Read Online The Glass Slipper by Mignon G. Eberhart - Free Book Online Page B

a scream, for her voice had gone. And Julie’s shabby, thin little body slid slowly out of the chair, hesitated in a queer kneeling position for a grisly instant and then went down on the rug.
    Rue couldn’t kneel beside her. She couldn’t get down on that French rug and try to find Julie’s strangely quiet pulse. She couldn’t.
    She did.
    Oddly her muscles obeyed her will. But there was no pulse on Julie’s bony wrist; no heart beat below her worn sweater. No life in her eyes when Rue made her fingers remember their training and pull those thin eyelids upward.
    There was a sound somewhere, but Rue did not hear it.
    She did not know Alicia Pelham was in the room until a voice spoke to her and said coolly: “Why really — what’s all this? One of your friends, Rue? She looks as if you’ve given her too much to drink.”
    Rue looked up then. Alicia, coated and hatted and furred, was smiling down at her and at Julie as if amused. Rue heard herself say: “She’s dead. Julie… dead…”
    It did not seem strange to her that Alicia was there. Nothing would have seemed strange to her at that moment because all her consciousness was stunned by the one enormous strangeness of Julie’s death. She said again with crazy, jerky loudness: “She’s dead. She’s been murdered. Alicia, what shall we do?”
    It was completely still. All the house around them was quiet except for the sound of Steven’s piano, distant, still crashing out dissonant chords. Going on, uninterrupted, with that music just as if Julie had not died tragically, in all the pathos of a starved, meager little life — at Rue’s feet.
    They must do something. Call doctors. What did one do? Julie was dead; Rue recognized death.
    Alicia, beautiful in her trim black street suit, suave and elegant with her sable scarf flung around her shoulders and her small black hat set expertly upon the black and silver waves of her hair, was bending over the shabby little heap on the rug. She pulled a loose beige glove from one hand and touched Julie’s cheek with long white fingers, rosy-tipped and flashing with a huge emerald. Her fingers shrank and hovered. Then she rose and looked at Rue.
    Alicia was no longer beautiful, her face was drawn and gray, and her lips had drawn back from her shining teeth. She cried shrilly and pointed at the rug and the limp thing upon it:
    “She — the nurse — she’s dead! Dead! So — you’ve done it again!”

CHAPTER VI
    T here was no mistaking her meaning. It cut as sharply clear through the fog of horror and bewilderment as the thrust of a knife. But Alicia repeated it:
    “You’ve done it again. It’s the way Crystal died. Poison. I suppose the nurse knew and threatened you. She knew it and came here and — Where are you going?”
    Rue’s feet were taking her across the room; she felt disembodied and light and had no consciousness of moving.
    “Stop. What are you doing?” Alicia was following her, her small face thrust forward, her eyes so bright and hard they were feral; the savagery of her attack was at sharp variance to her civilized, sophisticated appearance.
    “I’m sending for the police,” said Rue, too bewildered to reason. She rang the bell.
    Alicia cried: “The police! Are you going to give yourself up?”
    “I didn’t murder her. I didn’t murder Crystal.”
    Alicia’s eyes were very bright and watchful: Rue had an untraceable impression that there was a suggestion of triumph and eager certainty — as if chance had put some weapon in Alicia’s lovely white hands.
    Alicia said, more thoughtfully, watching Rue:
    “You were here when Crystal died. She was better; she ought not to have died. She was in your care when her — extremely unexpected death took place. And you married Brule.”
    “If Brule were here —”
    “If Brule were here he’d know.”
    “Yes, madam,” said Gross, opening the door. “You rang —” he began and saw Julie.
    Alicia was breathing quickly, thin red lips drawn back a