Miss Withers Regrets Read Online Free Page A

anyway? Will it be okay if I buy a Mexican hairless?”
    Bennington’s face, weathered by years of salt winds and alcohol fumes, was redder than usual now. “Look here, Beale, since you know this much you might as well—”
    It was Helen’s cool, sweet voice which interrupted them this time. “So here you all are! My very nicest guests, hiding out from the party!” Jed Nicolet moved forward, but she patted his shoulder in passing and took Midge’s arm in hers. “Come with me, young man. Don’t be so elusive—Leilani Linton is just dying to dance with you, and we’ve got a lot of new rumba and samba records.” She was smiling, but there was something strange and set in her smile, as if she had turned it on and couldn’t find the switch to turn it off.
    So Midge gladly suffered himself to be led along. Nor was he very surprised to find that neither Leilani nor Aloha Linton happened to be anywhere in sight and that it was Helen herself who wanted to dance with him. She even kicked off her shoes so that she was on his level.
    But instead of taking the position for the rumba, she came breathtakingly close into his arms, the lush perfection of her body and the scent in her hair making his knees suddenly turn to rubber. Her lovely face was flushed, and he would have thought her a bit tight except that he hadn’t seen her take even one drink.
    Helen didn’t want to dance either. She simply wanted to ask him something. It took them one turn around the room before he could guess, because she barely hinted at the thing that was on her mind.
    “Oh!” Midge said. “Well, of course I’m not at all sure that it was Pat. He looked a little taller and straighter, but that could be the Army. I just had a quick glimpse of his face as we came past. You know how Adele drives.”
    “You—you came past ?” she breathed in his ear.
    “Oh, yes,” he admitted. “About halfway up the hill. Pat, or whoever it was, seemed headed this way.”
    For a moment she stiffened, and then sagged so that he held almost all her weight in his arms. “Look, Helen,” he whispered. “Is anything wrong? I mean is there anything I can do?”
    “You can get me a drink,” she said, but when he came back with a double martini in each hand she was gone. He looked for her vainly in the drawing room, in the playroom, in the dining room and hall, and finally downed both drinks, for economy’s sake. A pleasantly pink fog began to close in upon him at that point. He had memories later of trying to play ping-pong with Trudy Boad and of losing the ball somewhere and of looking for Adele and not being able to find her either.
    When the fog lifted again he was somehow in the kitchen, that wonderful Flash Gordon kitchen with the automatic everything and the glass-walled stove and refrigerator, drinking milk out of a quart bottle and singing with Bill Harcourt, Doc Radebaugh, and the houseboy, whose name was Jeff and who had a fine deep contrabass.
“We’ll serenade our Louie
    While life and love shall last…”
    A dirty old man in overalls was screaming at them to shut up so he could use the kitchen telephone, and the quartet moved into the serving pantry. But even there, just as they were going good with “Oh, a Man without a Woman,” they were suddenly silenced by the screaming of the police sirens.
    “The party’s a success!” Bill Harcourt cried. “It’s a raid—don’t give your right names!”
    Then Lawn Abbott, her face whiter than ever, came inside to tell them what was lying at the edge of the swimming pool.

Chapter Three
    F OR A HOUSE WHOSE EVERY window blazed with light, the Cairns place was strangely quiet. The radio-phonograph was stilled, with a needle stuck in the middle of a record. Dishes and glasses were piled sticky and unwashed in the kitchen sink, unwiped ashtrays slowly overflowed on to the table-tops and rugs, and out on the service porch there was nobody to hear the soft drip-drop of the water which seeped from the body