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The Clue in Blue When Connie Blair takes a temporary job modeling glamorous clothes at Campion’s in Philadelphia she becomes involved in a baffling mystery taking place behind the scenes of the great department store. It all starts with a missing fur beret. Connie’s dashing young aunt, stylist for Campion’s, is deeply concerned. The hat, a Paris original, is fabulously expensive. But what really worries Aunt Bet is that it is not the first article in her care to vanish mysteriously, only to reappear later even more mysteriously. Connie is faced with one unanswerable question after another. Who was the man in the woman’s hat, that Sunday afternoon in the deserted store? Why was Grace, the little stock girl, sobbing in terror in the models’ dressing room? Most important of all, what unknown enemy is trying to cast the shadow of suspicion on Aunt Bet? Determined to find the culprit, Connie enlists the aid of Larry Stewart, the young display man, and finally comes face to face with a far more ruthless enemy than she had ever imagined in her wildest speculations.

The CONNIE BLAIR Mystery Stories The Clue in Blue The Riddle in Red Puzzle in Purple The Secret of Black Cat Gulch The Green Island Mystery The Ghost Wore White The Yellow Warning The Gray Menace The Brown Satchel Mystery Peril in Pink The Silver Secret The Mystery of the Ruby Queens

A CONNIE BLAIR MYSTERY

The Clue in Blue By BETSY ALLEN

Grosset & Dunlap PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK

© 1948 BY GROSSET & DUNLAP, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Fashion Preview Connie Takes a Job The Face in the Mirrors Enter Larry Stewart In the Models’ Dressing Room The Little Stock Girl Stop, Thief ! Lost, Strayed or Stolen? Clue Conscious Why, Aunt Bet! The Missing Hatbox Connie Pays a Call Part of the Story Display Room Quest “Curiouser and Curiouser” The Man in the Woman’s Hat An End—and a Beginning

1 17 30 41 53 66 77 91 104 117 129 142 155 166 183 198 205

CHAPTER

1

Fashion Preview

For the tenth time in half an hour, Connie Blah peered out of the east window of the bedroom she shared with her twin sister. “Aunt Bet ought to be here!” she said impatiently. “It’s almost two o’clock.” A heat haze hovered over the quiet street, and not a leaf on the maples rustled. Connie pressed her nose against the screen and slid her eyes far to the right, so that she could see the corner, but there was no car in sight. There was not even a dog or a person to bring movement to the scene. “I asked the girls for two-thirty,” she said, turning back into the room. Kit, christened Catherine, who was twisting her pale, shoulder-length hair into a careless knot on top of her head, murmured, “You know Aunt Bet! She’ll come dashing in just in the nick of time.” Then her 1

eyes rested for a second on Connie’s face and she laughed. “Look at your nose.” Connie stooped so that she could see over her twin’s shoulder into the dressing-table mirror, and the two fair heads, identical in contour, came together. The screen had made a crossbarred pattern of black on the tip of Connie’s nose, and she rubbed at it ruefully with the palm of one hand. Then her brown eyes brightened as brakes squealed outside. “There she is!” she cried. High heels were clicking up the cement walk even before the girls reached the first floor. As they burst out onto the comfortable porch, shaded by green-striped awnings, Elizabeth Easton, their mother’s youngest—and prettiest—sister, came running up the steps. Aunt Bet looked as cool as a mint frappe in a pale-green linen suit. She had the ineffable polish of a woman of fashion, but her smile was as warm and engaging as the twins’. “Fooled you!” she said. “I’m here ahead of time.” “I don’t believe it!” Mrs. Blair, plump and rosy in a ruffled apron, came through the screen door and laid her smooth cheek against her sister’s. Then she held her off with both hands. “Let me look at you. It’s been months since I’ve seen you. What is the fascination that keeps you in Philadelphia all the time?” 2

Connie edged closer, scenting a romance, but Aunt Bet shook her head. “Work,” she insisted. “Nothing but work. Being a buyer was bad enough, but being a stylist is a fulltime job and then some!” “But such fun,” Connie sighed, looking envious. “And doing fashion shows must be marvelous.” Her eyes took on the glow of a visionary. “Don’t you just love working in the city, Aunt Bet?” Elizabeth Easton nodded. “I do,” she admitted. “It’s right for me. But it wouldn’t be for some people.” She looked around at the stretch of garden beyond the porch and at the zinnias massed in a big stone crock by the door. “Small towns have their points.” Kit agreed. “I never want to leave Meadowbrook,” she said. “I want to stay right here and get married and have a big family and—” “Hey! Wait a minute!” Connie interrupted. “We only got out of high school in June.” Everybody laughed, and Mrs. Blair said practically, “What about this fashion show now? The girls will be here to try on dresses in half an hour.” Connie said, “We’ve two size twelves, and four size fourteens and Ruth Shaw and Ginny Anderson for the big ones.” She began ticking off the number of models on her fingers, trying to remember 3

everyone she had invited to participate. “Kit and I tried to choose girls who look like the collegeclothes type.” Aunt Bet grinned and nodded. “That’s fine,” she praised her young assistants. “I have some clothes with me that you’ll just adore.” She put her handbag and gloves on the wicker table. “Want to help me unpack the car?” “We’ll do it alone,” Connie said. “You go on in with Mother and cool off.” She pushed her aunt gently toward the door. Then, instead of following her twin down the walk, she ran to the side railing and, cupping her hands and directing her voice toward the rear of the house, shouted, “Toby!” It took five vigorous “Toby!s” to bring a towcolored head into view from among the leafy branches of a black walnut tree. “Whatdya want?” Connie’s ten-year-old brother finally asked. “Toby, come help us, like a lamb,” Connie invited. “Aunt Bet’s here, and we’re going to unpack the car.” A pair of skinny brown legs, bare to above the knee, appeared under the umbrella of leaves. Toby swung himself to the ground like a monkey and strolled amiably across the lawn. “Did you call for long?” he asked Connie as he joined her. “I was up in my tree house reading a 4

book.” “A mystery, I’ll bet.” Toby nodded. “A neat one. All about atomic engineers.” He saw Kit coming back up the front walk with a stack of dress boxes balanced under her chin. “What’s going on?” “The Fortnightly’s having a garden party and fashion show,” Connie told him. “Tomorrow. Aunt Bet’s doing the show, and the girls are trying on dresses here this afternoon.” Toby stopped dead in his tracks and snorted. “And you got me down out of the tree for that?” Nevertheless he was persuaded to help his sisters, and within ten minutes Connie and Kit’s room was covered with a froth of white tissue paper, and both the twin beds and the bureaus were decorated with enough clothes and accessories to make any girl’s eyes gleam with envy. Toby, after sticking out a hand to greet his aunt with manly casualness, escaped the melee and returned to the platform in the walnut tree. From there he caught occasional glimpses of some of the twins’ friends arriving at the house, but he was out of the hurly-burly of feminine fashion and back in the safe haven of atomic intrigue, where he felt more at home. Within the twins’ bedroom, the collected models were busy trying on Aunt Bet’s wonderful clothes. 5

Straight from the show windows of Campion’s, the smart woman’s apparel shop in Philadelphia where Aunt Bet worked, such costumes would have gladdened the heart of any girl, college bound or not. The suits and coats and sweaters and skirts and bags and gloves lived up to everything Miss Easton had promised the Fortnightly Club when she had been invited to put on a fashion show of college clothes in Meadowbrook. They were new and exciting, as vivid as the colors of autumn and as young as the girls who were to model them the following afternoon. Before the full-length mirror on the back of her closet door, Connie pirouetted in a soft tweed suit of quill brown. The color exactly matched her eyes, and against it her hair and skin were one shade, tawny gold. She felt like a debutante in a soap ad. She felt like an actress! She felt, in turn, like a cover girl on a fashion magazine and like the heroine of a novel. “It’s such fun to just change your clothes and get a whole new personality!” she cried. Her aunt looked at her from across the room, where she was buttoning one of the Size 12 models into a plaid jumper, and thought that nothing could change Connie’s own vivid personality, only enhance it, as this suit did. “That’s a French import,” she called, “the one 6

really expensive thing in this collection. And just wait till you see the beaver beret that’s to be worn with it. You’ll feel like a glamour girl for sure—if you don’t die from the heat.” “Where is it?” Connie was eager. Then she added comfortingly, “We’ll have a storm tonight and it will cool off for tomorrow. You wait and see!” While her aunt searched through the stack of hatboxes for the fabulous beret, Connie relinquished her position before the mirror, first to little Jane Trotter, in a pansy-colored sweater and skirt, then to Kit, in a polo coat that was bringing beads of perspiration to her upper lip. She admired each of them in turn, praising the way they wore the clothes with such wholehearted sincerity that they forgot the temperature was hovering in the high eighties and walked with their shoulders flung back and their heads held high. “You walk that way tomorrow,” Miss Easton said as she looked up from rummaging in the depths of a large carton, “and you’ll look enough like professional models to deceive your own mothers.” She pushed a damp tendril of hair off her forehead and got down on her knees in front of the carton. “Where is that hat?” “Can I help?” Connie asked, and her aunt sat back on her high heels and described the box that held the beret. 7

