Tiger Milk by David Garth

Author:David Garth [Garth, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery;espionage;war;spies;Nazi
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

The dim grayness of early twilight had settled over Philadelphia when Philip Courtney arrived at the Mayhew Foundation. He dismissed his taxi and stood there a moment, drawing on his gloves, glancing up at the old brownstone building. The Mayhew Foundation looked like one of those fine old private residences of an earlier period—solid, dignified, with great high windows and chimney pots studding an abruptly sloping slate roof.

Courtney walked up the stone steps, entered the storm vestibule, and before a grilled-iron door to the foyer proper he stopped and rang a bell. He heard it sound close at hand inside somewhere and shortly afterward the door was opened by a correct and courteous houseman.

“I would like to see Miss Linda Baker,” Courtney said. “I understand that she teaches here.”

The houseman escorted him to the Foundation’s office where an elderly woman receptionist took him in charge.

“Miss Baker is teaching,” he was informed. “Would you wait a half-hour or so?”

“Of course,” said Courtney.

As he sat in the small reception room off the wide, high ceilinged foyer, soft snatches of music occasionally reached his ears; once the strains of a violin flowed in gossamer waves as a studio door was opened, and another time he heard the deep sonorous manifestoes of a cello.

Linda was a long time coming. It seemed more than a half-hour before he heard the staccato beat of heels in the foyer and then looked up to see her sweep into the reception room.

“Court!” she exclaimed, and extended a hand. “I am astonished. But,” she laughed, “very pleased.”

She wore a simple black dress, its simplicity relieved only by a thin string of pearls about her throat. Yet with her black hair brushed back in two heavy wings from her low forehead and her mouth deftly touched with flame, the very simplicity of her costume became like an effective backdrop to the appeal of the low warmth of her cultivated voice and the quick expression in her mobile face.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” she went on, sitting down with him. “What brings you to this shrine of music?”

“The last time I saw Berkeley she said that you had mentioned teaching here,” said Courtney. He hesitated. “You have not seen her lately?” he asked tentatively.

“Only once, a day or two after we left the plane,” said Linda. She viewed him curiously. “You don’t mean you came down to Philadelphia just to ask me that?”

“Heaven forbid!” disclaimed Philip Courtney. “I mean—well, not exactly. You behold in me a rebel against the tradition that thirty minutes after a journey ends traveling companions scatter to the four winds to be remembered only by Christmas cards for a few years and then blank silence.” He grinned at her. “For example, I can remember very distinctly how we all had dinner in Horta that night—Berkeley and you and Luce and myself. Remember?”

“I do,” said Linda Baker. And if you are rounding up the same group you may count me in.”

“Unfortunately,” said Courtney, “I have no idea where either of them are.

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