I managed to breathe again.
“Have you told them about it?” I asked.
“Not yet. What good would it do? But look, Judy, what about the thing that was strung on it. What is it? You’re a woman. Haven’t you any idea?”
I shook my head.
“Nobody wears things like that nowadays, Don.”
“It must have meant something.”
“Yes,” I said dully. “It must have meant something. I don’t know what.”
He had a whiskey and soda before he left, and he began to look almost human. He even took the time to say that I looked like the wrath of God.
“Why don’t you go to bed and get some rest?” he said.
“I would,” I told him, “only Mother had the idea first.” For the first time that day he smiled, and I smiled back at him. I suppose he was just a nice blond young man who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, but I had cherished him for a long time, and the smile simply broke me up.
“Poor Judy,” he said. “It’s just too damned bad, isn’t it?”
For one idiotic moment I thought he meant to kiss me. He didn’t, of course, and with the slam of his car door I had a queer feeling that he was going out of my life for good. Or that he had never been in it.
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About the Author
Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958) was one of the United States’s most popular early mystery authors. Born in Pittsburgh to a clerk at a sewing machine agency, Rinehart trained as a nurse and married a doctor after her graduation from nursing school. She wrote fiction in her spare time until a stock market crash sent her and her young husband into debt, forcing her to lean on her writing to pay the bills. Her first two novels, The Circular Staircase (1908) and The Man in Lower Ten (1909), established her as a bright young talent, and it wasn’t long before she was one of the nation’s most popular mystery novelists.
Among her dozens of novels are The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry (1911), which began a six-book series, and The Bat (originally published in 1920 as a play), which was among the inspirations for Bob Kane’s Batman. Credited with inventing the phrase “The butler did it,” Rinehart is often called an American Agatha Christie, even though she began writing much earlier than Christie, and was much more popular during her heyday.
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ISBN: 978-1-5040-5824-7
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