“It was small.” She made a circle with her hands. “About so big. Pink and gray. And there was a pouch bag in with the hat. I remember it particularly because I packed the beret and bag myself.” Kit, who had laid the heavy polo coat on the bed and was standing around in a brief, lace-trimmed slip, joined in the search. The three of them ransacked the room, but no small, round box with the Campion name scrawled on it in elegant pink script could be found. “Maybe you left it in the car,” Connie suggested, and ran down to investigate, but neither in the trunk nor inside the car was there so much as a scrap of tissue paper that had been overlooked. “I just must not have brought it,” Aunt Bet said, while a small frown of annoyance appeared between her eyes. “But it was on my desk this morning. I know it was.” “Was it expensive too, like the suit?” Connie asked. Miss Easton nodded. “Fur hats always run into money,” she said. “Especially beaver or mink.” Jane Trotter, who was going to the state university in the fall, looked at the twins’ aunt curiously. “But are there many college girls who can afford to buy things like that?” Miss Easton smiled. “That’s a sensible question. No, there aren’t,” she told Jane. “Our millinery 8

buyer thought the beret was simply irresistible with the suit Connie’s wearing. It was she who really insisted that I bring it along.” Kit, who had given up the search, said, “Oh, well, you’ll probably find it right on your desk when you get back to the store.” But her aunt didn’t take the matter so lightly. As she folded away the clothes and replaced the bags and scarfs and gloves in their boxes, for transportation to the clubhouse, in the garden of which the fashion show was to be held, she checked every item against an inventory list. Not another thing was missing, just the small, round box with the beret and bag. Finally even she was forced to accept Kit’s conclusion, that the box must have been left in Philadelphia. “And it had better be there when I get back,” Miss Easton said, biting the end of her pencil. “It would cost me considerably more than a week’s salary to replace two items like that.” “Oh, but if a thing is lost, would they hold you responsible?” Kit asked naïvely. “They’ve got to hold somebody responsible,” Aunt Bet told her. “Business is business, after all.” To associate their fashionable young aunt with such a workaday statement was a new thing for the twins. They had always considered her rather a butterfly, who fluttered in and out of their lives to 9

give them occasional glimpses of color seldom seen in Meadowbrook. Connie looked at her quizzically and decided that Aunt Bet was more down-to-earth than she had ever suspected. For the first time she recognized the sisterly similarity to her own mother, in spite of the difference in their years and in the lives they led. “Girls!” Her mother’s voice cut into Connie’s musing. “If you’re finished up there, I have some iced tea and cakes you might be interested in.” “Would we ever!” Ginny Anderson, who never could remember that a Size 1G should be a little cautious about her figure, led the way downstairs. On the porch Mrs. Blair had a tea table spread, and within five minutes everyone was busy with tall, icefilled glasses and the tender cupcakes which Aunt Bet admiringly called the “spécialité de la maison.” “What’s that mean?” Toby, who had braved the assembled company to rustle a couple of cakes, turned back to ask. Aunt Bet laughed. “It means your mother’s a marvelous cook!” “You said a mouthful,” Toby replied inelegantly, suiting action to words. For the rest of the afternoon the discussion of the fashion show was interrupted only to talk about the various colleges to which the girls were planning to go. The girls were thrilled by the clothes they were 10

to wear, and Jane Trotter was already planning to cajole her mother into buying the plaid jumper with the pale-green shirt. “They say it’s awfully important for a freshman to make a good impression,” she said with great seriousness. “Don’t they, Miss Easton?” Miss Easton chuckled but refused to commit herself. She turned to Connie. “Are you getting excited about going away?” The twins were entered at a college about a hundred miles upstate. Connie hesitated, but Kit answered promptly. “I am! I’m a little scared, too. I don’t make friends as easily as Connie does.” “You do too!” Connie insisted. Then she turned to her aunt. “Kit’s going to adore college, but for myself—I don’t know. To be perfectly honest, I’d sort of like to skip it and get a job instead.” “Connie!” Kit sounded shocked, but Connie raised her head defiantly. “Well, I would! I’d give anything if I could land a job in the city—maybe in advertising.” She glanced at her aunt to see how this attitude seemed to strike her, but Miss Easton’s attention apparently was turned elsewhere. Connie noticed that for the next half-hour her aunt seemed preoccupied, and she wasn’t surprised when Miss Easton slipped into the house to put in a long11

distance call to Philadelphia. She knew that the fur beret was still on her aunt’s mind, and that she probably was checking with Campion’s to make certain that the small, round hatbox really was safe on her desk. Refilling the plate of cupcakes, Connie heard part of the conversation that ensued. “Campion’s? Miss Easton speaking. Connect me with the advertising department, please.” There was a pause, then Aunt Bet said brightly, “Jean? This is Bet. Do me a favor and see if I left a hatbox on my desk, will you? I’ll hold the wire.” The screen door shut behind Connie as she again emerged to the porch, and Aunt Bet’s further discussion was drowned in the chatter which greeted her. The cupcakes on the plate disappeared like magic, and she thought with amusement that the girls weren’t very different now than they had been eight or ten years ago, when they used to come to the Blair twins’ birthday parties. They still got ecstatic and ravenous at the sight of her mother’s marvelous food. It was several minutes before Aunt Bet reappeared, and just as the screen door slammed behind her, Jane glanced at her watch and cried, “Look at the time! We’ve simply got to go.” There was the usual flurry of leave-taking, accompanied by last-minute arrangements for the 12

fashion show and profuse thanks to Mrs. Blair. Connie glanced once or twice at her aunt, but her face revealed nothing of the outcome of the telephone call. It wasn’t until they had gathered up the tea things from the porch and were all out in the kitchen that Connie had a chance to put a direct question. “Was it all right about the box?” “It wasn’t there,” Aunt Bet replied, and her voice sounded puzzled rather than surprised. She started to add something else that piqued Connie’s curiosity. “You know, it’s the funniest thing. It isn’t the first time—” “I wonder if Toby knows anything about it,” Kit interrupted. “He was helping unpack the car, you know, and he might just have thought it would be smart—” She crossed the waxed linoleum floor to the kitchen door and shouted Toby’s name, then almost dropped the glass she was drying, as a voice from directly beneath her on the back steps answered. “Don’t strain yourself, sis. I’m right here.” It was a typical Toby retort, a little rough and arrogant, as though the youngest member of the Blair household were beginning to feel the need for expressing his masculinity. Hearing it, Mrs. Blair glanced at her sister, bit her lower lip and silently shook her head. 13

Aunt Bet was amused. She smiled, but restrained a chuckle, and walked over to stand beside Kit at the door. “Toby,” she said with forthrightness, “we’ve lost a small hatbox, a pink-and-gray job.” The word “job” brought her right to Toby’s own level and he looked up alertly. “Did you see anything of it when you were helping unpack the car?” “Who, me?” Toby’s voice rose on the personal pronoun. “I didn’t even look at the stuff. I just helped carry it in.” There was scorn for all feminine frippery in his tone. Over Aunt Bet’s shoulder Mrs. Blair asked, “You didn’t hide it somewhere, just for fun?” Toby held his head and groaned. In his eyes, as he looked up, were mingled honesty and disgust. “Of course not,” he sighed, and not a person who saw him could doubt his sincerity. “What would be the point?” His mother smiled back at him. “All right, Son,” she said, satisfied. Then, as she was turning away, she called back, “Have you fed Ruggles, Toby? If you haven’t, why don’t you do it right now?” Ruggles was the family cocker, named, because of his color, for Ruggles of Red Gap, and the preparation of his dinner was one of Toby’s daily chores. He came in now with the spaniel at his heels and began measuring out kibble biscuit from a stone 14

crock near the stove. “Women,” he said to no one in particular, “are the limit. Always after a guy to do some sort of work.” His words fell into one of those sudden little silences that occur for no reason at all, and a deep, masculine chuckle answered them. “A philosopher in our midst!” remarked his father from the dining-room door. Then Mr. Blair saw his sister-in-law and came forward to greet her. The corners of his eyes still crinkled with laugh lines he held her off with both hands on her arms. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he told her admiringly. “Sometimes I think I made a mistake, going into the hardware business. How d’you think I’d do as a junior floorwalker at Campion’s, Bet?” “Junior!” Mrs. Blair snorted, turning from the sink and eyeing her husband affectionately. “You’d have to dye those gray hairs.” The twins laughed and Connie reached out a hand and pinched her father’s ear. “Gray at the temple is very distinguished,” she insisted. “If you don’t believe me, Aunt Bet, you should see Dad’s new photograph. He’s been elected president of the State Hardware Association, you know.” Aunt Bet had not known, but she was ready with congratulations, and in the rapid-fire family conversation that lasted through supper and on into the evening, the question of the missing hatbox was 15

forgotten even by Connie. It wasn’t until she was lying in the twin bed next to Kit’s, when her promised thundershower was at its height and lightning was streaking crazily across the summer sky, that the hatbox flitted into her thoughts again. Then, as she turned over, she wondered sleepily what Aunt Bet had meant when she’d said, “You know, it isn’t the first time—” She must remember to ask her tomorrow, Connie decided, never dreaming that on the morrow her aunt was to make a proposal that would erase all concern for the missing hatbox from her mind.

