There is always love (15 page)

"What is it. Cellar'

The maid held out the hand which had been behind her back. From the shaky fingers dangled a string of lustrous pearls.

"My necklace! Where did you find it?"

"Nurse found it. Madam. She was taking soiled towels from the hamper in the powder room and she foimd the pearls in the bottom. She like to faint from surprise."

"The powder room! Where's that?" Shaw demanded.

"Near the entrance door."

"Entrance doorl" Shaw held out an immaculate white handkerchief. "Put them in this, Mrs. Colton. Cox, set up your outfit in the dining room. We'll get all these fingerprints." He wheeled on the visibly terrified maid.

"Find the bracelet?" He had a gorilla trick of baring his prominent teeth as he listened.

"No, sir. No, sir. Nurse shook out all the towels thinking it might be there too, but there wasn't nothing else."

"All right. Tell her to turn out every hamper in the house. Miss Bourne, we'll take you first. As you weren't here, Mr. Sanders, we won't need your prints; you can come in and see how it's done, if you like."

'Thanks, I've seen the operation a number of times; in fact I have my own prints in the ofl&ce. Don't look so frightened, girls. It's painless."

Keith Sanders might think this a joke but Linda didn't. In spite of his sudden shift to suavity, she felt that the detective regarded her with suspicious eyes as she pressed one finger after another on a smooth, blackened surface.

"That's all. Miss Bourne. You may go. Stay and help me, Mr. Merton," Shaw ordered curtly as Greg started to follow Linda.

As she left the room she wondered what Greg Merton 84

thought of her now. He believed that she had sneaked information about his business to her boss; he had seen her drag Skid from a night club and now she'd been fingerprinted because, no matter what he said, that poisonous detective suspected that she had inside knowledge of the theft.

"Well, I see you survived," Keith Sanders observed as she entered the library. He was seated at the piano running his fingers over the keys. She regarded him with a tinge of wonder. Was this laughing, friendly man the employer who had roughly given her the choice between carrying out his orders or losing her job? Had that been only yesterday? It seemed years ago.

"What's the matter, Lindy? Don't you like me any more?"

Once on a time the tenderness of his voice might have quickened her heartbeat. Not now. She shook off the hand he placed over hers.

"Crazy about you."

"I don't like your flippant tone." He rose, linked his arm in hers and drew her to the divan. "Sit here. I want to talk to you."

"I prefer to stand. Helps preserve my size-sixteen figure."

"Just as you say. Look here, you're not sore because of what I said in the office yesterday, are you?"

"You mean about me getting fired next Friday? Of course not. It's all in the day's work. I leave on Friday and step into a new situation."

"What do you mean?"

"What I say. I have another position."

"You can't walk out on me like that. I've grown to rely on you. You're the best secretary I've ever had. I didn't mean what I said. I was upset about something outside business."

"That's just too bad but the effect was the same as if you had meant it."

"I admit I went cockeyed but when you've been in business longer you'll realize that that sort of a blowup is to be expected occasionally. You're pretty young, you know." He put his arm lightly about her shoulders and regarded her with the satisfied, tolerant smile which she had seen first at the Grant dinner.

"Don't speak to me as if I were a child."

"But such a lovely child. You've forgiven me, haven't you?" His arm tightened. "You always do forgive me, don't you? I was getting a little jealous of my business rival till I heard you tell your mother in the office that you couldn't^ love Gregory Merton if he were the only man in the world.'*

"I beg pardon," interrupted a voice. "Am I butting in on a—business conference?"

Had Greg Merton heard Keith Sanders repeat the silly defiance she had flung at her mother? If he had, so what? The question set Linda's pulses quickstepping. If he really believed he was intruding why didn't he back gracefully out instead of coming forward into the room? She tried to free herself from the arm about her shoulders but it tightened.

"How clever of you to spot a business conference, Greg. You are right. I was just telling Mr. Sanders that I am leaving his oflBce next week to accept another position."

"Then what's the idea of holding Miss Bourne when she wants to go?" Merton's eyes rested suggestively on the arm about Linda's shoulders.

"Did you engage her?" Sanders demanded truculently and thrust his hands hard into the pockets of his jacket. Merton ignored the question.

"Where are you going, Linda?" he asked.

