Family Skeletons by Patrick Quentin

Author:Patrick Quentin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media
Published: 2018-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

PART FIVE

I had to go to work the next day. There were appointments all morning. And yet I dreaded leaving Virginia. It was overanxious, I knew, to worry about Trant. If he did show up, she could handle any disastrous situation at least as effectively as I. Hadn’t she already proved that point? But it was more personal than that. It was myself of whom I was really afraid. When I was with her, it was all right. Her closeness, the sight of her, the ability to put out my hand and touch her kept my trust intact. It was only when I was away from her that the insidious doubts were apt to nag. She could have spoken to Olsen at the Club Marocain. She could have made a date to meet him at the apartment. She could have invented that call from Sheila. The front-door key … the gun …

She came with me into the hall. Her face was pale and peaked from our horrible night but she was trying her best to be cheerful.

“Don’t worry, darling. If he comes, I can lie myself blue in the face. At least that’s something I’ve become quite expert at.”

I wished she hadn’t said that. I kissed her and went to the elevator.

I was actually flagging a cab on 61st Street when I changed my mind and decided to walk. There was no conscious reason for this. I merely started down Madison Avenue on foot. It was only when I was passing Constance Spry that I realised it had, from the beginning, been my destination.

For a moment, having no plan because there was no reasonable plan to have, I paused, looking in the window at huge unseasonable chrysanthemums, azaleas foaming pink, white and purple, and sprays of orchids delicate as clusters of sleeping butterflies. Three days ago Esmeralda had come here with Olsen’s twenty-dollar bill. Where? Stuck in the top of her stocking? They might remember her. But what if they did? What possibility …?

A large woman in lumpy tweeds who could well have been a classmate of Aunt Peggy’s at Miss Something or Other’s Academy had emerged from a chauffeur-driven limousine and pushed past me into the store. On impulse, I followed.

The air inside was moist and pleasant with the perfume of flowers and the indefinable freshness that growing plants exhale. The woman was clearly a treasured customer, for she was greeted by two assistants and taken off to inspect an enormous rubber plant. “We hope you’ll find it large enough, Mrs. Carmichael.” Large enough, I wondered, for what?

A third assistant came to me. As he stood awaiting my order I felt ridiculous embarrassment.

I said, “This is rather complicated. A friend of mine bought some flowers here three days ago. I want to reduplicate the order but I forgot to ask her what the flowers actually were. All I know is they cost twenty-dollars and my friend …”

I described Esmeralda as well as I knew how. The description seemed totally inadequate.

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