16

CHAPTER

2

Connie Takes a Job

Overnight, the temperature dropped ten degrees, and the big enclosed garden behind the historic Fortnightly clubhouse looked rain-washed and cool when Connie and Kit arrived there with their aunt the next afternoon. Again, all the clothes had to be unpacked and the accessories assembled, and Connie realized, as she watched Aunt Bet work, that there was more to this business of being a stylist than met the casual eye. It called for a person who was physically strong as well as fashion-wise. Hauling boxes as big as small trunks in and out of the car was no job for a weakling. She marveled that her small aunt could keep her crisp smartness of appearance throughout the necessary preparations for the show. But Elizabeth Easton was an executive who had earned her present position. In the nick of time the 17

girls were lined up in their first costumes. Aunt Bet, exquisite in a lightweight suit that was just dark enough against the summer clothes of the club members to look new, stepped out the rear door to a platform on which the models were scheduled to appear and pose, before they descended the steps to walk among the guests on the lawn. “Isn’t she marvelous?” Connie whispered to Kit as they stood together in the dimness of the hall that ran through the clubhouse from back to front. She was listening to her aunt’s gracious speech of introduction, in which she used the Campion name with unobtrusive advertising skill. “I don’t know how she does it,” Kit agreed. “It’s bad enough to have to walk out there, but if I had to talk to all those people I’d simply die.” “Oh, no, you wouldn’t,” Connie chided her. She was always rallying her more timid twin. Shyness was not a characteristic of Connie’s and she found it hard to understand in others. She felt friendly and warmhearted to all those people out there on the lawn. She wasn’t in the least afraid of them; after all, she’d known most of them all her life. “We’ll start with clothes for traveling, then go on to campus clothes, and finally we’ll show you costumes for various sports, and date dresses, and dance frocks,” Aunt Bet was saying. She clicked a little metal beetle hidden in the palm of her hand and 18

out came Jane Trotter, demure in a basque-jacketed suit of shepherd’s check, with a small, rolled sailor perched on the back of her smooth brown hair. Connie appeared next, wearing the imported tweed, but carrying in her hand a felt sport hat of her own instead of the fur beret which would have capped the costume. She stood easily and well on the platform, turned slowly, as Aunt Bet had coached her, and started down the steps with a smile that was both confident and gay. Just once, as she started to move among the guests, she looked back over her shoulder to be sure that Kit was making out all right. Her twin had just appeared on the platform, and if she was dying a thousand deaths within, she certainly didn’t show it. With admiration, Connie watched her pose and turn, and her own smile deepened. There was certainly one thing about Kit; she always came through. Costume changes, in the second-floor dressing room, were swift, and Connie appeared next in a tailored wool sports dress with push-up sleeves that just matched the color of her eyes. Most dear to her heart, however, was the dance frock of amber taffeta caught up at one side to reveal a flip, pleated petticoat of black-and-amber plaid. It rustled when she moved, and as she lifted the skirt to step out on the platform a soft murmur of appreciation swept the audience and every head 19

turned her way. It was a little triumph for Connie and she held her head very proudly as she descended the wooden steps. The minute she reached the grass, however, she was Connie Blair again. It was as though she had stepped out of a picture frame into reality. Now she was chatting with her mother’s friends, as she passed in and out among them, without any affectation at all. Aunt Bet squeezed her arm when she passed her on the way back to the dressing room. “My nieces were the success of the afternoon,” she whispered in Connie’s ear. “Thank you,” Connie said, though her sidelong glance was half doubting. “Tell Catherine that. She’s had the most awful stage fright, if you can believe it.” Aunt Bet looked at her incredulously. “I can’t.” Yet it was true that Kit was relieved when the show was over, while Connie was still elated even after the last of the models had departed along with the garden-party guests and just she and Kit and Aunt Bet were left to reload the car. Mrs. Blair had gone ahead to start dinner, because her sister was driving back to the city early in the evening. “I wish you could stay over another night. It was all such fun!” Connie sighed. Stacking the last of the garment boxes in the 20

luggage compartment, Aunt Bet paused. She looked from Kit to Connie quizzically and said, “I’ve got an idea, but I hardly know how to propose it, because it’s only partially worked out.” She banged the compartment door shut, locked it and walked thoughtfully around the car to slide under the wheel. Only when the twins were settled in the seat beside her and she had shifted into high and was rolling slowly down the quiet street did Aunt Bet continue. “I could use an extra model for our college show at the shop, and one of you girls would fit in perfectly.” Connie clapped her hands impetuously, but Aunt Bet’s next words stopped her. “One. I can’t use both of you, for a number of reasons. Chief among them is the fact that, of course, I’d want you to stay with me, and my apartment will only expand to the width of an opened-up studio couch, with me on the other half.” Connie’s eyes were vivid with desire, but she turned to Kit generously and quickly. “You go,” she started. “You’ll—” Aunt Bet cut in. “Now don’t start playing Alphonse and Gaston, you two. I think the thing to do is to draw straws. We’ll make a ceremony of it at dinner and be sure that everything is perfectly fair and square. That is, if your mother goes along with 21

the idea. Remember, we haven’t consulted her yet.” “Mother will think it’s grand!” Connie insisted. “She’ll think it’s good experience, I’m sure.” “How long will the store show last?” Kit asked practically. “And when does it start?” “It starts Monday,” her aunt told her, “and it lasts ten days. If either of you decides to take the job, you can drive back with me tonight and spend the week end. It would make it simpler all around.” Connie’s eyes continued to glow at the prospect. Her mind leapt ahead to the drawing of the straws, and she couldn’t suppress the hope that she would be the lucky one. Then Kit’s voice pulled her out of her daydream. “Aunt Bet,” Connie heard her twin saying seriously, “I hope you won’t be offended. I think it’s terribly nice of you to offer me the chance, but honestly, I don’t want to go.” “Don’t want to go?” Connie cried incredulously. “Aunt Bet, don’t believe her. She’s just trying to be nice to me.” “I’m not, really.” Kit sounded perfectly candid. “I just don’t like modeling. I didn’t this afternoon, and I don’t think I’d like it any better next week.” Wedged between them as she was, both Connie and her aunt could feel a shudder run through her. “And nearly two weeks of it!” Kit groaned and shut her eyes. 22

Aunt Bet leaned forward and took her eyes off the road long enough to glance at Connie. “I think she’s telling the truth.” By the time the car was parked in the Blair driveway Connie also was convinced of Kit’s sincerity, though she was still astonished that her twin—or any other girl—would refuse such a chance. A fortnight in Philadelphia, right in the midst of the bustle and brilliance of a store like Campion’s! Connie’s impetuous mind leapt ahead to a dozen questions. How many models would there be? What would they be required to do? Where would they dress and how often would they change costume? But first she had to settle the most important question of all. Slamming the door of the car behind her and racing across the lawn and into the cool interior of the house, she accosted her mother in the dining room and whirled her around. “Mommy,” she cried, reverting to the old, pet nickname that always popped out when she was excited. “Mommy, the most marvelous thing has happened. Aunt Bet wants me to come to Philadelphia and model for ten days at Campion’s. Please, please say I can go!” For the next hour, at the house on High Street, not another thing was discussed. Mrs. Blair was almost as quick to give her consent as Connie had hoped 23

she would be. She telephoned her husband at the store and he, too, felt that, under Aunt Bet’s chaperonage, his daughter’s excursion would be assured of success. Connie, on her part, was jubilant. While Aunt Bet helped set the table for dinner, she unearthed a rather battered suitcase from the depths of the storage closet and hastily packed. Kit offered two pair of nylon hose that had never been worn, along with an extra slip and some practically new pajamas to supplement Connie’s rather sketchy collection of clean lingerie. Three dresses, Aunt Bet insisted, would be ample, since Connie would practically live in store clothes. But just to be on the safe side, Connie packed a few extra things. Ten days seemed to stretch out like infinity before her, and she didn’t want to be caught short. Mr. Blair found no one to meet him at the door when he returned from the store. Everybody seemed to be gathered upstairs discussing Connie’s exciting “job.” Later, at the dinner table, he teased Connie and called her “my career girl.” “I never saw a child more eager to leave home.” He shook his head despairingly and put an arm around Kit’s shoulders. “You and I’ll have to get together,” he suggested. “If you spurn the big city, how about helping me out at the store while my clerk goes on vacation? I’ll pay you whatever 24

