fashion. The eyes weren’t hiding behind glasses now, but they were the eyes of the picture, dark and steady, and as melancholy as an Irish fairy tale. Her nose was a little broad at the tip, and her mouth was wide and full. She was gazing at me with a thoughtful, remote expression that meant nothing at all. She might have been sizing me up with wary care, or thinking about the menu for dinner.
I said: “Mrs. Johnston, we’re contacting the wives of business leaders in the community to see if we can form a community bond sales group among the ladies. You know, we still want to sell bonds, and we feel that women with go-getter husbands probably have something of the go-getter in themselves.” I smiled at her idiotically.
She studied me with a quiet repose for what seemed a long time without saying anything. I was glad I wasn’t Mr. Flood from the Treasury Department. My day would be ruined. I would need a pep talk. Behind me, in the hall or in another room, I heard a a phone being dialled, faintly.
“Mr. Flood. I’m terribly sorry.” Her voice was low, throaty, but very quiet and very gentle, like her eyes. “But I’m afraid I’m not a ‘go-getter.’ I know I’d just be a burden on the group. I’m sorry.” She smiled. I could feel that smile down to my knee caps. It was wide. It was incongruous. It was lovely. But it didn’t change the eyes much.
“I can’t agree with you, Mrs. Johnston,” I said. “I think you are just what we’re looking for: intelligent, young, of good standing…”
* * * *
MRS. JOHNSTON’S smile froze and she leaned forward and knocked an ash from her cigarette into a crystal tray. She did it slowly, deliberately. When she looked up the thoughtful, neutral, expression was back again.
She shook her head and said: “Really, Mr. Flood, you will have to excuse me. The cause is fine…”
The tall gaunt woman interrupted her, standing vaguely on the stairs from the hall. “Can you answer the phone, Mrs. Johnston?”
She excused herself and they both disappeared down the hall to the left. I hadn’t heard a phone ring, and I had heard one being dialled. It didn’t have to mean anything. The bell might ring in another room, the kitchen maybe, or the den. Or maybe the maid had put in a call for her.
She was back in no time at all. She sat down again and pulled the smile up from nowhere, as bright and as lovely as ever.
“Tell me, Mr. Flood, how large a group are you planning?”
That tore it. Not hearing a phone ring hadn’t really bothered me. But the new lease on the smile and the sudden interest in the size of the group were all wrong. I suddenly wanted to know if anyone was outside looking for the registration card on my steering post. I didn’t keep it there, but I had license plates.
I stood up and said, “We need at least one person to a square block, Mrs. Johnston.” I turned and walked toward the hall. I heard her rise and she said: “Mr Flood, I…”
I turned at the archway and said loudly, with a wider smile and a cock of my head, “Think it over, Mrs. Johnston. I know you’ll be a real addition to our group.”
She had a hand up and her lips were parted, ready to say something when I stopped.
I went right on: “I don’t insist on an answer now, Mrs. Johnston. Talk to your husband about it.” I turned and started for the front door. “And thanks for your time. I know you’re busy.…”
I went out the door. Coming up the flagstone path was the gray-haired maid. She jumped a little when she saw me and tried to pull herself into the dress like a turtle as she squeezed past me.
“You’re wasting your time,” I said. “I stole the car from a gray-haired old lady.”
She hurried into the house without looking at me or saying anything.
I walked out and drove away. My license plates didn’t tell me whether anybody had been looking at them or not.
CHAPTER III
PORTLAND lives on one side of the deep Willamette river and works and does its shopping on the other, so it is a city of bridges, some of them broad swaggering structures of concrete and steel, and others ancient draw-bridges that look as if they are weeping over the city.
Jefferson High School was far out on the east side of the river, an aged building with little greenery around it and a tired look under the eyes. The halls were empty, and sick with the old odor of schools. The office was of the standard pattern, the long bar-high counter cutting the room in half, the windows on the office side, the relentless glare on the other. There were three women shuffling papers behind the counter. I leaned on it and my foot felt instinctively for a rail. One of the women came toward me and I told her I would like a little routine information on a Miss Margaret Bleeker who graduated in 1937.
She said I would have to wait until Mr. Dolles, the Vice Principal, was back. He was at a meeting.
I showed her my buzzer.
“Los Angeleez, heh? You’ll still have to wait.”
I thanked her and decided to wait outside. I walked out and down the oiled, bitten hallway. I was on the stairs outside when I heard it: “Just a moment, sir!” I turned, and a woman came through the archway and trotted toward me.
She was forty, a little more, a little less, and thin. She had flat cheeks and a retiring chin that made her face look as if it were in full retreat. Her eyes protruded uneasily, and were the color and brilliance of cigarette smoke.
She said, breathlessly: “I didn’t want to leave the office too soon.”
“I see.”
She smiled. She had nice big teeth. “Miss Hurkette doesn’t like men,” she whispered. “Mr. Dolles is at a meeting all right—in Seattle.” She giggled and looked over her shoulder.
“How does she act when she hates somebody?”
The eyes swelled. “Oh terrible!” she said. “But I can help you. We all remember Margaret Bleeker. What’s she done?”
I had been edging down the stairs. I came back up again now. She was looking at me eagerly, and there was a vague light dancing behind the opaqueness of her eyes.
“You tell me first,” I said. “What was she like?”
“Well, she was expelled when she was a freshman for getting terribly drunk at a Hi-Y dance.”
“But she settled down later, huh?”
“Oh no. She learned to hold her liquor.” She clapped her hand to her mouth and giggled again.
“Quite a young lady.”
“She was beautiful. When she was a junior she got one of our chemistry teachers in trouble.”
“You mean one of the chemistry teachers got her in trouble, don’t you?”
She shook her head solemnly and said. “She was perfectly innocent. It was in the laboratory. He made her stay after class… She reported him.” She put a bony hand on my arm, looked over her shoulder again, and hissed: “What’s she done?”