"Not that it's anyone's business but mine and the person who engaged me, but I am to be a sort of secretary-companion to Madam Steele."

"Like fun you are! You—*'

"You clever kidl You darned clever kid," Sanders interrupted Greg's shocked protest. "So that's the way you intend to put across the sale? I am to have a representative on the spot. You'll get your cut-in on the commission just the same as if you were punching the time clock at the oflBce."

"Long distance for you, Mr. Sanders." The butler cut short Keith Sanders' exuberance.

"All right, Oscar. We'll talk this business matter over tomorrow, Miss New England. You're good; but even so, I may have some suggestions that wUl help."

Back to the room, he stopped in the doorway to speak to the butler. Linda had a flashing mental vision of herself dizzily clutching a chair in the dusky hall, of a man's figure outlined against the light. She knew now why it had seemed familiar. It had been Keith Sanders! But it couldn't have been. He hadn't arrived. Was she still dazed?

"Why are you brushing your hand across your eyes? Faint again?" Greg Merton inquired anxiously.

''No. I—I just remembered that I thought I saw Keith going out the front door when I came in from the swimming pool. As he didn't arrive till dinnertime my brain must have been addled by the sun or the shock of Billy Boy's crazy jump."

"You thought you saw Sanders," Greg Merton repeated

sharply. With noticeable effort he lightened his voice. "Like

him so much that you see him everywhere, I take it. Skip him.

He's out Did you mean it when you said you had accepted a

position with Madam Steele? You can't do it. You mustn't go there."

"Why? Because you think I'll influence her to engage Keith Sanders to take care of all her real-estate business?"

"Hang the business. It isn't safe."

"Not safe! Don't be fooUsh. What do you mean by 'safe'V

"If you need to have a simple English word explained, I mean that she insists upon keeping her jewels, which are fabulous, in the house and boasts of it, boasts that she is an excellent shot. She's one of those maddening women who knows it all. Can't be told anything. She exasperates her legal adviser, Judge Reynolds, to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Someday, someone is going to grab that loot and there will be one grand shootin' party with perhaps a smattering of blood or even a scatter of dead bodies."

Linda remembered her mother's anxiety to clear the matrimonial field for Hester; Sanders' voice as he exulted: "So thafs the way you intend to put across the sale!" Better to let Greg Merton think that her reason for going to Madam Steele was to further Keith's interests. Then he would dislike her even more and her mother and Hester would be happy.

"Sounds exciting to me. Perhaps she'll arm me, too. I've alv/ays wanted to learn to shoot. This is a chance in a lifetime; I'm going."

"You're crazy!"

"It's fun to be crazy."

"Sure, why not? I'm speaking out of turn, I can see that you're in Aunt Jane's class, one of those maddening females who can't be told. Sanders was right; you are going as his Johnny on the spot, aren't you?" His eyes burned in his white face.

"That seems to be his idea."

"Then that's all I can do about it. But some dark night when you're waked up by a flashlight in your eyes and a masked face bending over you, don't say I didn't warn you."

"Who's warning who, or should I say Svhom'?" Skidmore Grant inquired from the threshold.

"Lindy has accepted a position as secretary with Madam Steele and I've warned her—"

"Practically ordered."

"Not to go." Greg Merton finished the sentence which had been indignantly interrupted by Linda.

"Why shouldn't she go? She wants to change her job. Anything would be better than working for that big stiff she's with now, sez I."

Greg told of the owner's recklessness in hoarding cash and jewels in The Castle.

"It's not a safe place for a girl."

"Brother, haven't you learned yet that you can't stop an American from running to a fire? I'll bet it's as safe as this house where a person can enter and walk off with a diamond bracelet, drop a string of pearis in a hamper almost at the front door while the family is practically in the back yard, isn't it?"

"Thanks, Skiddy, for your moral support. Do you think someone came in from outside?" Linda asked hopefully. After all, Janet hadn't known Hester and herself long, and with Shaw filling the air with suspicion of her guests as a bomb spreads poison gas, it wouldn't be surprising if she began to doubt their honesty.

"I do. That boneheaded detective begins to think it was."

