucinda looked around to be sure she was unobserved, because it would obviously be impossible to keep her skirt in its proper place while climbing in a window and, seeing no one who might observe her, did climb in the window. The pink hat was knocked a little crooked in the process, but not really damaged, and when she was standing—in a bedroom, as it turned out—Miss Lucinda straightened the hat. Then she began her search.

It was about the time Miss Lucinda, having broken and entered, straightened her pink hat and looked around a dim, apparently empty, bedroom that Pamela North took her car up the Twenty-third street ramp onto the West Side Highway and said, “Thank heaven!” Dorian Weigand, sitting a little shaken beside her, agreed in stronger terms.

“I know,” Pam said, working into traffic on the elevated highway and picking up speed. “I hate trucks. Great, hulking things. Like the time Teeney was treed.”

There was no answer to that but “What?” and Dorian made it.

“Like Great Danes,” Pam said, “only it was really a police dog. They make Teeney furious and she always runs at them, only this one didn’t run. I mean, not in the right direction. She was terribly frightened but she found a tree. I feel the same way about trucks.”

“Once there I thought we were going to need a tree,” Dorian said. “I thought you were going to settle for one of the pillars.”

“He hadn’t any business turning out,” Pam said, turning out herself and going around, remarking, to her own steering wheel, that there ought to be a minimum just as much as a maximum. “Anyway, I had plenty of room, or almost.”

Dorian had never seen a more alarmed face than that worn by a driver of a trailer truck who had observed, in West Street, Pamela North using what she now considered plenty of room. Of course, Dorian thought, I couldn’t see my own. She shivered slightly.

“Whatever Jerry says,” Pam North said, speeding up, “it’s been fifteen thousand miles, anyway, since anything happened. And then he tried to pass on the right. So sixty or so more shouldn’t be hard.”

The last was clear enough. They were an estimated sixty miles from the place they guessed the Patterson cottages to be. At the moment, Pam seemed determined, if not destined, to make the distance in an hour.

“Who,” Pam asked, honking angrily at a man she considered about to get in her way, “would have expected it of Aunt Lucinda? The reading one? And—how did she get onto it? It must have something to do with Cripland not Gribland. But I can’t think what.”

Neither could Dorian Weigand, holding onto the door handle, enjoying herself all the same. She hadn’t, she thought, been this far into one of them since—oh yes, since she rode into New Jersey in the trunk of an elderly car, not by choice.^* At least, this time, she was riding sitting up. She wished she had had time to leave a note for Bill, when she couldn’t get him on the telephone. But he and Jerry would get together. They probably would come steaming after. Dear Bill!

“Jerry won’t get in until after five,” Pam said, as if Dorian had spoken. Trains of thought apparently had collided. Or perhaps, as Dorian had sometimes thought, Pam could jump without words. “They ought to get started by—oh, five thirty, unless Bill’s lost somewhere. They’ll have to take your car, of course.”

They stopped at the Harlem toll bridge and paid their dime. They went on, jumping, up the Henry Hudson toward the Saw Mill.

“It will be dark before we get there, or almost,” Pam said. “It’ll be—I hope we get there first. I can’t get over its being Aunt Lucy. It simply doesn’t go with that hat.”

“I don’t know,” Dorian said. “Perhaps it does, you know. Perhaps both things are a kind of breaking free.”

Pamela North, taking the inner lane at sixty-five on the Saw Mill, chancing the parkway police, said with some fervor that she wished Aunt Lucy had been content to take it out in hats.

“After all,” she said, “that hat is something you could do only once.” She speeded up a little. “I hope this isn’t too,” she said, her voice very sober. “The poor little dear.”

*Dorian’s experience is recounted more fully in Untidy Murder. J. B. Lippincott Company. 1947.