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

from the hall, she could see the gray film of ashes under the log. Not a vestige of pink remained which by careful tending might be nursed to a warming glow.

Her love for Paul Gerente had died that way, and now Paul was gone. He had burned brightly too, for a time, warming the hearts of the public. It seemed unbelievable that her love for him could have been so routine. Living, he would have said, “Ashes? Really, Norma, my dear! Why not the last fading sparks of a falling rocket—the last fizzing drops swallowed from a glass of dry champagne? Ashes are so hackneyed. My memory deserves something better than an aphorismic cliché!”

It was almost a pity that he could never know how much his violent death had upset her. His capacity for enjoyment was great. What immeasurable pleasure he would have gained from the knowledge that his lifeless body had disrupted Norma’s secure and peaceful existence; that, dead, he was stamped ineradicably on her mind at the end of a single day.

Stacy’s excited call to tell her that Babs had eloped with Paul Gerente had come as a paralyzing shock. For a moment it brought back the uncertainty which had plagued her earlier, revived the thought that the dead man might not have been Paul. She tried to recall the details of Stacy’s story. All she could remember was that Babs had left and taken all her things from the Ritters’—summarily run away.

Analyzing things more carefully, Norma realized that she was jumping at false hopes again. Stacy had known that Barbara was going out with Paul Gerente. He had no inkling that Gerente had been killed. He knew that Babs was meeting Paul surreptitiously. With Babs gone, Stacy’s boyish mind had seized on an elopement as the only logical explanation of his sister’s secret departure. That much was easy to see.

Norma set out on another mental labyrinth which conceded the fact that she had seen Paul Gerente’s body. Then Babs had seen it, too, for Babs was there. Beyond that point lay nothing but conjecture—frightful conjecture. Why had Babs run away? Babs was poised, self-assured, and proud of her family’s influence. She was the type who calmly smiled defiance at the police when they arrested her for speeding, conscious that Thaddeus Tredwill’s fortune stood back of her.

Norma shook her head in defeated bewilderment. She had told Stacy nothing over the phone, except to hurry home. She was glad of it now. In the morning she could talk to him, tell him to say nothing about Babs’s visit to Paul, try to explain it to him in some plausible way. She was certain of one thing—Babs Tredwill had not turned herself into a fugitive from the law just because she had blundered in onto Paul Gerente’s body on the floor.

Chill had crept into The Crags. It clung about Norma’s slim ankles like an invisible fluid rising slowly about the chair. When she stood up the weight of her fur coat dragged at her soggily, reminding her that she still had it on. Fighting an inclination to relax in the chair again and sleep until morning, she stood for a few seconds brushing at a damp spot on the coat with the tips of her fingers. The thought of her own bed finally proved incentive enough to take her back into the hall.

Her handbag and the paper-wrapped galoshes were on a small table where she had placed them when she answered the phone. She picked them up and put them down again. The night light and her tautened nerves were jesting with her. Both her gloves had been on top of the galoshes when she went into the living room. Now only one of them was there. The other one lay at the end of a big Oriental rug, halfway across the hall.

Norma picked it up, retrieved her handbag and parcel, and stood uncomprehendingly looking from the front door to the stairway. “I’d better get to bed,” she told herself firmly. “I’m walking in my sleep. I dropped that glove way over toward the dining-room door, and I don’t remember being there.”

Not until she was in her room did she begin to wonder if one of the servants hadn’t heard the phone and come downstairs. Christmas was near. Bella, the housemaid, was nosy. She might have tried to peek in a parcel if she saw one in the hall. The conclusion of Norma’s talk with Stacy had probably frightened her away.

“There’s no use questioning her,” Norma thought. “She won’t admit it even if it’s true.”

Once in bed, Norma found that all of her bones were aching. Wide-eyed, she lay listening to the whine of the storm, wondering if she were coming down with an attack of the flu. She finally surrendered entirely to her wakefulness, and laid it unreasonably to Babs’s galoshes. She had slipped them under her bed, still in their paper wrapping. Sleep might come if she got up again and put them away.

By the pink-shaded glow of a table lamp, she put on slippers and a warm woolen bathrobe. The package was loosely tied and opened easily. Norma put the brown paper and string in a wastebasket beside her small desk and, acting with a furtiveness which wasn’t quite clear to her, filled the top of the wastebasket with white tissue paper taken from a drawer.

The guest room, occupied by Cheli Scott, was near by, but Norma had no fear of disturbing her guest. Cheli slept soundly, and Norma’s soft padded slippers fell noiselessly against the thickness of the carpet in the hall.

Holding the galoshes pressed against her breast with both hands, she stopped outside of Babs’s closed door. Sheepishly, she admitted her oversight. Certain from Stacy’s call that Babs had fled, she had neglected to look in the most obvious place where Babs might be—the girl’s own room. Under the drive of panic, Babs might easily have taken her things from the Ritters’ and caught an