The Murder of a Fifth Columnist Read Online Free Page B

“I’ll be glad to. What is it you want me to do?”
    She let my arm go and pushed her hair back from her forehead, like someone coming back to her senses. She looked quickly back of her again.
    “Go to your room and telephone my daughter in New York.”
    Her voice was scarcely a whisper.
    “—I’ll write down her number for you.”
    There was another glass console table against the white wall in front of us, between two doors. It had a telephone on it, and beside it a pad and pencil.
    “Tell her you’re calling for me, and that I say it’s most inconvenient for me to have her herb, and I’d prefer she didn’t come. Tell her I’ll be in New York on Tuesday and I’ll see her then.”
    She turned her head away a moment.
    “You see…”
    She hesitated painfully, and looked back at me. “You see, she wouldn’t fit in. She’s just a child, and…”
    “You don’t have to explain, Mrs. Sherwood,” I said. I couldn’t possibly have called her Ruth just then. It seemed like such a… well, I suppose, shocking thing—just to tell your child not to come home. Still, she was so distraught that I was really sorry for her.
    I must have looked at the phone there in front of us, because she said, “I can’t phone from this apartment—the servants would hear me.”
    That seemed to me an extraordinary explanation indeed, and she couldn’t help realize it.
    “Believe me—it’s dreadfully important,” she said, with a kind of suppressed desperation. “I wouldn’t ask you if it weren’t.” She picked up the pencil and scrawled a number on the back of the telegram and handed it to me. “You can go through this door. Your apartment is the third on the left.”
    I took the blank and opened the door.
    “Thank you, Grace Latham,” she said. “Thank you—more than you know!”
    I couldn’t look at her. The relief in her voice was too terrible. I just hurried along the corridor to my door. I didn’t even look back to see if she was waiting for me.
    I unlocked my door and went in to the bedroom, went to the phone and gave the operator the number. As I waited I realized abruptly that Mrs. Sherwood hadn’t told me her daughter’s name. I turned over the wire and looked at the signature. As I looked, my eye caught the date line, and I looked again. The time was 12:05 p.m. And the message said—I read it shamelessly—“Coming down unless you wire you don’t want me—love, Betty.”
    I looked at my watch. It was seventeen minutes past eight. Something had obviously happened that had delayed that telegram’s delivery… and that meant that that child was in all probability well on her way. I started to signal the operator to change it to a person to person call, but just as I did a woman’s voice said, “Hello—this is Devereaux.”
    “It must be a school,” I thought. I said, “May I speak to Miss Elizabeth Sherwood?”
    There was, the kind of pause you expect to have followed by “Sorry, there’s no one here of that name.” Instead the woman said, “Who is calling, please?”
    “I’m calling for her mother in Washington,” I said. “I have a message for her.”
    “I’m very sorry,” the woman said. “Elizabeth Sherwood is not here just now.”
    “Do you know if she’s left for Washington?” I asked.
    “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I couldn’t tell you.” If she’d said, “I won’t tell you,” it would have matched her tone better.
    “Her mother is anxious to have her put off her coming,” I said. “Will you try to get that message to her?”
    “Thank you,” the woman said. “Goodbye.”
    I heard the phone click down. It all seemed stranger than ever. I sat there with the phone in my hand. Suddenly I heard her voice again.
    “—Operator,” she said crisply.
    I realized that we hadn’t been disconnected, so I said, “Yes?”
    “Operator—this is the Devereaux School.”
    She hadn’t recognized my voice, apparently.
    “Can you tell me where the call I’ve just