The Withdrawing Room Read Online Free PDF Page B

all their old haunts out of existence or into respectability.
    Luckily, she could escape before long. Sarah had let it be known that exactly half an hour after she’d served the coffee, she would either adjourn to her upstairs lair or go out to whatever social engagement she might have, though since she’d opened her boardinghouse she hadn’t been invited anywhere. She did so tonight, leaving the others to continue socializing in the library or get on with their own plans for the evening.
    As it happened, nobody was going anywhere. The lodgers were all still in the library enjoying their unaccustomed congeniality when the telephone rang at about a quarter past nine. After several rings, when it became clear that Charles and Mariposa must be in their basement quarters reading good books, listening to Bach partitas, or more probably doing something else, Sarah came back downstairs to answer it.
    According to old-fashioned custom, the original instrument had been installed in the front hall. This was the one she answered. As the library door was open, her boarders could hear, and the babble of conversation died suddenly as she gasped, “The police station? Yes, this is Mrs. Kelling. Yes, he does. Mr. Quiffen is one of my boarders. No, I’m not acquainted with his family, but I can find out who they are. Why? What’s happened to him?”
    They told her. She put down the receiver and entered the library with a face as white as the linen damask tablecloth she’d have to iron tomorrow. “I’m afraid we have some bad news. Mr. Quiffen has been in an accident.”
    “What kind of accident?” demanded Mr. Porter-Smith.
    Sarah swallowed hard. “He appears to have fallen under a subway train at Haymarket Station.”
    “What the hell was he doing at Haymarket Station?” That was a stupid question. Oddly enough, it was Professor Ormsby who asked.
    “I have no idea,” she replied.
    “Is he badly hurt?” was Mrs. Sorpende’s more reasonable inquiry.
    “He—” Sarah found she could not go on.
    “You mean he’s dead?” squealed Miss LaValliere.
    “I—I believe it happened very quickly.”
    “Naturally it would have to,” said Mr. Porter-Smith. “When you consider the weight and velocity of a subway train—”
    Sarah had no desire to consider any such thing. “Excuse me,” she interrupted. “I must call some friends and see if they can tell me who are his next of kin. Mr. Porter-Smith, you might pour us each a little brandy, if you will. I’ll get the decanter.”
    “Please allow me.” The young pontificator switched without effort to his role as mountain climber. He was out of his chair and across the room in a bound. Sarah showed him where to find the brandy and the liqueur glasses. Then she escaped to the kitchen, where there was an extension telephone, and dialed the Protheroes’.
    George was, as she’d expected, three sheets to the wind and fast asleep by this time. Anora was awake and every bit as shocked as Sarah had thought she would be.
    “Barney wasn’t such a bad old wart when you got to know him,” she snuffled, “and we’d known him forever. George is going to take it hard.” As to relatives, Anora had to stop and think. “Barney never married. Or anything else,” she added forthrightly. “He could never find a woman to suit him, and if he had, she’d have known better than to get stuck with such a pest. I expect you’ve had your hands full. But Barney wasn’t any worse than a lot of others, no matter what they say.”
    The parents were long gone, of course. There had been a brother, but he was dead, too. However, Anora was pretty sure she could produce a nephew and a cousin or two.
    “I hope you can,” sighed Sarah. “Otherwise this may wind up as my responsibility. Frankly, Anora, I don’t think I could cope.”
    “Of course you couldn’t and why should you? George is one of the executors. Poor old Barney was going to be one of his. They used to go on about which would get to