“It’s not a crazy idea. You know it’s not.”
He moved his shoulders impatiently and demanded: “Where’d you get it?”
She too moved her shoulders. “I didn’t get it anywhere. I–I suddenly saw it.”
“Nonsense,” he said sharply, looking up at her under his brows. “Did you see the Observer this morning?”
He stared at her with hard skeptical eyes.
Annoyance brought a little color into her face. “I did not,” she said. “Why do you ask?”
“No?” he asked in a tone that said he did not believe her, but the skeptical gleam had gone out of his eyes. They were dull and thoughtful. Suddenly they brightened. He took his right hand from his bathrobe-pocket. He held it out towards her, palm up. “Let me see the letter,” he said.
She stared at him with round eyes. “What?”
“The letter,” he said, “the typewritten letter–three questions and no signature.”
She lowered her eyes to avoid his and embarrassment disturbed, very slightly, her features. After a moment of hesitation she asked, “How did you know?” and opened her brown hand-bag.
“Everybody in town’s had at least one,” he said carelessly. “Is this your first?”
“Yes.” She gave him a crumpled sheet of paper.
He straightened it out and read:
Are you really too stupid to know that your father murdered your lover?
If you do not know it, why did you help him and Ned Beaumont in their attempt to fasten the crime on an innocent man?
Do you know that by helping your father escape justice you are making yourself an accomplice in his crime?
Ned Beaumont nodded and smiled lightly. “They’re all pretty much alike,” he said. He wadded the paper in a loose ball and tossed it at the waste-basket beside the table. “You’ll probably get some more of them now you’re on the mailing-list.”
Opal Madvig drew her lower lip in between her teeth. Her blue eyes were bright without warmth. They studied Ned Beaumont’s composed face.
He said: “O’Rory’s trying to make campaign-material out of it. You know about my trouble with him. That was because he thought I’d broken with your father and could be paid to help frame him for the murder– enough at least to beat him at the polls–and I wouldn’t.”
Her eyes did not change. “What did you and Dad fight about?” she asked.
“That’s nobody’s business but ours, snip,” he said gently, “if we did fight.”
“You did,” she said, “in Carson’s speakeasy.” She put her teeth together with a click and said boldly: “You quarreled when you found out that he really had–had killed Taylor.”
He laughed and asked in a mocking tone: “Hadn’t I known that all along?”
Her expression was not affected by his humor. “Why did you ask if I had seen the Observer?” she demanded. “What was in it?”
“Some more of the same sort of nonsense,” he told her evenly. “It’s. there on the table if you want to see it. There’ll be plenty of it before the campaign’s over: this is going to be that kind. And you’ll be giving your father a swell break by swallowing–” He broke off with an impatient gesture because she was no longer listening to him.
She had gone to the table and was picking up the newspaper he had put down when she came in.
He smiled pleasantly at her back and said: “It’s on the front page, An Open Letter to the Mayor.”
As she read she began to tremble–her knees, her hands, her mouth– so that Ned Beaumont frowned anxiously at her, but when she had finished and had dropped the newspaper on the table and had turned to face him directly her tall body and fair face were statue-like in their immobility. She addressed him in a low voice between lips that barely moved to let the words out: “They wouldn’t dare say such things if they were not true.”
“That’s nothing to what’ll be said before they’re through,” he drawled lazily. He seemed amused, though there was a suggestion of anger difficultly restrained in the glitter of his eyes.
She looked at him for a long moment, then, saying nothing, turned. towards the door.