13

Saturday, 12:50 P.M. to 2:10 P.M.

Mrs. North had ordered Spanish lobster for lunch because she liked it and it agreed with her perfectly, and Jerry liked it and would be home. But it showed, she thought, how really very little I know about children, because probably it isn’t good for them. Mrs. North sighed and thought how odd it was that so many things were not good for children, but were presumably all right for grownups, who were simply, when you came to think of it, children who had begun to wear out. After the children got to be a certain age, of course; not very young children, who were obviously intermediate.

“Of course, dear,” Mrs. North said, looking at Beth’s plate. “You mustn’t forget it is very rich.”

“Oh,” said Beth. “I like things rich. This isn’t very rich, Aunt Pam. And we never have it at home.”

This did not do a great deal to assuage Mrs. North’s doubts. Probably there was reason for that.

“We don’t want you getting sick while you’re here,” Mrs. North said, thinking as she said it that it was something rather special in the way of understatements. If they get sick, I’ll die, Mrs. North thought.

“If you don’t think things will, they won’t,” Margie said, rather suddenly. Mrs. North, to whom the remark sounded curiously familiar, looked at her with doubt. Mr. North looked at Mrs. North, who shook her head slightly, and smiled.

“Experience, darling,” he told her. “You don’t live with yourself, so naturally it’s beyond you. She means that if you don’t think things are going to make you ill, they won’t make you ill. Very succinct she was too, I thought. Weren’t you, Margie?”

“Succinct?” Margie repeated.

Mr. North looked as if he wished he had not brought it up. He also looked puzzled.

“Oh, direct,” he said. “To the point. Condensed.”

“Was I?” Margie said. “Anyway, I don’t know if it’s true, but Miss Norton said so. In physiology. At school. Anyway, she said it was a little true. I think I’ll have just a little more lobster, Aunt Pam.”

Pam gave her a little more lobster.

“Do you go to a nice school?” she said. It seemed somehow the proper thing to ask.

“Oh, we go to high school this year,” Beth said. “Because of Daddy being in the army, except this week. But we brought our books.”

“Did you, dear?” Pam said, looking a little helplessly at Jerry. “To study, you mean?”

“Oh, yes,” Beth said.

“But you haven’t studied,” Pam pointed out.

“No,” Beth said. “Not yet. We’ll study on the train going home. When there isn’t a murder.”

“Oh, yes,” Margie said. “How is the murder? You know, New York is so big, and exciting, that I keep forgetting the murder.”

“That’s a very good plan,” Jerry said. “I wouldn’t think about it if I were you, Margie. Or if I were you, Beth. It’s—well, you can leave murders until later in life.”

“Jerry!” Pam said. “That certainly sounded funny.” She looked at him. “Sometimes, dear,” she said, “I don’t think you’re as clear as you used to be. In saying things. You don’t think, sometimes. I—”

“I’m sorry,” Jerry said. “It must be carelessness.” He looked at her. “Or something,” he added. “I meant they could leave interest in murders until later in life. Murders are for the mature.”

“Oh,” Beth said. “We both like murders. We always read about them in the papers. Out home a man killed his wife and another man with an axe and it was very interesting. That’s one thing about going to high school.”

Both Mr. and Mrs. North looked blank, this time.

“Because we live at home,” Margie explained. “Sometimes Beth isn’t very clear. In boarding school, we didn’t have the papers. We just had current events.” Her expression became reminiscent. “It wasn’t the same,” she said. “And only selected things on the radio, like forums and symphonies.”

“Except the little one like a camera Vee-dee had,” Beth said. “The one Miss Ryder thought was a camera. We used to get Cugat.” They also remembered. “Very small, of course,” she said. “As if they were whispering. Particularly when Vee-dee kept it under her pillow so Miss Frantz wouldn’t find it.”

The conversation seemed a little private to Pam, but she remembered that she was hostess and should show an interest. If possible.

“Vee-dee,” Pam said. “That’s an odd name. Was she one of the girls?”

“Oh, yes,” Beth said. “Vee-dee Thompson. Or was it Thompson?”

“I don’t think so,” Margie said. “But it was something like Thompson.”

“Thomas?” Mrs. North suggested.

Both girls shook their heads.

“Tompkins?” Mr. North offered.

“No,” Beth said. “More like Thompson than either. Campbell, maybe.”

Mrs. North looked puzzled a moment and then her face cleared.

“Oh,” she said. “Like Thompson that way. Not sounding like Thompson, but being like Thompson. I thought you meant sounding like Thompson.”

“Really,” Mr. North said. “Really.” He looked at all of them. Evidently, he decided, it ran in families.

“Of course,” Beth said. “Like Thompson that way. Like Franklin or Turner or Williams or one of those names. Or Jones.”

“Not Jones,” Pam North said. She said it over. “Jones.” She shook her head.