Connie’s getting. That ought to be fair enough.” “I’d like to, Dad,” Kit said surprisingly. Even as a little girl she had always liked the hardware business, and used to beg to go down to the big, amply stocked store on Main Street and “help Daddy sort nuts and bolts.” She still loved the myriad little drawers which lined the wall behind the counter, holding innumerable fascinating gadgets to help in construction or repair. She liked the smell of the moth flakes in the big barrel near the entrance; and in the spring, when seed packets and fertilizer and sprays came into ascendancy over kitchen wares and cleaning equipment, she always felt that Blair Hardware was personally responsible for the beauty and fertility of Meadowbrook in the summertime. Kit’s father looked pleased and almost relieved. He squeezed her shoulder affectionately, and Connie realized for the first time what a close bond existed between her twin and her father. She adored Dad, of course; everybody did—he was so genial and friendly and sweet. But though Connie had inherited his talent for friendliness, it was Kit who really understood him. Connie, probably because opposites attract, was her mother’s girl. Aunt Bet wanted to get off right after supper, so that she could do the better part of the driving while it was still light. The good-byes were necessarily 25

brisk, and before Connie quite realized that she was on her way Toby had swung her suitcase into the car, and her mother and dad and sister were walking back across the lawn to the porch. Within five minutes the familiar streets of Meadowbrook, shady and quiet, gave way to open country, and Aunt Bet turned into the highway that led to Philadelphia. Behind a screen of trees the sun was dropping, and the sky was aflame with carnival colors. They matched Connie’s high spirits. Never before in her life had she felt more excited and alive. Aunt Bet drove in silence for a few minutes. Connie could feel the tenseness of the day’s work go out of her, to be replaced by the sense of relaxation that seeps into a person who really loves the feel of a car’s wheel. She didn’t disturb her, and let Aunt Bet herself make the first overture. What she said, finally, was rather astonishing. “I can’t get that hatbox out of my mind.” Connie remembered something. “What did you mean yesterday,” she asked her aunt, “when you said it wasn’t the first time?” A little pucker appeared just over Aunt Bet’s left eyebrow. “I had a hand-blocked scarf up in my office last week,” she said slowly. “It was pure silk, a beautiful thing, and I had it in mind for a certain suit. It was there when I left for the night. I know it was. I can still see it along with some alligator 26

sandals and a matching bag. The next morning it was gone.” “Gone? You mean stolen?” “I didn’t know,” Aunt Bet said. “I ransacked the office and called the accessory buyer and asked everybody I could think of if they’d seen it. You see, I get around the store a lot and I just might have laid it down.” “But if you were sure it was in your office the night before—” “I rather pride myself on my efficiency, and the store personnel knows that. That’s why it was an especially good joke when the scarf turned up, two days later, in the strangest place in the world.” “Where?” Aunt Bet smiled wryly. “In one of the drawers under the perfume counter. The last place anyone would think of looking. I’ll admit I’d been buying some toilet water for myself the day the scarf disappeared, but I’d scarcely go around back and tuck it into a drawer. It was just too silly for words.” It seemed silly to Connie too, yet her mind leapt ahead to the disappearance of the beret and bag. “Maybe you’ve got schizo—what’s that word for dual personality?” she asked with a grin. “I can’t pronounce it either,” Aunt Bet said companionably, “but I know what you mean.” She negotiated a curve, then chuckled. “You may be 27

right at that. It would be as good an answer as any I’ve thought of so far.” Big words seemed to be crowding Connie’s brain. “Or maybe there’s a kleptomaniac who keeps taking things,” she offered. “There was a girl like that in school once. She just couldn’t help herself.” “Kleptomaniacs don’t put things back,” Aunt Bet said sensibly. “At least, that couldn’t account for the scarf.” Connie knew, without pressing a direct question, that her aunt was genuinely concerned about the beret and bag. They represented a sum of money infinitely larger than the value of the scarf, and the most obvious explanation of their disappearance was that they might have been lost or stolen en route to the Meadowbrook show. She brought up all the questionable factors she could think of—the honesty of the helpers who packed the car, the possible stops for gasoline, but to each of her suggestions Aunt Bet shook her head. “I know it would be easy to steal a small hatbox, but the car wasn’t out of my sight once. And oddly enough, I can’t remember actually seeing it in the car with the rest of the boxes. I can’t remember it anywhere except on my desk.” Suddenly she made a decision. “I know what I’m going to do,” she told Connie. “I’m going over to the store tomorrow, even if it is Sunday. There’s 28

always a watchman on duty, and I have the privilege of signing in and out. I just can’t believe that Jean looked really thoroughly for that box.” “May I go along?” Connie asked shyly. “If you like.” Aunt Bet shrugged. “I don’t suppose old George will care. But a department store on a Sunday’s a pretty dismal place.” It was not only dismal, Connie was to discover. It was full of mystery—mystery in which she, as well as her attractive young aunt, were to become inextricably involved.

29

CHAPTER 3

The Face in the Mirror

Aunt Bet’s apartment was as small and clever as Aunt Bet herself. There was a living room with a picture window looking out on a patch of brickpaved, city garden, a kitchen no bigger than a closet, and a bedroom barely large enough to accommodate the opened studio couch, a chest of drawers and a single chair. Connie was entranced by its location, on one of the many narrow side streets that Crosshatch Philadelphia, and she exclaimed again and again over the inexpensive antiques with which Aunt Bet had furnished it, and over the gay Pennsylvania Dutch hangings in the living room, contrasting so effectively with the pine and maple. “I can’t imagine anything more perfect!” she said. “Thank you, Connie!” Aunt Bet was pleased. Someday, Connie thought, I’m going to have an 30

apartment of my own, an apartment like this, in the center of the city, where I can hear the clang of trolleys and the voices of people passing and the squeal of car brakes. The city noises spelled life to Connie; she didn’t cling to small-town life as Kit did. She liked the feel of being in the center of things. And the thrill she felt at looking out Aunt Bet’s window and seeing the night lights of a tall office building wink down at her was the same sort of thrill that some people find in the mountains or in the stars. It was fun to lie in bed, between the cool, clean sheets and pretend that the great day had already come when she would be a business woman herself, an executive in an advertising agency, perhaps, and as smart and assured as Aunt Bet. She dreamed of the friends she would have to dinner, of the plays she would see and the concerts she would hear when she lived in town. And there was about these dreams a quality of reality. Connie was determined that they should come true. In the morning, Connie and her aunt breakfasted on a drop-leaf table in front of the big window. Aunt Bet wore a dressing gown, and looked relaxed and comfortable and even younger than she did when her hair was smoothly combed and she was dressed with her usual urban care. They shared the Sunday paper, then walked uptown to a church near 31

Rittenhouse Square. It wasn’t until they had started back toward the apartment that Aunt Bet made the suggestion Connie had been anticipating all morning. “Let’s walk on over to Campion’s,” she said thoughtfully. “I’d like to check up on that beret and bag.” Connie had been in the store before, on infrequent shopping trips to Philadelphia. She recognized the facade, with its great glass show windows and its air of up-to-the-minute elegance. But as she approached the shop with her aunt she had a new feeling about it—as though the fact that she would work here somehow made it her shop. It was rather like the sense of possessiveness her dad exhibited about all cars of the same make as his own. “We’ll have to go around back,” Aunt Bet said, and Connie laughed because it was such a homely remark to apply to such a luxurious establishment. She walked with her aunt to the corner of the street, then down about a hundred yards to a cobbled passage that was little more than an alley. Old iron hitching posts still lined its narrow sidewalks, and there was barely room on the road for a single truck to pass. The rear of Campion’s was very different from the front. It made no pretense of style. The broad, businesslike door smacked of utility, and the words 32

