turned to me.
“Did you ever feel, Grace, when everything was . . . perfect, that maybe it was—too perfect? That maybe it was all more than you’d any right to, and that . . . fate, or life, or something, was getting ready to give you a frightful—well, sort of kick in the pants? That something you never dreamed of when you thought you’d thought of everything would happen to send everything crashing down on top of you?”
There was a frightened look in her odd autumny eyes.
I nodded. It had happened to me, one cloudless summer afternoon, and to two small boys catching crabs in the shallow bay.
“That’s the way I feel,” she said softly. “Everything’s so perfect. About Dad, and Sandy’s suddenly becoming adult and working like a beaver. The stock Dad put in trust for me and Billy when they thought he was going to die is paying enough so I don’t have to worry about Billy’s school bills. It’s all too good to be true. Billy even passed his Latin last month. It’s unbelievable! I’m . . . scared. I’ve had my fingers crossed all day.
She stopped and looked at me.
“You know, Grace, I guess I’m crazy . . . but you know the way primitive people used to make burnt offerings, and . . . the way they put flowers at wayside shrines, to try . . . well, to try to keep on the right side of whatever gods there be?”
She stopped again, her face a little flushed, and pulled a small brown paper bag out of her jacket pocket.
“Its just raisins and suet,” she said. “I thought, if you didn’t mind . . . maybe I’d make a . . . well, a sort of sacrifice, to the birds in your garden. I’ve got to do something—and they’d think I was crazy, at home. Do you mind?”
I looked at her, a little startled. She was perfectly serious.
“Not at all,” I said. I always wish on the evening star or a load of hay, so it didn’t seem entirely crazy to me, just a little surprising that it came from someone so clear-eyed and direct as Jeremy Candler. I heard her open the garden door, felt the brief cold blast, and felt it again as she came in. She sat down beside me again.
“Don’t tell Sandy.”
“All right,” I said. “And what about yourself, Jerry?” I asked. “Are you going to keep on with your job?”
“Of course. Unless Dad . . . well, I mean, if this does work out, and Dad thinks I shouldn’t . . . But I don’t dare think about that. I suppose if I don’t need the money I oughtn’t to keep it from some girl who does. And besides, Dad would need me.”
I glanced at her. All the proud Cavalier and all the Salem witchcraft was gone, suddenly. She was just a twenty-year-old girl, sitting wistfully in the firelight.
“And what about getting married?” I said. “Have you ever thought of that?”
“Not lately.”
She spoke so abruptly and with such a dead sort of voice that I was startled.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Oh, it’s all right. It’s just that . . . well——”
She got up, trying desperately to get back the starch that had gone out of her.
“It’s just that I guess Karen Lunt’s got him instead. She had more time to work on it than I did—and more of what it takes, I guess.”
She laughed, bent down and kissed me lightly on the cheek.
“I told you I was a pig.—Oh Lord, I’ll be late for dinner. Goodbye, Grace.”
She jammed her hat on the back of her head and dashed out, slamming the front door.
I sat there for a moment. Then I got up and pushed the little paper bag she’d brought her sacrifice in into the fire. As it flared up in a yellow flame I wondered if it wasn’t her heart that she’d really thrown out there on the snow. And it was then that I began thinking about Karen Lunt and the young man holding the car door open for her, and Roger Doyle . . . though oddly enough still not of Philander Doyle, Judge Candler’s oldest friend and one-time law partner.
2
If it hadn’t been for all that, I doubt if I should have accepted an invitation to a party at Karen Lunt’s house the night of February 3rd, the next morning when she called me up.
“I’m having a few friends in to supper, Mrs. Latham,” she said over the phone. “I hope you don’t mind my calling you one. The Candlers’ friends have always been mine too. Jerry simply adores you! A quarter to eight. You know my place, don’t you? The Candlers’ sweet old carriage house in Chatham Street?”
I said I’d come and put down the phone; and all that day and evening, everywhere I went, Karen Lunt’s name kept popping up. It was exactly like a new word that keeps appearing in everything you read when once you’ve looked it up in the dictionary or missed it dismally in a parlor game. I’d met Karen, once in a while, always, it seemed to me, the center of a little knot—ranging from two to a dozen—of men ranging from eighteen to eighty. But this day she was everywhere, or at least her name was.
At lunch the wife of a new senator from the West said, “I wonder if you know a girl named Karen Lunt.”
I said, “Yes. Do you know her?”
“No, but my brother wanted me to look her up. He was at the party the night her father drove her mother and himself off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean.”
“Really?” I said.
“Oh, yes. The coroner said it was accidental, but I dare say it was one of those accidents a lot of people had during Prohibition.”
A girl on my right who’d been a reporter before she married said, “Somebody told me there wasn’t a trace of alcohol in his brain. He was just stone broke, and she was suing for divorce, and he was mad about her and just couldn’t stick it.”
“I don’t know about that,” somebody else said, “but he couldn’t have been very stone broke—Karen kept on at Briar Hill, and that costs two thousand a year, not counting clothes and extras.”
“She can’t have much left,” a little woman across from me remarked from behind an enormous silver bowl of yellow roses. “I understand the poor child is living in the old carriage house on Judge Candler’s place.”
The former newspaper girl laughed. “Yes—decorated by Paravinci of 59th Street. I’d a lot rather live there than in the Candlers’ old place, where your breath hangs in icicles.”
She shook her head.
“It’s wonderful, the way that gal’s got Judge Candler buffaloed. It’s a gift. He’s her guardian, you know, and she’s a blue-eyed orphan child. Her father was his best friend, the sworn brothers sort of thing. Philander Doyle made sort of a third wheel. They all started in old Colonel Candler’s law office in Fairfax Street. Then Mr. Lunt came into a lot of money, and Philander Doyle moved to New York and—made his name.”
Her eyebrows lifted a little.
“It’s