"Shaw's keen. He's the one I reconamended to you, Skid. I still believe he could help us. Talk with him before he goes, to satisfy me, will you? He went a bit cockeyed tonight, I admit, but he's a good egg and a surefire sleuth. I wonder why the light-fingered gent or lady left that string of pearls?"

"It's a bracelet year, apparently. Greg told you, didn't he, that we're getting a trifle 'warm' about Mother's bracelet, Lindy?" Skid Grant inquired in a low voice as Merton turned to speak to his sister as she entered the room.

"Yes, and warned me that it was a hush-hush story."

"That goes too for the spectacle I made of myself at the night club. I'd like to see a movie of you and me sneaking out."

"Perhaps our detective friend, Jim Shaw, can accommodate you. He seems to be fully informed as to the act we put on even to your change of name. In spite of that I believe in him. I have a feeling that he is deliberately trailing a few red herrings across his trail. Is that mustache you're cultivating a disguise?"

"It's a beaut, what?" Grant tenderly stroked the stiff red sprouts on his upper lip.

"That's a matchless imderstatement. It's one of a thousand, fortunately."

"You're ribbing me but I can take it. Lindy, do you think you'd better put through the deal with Madam Steele? Greg's a bright boy. He's pretty sure to know what he's talking about."

"Objection overruled—^That's a hang-over from Dad's court days. Think of the years she has lived at The Castle without its being burglarized. I like her. I wdll see a side of life I've never seen before. She will pay me enough to provide clothes suitable to a stratum of society which will be an education. In short I'm in luck. . . . Here's our ace sleuth with his suspects behind him. What has he up his sleeve now?" 8S

Apparently Jim Shaw had nothing up his sleeve. He declared he was convinced that no one in the house knew the whereabouts of the missing bracelet, that he would follow clues which led outside.

"I'll shove, folks." His eyes traveled from Hester's flushed face to Ruth's beside her, leaped from man to man, lingered on Lindy, came back to Janet Colton.

"Just one thing more. What's the value of that bracelet, Mrs. Colton?"

Janet spoke to her husband who was standing between Skid Grant and Keith Sanders.

"Bill, Mr. Shaw wants to know the value of the bracelet which was stolen. It was the one you brought home to me two weeks ago."

"Oh, thatl It cost me four grand. What the cost . . ." His voice was drowned in a crash as a Ming lamp toppled and fell, breaking into a dozen pieces.

"Sorry, Mrs. Colton. Did I do that?" Keith Sanders' face was a brilliant red. "I must have stepped back suddenly. I didn't know I was anywhere near the table." He knelt to pick up the pieces. Greg Merton bent to help him.

"I'm waiting to hear the value of that bracelet," the detective reminded acidly. "And tipping over that table isn't going to let you off from telling, Mr. Colton."

XVII

ALMOST three months had slipped away since she had come to The Castle, Linda reflected, as from the window of her boudoir she watched snow drifting and blowing in white sheets. The branches of a tree reached and writhed against the sky like an enraged octopus grabbing for its prey. The river was turgid gun-metal gray. October had gone and taken with it the last vestige of color from the garden, had left behind patches of black on the lawns. November had presented a parade of horses, their sleekness and beauty equaled only by the regally-furred-and-frocked women who flocked to admire them, heard John Barbirolli reviving Debussy's Berceuse Heroique at the Philharmonic on Armistice Day—a mournful commentary on wars and their consequences; had loaded shopwindows with footballs, crimson and blue, and the miniature turkeys and pumpkin-orange of Thanksgiving. December had filled the shops with red-bowed holly wreaths, glistening trees, multicolored lights and shining baUs. Christmas was but two weeks ahead.

In all that time she had met Greg Merton only casually

at Ruth's. He had been frigidly courteous. If he had come to The Castle it must have been when she was in the city for an evening of gaiety. Madam Steele had been wonderful, had invited young people to meet her, had entertained Ruth and Hester, Skid Grant and Keith Sanders for week ends.

Keith Sanders. She couldn't quite make him out. Her late boss had slipped easily from the role of employer to that of devoted escort, as devoted as she would permit. He had accepted the withdrawal of The Castle estate from the market with a resigned 'These womeni" shrug. Madam Steele apparently liked him. At first, she had looked at him with her sharp "Is it a touch?'* expression when he had been at his smoothest and most suave.