All for the Love of a Lady: A Col. Primrose Mystery. Leslie Ford
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from the front bedroom through the bath into her room, and looked in. She was lying on top of the turned-down muslin spread, fast asleep, the moonlight from the open windows over the garden streaming full on her. My heart felt cold for an instant. Then I realized how jittery I really was. It was the silver glow of the moon that made her look so strange and not of this earth. The light that glistened on her upturned face was from the tears that hadn’t dried as she’d cried herself to sleep. She was still fully dressed, one shoe on and the other half falling off the foot of the bed. Her bag was still unopened on the luggage rack in front of the fireplace.
I turned away. She might try to be as cold-blooded as Courtney Durbin probably was, and as Cass Crane appeared to be . . . but it was going to take a lot of the now classical blood, sweat and tears.
Something half waked me once, after I got to sleep. It sounded like a shoe dropping, and I remember thinking vaguely of Molly’s shoe on the edge of the bed, and that I should have taken it off and put it on the floor, before I turned over and went back to sleep to the monotonous whirr of the electric fan out in the hall. Then something waked me again, I don’t know how long after. I opened my eyes and lay there listening, unable to sort out the disturbed realities of the borderline worlds merging into each other. Then I sat up. The downstairs phone was ringing. The one on my bedside table I’d turned off, so I could sleep in the morning when it was cool. I reached out, picked it up and said “Hello,” knowing, some way, before I did, that it would be Cass Crane.
“Grace?” a voice said.
It wasn’t Cass. It was Randy Fleming.
“Look, Grace. Is . . . Molly all right?”
With the illuminated hands of the clock on the table standing at ten minutes past three, not even the overtone of acute anxiety evident across the wire kept me from a sharp feeling of irritation. I could be sympathetic enough with Randy’s concern for her, and think it was sweet, in the daytime. To be waked up by it in the middle of a filthy hot night, with no telling when I’d get back to sleep again, was something else.
“She’s perfectly all right,” I said, trying not to sound as annoyed as I felt. “She’s fast asleep, and so was I. Now will you please go to bed, and don’t worry.”
Then I said, “Have you heard anything from Cass?”
I don’t know why I thought he might have, or why I asked it, except that I was wide awake and curious.
“Yeah,” he said shortly. “In fact, I’ve seen him. Sorry I woke you. Good night.”
His voice couldn’t have been more abrupt, nor could the phone zinging away where his voice had been. I put it down and sat there, hot, sticky and pretty mad. I knew if I turned on the light and tried to read I’d have a thousand bugs sifting in through the screen, so I kicked off the sheet and lay down again. After a few minutes I sat up, something sifting in through the screens of my own mind. Whether it was the anxiety in Randy’s voice, or a feeling I’d been too short with him, I don’t know. Anyway, I got up. The phone might have waked Molly, and she might have heard Cass’s name.
I turned on the light and went out into the hall. There was no sound except Sheila’s tail thwacking against the floor down the hall when she heard me. I looked at Molly’s door. It was closed, so she probably hadn’t heard the phone at all. I started back to my room. The heat was so oppressive, however, that I changed my mind and started downstairs, where it would be a little cooler.
Perhaps it was the fact that Sheila was sitting in front of the door, when she usually spends the night sprawled out on the hearth stones, that made me notice the chain had been moved . . . or it may have been that the light glinted on its polished links hanging down instead of looped up in the socket. I stopped half-way down the stairs, looked up at Molly’s door, went back up, opened it quietly and looked in.
The bed was empty and she was gone, her bag still on the luggage racked in front of the fireplace.
That, I thought, was that. A couple of hours of sleep had done its job, and she’d gone home to Cass. I realized then that that was what I’d been counting on. And I was more relieved than I’d thought I’d be. It’s always such a mess getting mixed up in other people’s domestic quarrels. And Molly belonged with Cass. She must have been acutely aware of it, waking up and lying there alone, before she slipped out through the darkened streets and back to him.
The air probably just seemed fresher and lighter as I went back to bed. It was certainly hot enough the next morning. I woke up with the sun streaming through the windows and Lilac’s heavy step plodding up the stairs. She wasn’t muttering darkly to herself, so we were headed for a peaceful day, I thought as I sat up and looked at the clock. It was ten minutes to eight. I turned to smile at her polished ebony face in the doorway; and my jaw dropped, but literally, as I stared blankly past her.
Molly Crane was there in the hall. She was dressed in her blue nurse’s aide uniform, with her hair brushed up on the top of her head, the curling tendrils around her neck still wet from the shower. Her suntanned face was fresh and lineless, her lips bright red and smiling. Her amber eyes were a little pale, but it could so easily have been the heat that for a moment I wasn’t sure it hadn’t affected me myself.
She laughed. “Don’t tell me you forgot I was here. I tried to be as quiet as I could.”
I didn’t know what to say, under the circumstances. She obviously had no idea I knew she’d been out, and apparently had a definite reason for wanting me to think she hadn’t. It was very confusing. But she didn’t wait for me to answer.
“I’ve got to be at the hospital by eight-thirty,” she said. “If . . . anyone should call me, will you tell them I’ll be back after lunch? If I may come back . . . do you not mind, really?”
Lilac stopped closing the outside shutters. “No, child, Mis’ Grace she don’ mind. It’s company for her. She like company in the house.”
As I didn’t need to say anything, with Lilac taking over, I just smiled.
“Goodbye, then—I’ll see you,” Molly said. She went out, Lilac following her.
I poured a cup of coffee, turned on the portable radio on the table for the eight o’clock local news, and glanced through the comic strips waiting for it to come on. When it did come there wasn’t much I hadn’t heard the evening before. I turned to the gossip column. The last paragraph stood out from the rest of it.
“We can hardly call it this column’s scoop, because it’s what everybody’s been saying since they caught their breath again. But unless our crystal ball is cloudy with the heat, we see a low pressure area reaching as far west as Reno. Some people say he forgot to tell her he was coming back last night, but he looked cheerful enough when we saw him being met by one of the Capital’s coolest looking lovelies . . . who may, of course, just have happened along. You know how airports are, these days. You’re apt to run into most anybody.”
I turned the page and took up my orange juice, half listening to the commercial reporter announcing that the Snow White Laundry was discontinuing pickup and delivery and would take no more new customers, and Fur Storage Inc. had no room for more furs or woolens. You know how it is . . . the radio goes on, and your inner ears are partly closed. Then mine were abruptly open.
“. . . corner of 26th and Beall Streets in Georgetown this morning,” the voice was saying.
I put my glass down and sat up, trying to grope back into the lost ether for what had gone before.
“—The police were called by a paper carrier who noticed the front door standing open and looked inside. The body was taken to the Gallinger Hospital, where the cause of death will be determined. Officers of the Homicide Squad said there was no evidence of violence, but the circumstances surrounding the case were such that an investigation will be made. If you are unable to find your usual supply of Mullher’s Five-X Beer at your dealer’s . . .”
I switched off the dial and sat there, staring blankly in front of me. I couldn’t bring back the words I’d missed . . . but I could hear Randy