Read Online Murder Comes First by Frances and Richard Lockridge - Free Book Online Page B

anything.”
    To this Aunt Thelma had said merely “Oh?” at first and then, in a puzzled tone, “I’m sorry, Pamela. The connection—”
    â€œTwin buildings,” Pam said. “Siamese, really, because of the bridge. Anyway, I have to wait for the maid.”
    Pam then suggested dinner and duty, having got her unexpectedly by the throat, chuckled evilly. Aunt Thelma had said that that would be nice, unless they were too tired. She had asked Pam to call later. Now, Pam decided, was not enough later.
    She wondered what Bill was doing, and what he had made of Lynn Hickey and her mother, except for the obvious—that Lynn and Paul Logan were in love, the girl, under the strain of what had happened, rather irritable in her love. Probably, Pam thought, Lynn was often irritated with the boy—with his gentleness, with what was perhaps uncertainty and perhaps an inner lack of decision, with what clearly was, at least in obvious matters, a lack of self-confidence. Well, Pam thought, the girl is young; she’ll have to learn about men, if she’s going to marry one of them.
    â€œDear Jerry,” Pam said aloud to Martini. “All the same, I’m glad he’s not, or not very, anyway. No more than the right amount.”
    Martini, as far as Pam could determine, understood this aside perfectly. At least, she flicked the end of her tail in sleepy comradeship.
    You had only to see Lynn and Paul Logan together to know how it was with them, Pam thought. They had been together in the room when Bill and the Norths returned and so conscious of each other that the most casual enterer of the room became conscious of their consciousness. But they had been apart, apparently because Mrs. Hickey was there—a plump woman, no taller than her five-foot daughter, gray-haired, obviously worried. And, in the end, adamant.
    It was true, she had admitted, that she and Grace Logan had had a disagreement, as a result of which she had decided to leave the Logan house and move in with her daughter. But the disagreement had been, for all that, a trivial thing.
    â€œIt didn’t basically change the way I felt about Grace,” Rose Hickey said. “Or, I think, the way she felt about me. And it was entirely personal, Lieutenant.”
    And there she had stuck. It had had nothing to do with anything which concerned the police; nothing, remotely, to do with what had happened. Bill Weigand was patient with her; patient, afterward, with her daughter.
    â€œI don’t know what it was,” Lynn Hickey had said, her voice crisp. “If I knew, I’d tell you. She won’t tell me.”
    â€œNothing,” Rose Hickey said. “A trivial thing. It would all—all have been straightened out if—if—” She stopped and her eyes filled with tears.
    Beyond that there had been nothing. Rose Hickey had not known of anyone who had had, with Grace Logan, a disagreement not trivial—a disagreement vital enough to lead to cyanide. She, like any number of others, could have placed the poison in the medicine bottle. She had not. Lynn had been at the Logan house, to see her mother—and Mrs. Logan too—several times during the two previous weeks. For all she could remember, she might have been in the bathroom. She recorded denial of murder in a clear, quick voice.
    Mrs. Hickey, when Bill shifted from the impasse, had known that Grace Logan was worried about her niece, Sally. But the worry had never been lengthily discussed; Rose Hickey denied knowing why Grace, although the girl wrote her regularly, still was worried about her.
    â€œOf course,” she said, “she may merely have wanted to straighten things out. Not actually been worried. She—Grace hated misunderstandings, and she was fond of Barton too.”
    Rose Hickey had not known that Mrs. Logan had sent her son to St. Louis. She had accepted the story that he was with friends in Maryland.
    â€œYou?”