The Philadelphia Murder Story Read Online Free PDF

moment after he’d finished reading it. Then he crumpled it up with the others and tossed them back into Myron’s wastebasket. He turned to Laurel with a sardonic grin.
    “Being nice to Kane didn’t net you much, Miss Frazier. You are marrying the young man, aren’t you?”
    The two red spots I’d seen in her cheeks at the Broad Street Station were burning there again.
    “I certainly am.”
    He looked at her silently for an instant, the grin disappearing slowly. “You know, I wouldn’t, if I were you.”
    Her eyes widened with astonishment. I thought as much at the sudden change in his tone as at what he’d said.
    “You’ve never been in love with the guy,” he added.
    “I suppose you think I’m being grateful too?”
    “As a matter of fact, it wasn’t you I was thinking about. It’s Travis. He’s too good a guy—”
    “You mean he’s not in love with me? He’s just marrying me because—” She stopped, her eyes incredulous, her breath coming quickly.
    “I think you’re both all mixed up with a lot of feeling grateful and sorry and this is what’s expected of you, and neither of you has ever been in love with anybody.” He stopped short, looking at her. “I guess I ought to keep my trap shut. I’m sorry, Laurel. I didn’t—”
    “You just don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s all,” she said quickly.
    The words were blurred and scarcely audible as she made an abrupt move toward the door and was gone down the stairs.
    Monk Whitney stood staring after her for an instant. He turned back slowly and looked at me. “I guess we’re all wet,” he said. “She is in love with the guy, after all.”
    He went on looking at me, so I said, probably acidly, “It looks like it. And what are you trying to do?”
    He looked for an instant then as if he thought it was none of my business, which, heaven knows, was true. But he said curtly, “Aunt Abby’s worried. She doesn’t think Laurel’s in love with Travis, or Travis with her, and Laurel’d marry Kane if she had an out. She asked me to talk to her—and now, because she didn’t know she was up here. I came up to see if Kane was in. I guess I wasn’t—”
    I drew a deep breath. “Look,” I said. “You talk about your aunt as if she were God. She’s not. She’s a scheming, worldly old woman, a lot smarter than all the rest of you put together.”
    I was more than a little annoyed, for some reason, or I expect I’d have used more tact.
    “She knows perfectly well Laurel Frazier isn’t in love with Myron Kane, but she’s perfectly willing to sell her down the river just to stop him from writing that profile or to get back that document, whatever it is—one or both. I’ll be willing to bet anything she and Myron have made a deal. She wrote me yesterday and said Laurel ought to be terribly grateful to Travis Elliot and she thought they’d be married soon. Now she’s made a complete about-face. She’s counting on all of you to make Laurel so unhappy she’ll marry Myron. If that doesn’t work, she’ll probably put it to her, on the grounds that it’ll save your father, because she knows the girl adores him and thinks this is all her fault. And if I were you, I’d be ashamed to have any part in it.”
    I stopped, rather appalled at my own temerity, and also startled at the towering structure I’d built up on the patch of quicksand of fact I’d overheard in the Broad Street Station.
    “Well, of course I may be entirely wrong,” I added hastily. “I haven’t—I mean I guess I said that because I think you’re being a little rough on her.”
    He stood there silently, thinking it over. “I wonder,” he said. “Could be.” He looked around the room. “Did she do all this?”
    He indicated the hastily pushed-in drawers and littered papers. I nodded. He went around methodically straightening things up, still pretty sober-faced, picked up one or two of Myron’s unfinished paragraphs lying on the floor, glanced at