Haywire, Brooke Hayward [the best ebook reader for android TXT] 📗

feet in the small hall outside my door. The hall was semiprivate; unfortunately it provided wizened old Mrs. Rosenbaum and myself with a common meeting ground, ours being the only two apartments opening off it. She endowed it richly with a perpetual odor of cabbage, and I with an expensive new layer of wallpaper to distract from her barbaric cuisine.

Late-afternoon sun was streaming over the planetarium’s dome through my living-room windows; there was a bucket of huge chrysanthemums in the hall, which our Scottish housekeeper, Miss Mac, had strategically placed in my path so that while crashing into it I would at least know that her loyalties were divided between me and the sender, with whom I was engaged in a momentary dispute.

My two chocolate-coated children, Jeff and Willie, pounced on me like small M&Ms; without too much difficulty they had acquired Miss Mac’s finely honed sweet tooth. Would I like a cup of tea? (Definitely.) Biscuit? (Definitely.) Would I like to watch cartoons on TV and had I brought any comics and there was a whole bunch of telephone messages. Jeffrey coughed violently to demonstrate that the croup with which he’d been afflicted since the first day of nursery school had in no way abated. Willie told me that while he and Miss Mac had walked Jeffrey across the park to school that morning, they had seen a flock of pigeons fly up that gave him the feeling his heart was about to break. Then, while Miss Mac was showing me a mink hat that her new beau who owned a garage had presented her with the previous evening, the doorbell rang.

It was my stepmother, Pamela.

Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward had never rung my doorbell before. It struck me as a curious hour for her to be doing so now, but she was in good form and came in and hugged the children, who loved to be picked up once a week in Father’s limousine and driven directly across the Park to 1020 Fifth Avenue, where they would be given a splendid high tea, Pamela being English, and later returned with balloons and pockets full of candy. Father and Pamela lived across from the Metropolitan Museum and that in turn lay on a straight line across the Park to me, so that whenever we looked over at Father’s skyline, which was at least five or six times a day, I had the sense of being able to solve a difficult geometric problem.

“Brooke, darling,” said Pamela, between ardent embraces from Jeff and Willie, “I would love to have a tour of your apartment, but do you suppose that I might have a word with you first privately?”

It was odd that Pamela had never been here since I’d moved in, particularly since she had helped immeasurably with decorating sources of all kinds, and had even loaned me her cleaning lady twice a week after she’d been exposed to my tortured voice on the telephone the day we’d moved in from the country with four times as much solid mass as there was room to hold it, a slight miscalculation on my part. Now that she had suddenly materialized, I wanted to show her just how I had distributed that mass around, but obediently led her down the hall to my bedroom.

“Shall I shut the door?”

“Yes,” she said. “The children.” So I closed the door and stood with my back to it, facing her.

“Darling,” she said, every word penetrating the three feet between us with the distinct precision of her English accent, “I have something terrible to tell you.” She paused. I gazed at her, hypnotized by the inexorable chic of her pale blue suit and the long twisted rope of pearls and turquoises banded by a row of diamonds every two inches or so that hung gracefully knotted against her silk blouse. My scalp tightened. The whole day had been put together wrong.

Bridget’s dead, I thought I said to myself, not in that room at all but back in front of her apartment, unable to go in.

“My God, how did you know? How did you know?” Pamela was practically shouting as she grabbed at my arms, which were dangling at my sides. I was so shocked by her affirmation that I was absolutely unable to move, and yet I knew that she was as badly shaken as I by my response, so I made a tremendous effort to speak through the thick white paint that was beginning to drift down over me.

“I didn’t know,” I said gently, so as not to scream. “It just occurred to me.” No, I said to myself carefully; no, this is definitely not happening, no. I focused on Pamela’s blue eyes and powdered face.

“How did it happen?” I asked cautiously. It seemed a sensible question and my voice managed to dole out the words in level teaspoons without much help from me. Pamela looked at me closely with a split second of curiosity and approval; I wasn’t behaving like a rabid dog yet, although she must have sensed that I was seconds away from foaming at the mouth. Now my vision was beginning to double-cross me; the scene seemed to be speeding out of control like a runaway train about to be derailed.

Pamela seemed to be talking to me. “We don’t know the exact details yet, darling. Bill Francisco found her about four this afternoon—he had a key to her apartment and they’d had an arrangement to meet or something—so then, when she didn’t answer, he went in to wait and found a disturbing note for him which she’d written last night, so he went into the bedroom and found her lying in bed.”

“Wait, wait a minute.” I roused myself. “What was disturbing about the note? I mean, I talked to her at around eleven last night and she sounded great—I was supposed to meet her this—”

Pamela put her purse and gloves on the bed. “I’ll come back to that later—the car is waiting downstairs, so we