Rex Stout - 1934 - The President Vanishes by Rex Stout

Author:Rex Stout [Stout, Rex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76806-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

13

At half-past seven Wednesday evening Alma Cronin was in her room eating crackers and mushroom soup which she had taken from a can and heated on the electric plate she kept in her bathroom. She had not been able to get away from the White House until six-thirty. The flood of personal telegrams and letters which had been arriving since dawn for Mrs. Stanley were for the most part going disregarded, but it had been Alma’s task to sort out from them the few that might require acknowledgment or prove pertinent to the crisis. Mrs. Robbins had asked her to return for the evening, and she had promised to do so later.

At six-thirty she had left. She was worried. The man who was to call on her at eight o’clock surely wasn’t such a fool that the possibility of a trap had not occurred to him. Would he not be watching in front of her house to observe those who entered? He might even know Chick Moffat, a member of the White House squad, by sight. The house she lived in was not large, three stories, built of stone up to the sidewalk, one of the better classes of those hundreds of buildings in clusters here and there in various parts of Washington, consisting of room-and-bath apartments designed for the profit of the owners and the convenience of privates and lesser officers in the army, male and female, which carries on the work of the government. It had a small garden-court in the rear. Alma’s room was one flight up, in front, with windows on the street.

She bought crackers and a can of soup and hurried home, to telephone Chick a warning. She could not get him. She tried his apartment several times; there was no answer; and even called the Secret Service Bureau; he was not there. She gave it up, and ate the crackers and soup, and worried. She was restless and uncomfortable and on edge. Various elements were contributing to her inquietude, but they were all merely differing aspects of the central fact that she was twenty-four years old and that life, which had hitherto presented itself to her as an arena for interesting and lively discussion, had suddenly begun to display to her the realities of its passions and conflicts. Harry Brownell, with whom she had several times spoken, who had been to her eye a discreet and polished person impressively intimate with power, had become a man in jail, suspected of an execrable treachery. Mrs. Stanley, who had been an affable, amusing and ubiquitous First Lady, a central figure in the national tableau, had become a woman whose husband was missing and who, far from appearing stricken with grief or anxiety, seemed rather to be filled with a pleased excitement at her opportunity to contribute to the noise of affairs and alarms. Arthur, the nice little man with spectacles in the receiving-room downstairs, to whom one went for lead pencils or fertilizing tablets for the

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