Date with Death. Leslie Ford
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be able to see that as well as me. I’m just a writer, but it’s my job to see things. Elizabeth was sitting on ground glass waiting for him to come. She forgot all about Miss Olive’s making her look like a fool, springing the job business out in open meeting. Or didn’t you notice that either?”
She gave him a mocking sidelong glance.
“Are you the strong silent type, Dr. Smith? Or is it just the extension of your bedside manner, acquired with long years of suffering and patience?”
“Meaning, Miss Van Holt…?”
“Meaning you didn’t open your mouth twice at the Darrells’. You just sat like a—”
“Bump on a log, is the usual—”
“I avoid the usual as much as possible, doctor. That doesn’t apply, anyway. You’re alive. I don’t think you miss much. That’s why I’d like you to be on my side in what I’m going to do.”
“What are you going to do?”
She was silent for a moment. “I haven’t figured that one out yet. When I do I’ll let you know. Turn right. That’s the house down there. Couldn’t you guess it even if you didn’t know?”
Jonas drew up in front of a small weatherbeaten yellow brick house half hidden in a snowy avalanche of silver moon roses, the white picket fence a misty cloud of blue and violet irises.
“I thought it and Miss Olive were enchantingly picturesque, when I perjured my soul to get her to rent me two rooms,” Philippa said moodily. “I told her I was one of the Van Holts, whoever the hell they are. They must be okay, she even lets her maid get breakfast for me. And I’m allowed Papa’s sanctum to receive my… my gentlemen guests in.”
She caught her breath in a quick laugh that was more like a sob than laughter, and fumbled in her bag for her key. Before she got it in the lock the door opened. A colored maid with her hat and coat on stood aside for them to come in.
“There’s somebody here to see you, Miss Van Holt,” she said stolidly. “He’s waiting in the library. I detained myself from a previous engagement to go to church. He wouldn’t go, and Miss Olive don’t want strangers messing around in her things when she’s out.”
“Thank you, Elsie.”
Philippa took a dollar bill out of her bag. The girl took it, only partly mollified, and went on out, letting the screen door bang behind her.
“I think Elsie knows I’m not one of the Van Holts,” Philippa remarked. “And about Gordon, too. It’s funny how much they know, isn’t it?”
Jonas opened the door. It was an idea that had crossed his own mind at the Darrells’ as he’d watched the immaculate and aristocratic figure of old Wetherby.
“This is the library. It’s where Papa’s ghost—”
Philippa pushed open the small door at the left of the narrow hall next to the wrought-iron umbrella stand.
“Oh,” she said. She stood poised, half-way across the worn threshold.’ “Oh,” she said again.
Jonas Smith came to an abrupt stop behind her. He caught his breath. It took all the self-control he could muster not to do more. Before, he had merely looked over Philippa Van Holt’s sleek perfumed shoulder. He stared over it now, at the man who was standing motionless behind the marble-topped table in the center of the room. It was a ghost standing there, but not the ghost of Miss Olive’s father. The man was very tall and strikingly handsome, with a suntanned face and wavy blond hair. Jonas’s eyes went mechanically down to his hand, to see if he still wore the green scarab ring and the gold bracelet. He had last seen this ghost lying in a pool of his own blood, quite dead, on the green-tiled floor of the Milnors’ cottage on Arundel Creek. Gordon Darcy then wore expensive and perfectly tailored evening clothes. His ghost had somehow changed to a blue chalk-stripe business suit, as expensive looking and as perfectly tailored.
“I thought buzzards only operated from a sense of sight,” Philippa Van Holt said calmly. “It’s one of Miss Olive’s favorite cut-out facts.”
She went on into the room. The brown eyes of the man behind the table moved with her until she said, “Dr. Jonas Smith… my brother-in-law Gordon—I mean Franklin—Grymes. And Grymes is their name, not Darcy. Dr. Smith, Mr. Grymes.”
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