Who Done It by Alice Laurance & Isaac Asimov (Ed)

Author:Alice Laurance & Isaac Asimov (Ed)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

The Winthrops had a tremendous collection of Big Band records—Miller, Lombardo, Harry James … But then, the Winthrops had a tremendous collection of almost everything, and when they gave a party, Tom Winthrop’s measure of its success was the variety of his possessions to which his guests found their way. His hospitality was excessive: champagne, the best of liquors; the dining-room buffet — replenished throughout the evening, with monster prawns, half-lobsters, mounds of succulent beef, crisp vegetables, mousses, and souffles, melons, cheeses, and the most delicate of pastries.

The trouble with the Winthrops’ parties was that nothing ever happened at them; paradoxically, too much was going on. There was a billiard room in the basement for those not drawn to the dance. Next to the billiard room was the gun room, with its trophies of ancestral hunts. Tom liked to tell that it was part of Sally’s inheritance. Her great-grandfather was supposed to have gone big-game hunting with Teddy Roosevelt. The younger residents of Maiden’s End had a modest reverence for that Roosevelt, but their politics, for the most part, were in the tradition of his cousin Franklin. Nor did they have much taste for guns or the hunt. It was generally by accident that a guest found himself—or herself—in the gun room. Or he might pass through it on his way to a room Winthrop called “The Double Entendre,” where he housed his collection of pornographic art.

It remains to be said of Winthrop — or perhaps of Maiden’s End — that since he had built Woodside, a neo-Tudor mansion that dwarfed the sedate, more modest houses, some of which were historically significant, no one in the community had ever asked him if he was related to other Winthrops of their acquaintance.

• • •

On the afternoon of what became known as the last Winthrop party, Jan Swift stopped by the Adams house to see what Nancy was going to wear. Jan, a plump, self-conscious woman, didn’t like parties, but she went to them. She’d have liked it less not to be asked, and if you didn’t go to one, you might not be asked to the next. Or so Jan feared. What it amounted to was that when the invitation came she was so relieved to have been asked — for Fred’s sake mostly, she told herself — that there was never any doubt of their accepting.

“Hello?” she called up the stairs. The Adamses still left their door unlocked in the daytime. “Nancy, it’s me.”

“Hello, you,” Nancy called down, a greeting that always gave Jan pleasure, something about the intimacy of it. Jan had never heard her say it to anyone else. “Come up if you like. Or I’ll be down in a minute. I’m doing a bed in the guest room.”

Jan climbed the stairs, a little aware of her weight, and wondered what she could wear and be comfortable to dance in that wouldn’t look like a tent. She loved to dance when she got high enough and someone besides Fred asked her.

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