“Employees Only” were stenciled on it in clear script. Aunt Bet rang the night bell, and they waited in the sun for what seemed to Connie an interminable time. “Maybe nobody’s home after all,” she suggested, but Aunt Bet said, “Old George is likely to be on one of the upper floors. It’ll take him some time to get back here.” “I can’t imagine anything worse than being a watchman,” Connie said with a wriggle of her shoulders. “Imagine being shut up in a big building all alone!” Aunt Bet smiled. “I don’t imagine George minds being alone,” she said. “In fact, he told me one day he rather enjoys it. ‘Seems kind of nice to have it quiet,’ he said. ‘My wife and me, we raised eight kids.’ ” Aunt Bet had a knack for mimicry, but there was understanding in her tone, not unkindness. She had scarcely finished speaking when old George himself opened the heavy door. The moment he recognized his visitor a smile broke over his gaunt face. “Miss Easton!” he cried. “I thought to myself, who’s wantin’ into Campion’s at midday on a Sunday? Never would I have guessed it would be you.” 33

His very surprise implied a compliment to Aunt Bet. It was as though he questioned why such a lovely lady should want to return to the scene of business on a summer week end. “I’ve been out of town on a trip, George, and I want to go up to my office for a few minutes,” Miss Easton explained. Then she turned to Connie. “This is my niece, Miss Blair.” The watchman acknowledged the introduction with a nod of his grizzled head, then stood back so that they could enter the building. It was as dark in the corridor as it was blinding bright without, and Connie blinked and almost groped her way along in her aunt’s wake. George edged ahead from the rear, and led them past a group of offices to the store proper, where all the counters were shrouded in dust covers and a few feeble night lights maintained an atmosphere of eternal dusk. Never before had Connie been so aware of the height of Campion’s ceilings, nor of the length of its block-long aisles. Empty and silent as it was, with the street noises smothered by the closed doors, it seemed like a different place from the busy store she had known on weekdays. She felt as though she should tiptoe and whisper, as though any brash sound might disturb its Sunday peace. Her aunt must have sensed some of Connie’s feeling, because she turned and said, “I always think 34

the counters look as though they were wearing oldfashioned nightgowns.” Connie’s sense of play was strong. “Sh!” she whispered back. “They’re asleep.” George had come up with a book in which Miss Easton was required to sign her name. She glanced at her wrist watch and noted the time of her arrival beside her signature. Then she said to the watchman, “Miss Blair can wait down here if you think it would be best, George. I know you have rules.” “I’ve never even seen a young lady by the name o’ Miss Blair,” George said with a wink. “Come along, the two of you.” It was easy to see, as George took them upstairs in the service elevator, that Miss Easton was a favorite of his. Connie thought she knew the reason. Aunt Bet’s warmth and social ease knew no class distinction. She was as natural with George as she would have been with the president of the company, and in return for her friendliness George gave her his admiration and any special favors of which he was capable, like letting her take her niece upstairs. Aunt Bet’s office was on the third floor, tucked away in a corner behind the big Bridal Salon and next to another door marked “Advertising.” “This office of mine is just a cubbyhole,” she told Connie as she opened the door with her own key. “I’m sort of a stepchild of the advertising 35

department. Neither bird, fish, nor good red herring—that’s me.” “I think you’re very good red herring indeed,” said Connie firmly as her aunt switched on a light to reveal an office which was as cluttered as it was tiny. “Isn’t this place a mess?” Miss Easton asked brightly. “I love to work in a clutter, even though at home I’m not happy unless everything’s as neat as a pin.” To Connie the disorder was interesting, because it helped her understand Aunt Bet’s job. There were proofs of newspaper ads, swatches of materials, a profusion of fashion magazines and a mailbox piled high with letters. Boxes and cartons crowded the shelves that lined one wall, and a pair of motherdaughter dresses, made precisely alike of blue corduroy, swayed slightly on their hangers, the wire hooks of which were holding precariously to one of the shelves. The dresses were apparently a surprise. Aunt Bet said, “Aren’t they sweet?” and walked over to feel the material. But her interest was more particularly concerned with the missing hatbox, and almost immediately her eyes started to rove around the office, as though she still couldn’t believe that she wouldn’t find it somewhere here. Five minutes’ search, however, convinced her 36

that it was not in the office. “I just can’t understand it,” she said with a puzzled frown. “I’ll have to report it tomorrow morning, and the powers that be will not be pleased.” Then her attention was diverted by a letter on top of the pile on her desk. “Here’s something that should have been answered Friday,” she murmured to Connie. “Can you amuse yourself for fifteen minutes while I get off a reply?” “Certainly.” Connie was perfectly agreeable. “Is it all right if I wander around?” “Why don’t you?” Aunt Bet suggested. “The stairs are open. I’ll meet you back on the first floor by the elevators, if you like.” Connie thought it would be fun to explore the store alone. She went back through the Bridal Salon and into a dress department, then turned and walked down a few carpeted steps to a suit-and-coat section, stopping now and then to consider the models on display. The front stairs, broken by landings between floors, were easy to find, and she walked on down to the next floor, and found herself in what must surely be the College Shop, where she would work. She lingered for several minutes here, then strolled on back to a large, square room entirely lined with mirrors, and furnished with little mirrored tables, which was obviously the Hat Salon from which the missing beret had come. 37

Two display cases at the entrance carried, within plate-glass enclosures, an assortment of fall models. The hats were so dashing and expensive-looking that Connie wasn’t surprised to find that in one case a card bore the reproduced signature of a famous Paris designer. She stood looking at the hats for a long time, a half-smile lighting her face because it amused and excited her to think that these little scraps of felt, with their foolish but smart feathers and ribbons and ornaments, had come on such a long journey to rest in a showcase in Campion’s. All the way across the Atlantic, wrapped in their tissues and closed into hatboxes. “Sometime,” she thought, and her lips moved to form the words, “it would be fun to own a Paris hat.” Another showcase at the rear of the department, opposite a door which Connie decided must lead to a stock room, contained a group of even gayer models, and she wandered back to look at a little red felt sailor with two black-and-white birds on the front. The birds were so unusual that she bent to examine them more closely. Their eyes were made of the most brilliant stones she had ever seen. Perhaps it was looking into those peculiar eyes that made Connie freeze suddenly, attacked by an eerie sensation that she was being watched. She 38

became conscious, for the first time, of the stockroom door behind her, and the next instant she heard an unmistakable creak. Still crouching to inspect the hat, she let her gaze travel slowly to the mirrored back of the showcase, and for a split second another pair of eyes—a man’s eyes, narrow and surprised—met hers. They peered out grotesquely from under a large, beribboned woman’s hat, and the mouth below them was thin and hard. A ruthless, ugly mouth, Connie thought. Then she awoke to the fact that this was no apparition but a flesh-and-blood man staring at her from under that fantastic hat—a man who was standing directly behind her in the shadow of the stock-room door. She wanted to whirl and face him, but her knees were like jelly and for the first time in her life she felt fear so intense that it was paralyzing. The store was like a tomb, it was so quiet, and the eyes in the mirror held hers even as the image wavered and the man seemed to move. Then Connie tried to scream. She felt sure that if she could get out one good healthy yell Aunt Bet or the watchman would hear her. But just as she opened her mouth there was a blow like a soft thud at the back of her head. Then, for Connie, there was nothing left in the vacuum of the vast second floor save hideous noise 39

and the feeling of slipping, slipping into a well of darkness.

