Odor of Violets, Baynard Kendrick [best short novels .txt] 📗

included, and he hadn’t seen her mink coat in the coat closet. He shrugged his shoulders and walked to the window to stand for a while watching the automobiles speed along through the slush on Park Avenue ten stories below. It was fun to have the use of a six-room New York apartment while the owners were away. It gave one a feeling of importance. The Ritters were swell—realized that he and Babs were old enough to have a little sense. Not many people would have left permission for visitors to order what they wanted from the restaurant downstairs.

Stacy left his place at the window and turned on the radio. A midnight program of dance music was on, playing a hit from a current picture. He sat down at the Mason and Hamlin grand and swung into the melody. He had seen the picture that evening with a friend. It pleased him to be able to remember every passage of the song; to select the key the orchestra was using.

When the number was finished, he shut off the radio. Back at the piano, he played the piece over and over again, adding variations of his own, playing very softly. A clock chimed somewhere. He quit abruptly in the middle of a bar and walked out into the hall.

Packages, gaudy in Christmas wrappings, were piled along one wall—tokens of several hours spent shopping with Babs during the day. Stacy passed them by and stopped before a bedroom door. He listened for a second or two before he knocked lightly and called his sister’s name. The hall light fell across an unrumpled bed when he opened the door.

His slim shoulders were set and a line of determination strengthened his youthful chin when he returned to the living room. He had a code of his own governing the relationship between brother and sister. It was simply that they let each other alone.

Babs knew what time he’d be back at the apartment from the picture show. She’d told him that she had a dinner date and would be home before eleven. It wasn’t his province to check up on her if she stayed out until two, but for her not to telephone was unfair.

With a telephone directory spread out beside him on the piano bench, Stacy sat for a long time staring down at Paul Gerente’s name. Babs had carefully avoided saying where she was going, but Stacy knew. He knew nearly everything that Babs thought, and did—except, possibly, why she persisted in treating him like a fool. He closed the book with a bang. Babs would never forgive him if he called Paul Gerente.

“She wouldn’t be there, anyhow,” he assured himself half aloud. “They’ve probably gone dancing in the Rainbow Room.”

He took a current mystery from the bookrack and went to his own room feeling that Babs’s unthinking lateness had brought a depressing end to a pleasant day. In bed, he read for more than an hour, lowering the book every time he heard the elevator stop at the tenth floor.

It was difficult to concentrate on the story. Accidents kept filling his mind. Such things were always happening in New York—taxicabs crashing—pedestrians getting run over—people slipping in the ice and snow. Finally he turned out the reading lamp and fell into a restless doze to awake some time between three and four.

His pajamas were damp with perspiration. He got up drowsily, realizing that he had neglected to open a window in the room. Barefooted, he crossed the hall and opened Babs’s door.

The bed was still smooth and unrumpled. Stacy switched on the light and ran a hand nervously through his tousled blond hair. Babs was thoughtless in lots of things, but she had her own code, too. Nothing but tragedy, Stacy felt certain, would keep her out with a man until four.

His drowsiness fled as he looked about the room. With the light on, he noticed something which had not been apparent before. The room was disconcertingly bare. The dressing table was cleared. Babs’s traveling bag was missing from the stand at the foot of the bed. Moved by a sense of panic, he ran across the floor and opened the closet. It was empty, and for dragging seconds he stood leaning weakly against the door.

His first thought of sudden illness in the family he put quickly away. If his father, brother, or Norma had summoned Babs she would have left a note. Even if she had forgotten it in her haste, someone would have phoned him. They all knew where he was.

Dazedly, he walked from room to room of the apartment searching for an answer. It came after a time—logical and most unpleasant, but the only possible reason he could think of for Babs to leave and take her clothes away.

Resolutely, he picked up the phone in the living room and put in a Hartford call. He was faced with something which only Norma could handle, something overwhelming which must be broken to his father with a woman’s diplomacy.

He was shaking when the distant ringing of the phone bell finally stopped and he realized the call was through.

“Norma?” he said.

“Yes. Who is it?” Her familiar voice sounded strained, distant and faraway.

“It’s Stacy. Something terrible’s happened, Norma. I don’t know what to do. Babs has eloped with a man. She’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know. She took all her things and left no word. It’s terrible, Norma. I don’t know how to tell you—she’s eloped with Paul Gerente!”

CHAPTER VIII

UTTER EXHAUSTION swept over Norma in an enervating wave as she ended her conversation with Stacy and hung up the phone. A night light burned dimly in the hall, lending an air of cavernous vacancy to The Crags. Norma went into the living room, swept Cheli’s manuscript aside, and eased herself down into the comfort of the big armchair.

The embers of the fire had long since died. Half a log, blackened and grim, lay across the andirons. By the feeble light, shining in