What McKee said was, “Striped like the leopard, spotted like the pard…‘Lamia,’ I think.” He reached for the phone.
Long before the latest victim had joined the others who had traveled the same path, McKee and the entire police department of New York City had begun looking for a tall dark woman in her thirties who had been in Grand Central between a quarter of five and a quarter past on the afternoon of December the fourth and who had worn a leopard coat.
Chapter Three
RETURN OF THE TIGRESS
Meanwhile the people who were finally to become the other participants in that tragedy of errors and of deliberate, premeditated, cold-blooded murder, with two exceptions, had all assembled at Hoydens Hill in Connecticut.
Hoydens Hill was in the high country back from and above the Sound in one of the few unexploited spots of the Nutmeg State still within reach of the metropolis. Its inaccessibility—the station was five miles to the east—and the nest of factories, quiet places ringing the Hill’s base, were responsible for the colony’s isolation. The people who had settled on the Hill’s rolling, wooded slopes were fond of their fastness. There weren’t many of them; they all valued privacy and the freedom it gave.
At that time, Julie Bishop and Julie alone was without previous knowledge of any kind on any single facet of the peculiar set of crimes which already had engaged inspector McKee’s attention in New York and whose fine flowering had reached neither its ultimate objective nor its peak.
On the afternoon of December the fourth, shortly before McKee was summoned to Grand Central, Julie was dressing for dinner in her cottage in the little settlement sixty-odd miles to the northeast. The shadow that had fallen over her on the day of Mouse Tilden’s wedding had never completely retreated. She had tried to make herself believe that it had and she had succeeded to a certain extent. She hadn’t spoken to anyone of Bill Conroy’s appearance at the Biltmore on the afternoon of Mouse’s wedding. When she examined her fear in the light of normal surroundings, it had seemed more than a little absurd. And her anger at Brian, at his abrupt change of plan without consulting her, had dissipated. He had said to her, coming up on the train, “Julie, don’t mind me, I’m jittery these days,” and had kissed her quickly and satisfactorily in the darkness of the platform to which they had repaired for a cigarette.
Under other circumstances she might have lingered over certain irrelevancies and discrepancies that remained unsolved, but on the ninth of December, as soon as Brian got his divorce, they were going to be married and she had hordes of things to do. The marriage was to take place at a little church at Westhaven under the auspices of Brian’s aunt, Eleanor Yates, a shrewd, forthright woman who was very fond of her only nephew and who had relievingly taken a fancy to Julie.
The only other guests were to have been Sam and Frances Ashe and Mouse and Joe Westing, who had reached the Hill two days earlier. The Prendergasts, friends of the Ashes who were spending the winter in Florida, had loaned their house at Hoydens Hill to the newlywedded Westings for their brief honeymoon. They were only just settled when Joe’s sister, Rosetta, arrived unexpectedly and plunked herself down bag and baggage on the bride and groom.
“Why,” Brian had demanded, “do we have to have little pussy whose claws are so long?” Julie had laughed, but Rosetta was rather a problem. The people on the hill were older, all busy about their own concerns, and there was nothing for Rosetta to do. Mouse and Joe had arrived sooner than they were expected. A short sojourn in Atlantic City—“Wouldn’t you know?” Frances said with a little crow of delight—had been enough for the two shy and reserved people who wanted quiet and peace in modest surroundings. Rosetta explained her appearance with what Frances said was a cock and bull story about being made to feel an interloper in the home of the relatives in Jersey with whom she had been staying and with whom she was to have remained until the honeymoon was over.
Frances and Julie had both offered to have Rosetta till Joe’s leave was up, but Mouse had refused. She had said in her calm steady way, “I don’t mind her, really. She gets on Joe’s nerves a little because she plays on him, but there’s no harm in her. It’s just that she’s young. Anyhow, she and I have to learn to get on with each other and we might as well begin now.”
Julie had agreed with Mouse. Rosetta was awkward and shy, and it was her shyness that made her blunder. You couldn’t come into a close little corporation such as Hoydens Hill was and not make mistakes. It wasn’t her fault that she accented the wrong things. Frances’s money, for instance. Sam’s income had been cut down drastically in the last five years, and though he worked harder than ever he earned only a fraction of what he had formerly made. It was Frances now who bore the burden of their expenditures. Sam never said much about it, but he obviously didn’t like the state to which he had had to learn to become accustomed. Rosetta kept calling attention to it innocently enough, saying how wonderful Frances was and what taste she had. “She chooses your ties, doesn’t she, Sam? They’re lovely. I wish Joe wore ties like that. I wish I had money.”
In Julie’s and Brian’s case it had been Brian’s first wife, Rikki, upon whom Rosetta’s curiosity had lighted. Julie had never met the woman who had been Rikki Moore, Brian never spoke of her, and she hadn’t liked to ask questions. Frances had once described Rikki with what was, for her, unusual violence, in a terse five-letter word. All Julie knew was that Brian and his first wife had been unhappy together during a marriage that had endured for a little more than three years. It was Rosetta, prowling around in Brian’s cellar, who found Rikki’s trunk, a big costly outmoded affair, and a bag of shoes. They were expensive shoes, most of them scarcely worn. Rosetta had exclaimed over their elegance, bursting into a shower of questions. “Did she live here with you, Mr. Moore?” Brian said no, patiently, that he had had the things sent up from New York one winter when he rented the house in Morton Street to a friend. Was she pretty, was she nice, what a lovely name she had. Rikki. Rosetta played with the name like a kitten with a ball.
Julie would have smiled, only that Brian had been annoyed. She wasn’t in the least jealous. There had probably been plenty of women in Brian’s life, as there had been other men in her own. The past meant nothing. It was the future that concerned them both, the lovely, lovely future. Julie opened a drawer, took out a pair of stockings and began to pull them on.
She and Brian were coming straight back to Hoydens Hill after they were married. He had to go on with the work on his carburetor, so that there would be no time for a trip anywhere. It couldn’t be helped and nothing mattered as long as they were together.
They were all, she, Sam and Frances Ashe, Mouse and Joe Westing and Rosetta, going up to supper with Brian that night. Julie slid a simple dinner dress over her head. It was a sea-green piqué with a white ruffle at the V neck and tiny white ruffles edging the bracelet sleeves. She shook crisp folds into place and started doing her lips. Her mouth smiled warmly at her out of the mirror and her gray-blue eyes, long and liquid, were steady and shining. What was marriage with Brian going to be like? The answer was instant. It was going to be gorgeous. They would have their quarrels, of course, and plenty of differences, but the unity between them, the matching tempo, was so complete that nothing could break it. She stood up with a sudden movement. Her skirts swished and a little shiver went through her. Don’t be too happy, a small voice whispered. Surety in an uncertain world invites disaster. What was it George Eliot had said, something about prophecy’s being man’s most gratuitous form of mistake?
Julie refused to give ground to the tiny handful of doubt that lifted itself. There was nothing wrong. Everything was just as it had been, ought to be. Any difference in the colony, in Brian or Sam or Frances, in Mouse or Joe Westing, was a reflection of her own mood. It was natural that she should be edgy and unsettled in the face of the change that was coming. She got her tan polo coat. One of the white pearl buttons was loose. She had no needles, she would have to borrow one from Frances.