40

CHAPTER

4

Enter Larry Stewart

When Connie opened her eyes again, an enormous stretch of time seemed to have elapsed. She couldn’t remember where she was, and halt expected to find herself in her bed at home, awakening from a disagreeable nightmare. Then she realized that her head was cradled by no pillow, but that her cheek lay against a rough, red carpet which bit into the tender skin with a thousand prickly hairs. Connie tried to raise her head, but its ache was sickening, and dizziness swept over her like a heavy fog. Dimly she could hear her name being called. “Connie . . . Con-nie . . .” The sound came from a great distance and she wanted to answer but couldn’t. She closed her eyes again. When she awoke next, her head was in Aunt Bet’s lap and the watchman, old George, was 41

bending over her with an expression of puzzled solicitude on his face. “She must have fainted,” Connie’s aunt was saying. “It may be the heat in town. She’s used to country air.” Connie wanted to correct her, but it was so pleasant to lie still that she couldn’t rouse herself to the effort. Very carefully she tried to move her head. The ache was less intense now. She opened her eyes again and tried to smile. “Feeling better, dear?” Connie’s eyelids lowered in assent, and her lips formed the word “Much.” Aunt Bet stroked her forehead. “Think you can sit up?” “I think so.” She tried it, then said, “Ouch! The back of my head hurts.” She felt the sore place gingerly. There seemed to be a bump. Then abruptly she remembered everything, the face of the man in the mirror, the wavering image, the thud. “Somebody hit me,” Connie said. Surprisingly. Aunt Bet laughed. “Defense reaction,” she murmured. “There was nobody here to hit you, Connie. You must have struck your head on the edge of the showcase as you slipped.” “But I didn’t slip.” Connie managed to sit up alone and she looked from her aunt to the watchman 42

in indignation. “There was a man. A man in a woman’s hat. I saw him in the mirror. Honestly, I did.” Miss Easton and old George exchanged a brief glance that expressed volumes, and her aunt patted Connie’s shoulder kindly. “All right, dear,” she said, as though she were humoring a perverse child. “Let’s see if we can get you on your feet now.” With the watchman’s help, Connie stood up, and Aunt Bet got quickly to her feet beside her and tucked a supporting arm under her niece’s elbow. “All right?” “Perfectly all right.” Righteous anger was bringing Connie around. She remembered the incongruous face in the mirror so clearly now that it made her furious not to be believed. “Honestly, Aunt Bet, I didn’t just pass out. Girls today don’t faint,” she said scornfully. “There was a man standing in that doorway.” She pointed. “Right over there.” “I’ll take a look in the stock room,” the watchman said, evidently impressed by the sincerity in Connie’s voice. He walked over to the door, opened it rather cautiously, then went through. At the time, Connie didn’t know what she expected to hear, unless it was the thud of another blow, a falling body or a shot. What she certainly 43

didn’t expect was to see George return in a moment, smiling. “Nothin’ in there now but them bonnets my old lady used to call ‘cree-ations,’ ” he chuckled. “But there was a man!” Connie insisted. Then, as her brain cleared still further, she added sensibly, “Though I don’t suppose he’d attack me and then just stick around.” “But be logical, darling,” Aunt Bet urged hastily. “Even if there had been a man, why would he have wanted to knock you out? Can’t you believe you fell against the showcase, and that the rest was just a very nasty dream? Because I really think that’s the answer. Don’t you, George?” George nodded his head vigorously. “I been all over this floor just half an hour ago,” he assured them as he led them to the elevator. “Warn’t no man here then.” He was opening the door for Connie and her aunt at the main floor when the signal light from the basement glowed. “Who’s downstairs?” Aunt Bet asked. “Oh, that’s Mr. Kurt, the new floorwalker. He needed to get into his locker for something, and now he wants up.” George hesitated between the two demands for his attention, then said, “Suppose I let you out first. You’ll be wantin’ to get the young lady a cab.” 44

“I don’t need a cab,” Connie protested. “I’m all right now.” But she was glad the watchman didn’t keep them waiting in the corridor while he took the elevator downstairs for the floorwalker. She did want to get out in the sun and fresh air. For a few minutes the bright light outside blinded her, however, and her headache increased. She leaned against a hitching post until she was sure of her equilibrium, then meekly allowed her aunt to lead her around the corner into Chestnut Street and hail a taxi. They were driven back to the apartment in style, and then Miss Easton insisted that her niece take a nap. Connie, unusually acquiescent, lay down and fell asleep at once, to awake an hour later feeling right as rain, with only the bump on the back of her head, sore to touch, as a reminder of the strange incident at Campion’s. She washed her face, ran a comb through her glistening hair, flicked some powder on her nose and then went into the living room to join Aunt Bet, who was sitting curled up on the Victorian sofa amid the comfortable disarray of the Sunday paper. The late afternoon sun was creeping in between the slats of the Venetian blinds, and the apartment looked cooler than it felt. “Want something cool to drink?” Aunt Bet asked. “I’ve got grape juice, coke, ginger ale—” She began ticking the possibilities off on her fingers, but was 45

interrupted by a whistle from the narrow street below the casement window. “That sounds like Larry Stewart.” “Who’s he?” Connie asked. But Aunt Bet had already turned to kneel on the sofa and pull up the blind. She peered down, grinned and shook her head. “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun!” she chanted gaily. “It’s not midday; it’s practically evening,” a young man’s voice retorted, and Connie walked over to stand behind her aunt and look down at the speaker. A boy who was long and lean and whose short brown hair was trimmed in a crew cut squinted up at them, though he couldn’t see Connie in the shadow. “If somebody’d invite me,” he said with assumed plaintiveness, “I’d come up.” Aunt Bet said, “All right. You’re invited.” But when she turned back into the room she shook her head again. “Larry’s in the display department at the store,” she said. “He’s a nice child, but he’s getting to be a little like a shadow.” A thought seemed to occur to her suddenly. “He’s just about as much older than you, Connie, as he is younger than me. Maybe you can take him off my hands,” she suggested artfully as she slipped past her niece to open the door. 46

Larry Stewart’s reaction to Connie was involuntary and complimentary. His brown eyes widened and he whistled softly. Then, collecting himself, he came forward and held out his hand to Connie while he glanced at Miss Easton with a grin. “Something new has been added!” he said. “My niece, Connie Blair.” Aunt Bet made the introduction casually, but she winked like a conspirator at Connie behind Larry’s back. “We were just about to get something cool to drink,” she said after a minute. “Now, let’s see, we have—” “Coke, ginger ale,” started Connie. “Grape juice,” Aunt Bet followed through. Larry asked for a coke, and within five minutes they were all settled comfortably with ice-filled glasses, and Aunt Bet was explaining to her guest that Connie would be around for a while, because she was going to model college clothes at the store. “Nice!” Larry said with a nod. “But very nice.” And it was impossible to tell whether he was talking about the girl or the idea. “Come down to the basement and visit the display department. We’ll show you things you’ve never seen before.” “Like the Lucy?” Aunt Bet asked with a grin. “Like the Lucy,” repeated Larry. “And like Armless Alice and Dumb Dora and Torso Tessie. You’ll be surprised!” “It sounds as though I would,” admitted Connie, 47

looking utterly confused. “What’s he talking about, Aunt Bet?” “Mostly,” laughed Miss Easton, “he’s talking about some window dummies who’ve seen better days.” “Slander!” accused Larry. “Those girls are in their prime.” He turned to Connie. “You wait and see.” In spite of his teasing, or perhaps because of it, Connie liked Larry at once. There were golden flecks in his brown eyes that sparkled in the sunlight, and his broad mouth had an upward twist that indicated a happy disposition to go with the sense of humor he had already displayed. He seemed more sophisticated than the boys she knew in Meadowbrook, but not much older. She wondered about his job and wanted to ask some really serious questions, but this scarcely seemed the time. As they sat and chatted, the sun dropped lower and lower behind the chimneys and roof tops. Finally Aunt Bet said, “We ought to be thinking about food. How are you feeling now, Connie, up to walking a few blocks for something to eat?” Before Connie could do more than nod, Larry turned to her in surprise. “What’s the matter? Have you been sick?” Connie looked so full of youthful vitality that it was no wonder such a thing seemed incredible. She 48

changed her nod to a shake of the head, then ran one hand up under the hair at the back of her neck. “No, but I scared my poor aunt half to death this noon.” Her eyes twinkled mischievously and she added, “Aunt Bet contends I fainted from the heat like a gal from the gaslight era, but my story is more interesting, even if nobody seems to believe it.” “What’s your story?” Larry asked. “Before you laugh, remember I’ve got a bump on the head to prove it!” Connie warned. “I’ll remember.” “A man in a woman’s hat—a big, ridiculous sort of hat with lots of decoration—came out of the stock room in the hat department at Campion’s and knocked me out,” Connie said firmly. Larry’s reaction was unexpected. “But what under the shining sun were you doing in Campion’s on a Sunday?” he asked. “Waiting for Aunt Bet,” Connie replied promptly, then glanced at her aunt and realized that a little frown of concern was making tiny marks on her brow. “Then what were you doing, Liz?” As Larry turned to her aunt, Connie began to wish she had never mentioned the incident. It all did seem absurdly farfetched, even though a shudder still swept over her when she thought of the man’s eyes in the mirror. And somehow it seemed to 49

involve Aunt Bet in an explanation she didn’t want to make. “I had stopped in at the office to look for something I’d mislaid,” Miss Easton said. She didn’t mention that the something was a fur hat and a bag. “Connie wandered on downstairs to see the store.” She hesitated a minute, then stood up with a slight shake of her shoulders. “Come on. I’m hungry. Want to join us, Larry?” Larry did want to, very much. On the way to the restaurant he also wanted to pursue the subject Elizabeth Easton seemed only too ready to drop. Finally she explained her reason. “It was a little irregular for old George to let Connie go upstairs with me,” she said. “I think he was just overlooking the store rules in an effort to be nice.” She walked along for a few seconds in silence, then added, “And heaven knows we didn’t expect to cause him any trouble. The very last thing I expected was to find Connie unconscious on the floor.” “This man—” Larry turned to Connie. “Were you just making that up?” Connie was confused now. She didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know. I really thought I saw a man’s face in the mirror, just before I blacked out.” She shrugged her shoulders and gave a little chuckle. “Oh, I suppose it could have been the heat.” 50