“Jones isn’t one of them,” she said. “I’ll give you Turner and Williams.” She stopped suddenly. “Williams?” she said.

“It was Williams, Beth,” Margie said. “I remember, now. And she had a daffy sister.”

“Listen,” Mrs. North said. “Was Vee-dee really her name? Vee-dee Williams?”

“Everybody called her Vee-dee,” Margie said. “It must have been. Although it does sound like a nickname.”

“Oh, I think her name was just Vee,” Beth said. “Somebody added the rest. It was just Vee to start with.”

“Nobody’s named just Vee,” Margie objected.

Beth said oh, she didn’t see why. “You can be named anything,” Beth added. “Maybe her parents were crazy too. And it’s better than—than—”

“Lizzie,” Margie said. She listened to it. “I don’t see what’s wrong with it,” she said. “I’d just as soon be Lizzie. Beth sounds like Little Women or something.”

“Oh, it does not,” Beth said. “It’s ever so much better than Lizzie.” She looked at Margie without affection. “It’s better than Margie, when you think of it,” she said. “Much better.”

“Girls,” Mrs. North said, with admonition. But her curiosity overcame her. “You mean one of the girls at the school—this Vee-dee’s sister, was really—daffy?”

“Not at the school,” Margie said. “She wasn’t at the school. She was at another school. For backward children, I guess. But Vee-dee talked about her. She always said, ‘My sister’s daffy.’”

“Oh, always,” Beth said. “She didn’t mind at all. I mean, Vee-dee didn’t. I expect the daffy one did, really. Except maybe she didn’t know.”

“Look,” Mr. North said, “could we please talk about something else. Maybe about somebody we all know?”

“Well,” Mrs. North said, “of course you got the coincidence. Williams. And Williams. Mrs. Williams.”

“Yes,” Mr. North said. “Coincidence with a very short arm, dear. Like finding two people named Smith.”

There was that, Mrs. North had to admit. She agreed that it wasn’t a big coincidence. Then said, “Ouch! Toughy! My stocking!”

“He wants lobster,” Jerry told her. “Naturally.”

“Well,” Mrs. North said, “he can’t—Toughy!”

The gray cat was in her lap. A gray paw licked out and circled a morsel of lobster and seemed to toss it into an open red mouth. And Toughy poured himself off Mrs. North’s lap with a movement like milk pouring. Toughy crouched over his morsel of lobster, looked up at Mrs. North with a yellow eye, swallowed the lobster and gulped. He seemed surprised and sat for a moment, evidently considering the downward passage of the lobster. Then he looked pleased, saw Ruffy approaching, crouched and swished his tail, and leaped half across the room, landing where Ruffy’s head had just been. Ruffy’s head had removed itself. Ruffy looked bored and began to wash herself. Toughy sat down and looked at her, got the idea with a start, and began to wash himself.

“I wonder,” Mrs. North said, “if that Scat stuff would keep them off me?”

Mr. North nodded. He said he should think so. He said he imagined she wouldn’t be troubled by the cats if she put the Scat stuff on her.

“Or by anything else,” he added.

“Jerry!” Mrs. North said. The doorbell rang and, clicked past the barrier, Bill Weigand came in. He said, when asked, that he had had lunch. He looked at the almost empty plate which had held Spanish lobster.

“Which is apparently just as well,” he added. “Is that that lobster stuff?”

“Yes,” Pam said. “I didn’t for a long time and then I thought, what difference did it make? So now I do. After all, that was a long time ago, and it wasn’t just the lobster. You’d have got him anyway, in the long run.”

“Probably,” Weigand admitted. “Anyway, as you say, it’s over. Whereas this one—” Weigand sighed. “These two, now,” he told them.

“Bill!” Pam said. “That’s dreadful. I wish people wouldn’t.”

“Right,” Bill Weigand said. “Job or no job. I wish they wouldn’t. But they do. This one was with a pillow.”

He told them about Mr. Demming; pressed, he ran quickly over what he had learned since he saw them. It amounted, he said, to nothing that came clear. Where people used to live, who had insured whom, which two were about to marry and which were jealous of others—somewhere in all this there might be a solution. But, bluntly, he didn’t see it.

“Usually,” Pam said, “you have a point when you can make a guess. Or get a hunch, or whatever it is. Haven’t you yet?”

“No hunch,” Bill told her. “No major hunch, anyway. Some little, intermediate hunches, hardly worth the mind they’re thought on. It doesn’t jell.”

He looked at the Norths and they looked at him. He shrugged.

“Well,” he said, “probably it’s all there somewhere. Waiting to come out in the wash. There’s one point, Jerry—”

There was one point on which Jerry North might help him, and for that help he had stopped by on his way to an interview. “With the Akron girl,” he said. The matter of life insurance, written in favor of Burden, on Sproul. As a man who knew something of such matters—was Burden’s agency in bad straits financially? Was it probable that interest in what Sproul might have had to say was subsiding to a point which would leave the tour unprofitable?

