Read Online Slightly Abridged by Ellen Pall - Free Book Online

rejoiced in the knowledge that street-sweeping operations would be suspended and their cars, therefore, allowed to remain wherever they were despite the posted no-parking hours, perhaps for days and days. Restaurant deliverymen cried on their bikes, the teardrops freezing in their lashes. Supers counted their staff and cranked up the heat.
    Juliet worked easily late into the evening, pausing only to eat some soup in the kitchen and, now and then, to glance out and enjoy the spectacle of the hushed and darkened city under its purifying cloak of white. Back at her desk, while the Walkingshaw girls lay in their beds debating what made for happiness, Lord Spafford’s steward, Tom Giddy was taking shape on the page. He was a bluff, burly, practical man famous in the village for his feats of strength as well as his unusual generosity. (On their way home last night, apropos of the sight of circling snowplows, Ada had mentioned with satisfaction that her neighbor, the real Tom Giddy, always plowed her driveway for free. This Tom, she also noted, had once been captain of his high school wrestling team.) Today, he was sternly confronting his employer with a respectful but forthright accounting of his lordship’s failing finances. Lord Spafford’s finances were of the greater concern to the conscientious steward because his own life’s helpmeet, stout, cheerful, comfortable Mrs. Giddy, was his lordship’s cook. Juliet went to bed feeling pure and virtuous, a weary but satisfied spinner of fifteen pages of first-rate froth.
    The next morning Suzy called to report that Ada had gone out the day before and had never come home.

chapter FOUR
    Mrs. Caffrey Gone
    Juliet’s first thought was of Pierre. If Ada were missing, mightn’t his bed be one place to look?
    Suzy agreed. “I wouldn’t put it past her.”
    Juliet rubbed her eyes. After her late work last night, she had allowed herself to sleep in. The phone had rung just as she was sitting down at the kitchen table with her first cup of tea. She wasn’t at her most alert. Still, there was something—
    â€œOh, but the storm,” she blurted out. “How can Ada be lost in the middle of a blizzard?”
    Suzy ignored the apparent idiocy of the question. “I know, but she went out anyway.”
    â€œYesterday?”
    Juliet stood and looked out at the white, glaring world to the west. A good eighteen inches of snow must have fallen on Manhattan since the storm began. The cars parked along Riverside Drive were mere swells, soft billows under a sea of white. Even now, a plow hooked up to a garbage truck was shoving more snow against them, marooning them further behind a tall, compacted bank. The pile of Christmas trees had grown to a sugar mountain. On the playground at Eighty-third Street, snowmen and snowdogs made yesterday peered out from under new veils. A few cars moved sedately along
the West Side Highway. From the titanium sky, a flurry of flakes still tumbled past the window.
    â€œWhere did she go?”
    Suzy’s voice rose to a worried wail. “I don’t know. She was planning to go to some kind of rondeau slam in the East Village last night. She didn’t want me to tell you because apparently she had her eye on someone she expected to see there, and she thought you would ‘cramp her style.’ That’s a quote,” Suzy noted. “I tried to talk her into staying home, but it was a waste of breath. The only thing I know for sure is that in the afternoon she had an appointment with your friend Dennis. I made her lunch, she took a nap, I walked her up to Rara Avis, and that’s the last I saw of her.”
    â€œThey kept that appointment?” Juliet asked. “Why didn’t Dennis come down to her? It was already snowing so hard.”
    â€œI don’t know. She just said she was going. She was due there at three-thirty.”
    â€œDid she come home after that at all?”
    â€œI