Larry looked at her curiously, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. The whole episode, with its undertone of horror that she couldn’t forget, seemed too utterly fantastic when it was discussed walking across Sixteenth Street. “Let’s forget it,” Connie said after another minute. “Aunt Bet will get disgusted with me and send me home. Such a stunt to pull on my first day in the big city!” Aunt Bet, walking on the inside of the pavement, thanked Connie with a smile for dropping the subject, and managed to give her arm a light squeeze. “I’ll scarcely send you home,” she promised. “I’ll need you too badly at the store.” Their arrival at the restaurant put a natural period to the conversation. Connie had actually forgotten it by the time the waiter brought their dinner check, so absorbed was she in an experience seldom enjoyed. The people who came and went fascinated her. She wondered what thoughts lay behind their polite city expressions, what work they pursued, what lives they led. With only half an ear she listened to the casual conversation between her aunt and Larry. When the boy tried to include her in the talk she made a conscious effort, then quickly fell silent, letting the wonder of just being here seep in. But if her tongue was checked, Connie’s eyes were sparkling. As she pushed her chair back from 51

the table she smiled ingenuously and said, “I’m having such fun!” The remark seemed to delight Larry. He looked at her with understanding warmth and stuck out his hand and said, “Shake.” Then later, following her down the aisle between the tables with Elizabeth Easton at his side, he said, “There’s a girl! Natural and spontaneous—that’s what I like. You can have these bored sophisticates. I’ll take a girl like Connie any time.” Miss Easton clasped her hands in a gesture of despair. “I told her she’d cut me out in your affections.” “Oh, but—” Larry started. “I also told her you were the fickle type.” She escaped through the revolving door as the boy made a playful lunge in her direction, and, still laughing, joined Connie on the street. The walk home through the warm, soft dusk was all too short. Connie felt relaxed and peaceful, though at the back of her mind was a little tickle of anticipation, for tomorrow morning bright and early, she would be launched on her first—though temporary—job.

52

CHAPTER

5

In the Models’ Dressing Room

On Monday morning Campion’s held no hint of terror. When Connie walked through the employees’ entrance she could scarcely credit her own memory of the Sunday incident. The store was alive with workers. Lights were blazing, voices were brisk, and dust covers were being whisked off counters by a hundred hands. Connie’s own eyes were almost as bright as the lights. The prospect of being part of this colorful scene for ten whole days seemed like the best luck in the world. When her aunt took her to the personnel office, where she was asked to sign her name to a couple of cards and instructed in the manner in which she could collect her salary, she 53

behaved soberly. Actually she was filled with wonder that she should be paid for a job which promised to be so much fun. “Just to walk around the store wearing beautiful clothes!” she whispered to her aunt when she rejoined her. “I think models have about the easiest job in the world.” Miss Easton smiled. “You wait until you’ve talked to a few of the professional models who’ll be working with you this week. Maybe you’ll change your mind.” In the models’ dressing room off the College Shop Connie met the five other girls who had been engaged to wear the clothes that would be featured in the special promotion. To her they all seemed attractive in a polished and sophisticated sort of way, infinitely different from the girls in Meadowbrook with whom she had grown up, and equally different from herself. At first she couldn’t quite put her finger on the difference. Two of them weren’t much more than seventeen, yet their interests were so foreign to hers that they seemed older. As a matter of fact, it was one of the older girls, named Marcia Schuyler, who made Connie feel most at home. It developed that they both came from small towns, and it established a kind of bond between them. Marcia was a tall, slender redhead, with a certain 54

elegance in the way she moved that made her a girl one would notice in a throng. She wore sports clothes with great distinction, Connie thought. Among the other models, Connie at first only remembered one other name, that of Suzanne O’Keefe, who looked more Irish than French, with black, curling hair and blue eyes the color of a kitten’s. The other three girls were all brown-haired and slender, of about Connie’s own height and with equal ability to wear collegiate clothes. Aunt Bet, along with the buyer for the College Shop, was in charge here, and Connie had another opportunity to admire the efficiency of Miss Easton at work. She explained the girls’ duties, helped select the clothes that they would wear and managed every detail with experienced ease. An hour later, as the store began to fill with morning shoppers, many of them hunting bargains advertised in the Sunday papers, Connie found herself strolling from one department to another in the same tweed suit she had worn at the Meadowbrook show. “We’ll go down and get you a hat later in the morning, perhaps,” Aunt Bet had told her when she sent her off. “Until then you look lovely just as you are.” Connie didn’t feel particularly lovely. In this brilliant store she had less assurance than in the 55

garden of the Fortnightly Club at home. The other models all seemed to walk in a way that made them identifiable, but Connie couldn’t attempt to achieve their studied perfection. She didn’t feel arrogant; she felt a little shy. Though she kept her head high, her shoulders well back, and her stomach in, she doubted that she looked like other than a girl dressed expensively and a little unseasonably for a day in town. Customers, fortunately, thought differently. The mere facts that Connie carried no handbag or gloves and that her clothes were store-fresh made her conspicuous. She could feel the eyes of many of the women following her from time to time, and occasionally a matron, shopping alone or with a college-age daughter, would stop her and inquire the price of the suit. After a while Connie’s initial self-consciousness left her and it began to be fun to wander at will among the shoppers and to explore the store. Once in a while she would meet one of the other five models and stop to chat for a moment, but usually she was alone. She was alone, but she wasn’t in the least lonely. There was so much to see and hear, so much to learn! For the first time Connie began to realize that a big apparel shop is primarily a woman’s world. Most of the workers at Campion’s, from stock girls 56

to buyers and department managers, were of her own sex. She didn’t see Aunt Bet until nearly noon, and then only in passing. Miss Easton was walking through the coat-and-suit department, talking with a large and rather florid gentleman in an insistent manner. The man was talking, too, and shaking his head with authority. “Who’s that with Miss Easton?” Connie asked a sales clerk who was standing idle. The girl gave a short laugh of surprise. “That’s Mr. George Campion,” she told Connie. “I thought everybody knew him.” Connie turned to look back toward the elevators, where her aunt and Mr. Campion had stopped. She saw them take leave of each other, Mr. Campion getting into one of the cars while Aunt Bet turned back and would have passed her niece without seeing her, so deep was her concentration. Amused, Connie put out a hand. “Oh—hello, darling—” Aunt Bet still seemed vague. “You said something about selecting a hat.” “Oh, yes. Come along.” Aunt Bet tucked her arm through Connie’s. “We may as well get it over with now.” “Getting it over with,” Connie discovered within a few minutes, meant facing the hat buyer with the 57

news that the beaver beret had disappeared. Miss Easton, when she had a disagreeable task to do, was direct about it. While Connie stood in the background her aunt approached a small woman with strong, regular features and dark hair with a wide stripe of white running diagonally through it. “Estelle,” the stylist said, “that beaver beret you loaned me for the Meadowbrook show—the import with the little pink cameo—” “Yes?” “It’s disappeared.” “Disappeared?” Aunt Bet nodded. “Either mislaid or”—she hesitated on the word—“stolen.” The hat buyer was apparently the emotional type. She clapped a hand to her forehead, shut her eyes and groaned. “That was an original!” she shrieked softly. “We were going to make copies. It wasn’t even for sale.” Connie gulped, but Aunt Bet asked quietly, “What was its price?” “We paid a hundred and a quarter for that hat,” the buyer said. “Very well.” Aunt Bet’s voice was still contained. “I’m still hoping it will turn up. But in the meantime, of course, I’ve made the usual report.” She gave a short chuckle. “And I guess I’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest.” 58

