Call After Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page B

then found it, in a corner, its heavy wood bleached to a kind of gray beige. The top was carefully arranged with jade paper knife, jade inkstand, a tall orange lamp with a white shade. She missed the thin old rug, but it had been really too old and too thin and Fiora was certainly quite right to replace it with a mustard green, thickly piled carpet. But it was a very different room. Fiora had made her mark on the house as Jenny herself had never done.
    In fact she couldn’t think of anything in particular she had done herself to change the house. She wouldn’t have thought of changing anything, for it had seemed to her as if even the massive mahogany chairs and tables were a part of the house and had earned their right to stay exactly as they were. Besides, Peter had secretly loved every one of them.
    She felt a sneaking admiration for Fiora’s courage in discarding anything she—or the decorators—chose to discard. At the same time she missed the odd comfort of familiar and loved things.
    She lost herself in thinking of the two enchanted springs she had spent in that house. The doors at the end of the room opened upon a terrace overlooking the Sound. When there was a storm at sea, waves dashed against the sea wall below the house and sent salt spray up over it. She and Peter had walked on the terrace many times and heard the peepers in the spring, shrilling out musically everywhere, and watched gulls dropping mussels down upon the stones to crack them open and swooping to pick up the exposed food; Peter had laughed and said it was a hard way to earn one’s dinner. She remembered the great trunks of the wisteria which lined the terrace and burst into masses of softly purple bloom, and the jonquils which came out brilliantly gay and yellow.
    But the present was Fiora lying back on the pillows with her eyes closed. The present was Peter sitting beside Fiora. The present was Blanche, upright and composed, her ankles neatly together; there was no lounging for Blanche. Her eyes looked rather pale and abstracted, yet Jenny felt that if she so much as moved a finger Blanche would know it. The present was waiting for police to investigate a prowler and a gunshot.
    Jenny looked at Cal and he was looking at her. Unless she imagined it there was a kind of warning in his eyes, as if he wanted to say, Don’t get involved in this.
    How could Fiora have failed to see someone standing in the pantry, someone with a gun?
    It could have happened if that someone had managed to approach Fiora as she bent over the refrigerator.
    Cal said abruptly, “Is anything missing? Was it a robbery?”
    Peter gave him a deliberate look and rose. “I didn’t look.”
    “I did,” Blanche said coolly. “There’s a bracelet and a necklace on Fiora’s dressing table.”
    Fiora’s eyelids fluttered. “The rest of my jewelry is in the safe. In Peter’s room.”
    “I’ll see,” Peter said and went at his usual solid pace out of the room. He was back in a matter of moments. “Nothing’s been touched. He must have got scared and got away. He must have been hiding on the back stairs and heard Fiora, thought she’d seen him, so he shot at her and escaped. That seems reasonable.”
    “There’s a car,” Cal said.
    It was the doctor. He was young, and unshaven at that hour, so he looked vaguely raffish and untidy. He also looked sleepy and a little unnerved, as well he might be, Jenny reflected, called out in the middle of the night to attend a gunshot wound.
    “Sorry about this, Doctor,” Peter said, acutely sensing the young doctor’s weariness. “It was a prowler—thief, somebody got into the house.”
    The young doctor’s face waked up. “Did you get him?”
    “No, he got away. We’ve sent for the police.”
    The doctor shook his head. “Too much of that around here. Big houses. Well, now let’s just see about it, Mrs. Vleedam.”
    Mrs. Vleedam. It was the first time Jenny had heard Fiora called Mrs. Vleedam; she had always thought