Lilac!” I exclaimed.
“William, he say she’s a devil,” she retorted. “An’ he been livin’ there since he was bawn. He say the Judge, she got him wrapped up in her apron, with them blue bat eyes.”
She stressed the “blue” as if it were a strange unholy color for eyes to be.
“An’ her tongue sweet as butter. He say, ain’ no knowin’ what devilment she up to nex’.”
I don’t know why I always try to defend people that Lilac doesn’t like. “She seems to me a very attractive girl,” I said. “I’m going to supper there tonight.”
“Then you ought to be ’shamed,” Lilac replied. “—An’ that pore baby in there cryin’ her heart out.”
She went out, mumbling and muttering. I don’t know why I put up with her, except that I couldn’t live without her. She came before my older child was born, and he’ll be seventeen before long. Sometimes her loyalties that know no shading are pretty trying . . . especially if I happen to have at the same dinner party someone she calls a saint on earth seated next to somebody who’s a devil from hell. I opened my paper, wondering myself if I really ought to go to Karen’s party. Then I heard Lilac coming back from the stairs.
“Is that chile comin’ back tonight?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Ask her.”
“She’s went, to th’ office.—Her workin’ like common trash.”
“Don’t be stupid, Lilac,” I said sharply. “Working doesn’t make people common.”
“Then why don’ that Karen Lunt get herself a job, ’stead of layin’ in bed till noon every day?”
I realized I’d fallen headlong into a trap. She gave a kind of victorious grunt and closed the door, and I went back to my paper, thinking that after all it was a small price to pay for peace.
Then the telephone rang. If I’d really thought we were going to have any peace that day, I was wrong. I picked it up, heard the operator say “Five cents, please,” heard a nickel clang at the other end and the operator say “Go ahead, please.”
A man’s voice said, “Is Miss Candler there?”
I said, “No, she’s not. Is it you, Roger?” And before I’d got it out of my mouth I realized it wasn’t Roger. It was a quite oily voice, and it said “Who?” so quickly and in such a pouncing way that I was a little disturbed.
I said, “Miss Candler is not here.”
“Where can I get in touch with her?”
By this time, whether it was because Lilac had been so trying, or because I hadn’t had breakfast yet, or there actually was in that voice all I seemed to feel in it, I was really worried. I said, “Who’s calling, please?”
“A friend,” the man answered. “It’s important I get in touch with her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Perhaps you’d better call her home.”
“She stayed all night at your place, didn’t she?” the voice demanded unpleasantly.
The nice thing about a telephone is that you can bang it down. Not that it did much good. An hour later he called again. Lilac answered. Not even my friends can get information out of her, so that was all right. He called again at eleven and twice during lunch. Some women came in to play bridge in the afternoon, and every half hour, it seemed to me, the phone would ring again, and Lilac would put her head—getting blacker each time—in the door and say, “That man callin’ up ’bout Miss Jerry again.” It got so I could almost hear that nickel clanging and hear that oily unpleasant voice.
And you can always count on your friends to be helpful, especially when they’re dummy. Dummy on the east said, “Jeremy Candler’s a frightfully nice girl, but I do wish she’d give that old brown velvet evening dress to the Salvation Army. By the way—have you heard! Sandy’s got a job, believe it or not, and they say he’s working like a beaver.”
She paused to fish inelegantly around in the silver dish for a chocolate that wouldn’t be too fattening.
“You know, I don’t see how anybody as ugly as Sandy can be so completely attractive. I suppose, though, if he’d been a Greek god he’d never have come through that crackup in the Bakers’ cornfield last spring without a scratch the way he did. Just think what a good plastic surgeon could have done with that face. I know Ben Adams, who did over Lucy Dawes, is dying to have a go at him. And so far he’s demolished at least three cars and the plane and nine telephone poles without so much as a sprained ankle . . .”
“I suppose now he’s got a job he’ll slip on the hall rug and break his neck,” my partner remarked. “It’s your deal, Grace.”
The phone rang once more just then, and I was so jittery I exposed the only king I’d had all afternoon and then had to watch it trump the only ace I’d had for years.
Dummy on the west took up the Candlers where dummy on the east had dropped them.
“I wonder what happened between Sandy and Karen Lunt. Maybe he took it too much for granted. Maybe it’s money. But in that case I can’t see why Karen’s wasting her time with Geoffrey McClure. He may be as handsome as sin, but the wife of one of the legation secretaries told me his family haven’t anything but a mouldy old country house with thirty bedrooms and one bath and six daughters to marry off.”
My partner, glowering mildly as my singleton ace dropped, said, “I should think Karen would concentrate on Roger Doyle. His father’s literally rolling.”
“He’s not handing any of it out,” Dummy said. “Do you know—I saw Miss Isabel Doyle at the auction of old Miss Fairweather’s things the other day. She bought three trunks of old clothes sight unseen! If she turns up in that purple feather boa Miss Fairweather used to wear to early service at the Cathedral, I’ll die—literally! That’s game and rubber for us, partner. You could have taken Grace’s jack if you’d finessed her eight. That’s eighty-three cents you owe me, Grace.”
She could have taken practically anything in my hand and I could have owed her eighty-three dollars and I wouldn’t have cared. Miss Isabel Doyle’s purple feather boa weighted me down like the albatross, for some reason. Lilac bringing in tea was all that got me through the rest of the afternoon. If the phone had rung again, I should have died—literally.
I almost did anyway when the last one of them had gone laughing down the snowy steps, and I’d gone back to the living room to collapse a moment and the doorbell suddenly jangled as if it were being yanked off its ancient springs. My heart sank.
“If it’s that man who’s been phoning, Lilac,” I said, “I wish you’d call Sergeant Buck.”
Then my heart sank even further. I’d never thought the day would come when I’d find myself thinking of that dead pan and those fishy eyes with anything like affection. I realized suddenly that from the third time the phone had rung I’d been thinking about him—him and not his Colonel, for Colonel Primrose believes generally in law and order and Sergeant Buck, in his grim way, knows there are some things the police can’t do.
