The Philadelphia Murder Story: A Colonel Primrose Mystery. Leslie Ford
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I have a very simple Code of Ethics, Dear Child. I believe a single Mistake, however Serious, should not be held against a man who has Repented it and become a Respected Citizen. I think the Dead Past should be allowed to stay Buried.”
Her voice was firm and clear, and the only sign of agitation was her hand fiddling with the dial of the small radio on the table beside her.
“I am sure Elsie is right in saying that if it had not been that Laurel and Myron Kane were attracted to each other in London last summer, he would never have come here to write a Profile of my Brother. He would not have had the opportunity to dig up the Past. If by marrying him, Laurel can undo the Harm she has done—however much my Brother would pretend to be opposed to it—I feel she should do it. But I would be the Last to attempt to Force her to do it or even allow her to know I thought it her Duty.”
What she called everything she’d been saying up to that point, I had no idea.
“You ask me very legitimately, I think, what there can be in my Brother’s life that cannot be published in The Saturday Evening Post,” she went on. “You have never met my Brother?”
I shook my head.
“They complain that dear Monk Whitney is wild and untractable, and had to have a War to Come of Age,” she said. “My brother didn’t have a War, and his son is a pale and docile Lamb compared with him. Women adored him. He married, because it was expected of him, the way his son will no doubt do—before he met the woman he adored. He paid for that, and so did she. That is what Elsie wants kept out of The Saturday Evening Post.”
She stopped for a moment, looking very steadily at me. “It is not what I want kept out. My Brother killed a man. That is what I want kept out. That is why I don’t see my Brother. He doesn’t know I know it. That man is dead. I loved him, but I want him to stay dead. I don’t want another Useful Life destroyed because of one Mistake.”
Her voice was vibrating, her eyes a burning vivid blue under the preposterous fuzz of henna hair. I’d hardly noticed that she had dropped all but the emphasis of her usual roundabout speech, and all her vagueness.
“That, Dear Child, is why I would be happy to see Laurel marry Myron Kane,” she said. “And now, I’m Very Tired. Will you close the door as you go out? One can’t always be sure, my dear. We may still need your Policeman.”
I was too torn by conflicting ideas and emotions and too bewildered by the whole thing to think very clearly or even think at all. I pulled the door shut behind me and stood there for a moment, my hand still on the knob. Then I sort of came to, and blinked my eyes without quite believing I was seeing properly.
The girl with the copper hair and the wood-hyacinth eyes was sitting as motionless and white as marble in the needlepoint armchair beside the shell-ceilinged recess. Mrs. Whitney had not been talking to me. Every word she’d said she’d said to Laurel Frazier.
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