“No,” Jerry said. “Two no’s. Burden’s got most of the big people; the people who get the big fees. Unless the whole lecture business is unsound, Burden is sound. I’d bet on it. And as for Sproul—I’ll grant you he’s been superseded here in the East. But the East isn’t everywhere. He’s still big stuff in the West and Middle West. And I could prove that by sales figures.”

Weigand said, “Um.”

“I’ll grant that the insurance deal is unusual,” Jerry said. “I mean, I don’t suppose it is commonly done. But I honestly think, Bill, it would be foolish to build too much on it.”

“Right,” Bill Weigand said. “I’m afraid I agree with you. However—no stone unturned.”

“You’re full of aphorisms today, Bill,” Pam said. “I don’t think they’re terribly becoming. But by the way—how do you feel when you’re not feeling well? Both of you.”

She said the last to the two men, who stared at her.

“Again?” Jerry said.

“How do you feel when you’re not feeling well?” Mrs. North repeated. “Surely that’s clear enough.”

“It sounds all right,” Bill Weigand admitted. “Words and everything; even a verb. Only it doesn’t mean anything. When I don’t feel well I just don’t feel well. Sometimes I have a headache. Sometimes I’ve eaten something—”

“That isn’t it,” Pam said. “I don’t mean that at all. I don’t care whether you have a headache.”

“Well, Pam,” Bill said, “after all—Old acquaintance forgot?”

“Don’t make a joke out of it,” Pam told him. “Of course I’d be sorry. Have you got a headache?”

“No,” Bill told her. “Not today. I had one yesterday.”

“I’m sorry,” Pam said. “How did you feel?”

“Terrible,” Bill told her.

“No!” Pam said. “You keep slipping off. Jerry—how do you feel when you don’t feel well?”

“Please, Pam,” Jerry said. “You’ve got us. I haven’t the remotest idea what you’re talking about. Bill hasn’t the remotest idea. The girls haven’t. Have you, girls?”

“No,” Margie said, and Beth shook her head.

“You!” Pam North said. “All of you. It’s perfectly simple, and if I make it any simpler there won’t be any point. Think! How do you feel when you don’t feel well. What do you say? You say, ‘I’m feeling—what?’”

Bill Weigand looked at her and then at Jerry and both men shook their heads. Pam looked at them, compellingly.

“Say it!” she commanded. “Say it!”

“I don’t know,” Jerry said. “I don’t get it at all. I’m sorry, Pam. When I’m feeling sick I just—”

“There!” Pam said. She was excited and pleased. “You say ‘I feel sick’ or ‘sort of sick,’ depending.”

“I feel sick,” Jerry said.

Pam looked at him, and her expression was suddenly worried.

“Jerry,” she said. “Oh, I’m sorry, dear. The lobster?”

“I feel fine,” Jerry said. “I was just saying it over.” He looked at Pam a little desperately. “Are you all right, Pam?” he said.

Pam said she was fine.

“Now, Bill,” she said. “What do you say? Do you say, without thinking, I feel sick? Without thinking?”

“I don’t know,” Bill Weigand said. “Maybe I do. Or—I suppose I really say, ‘I feel ill.” Unless I do feel sick—nauseated, that is. But I don’t see that it makes any difference.”

“Neither do I,” Jerry North said. “Sick—ill. Probably I’d write ‘ill’ although I’d say ‘sick.’ And what possible connection this has with anything in the world—”

He broke off because there was an odd look, something like triumph, on Pam’s face. She nodded and seemed very pleased.

“You were born and grew up in New York, Bill,” she said. “Right?” Bill nodded. “And you came from the middle west, Jerry, middle west and south.”

“Of course,” Jerry said. “And of course it’s regional. You sound like a radio quiz, or expert or something. The man who tells where you came from by your accent. Anybody can do it, after a fashion. It depends on ear and training.”

“Naturally,” Pam said. She still seemed pleased. She looked at the two men, as if waiting for them to make some comment. But the men looked at each other and shook their heads and Pam looked somewhat disappointed. She was abstracted then, for a time, and nodded abstractedly when Bill Weigand left. For a time after he had gone she still said nothing. Then suddenly, she said she had to run uptown and do some shopping.

“For—for stockings,” she said. “Because the cats claw them so. I won’t be long and then we’ll go look at something. The Empire State Building or something.”

She went, almost tempestuously. Jerry North looked, with a puzzled expression, at the door she closed behind her. He knew the symptoms. Pam North was up to something. He had been wrong to let her go alone, but she had gone so quickly; really she had gone before he realized she was up to something. He went to the front of the apartment and looked from a window down into the street. Mrs. North was getting into a taxicab. She looked up and saw him and waved, and before Jerry could open the window to call, the cab with Pam North in it had rolled to the corner.