“I think we’d better go,” Sam Phelps said nervously. He went to Monk Whitney and put out his hand. “Sorry. Elsie’s upset. All this war work she’s doing——”
Monk Whitney smiled rather grimly. “I’m used to it, Sam. So long.”
Sam Phelps made a stiff bow to me and followed his wife out. There was complete silence in the room for an instant. Abigail Whitney opened her eyes then.
“Elsie is Very Trying,” she said. “I’ve always found it best not to listen to her. I Concentrate my Mind on Something Else.” She raised her hand toward me. “Dear Child, you want to go to your room. It’s upstairs, in back, or is it front? It’s wherever Myron isn’t, and I’m sure you can tell. Come down Again soon, won’t you?” She went on without a stop, “Travis, dear Boy, you must have a great many Things to do. I won’t keep you any longer—and close the door, it’s very drafty in here.”
Travis Elliot followed me out into the hall and did close the door. Then he looked at me with a smile. “You’ll get used to her.”
“I hadn’t realized she was an invalid,” I said.
He nodded. “She slipped on the ice eight years ago, and she’s never walked since.”
His face sobered. “It was coming from my father’s funeral. I’ve always felt sort of—— Well, you know. That’s not why I come here, though. I’m nuts about her. . . . Oh, I forgot.”
He turned back and knocked on the door, and I went on upstairs, to find the back room, or was it the front.
I knew the instant I pushed open the door that it wasn’t the back. My feet had made no sound on the thickly carpeted stairs. The girl kneeling on the floor beside the waste-paper basket, her back to me, her hair a shower of molten copper in the light from the desk lamp, was too intently occupied to be aware the door was opening until it was too late.
She started violently and flashed her head around, a breathless gasp parting her red lips, the defiance that had darted into her eyes changing to alarmed dismay at the sight of someone she didn’t know. I must have looked just as startled myself.
“Who . . . are you?” she stammered. Her face flushed crimson as she got to her feet in the middle of the litter of papers from Myron Kane’s wastebasket. Some of them were still in crumpled balls, and the ones she’d smoothed out to read had partly finished paragraphs on them, obviously discarded by Myron Kane as unsatisfactory.
“I’m Grace Latham,” I said. “I’m sorry. I was looking for my room.”
She took a step toward me. “You’re a friend of Myron’s, aren’t you? He’s talked about you. I’m Laurel Frazier. Maybe you can do something. That’s why Mrs. Whitney asked you to come, isn’t it?”
She stood there, her back to the desk, slim and really lovely, and still startled, the color in her cheeks heightened, her chin raised, not defiant now, so much as defensive. She didn’t look more than eighteen, in the Quakerish gray wool dress with a narrow white collar tied in a small bow at the throat. Her eyes were wide-set and the curious gray-blue of wood hyacinths, flecked with black. I could understand Travis Elliot and Myron Kane wanting to marry her more easily than I could Judge Whitney having had her as private secretary for five years. She looked more like a frightened, lovely child than an efficient young woman one took on a mission to London.
It was an extraordinarily embarrassing situation for both of us, and I didn’t really know what to say.
“I’m not a friend of Myron’s when he takes things that don’t belong to him,” I replied. I don’t know why I added, “It’s the—the document, I suppose?”
It seemed a silly thing to call it, but that was apparently what it was, the way they all referred to it.
The pulse in her throat quickened as she stared at me. “He . . . told you?”
I shook my head. “Judge Whitney’s daughter. Mrs. Phelps.”
“Elsie.” It was hardly more than a whisper, and the color ebbed sharply from her cheeks. “Then she was listening. I knew she was. I told him so.”
“Told——”
“Judge Whitney.” She said it mechanically. “Oh, it’s so awful! Now everybody—— And it’s my fault!”
She turned her head away, trying to keep back the tears that were glistening along her thick black lashes. I looked around the room. She’d done a thorough if slapdash job of searching it. The drawers of the dresser and the desk were pushed back crooked and the books and papers on the desk were pretty helter-skelter.
“If only I’d been careful!” she said. “And he’s being so wonderful about it. He keeps saying not to worry, it isn’t my fault and it’ll turn up somewhere in the library, but I know he’s terribly upset. He’s gone through everything over and again, at night after I’ve gone. But it isn’t there. I’ve looked everywhere.”
“What . . . is it?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. All I know is it’s something that will . . . hurt somebody terribly.” She tried to control her voice. “It’s worse because it wasn’t his. It’s something she gave him to keep.” She nodded down toward Abigail Whitney’s room. “She gave it to him because she said she could trust him not to open it better than she could herself.”
“Then she doesn’t—neither of them knows what’s in it?”
“She may now. Maybe Myron told her. She always finds everything out, someway.”
I wondered if that could explain her sudden desperate fear when she’d talked to me over the phone that morning. She surely hadn’t known, whatever it was, when she wrote to me.
“If only I hadn’t been so smart,” Laurel Frazier was saying helplessly. “It was me that suggested it. I wanted people to know about my boss, because I’m so proud of him. And he said I could give Myron a file of his old records, and it must have been in them.”
She stopped short, her slim body stiffening as if an electric charge had gone through it, the color rising in her cheeks again. She was looking past me at the door, and I turned quickly. Monk Whitney was there, looking down at the littered floor. If he was surprised, there was nothing in his manner to show it. He came on into the room.
“It didn’t occur to you to check through the file before you gave it to him?” he said calmly. “Where’s the old Frazier efficiency they talk about, Coppertop?”
She flared up passionately. “Quit calling me Coppertop! And I don’t need you to tell me what I should have done! I know it. I started to, but we were busy, and they were all before my time. I know it’s my fault. I’m not trying to pretend it isn’t!”
“Myself, I don’t see what all the row’s about,” he said imperturbably. “If the old man’s got a dark streak in the past, I’m all for it. If it’s too dark, the Post isn’t going to publish it. They aren’t running a scandal sheet. Nobody’ll be hurt.”
“You don’t know Myron Kane!” Laurel retorted hotly. “He’s so clever, they’ll never know what he’s doing. It’ll sound perfectly all right. I know. He told me in London last year he’d got even with lots of people that way.”
Monk Whitney shook his head. “Who’s he: got to get even with around here, Dear Child?”
“Everybody. Sam and Elsie treated him like a police reporter with the smallpox. And he’s sensitive as a child; he’s always trying to cover up to keep from being hurt. Travis was horrid, and you’ve been just as bad. Patronizing and superior——”
“I thought he was doing the superior patronizing, myself.” He grinned at her amiably. “And personally, I don’t give a damn about what he said