both through a mist. Her sense of foreboding, her latent fear had quickened, sharply. Steven had said that Sara was going to the theater with friends. Why had she altered her plans? What did it mean? Cristie felt herself beginning to shake.
She got up, walked to one of the windows and stood there with her back turned, looking out into the dusk.
Chapter Two
The Ermine Cape
With the coming of darkness Cristie’s spirits lifted. The atmosphere of the penthouse helped. It was anticipative, brisk, and every moment was bringing her nearer to Steven. Margot had thrown off her preoccupation and was busy with a thousand details. Sara Hazard’s name wasn’t mentioned again. Cristie tried to forget her. At seven Euen and Johnny went home to change and Margot and Cristie had a quiet meal together, just a. bite because the dining room was filled with the caterer and his men.
Cristie dressed quickly, slashing herself to renewed vigor with a hot and cold shower. Eau de Cologne, a mist of powder, cobwebs of stockings, white sandals. She applied lipstick and slid into cool white chiffon, yards and yards of it, bound round her midriff with a girdle of silver.
Margot wore stiff, sweeping brown net that was superlatively smart and reduced mere prettiness to a wishy-washy non-essential. She had invited almost a hundred guests. Publicity was good for her business. Cristie got a fleeting impression once or twice in those last moments that she would have liked to call the whole thing off. There was nothing solid to tie it to.
People began arriving at around half past nine. By half past ten the spacious, flower-decked rooms were well filled. There was music, sweet and swing. There was dancing. There were games. There was impromptu singing. Voices were recorded on a special machine that Margot had for her composers. A number of the guests had a try at it and there were exclamations of dismay and corresponding laughter when the records were played brick. A new baritone from the Met sang and there was a soft-shoe dance by Gorkin from the town’s hit musical.
Men in white jackets and women in thin, colorful gowns wandered into every room and out on the terrace. The drinks were plentiful and excellent. Euen Firth, tall and sandy and beaming, was in his element as auxiliary bar man. He was one of his own best customers.
As the evening advanced and the time she might expect to see Steven approached, the penthouse began to be peopled with shadows as far as Cristie was concerned. Smile, reply, respond to talk—about the weather, about how well Margot was looking, about what a splendid fellow Euen Firth was. Her whole being was centered on the thought of Steven, when he would come and what he would have to tell her.
She tried to banish Sara and her belated telephone call, tried not to speculate as to why Sara had given up the theater and was coming to the penthouse instead. The attempt wasn’t a success. She wasn’t the only one who was troubled. She hadn’t imagined it; there had been something peculiar about the way Margot and Johnny and Euen had reacted to Sara’s shift in plans. Perhaps it was to see or say something to one of them, that she was coming.
Cristie was standing beside Margot in the long and wide hall that ran from the foyer to glass doors opening on the terrace in back when Miss Dodd arrived. The daughter of the eminent psychologist was a friend of Steven’s. Steven was very fond of her, had spoken more than once of her intelligence, her understanding. Tragedy had touched her early. She had seen her fiancé killed in an accident before her eyes when she was a girl. Mary Dodd had gone to school with Sara Hazard’s oldest sister and had known Sara from childhood, but she was Steven’s friend too.
She was a tall woman in her middle thirties with an interesting face, not beautiful, her nose was too long for beauty, her forehead was too high, but there, was dignity in her supple figure, sensitiveness in her thin, fine-boned hands and her clear hazel eyes were youthful. A streak of white running through her thick dark hair added to her air of distinction. She wore black that brought out the fresh tones of her skin.
When Margot introduced them, Mary Dodd shook Cristie’s hand warmly. She said she had seen Cristie’s pen-and-ink drawings in the New Yorker and told her how much she liked them.
Cristie was pleased. She said deprecatingly that they were silly little things.
Margot said, “Don’t let her kid you, Miss Dodd. It’s swell stuff and she’s going places with it.”
Miss Dodd wanted her niece, Kit Blaketon, to meet Cristie. She disentangled a girl in green from a laughing group. Kit Blaketon was lithe, slender-waisted, long-legged. Red hair in a long page-boy bob flamed away from a thin face with a pointed chin and an enormous pair of bright green eyes.
Kit Blaketon was of no particular interest to Cristie then. Kit had lived with Mary Dodd since the death of Miss Dodd’s father a year and a half earlier, was engaged to a man named Cliff. She gave Cristie a perfunctory smile, said to Margot, “Darling of you to have us. I’m mad about Gorkin. Do wangle it so I get a dance with him later.” A young man touched her shoulder and she waltzed off, humming the refrain of a popular song.
Mary Dodd and Margot were talking. Cristie took a stout woman in pink velvet in tow, showed her where to put her wraps, abandoned her. Why didn’t Steven come? It was almost eleven. Her throat was tight. Could he have come in when she wasn’t watching? She kept looking anxiously through the throngs on the terrace. He was nowhere in sight. What could be keeping him? The prospect of his arrival made her feel light-headed. At the same time there was a cold little core of fear at the heart of her expectation that wouldn’t dissolve.
She had almost forgotten about Sara Hazard. And suddenly she saw her. Cristie stood where she was in the partial shelter of a tall sheaf of gladiolas. Her hands, hanging at her sides, were hidden in folds of white chiffon. The fingers were tightly clenched.
Sara Hazard’s entrance into the party at the penthouse that night was, as always, spectacular. Three steps led down from the hall above. She paused on the top step and looked around. Cristie wasn’t the only one who stared.
Sara Hazard had a picture sense where her extremely attractive body was concerned, managed to make you aware of it, in some subtle fashion, even when she was standing still. Perhaps her own concentration with it had something to do with the effect she contrived to produce.
The word slim covers a lot of territory. Sara was slim enough but there were curves, the right curves in the right places. She wore a daringly brief evening gown of black and gold that left practically nothing unsaid. Her upthrust breast had the pout of invitation to it and the gently swelling hips under the gold corselet that defined the small waist seemed, in spite of her immobility, to sway a little.
Her golden hair, hair that was really golden, was turned back from her long narrow white face in a soft roll. Everything about her was narrow, velvet-brown eyes, straight nose, hands and feet, everything except her mouth. Her mouth was a full scarlet bow. The lower lip, a Hapsburg, was inclined to protrude a little. You didn’t notice it at first. The general effect was too good.
Sara Hazard was alone.
Cristie’s eyes absorbed the emptiness beside and behind her as Sara descended to the floor, located Margot and strolled in Margot’s direction. Heads turned as she passed and people stared, women with a touch of envy, men with admiration and here and there something rather more intense.
Cristie stayed where she was, conflicting emotions driving to and fro inside of her. How could Steven care for her when he had such a beautiful wife—because Sara Hazard was very, very beautiful; there could be no two opinions about that. But Cristie’s critical faculties hadn’t deserted her. There was something self-centered, ruthless, beneath that
