Brian was coming back. Julie glanced up at him when he reached the table, and a start went through her. His gray-green eyes were dark between compressed lids and his mouth was a hard tight line. She said on a quick breath, “Brian, what’s the matter? Who was it?”
He said carelessly, “Just Andrews, my old flying instructor. He wants to get in touch with some of the boys,” He said hello to the others and sat down.
Julie’s heart contracted. He wasn’t telling her the truth. Something had happened, something that had upset him badly. She suppressed a swift stab of alarm. When they were alone he would explain. She was going back to Hoydens Hill that night, and he was going to stay in the Morton Street house for a few days, but they would be together until he put her on the ten o’clock train.
“Weddings and rumors of weddings,” Sam said. “What’s this I hear about you two?” He and Frances congratulated Julie and Brian and reproached them with their secretiveness. “You shouldn’t have kept it from us, not that it’s any great surprise.” Rosetta was thrilled. She kept looking at Brian with her big black eyes. Julie was amused. Rosetta had evidently conceived a schoolgirl passion for Brian and he, quite as evidently, didn’t like it. Julie’s desire to get away from all of them gathered strength. She was correspondingly annoyed at the suggestion that was put forth.
Frances had been abstracted, sipping her sugarless tea and, looking around the room for acquaintances, she became suddenly gay. “Let’s not go home, Sam. Let’s make a night of it,” she proposed. “Let’s give these two a party—go to the theater and then have supper somewhere and dance. I feel like dancing.”
Julie looked at her. Frances hadn’t been cold exactly, but she hadn’t been particularly pleased when Julie first told her the news about Brian and herself. It was understandable enough. Brian was one of Sam’s and Frances’s oldest friends, and Frances had had a lien on his free time for years. When he was married it would be different. She was evidently trying to make up for her initial lack of enthusiasm.
“Say yes,” she urged. “We’ll go on the tiles. Care killed a cat—and that horrible house of Sarah’s and Mouse’s wedding almost killed me.”
Julie didn’t say anything. She waited for Brian to speak, confidently and with a little smile. Her smile froze. She and Brian weren’t going to have dinner alone together. Brian wasn’t going to the house in Morton Street. He said, “You can have your party, Frances, but not in New York. I meant to stay in town, but I find I’ve got to get back to the country. We’ll stop at the inn in Easton after we get off the train and have dinner. How’s that? All right with you, Julie?”
Adding it up afterward Julie knew that she should have been warned then. The discrepancies were glaring. Sam oughtn’t to have been in the Biltmore. He had intended to go straight home. Rosetta oughtn’t to have been there, either. As for Frances, she wasn’t a mercurial person and her changes of mood had been more than marked. Julie noticed none of these things consciously at the time. All she could think of was Brian, and the upset in their plans and his calm decision made without the slightest pretense of consulting her in advance, and of her own anger and resentment and hurt.
It came fast after that. Sam was looking at his watch. He pushed back his chair. “Come on, girls. Sorry to leave you, Rosetta, my pet, but we can make the seven-fifteen if we step on it.” Brian signaled to the waiter, took out a bill. “Yes, sir, thank you, sir.” He waved the man away, Julie rose without demur. It was then, as she turned to pick up her gloves and purse, that she saw the man and woman.
They were standing side by side in the mouth of the aisle that opened on the corridor to the right. Julie didn’t know the woman, noted nothing about her, except that she was tall and darkly handsome and wore a leopard-skin coat. The man was Bill Conroy. He looked much as he had looked that afternoon when he left Mouse tearing his flowers to pieces in Sarah’s study, handsome and sulky and in a bad temper. His attention had been focused on Mouse earlier. It was on her now. Thirty feet of space filled with seated figures intervened between them, but there could be no mistaking that deliberate, intent and prolonged scrutiny. Bill Conroy and his companion were staring, not at Rosetta or Brian or Frances or Sam, but at her.
Julie’s heart was beating thickly. Her anger had vanished. Another emotion took its place. The emotion was fear. None of the others appeared to have noticed Conroy. Rosetta was pouting over her half-finished cocktail and Frances was getting leisurely to her feet. Julie said on a breathless note, “Hurry, or we’ll be late,” put her back to the distant archway where Bill Conroy stood with the woman, and started precipitately for the exit under the clock, in flight, without knowing why or from what, for the second time that day.
There had been no police at the wedding, there were none at the funerals, at any of the funerals in point of fact. Before the second crop of those strange and dreadful removals matured, attention had shifted elsewhere. The first death took place two days after Margaret Tilden or Mouse, as she was called, married Lieutenant Joseph Westing in the Jennings house on Twenty-second Street. Alice Camber, a maid in the Hotel Sandringham, died suddenly while on duty. The hotel physician, a Dr. Mull, said heart, and let it go at that. Alice Camber was a married woman. She and her husband didn’t get along too well. Her sister put up a howl, mentioning insurance, and an investigation was ordered.
The facts that developed, however, were simple and clear and pointed at death from natural causes. Alice was a chambermaid and her wages were regular. Will Camber was an upholsterer’s assistant and his were not. On Saturday night, which was Alice’s night off, she was in the habit of taking home a bottle with which to smooth out the wrinkles in domesticity and create a temporary, if alcoholic, accord. She had done so on the Saturday preceding her collapse and death, which took place on the Sunday following. Unfortunately, on that particular Saturday night, Will Camber had also brought home a bottle out of the proceeds of a bill unexpectedly paid by a longstanding debtor. The union of two pints of rye followed the familiar pattern of headache, nausea and general debility on the inevitable morrow. Alice Camber reported for duty at the Sandringham at 9 a.m. on Sunday morning feeling, as she said, like “nothing on earth.” It was a grisly prophecy. At five in the afternoon she was dead.
Unfortunately, her body had been cremated. Except for that the inquiry was thorough. There were no attendant circumstances to arouse suspicion, and, at the end of twenty-four hours, “case closed” was written across the voluminous and careful report.
Alice Camber’s death didn’t go entirely unrecorded. Christopher McKee, the head of the Manhattan Homicide Squad, was an extremely busy man. World War I had graduated him from Army Intelligence into the New York Police Department via the appeal of the then commissioner for a trained criminologist. World War II had enormously increased the Scotsman’s responsibility—which was the continued safety of one of the few great cities left lighted in a darkening world.
Alice Camber picked herself from the day sheet dated November thirtieth and slid into a niche of McKee’s memory.
It was on December the second that the second casualty occurred. On that day a Mrs. Sally Fenway dropped dead at the feet of her hostess at a cocktail party in a Park Avenue apartment. Again heart was diagnosed. A friend who had been seated with Mrs. Fenway said that she had become ill after drinking a Martini. She had hoped that the illness would pass, but she had steadily got worse. When she went to ask her hostess, a Moira Jackson, to let her lie down some place and call a doctor, she had succumbed.
Mrs. Fenway was a wealthy widow with a home in Greenwich. She had come into the city to do some shopping on the two o’clock train and had then gone on to the party. She wasn’t strong anyhow. She had had stomach ulcers for years and wasn’t supposed to touch alcohol. Her death might have been written off as due to natural causes if Mr. Jackson, the husband of the woman
