The Man in the Net Read Online Free Page B

twenty-five thousand, wouldn’t it?”
    “I guess so.”
    She giggled. “My, we’re being poor in the grand manner, aren’t we?”
    She patted his hair and released him.
    “I’ll just lie here for a while and then I’ll make myself something to eat. Don’t hurry home. I don’t want you to spoil your evening worrying about me. And give Vickie my love. Give them all my love. Say how terribly sorry I am.”
    “Sure.”
    He started for the door.
    “Darling,” she called, “you’ve forgotten the tray. My beautiful gift-wrapped tray.”

3
    HE GOT into the old black sedan, put the tray, wrapped in gold paper with a large blue ribbon rosette, on the seat next to him and swung down the weed-matted drive to the road.
    I mustn’t worry, he told himself. For a long time now anxiety had been his greatest enemy, eating into his reserve of strength, making him each time progressively less adequate to face trouble when it came. Getting through the party would be tough without the added burden of agonizing about what Linda might be up to at home.
    And perhaps she wouldn’t be up to anything. It was perfectly possible that, when he got back, he would find her all right. She’d controlled herself before after she’d started to drink. This habit of always expecting the worst was bad.
    Vickie and Brad Carey lived on the edge of Lake Sheldon which was the most attractive situation in Stoneville. It was just about a mile away from the Hamiltons’ old farmhouse down a plunging hill through the woods. Brad was the only son of old Mr. Carey who owned one of the longest-established family paper companies in New England. He worked at the factory as vice-president and heir-apparent, and five years ago had married Vickie, a wealthy girl from California.
    Although Stoneville was in the heart of the Berkshires, that swarming ground for summering New Yorkers, it was still surprisingly undiscovered. Old Mr. Carey had lived there for years and established his family as a sort of self-elected “gentry”. But, apart from them and the Fishers who were currently visiting in California, the only other people with social pretensions were Gordon and Roz Moreland, Timmie’s parents, who collaborated on almost best-selling historical novels and wintered in Europe. With the Fishers away, a party at Brad and Vickie’s inevitably meant a party consisting of the old Careys and the Morelands and, since their discovery of Linda, the Hamiltons.
    The very smallness of the group made it fanatically closely-knit. The Morelands took an intense interest in the Careys and the Careys in the Morelands, and the old Careys in both families. They were beginning to be the same with Linda.
    It was this growing intimacy which worried John. Except for Vickie and Brad, who were simple and friendly, the Carey set were not his kind of people, nor was he theirs. To him, old Mr. Carey was a boring bully and the Morelands silly and affected. And yet for Linda the fact that they had accepted her was enormously important. It gave her that added security which she so desperately needed, and for almost six months she had been able to keep her public personality intact with them. But John knew that the whole relationship hung by a hair. If ever the Carey set, smugly insulated against the seamier side of life, suspected the truth, they would discard her in a minute. And once that happened …
    As he drove past the empty Fisher house and down the hill through the vast stretches of maple trees, paradisically serene in the yellowing sunlight, John felt once again a spasm of anxiety in his stomach. Twice already he’d had to use Linda’s migraine as an excuse. Would it work for a third time? And for a birthday party too? The Carey set made a cult of birthdays, and Linda, always lightning quick to pick up other people’s affectations, had been gushing for almost a week about this one.
    “Vickie darling, a real Carey birthday party;