Date with Death. Leslie Ford
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machine, taking him in and totting up the score of his various points with an experienced and intelligent accuracy.
“How do you do,” Jonas said. He looked at her with an easy grin. “Don’t tell me you’re an Annapolitan.”
“Good Lord, no.” She laughed. “You have to be born here, or live here forty years, before you can call yourself that. I’ve only been here a month. And if I stay another it’ll only be because creeping paralysis is infectious. Or is it contagious? I don’t know the difference. Anyway what I mean is catching. No, Dr. Smith, I’m not a native crab. I’m a writer. I’m here getting what we laughingly call local color.”
“Oh,” Jonas said. He glanced up past her at the open door of the Blanton-Darrell House. The slight sinking feeling in the bottom of his stomach was nothing a mint julep wouldn’t fix—he hoped. “What kind of a writer?”
“Oh, bad, very bad, I guess. But it pays, and the nice thing about it is people never recognize themselves in print.”
The sherry eyes were giving him another critically detached summing-up.
“Of course I don’t mean you,” she added calmly. “You’re an outlander same like me. I mean these characters you see in houses like this, that… oh well, you know. They’re dead but they won’t lie down, as Gracie Fields puts it.”
“They’ve got nice manners, though, haven’t they?” Jonas asked. “I mean it’s nice of them to invite us vipers in to drink their liquor on Sunday morning.”
Philippa Van Holt laughed and shrugged her shoulders. “Oh of course. I forgot. You’re going to live here, aren’t you.—Oh, how do you do, Professor Darrell?”
One thing about Philippa Van Holt, Jonas decided then and there, was that she must be radar-equipped, though it was difficult for the naked eye to see where she carried it. Unless, he thought, it was hidden under the large hunks of rose tourmaline set in gold medallions around each of her wrists, that he saw now she had stripped off her beige doeskin gloves. Or perhaps looking at them had deafened him as well as blinded him to the approach of his landlord-host.
“You’re sweet to ask us here!” Philippa Van Holt was up the third step and inside the door shaking hands with Professor Darrell. “It’s always such a privilege to come inside this lovely old house. If I owned it I’d never let a barbarian like me or Dr. Smith put a foot inside it.”
Barbarian or no barbarian, Jonas thought, there was certainly nothing of the classic Greek visible about Professor Tinsley Darrell. He looked like a schizophrenic evil-eyed old horse. His pale bulging grey eyes glared at them, his nose looked less like sculptured marble than a bulbous lump of slightly cyanotic clay thrown off-center at his face and left to harden there with no attempt at shaping. He was tall, heavy-set and wheezingly short of breath. There was, however, one thing Greek about him. Barbarian though she might be—and Jonas thought she conceivably had something—Miss Van Holt had struck his Achilles’ heel with a true and deadly aim. The glare in his eyes gave way to a watery glint.
“Barbarian, ha! It’s a pleasure, Philippa. It’s always a pleasure!”
He shook hands with her, brusque, but deeply pleased.
“Good morning, doctor. You’ve met Miss Van Holt, I see. Come in, Philippa, come in, doctor. I want you to meet my granddaughter.”
As he moved across the wide airy hall in his wrinkled grey seersucker suit he looked like a huge bag tied up for the laundry.
“Oh, this heavenly room—I simply adore it!”
Jonas wondered if Miss Van Holt wasn’t slightly overdoing it. One look over her sleek sweet-smelling shoulder as she paused ecstatically convinced him she was so far as Elizabeth Darrell was concerned. She was standing erect and poised across the room. As her eyes met his she looked quickly down, a faint flush showing for an instant. He saw Jenny at the same time. She was there beside her sister so quickly from where she had been sitting that he would hardly have known she had moved, if she had not brushed a section of the Sunday paper off a chair onto the floor. Jonas thought of a frightened fawn springing to its mother’s side. The contrast between the two of them was more striking than he’d remembered—outwardly, at any rate, for he knew Elizabeth was not as calm and self-contained as she looked. She was taller than he had thought, honey-blonde with a quality that some way made Miss Van Holt a little too glittering. By comparison Jenny seemed a changeling gypsy child, burning with a dark flame-like intensity, with her blue-black hair and small pointed face. The only thing about them that indicated blood relationship was in the grey-violet of their eyes, and it was less in their eyes than in the long dark curling lashes each had.
Philippa Van Holt said, “Hello, Elizabeth—hi, Jenny.” It was evident that she did not waste her charm on her own sex, and more apparent as she turned to a woman Jonas did not see until he was inside the room. She was sitting primly on a stiff sofa against the inner wall, white-haired and pink-cheeked, dressed in her Sunday best, with innocent china blue eyes, as mild and happy-looking as a small sweet-tempered child at a birthday party.
“Hello, there, Miss Olive,” Philippa said. “How on earth did you get here?”
“I walked,” Miss Olive said.
“My granddaughter, Elizabeth Darrell, Dr. Smith,” Professor Darrell said. “Now let’s have a drink. Where’s Wetherby? Wetherby!”
He glared around at the doorway.
“And this is my sister Jennifer, Dr. Smith,” Elizabeth said.
Jenny put her hand out, small, tense and very cold in Jonas’s.
“How do you do, Dr. Smith?”
“And Miss Oliphant, Dr. Smith,” Elizabeth said.
“It’s a great pleasure to meet you and welcome you to Annapolis, Dr. Smith,” Miss Oliphant said happily. “My father had a great friend who was a Dr. Smith, but I don’t expect you’re any connection of his. He lived in New Orleans. I don’t recall his first name, but he—”
“Jennifer!”
Jonas released Miss Olive Oliphant’s plump soft little hand with a start and turned around. Professor Darrell was standing over the section of the morning paper that had slid off the love seat, glaring as if it were a coiled snake.
“Jennifer, haven’t I told you—”
“That wasn’t Jenny, Grandfather. That was me.”
Elizabeth’s warm beautiful voice that stirred the roots of Jonas Smith’s spinal column also slightly staggered him with its calm disregard for palpable truth.
“I left that there, dear. Not Jenny.”
“It doesn’t make any difference anyway.” Professor Darrell bent down and picked the paper up. “It’s the way they fold the damned things these days. Won’t stay together five minutes. Where’s Wetherby with those juleps?”
He glared around at the door again.
“I’ll go get him, Sis.”
Jenny ran across the room and out. Jonas looked at Elizabeth. She had put all the papers on an ottoman by the fireplace and sat down where they’d been, smiling up at her grandfather. He wondered if it was a brief but vivid picture of life in the Blanton-Darrell House. Anything that Jenny did that was wrong was right if Elizabeth did it. Jenny was terrified of the old man, Elizabeth had no fear of him at all. He wondered about it, in terms of what had happened the night before.
“Goiter is six times more common among girls than among boys,” Miss Olive said. “It tends to occur chiefly in adolescence. I read that in a magazine the other day. I cut it out, and I have it here in my bag somewhere. My father always encouraged me to read a great deal and to cut out and keep items of great interest.”
She fished around in her rusty black bag, smiling happily at Jonas.
“Although you probably saw it yourself. And