The Case of the Murdered Muckraker Read Online Free

proportion of the rest. The no bosom, no bottom figure, emphasized by the hip-level “waist,” was as fashionable here as at home. Though it was not a look Daisy would ever attain, she did not want to find herself with the silhouette of a blimp.
    â€œThank you so much for my tea,” she said. “I’ve enjoyed talking to you. I think I’ll go for a bit of a walk now, before it gets dark.”

    â€œYes, better get back before dark,” said Miss Genevieve. “It’s Halloween. There will be all sorts of mischief tonight.”
    â€œI’ll just go and look at the General Post Office and Pennsylvania Station, as you suggested.”
    This she did. The station was modelled on the Baths of Caracalla, she had been told, though she had not been told precisely what the Baths of Caracalla were. They sounded vaguely Roman. The station was certainly impressive, more so than the post office building on the other side of Eighth Avenue, though both boasted vast numbers of classical pillars. Daisy made a dutiful circuit of the post office to read the motto carved on the architrave: Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
    Then she strolled back by a roundabout route towards the hotel. On Twenty-eighth Street she came across a small park. Most of the trees were leafless, but it was still refreshing after the dusty streets. Children were playing there in the twilight, and she lingered to watch. Though the voices were American, the games seemed much the same as in England—hopscotch, marbles, and tag.
    The tag players swirled around her. As she turned to watch, she caught a glimpse of a man dodging behind a tree, as if he were trying not to be spotted.
    He looked remarkably like young Mr. Lambert, but she must be mistaken. Why on earth should Lambert follow her?
    Â 
    Next morning she set off for her appointment. The offices of Abroad magazine and several associated publications were
in the Flatiron Building. On her first visit, Daisy had been too anxious to appreciate the merits of the unusual structure.
    This morning she had a few minutes to spare. She strolled through Madison Square Park, noting the ashes of a Halloween bonfire and the corpses of firecrackers. Pausing on the corner of Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue, she gazed across at her destination. The Fuller Building, as it was originally named, had been designed to fit on an awkward triangular plot where Broadway crossed the other two streets. To Daisy, its shape made it look less like a flatiron than the prow of a great ship forging its way north across Manhattan.
    The chilly wind whistling around it increased the resemblance. As she crossed the wide, busy intersection beneath the gaze of a harried policeman on point duty, Daisy, along with many another passer-by, held onto her hat.
    Walking south towards the entrance, she gazed up at the ornate stone and terra cotta details of the façade. And up and up. She had thought she was accustomed to New York’s “skyscrapers,” but now she felt quite dizzy. The building seemed to sway, then to lean over her, threatening.
    Quickly she returned her gaze to mundane street level, only to see a man step hurriedly backwards out of sight around the far corner of the building—a man who looked remarkably like young Lambert.
    An illusion, of course, like the toppling building. She must have squished the blood vessels in the back of her neck, as revoltingly described by her friend Madge, a VAD nurse in the hospital where Daisy had volunteered in the
office during the War. (Naturally anatomy had not been considered a suitable subject for the young ladies at Daisy’s school.)
    She blinked, and shook her head to clear it. As she stepped into the lobby, no further illusions met her eyes, just a brass-buttoned doorman.
    He recognized her from the previous day’s visit. “The English lady,