The hat buyer looked at Aunt Bet questioningly. Connie, too, was interested and came closer. “A lace-and-chiffon robe has just disappeared from the lingerie department, it seems. Mr. Campion says too many losses have been reported lately. He’s putting on a store detective.” Miss Easton seemed to lapse into thought and slowly shook her head. “But my beret!” The buyer came back to the original subject. “It’s absurd for it just to disappear.” “Ridiculous,” Aunt Bet agreed a trifle wanly. She explained how she had come to miss the beret, described the search that had been made. Then, as though she had decided it was useless to pursue the subject further, she turned to Connie and introduced her to Miss Estelle. “Could you find something else for Miss Blair to wear with this suit?” she asked. “She’s modeling at the luncheon show in the Mirror Room.” Grudgingly, Miss Estelle brought out a selection of hats. Connie noticed that they were all inexpensive felts, and, indeed, she thought that they were in far better taste for a college girl than the fabulous fur beret that had disappeared. Between the three of them, they made a choice, and Connie went back to the College Shop wearing a soft tan felt. At luncheon, in the small restaurant on the top floor of Campion’s, the girls each modeled three costumes, appearing briefly on a low platform built 59

for the occasion and moving about among the tables, so that the clothes could be more intimately displayed. For the first time Connie realized that this job was work as well as fun. She had been on her feet all morning, wearing higher heels than usual, and her toes were beginning to feel cramped. She had three changes to make for the luncheon show, and by the time she appeared in the last of the costumes, a fall golfing outfit, she was both warm and a little weary. It took effort, now, to answer shoppers’ questions with a pleasant smile, and to avoid letting her shoulders sag as she walked. The break for Connie’s own lunch was consequently more than welcome. The models ate together in the emptying restaurant, seated at a round table in a far corner. They were free until three-thirty, when they would again be on parade throughout the store. Connie was the last of the girls to slip into her seat. “Whee!” Suzanne was saying as she reached down to wriggle her heels out of her slippers. “Do my feet ache!” Connie’s feet didn’t actually ache, but her arches felt the strain of standing, and she could be sympathetic with a girl to whom this business was routine. 60

“Do you model regularly here?” she asked her neighbor. Suzanne shook her head. “This kind of modeling’s a seasonal business,” she explained. “I work for a photographer part of the time, and once in a while for a fashion artist.” She shrugged. “Anything that comes up.” “That sounds interesting.” Suzanne looked at Connie sharply. “You can have it, sister,” she said. “It’s the most tiresome work in the world.” Fortunately for Connie’s illusions, not all of the models felt the same way. Marcia insisted that she loved her job—“In spite,” she laughed, “of hurty feet.” “Is this your first crack at it?” asked one of the other girls, and Connie admitted that it was. Immediately a wholesale discussion was engendered, and the pros and cons of modeling as a career were bruited back and forth. “I’d like to land a job like Miss Easton’s,” Suzanne said slangily. “That’s for me.” “B—but don’t you have to begin at the bottom and work up?” asked a brunette named Elaine Scott. “You do,” insisted Marcia firmly. “I’m going to go on modeling until I get married, myself.” “Oh, are you going to be married soon?” Connie was full of innocent interest. 61

“Soon as I meet a guy on a white charger,” retorted Marcia, and everybody laughed. Marcia was undismayed. She rested her chin on the palm of one hand and leaned forward languidly. “Afterwards,” she said, “think what fun it would be to do mother-and-daughter ads—in matching dresses. You know, like the ones in the magazines.” “Model Mother . . .” Elaine murmured, and struck a pose. Suzanne yawned and pushed back her dessert plate. “Come on, Mother,” she invited. “Let’s go put our feet up on a railing somewhere. Coming, Connie?” “No, thanks,” Connie smiled. “I want to do some shopping. I’ll see you later, if you don’t mind.” The shopping was simple enough. Connie simply wanted to buy a gift to send to Kit. She still felt like Little Jack Horner, and it hardly seemed fair that she had stuck in her finger and pulled out such a perfectly enormous plum as this fascinating job. On her way back to the models’ dressing room she almost skipped with exuberance. Rested now, and fed, she forgot that she had ever been tired. “I never saw a girl who looked as though she were having such fun!” a voice said behind her as she crossed the carpet of the College Shop, and Connie whirled around to meet Larry Stewart’s eyes. 62

The young display man was leaning on a big cardboard poster as though he were waiting for someone. His eyes were full of admiration as he grinned at Connie. “Why, hello, Larry!” Connie cried. “Now don’t go greeting me like a long-lost brother. I’ll bet you haven’t given me a thought all morning,” Larry said with a pretense at sternness. Connie, instinctively honest, dropped her eyes. Amused, Larry pressed his advantage. “While I slaved away in my cellar, waiting for that visit you promised. I even dusted off Armless Annie and . . .” “Last time it was Alice,” Connie reminded him with a grin. “Better keep your women straight, Larry.” “Alice, then,” Larry agreed amiably. “I’ll come tomorrow,” Connie promised before he could continue. “Tomorrow’s too far away,” Larry told her. “I was thinking that maybe tonight—” But what Larry was thinking about tonight Connie didn’t learn. The department head bustled up at that moment, cutting into their conversation with, “And now, Mr. Stewart, if you have a moment—” Connie faded into the background in as inconspicuous a manner as possible, resuming her journey to the models’ dressing room. As she pushed open the door she was still 63

wondering what Larry had had in mind for the evening. A movie, possibly? She thought it would be fun to have a movie date with Larry. Aunt Bet had explained at breakfast that she would be engaged after dinner, and had asked Connie if she’d mind being alone in the apartment. Connie had assured her she wouldn’t mind, but she couldn’t help thinking that spending the evening with Larry would be more pleasant. She started to hum a little tune under her breath. Then, very suddenly, she stopped. She wasn’t alone in the room, though it appeared to be empty of everything except the table of accessories and the racks of college clothes. Connie stood stock-still for an instant, listening to a muffled sobbing, then pushed aside a ski suit, a polo coat and half a dozen dresses, and revealed, behind the rack, the small, huddled figure of a girl. Pale, stringy hair did little to crown the bent head, and the girl’s thin back was shaking. She didn’t look up when Connie made a startled exclamation of concern. She cowered even closer to the wall, as though she wished she could disappear into its plaster surface. Her whole attitude said, “Leave me alone.” But Connie’s natural warmheartedness wouldn’t let her turn her back and tiptoe out of the room. “Why, what’s the matter?” Impulsively she put an 64

arm around the girl’s shoulders, patting her as she would a hurt child, barely able to restrain herself from saying, “There, there.”

65

CHAPTER

6

The Little Stock Girl

The girl, in the brown jumper which stock clerks wore as a uniform at Campion’s, simply shook her head without turning it from the wall. Connie could tell she was making a fight for self-control, yet still the sobs racked her. “Come on over here,” Connie urged her, “and sit down.” When finally the girl allowed herself to be led to the low window sill of the dressing room, which was its most comfortable seat, Connie saw her face. She was so slight that she seemed little more than a child, and her dark eyes were so enormous and frightened that Connie felt more sorry for her than ever. “What’s the matter?” she repeated. “Can’t you tell me?” Speechless, the girl shook her head, and her eyes 66

overflowed again. “I’m sorry,” she said, after a minute. “I’ll get out of here.” Connie had never seen anyone so utterly whipped. Abruptly she changed her mind about shopping for a present for Kit. It would be utter inhumanity, she decided, to leave this poor child alone. On the table where the models made up was a box of pale-blue cleansing tissues. Connie whipped out a couple and handed them to the girl. “Here, dry your eyes,” she said in a tone of authority which did more to help the situation than any amount of sympathetic words. She waited for a few moments, then asked kindly, “What’s your name?” “Grace Blair.” “Why, that’s funny. That’s my last name too!” Immediately it seemed to Connie that a bond of interest was established, and she was conscious that a little warmth also crept into Grace’s drenched eyes. “Blair’s a common name around here,” the girl said. “It’s a good name,” Connie replied. “I’m proud of it. Aren’t you?” The girl’s eyes dropped again, and she didn’t reply. Connie sat down on the broad window sill beside her and tried again. “Can’t you tell me what’s 67

upsetting you? Maybe I can help. I’m new around here, but Miss Easton’s my aunt, and I know she’d—” But Grace was on her feet. “There’s nothing anybody can do,” she said a little wildly. “Thank you. Thanks a lot, but there isn’t, really.” She started toward the door, then turned and looked back at Connie. Her dark eyes were full of fright again, but at the same time they were compelling. “Except, don’t tell anybody I was in here,” she added quickly. “Promise me that?” “Of course!” Connie told her, anxious to do anything to allay such alarm. Then, the moment the girl had gone out the door, she was sorry she had made the promise. Why shouldn’t Grace want anyone to know she was in the models’ dressing room? Had she been doing something wrong? Then Connie laughed at such a notion. “Well, if I’m not getting jumpy!” she said out loud. The poor kid had probably ducked in here just to be alone, knowing that the models would be on their lunch hour. After all, she couldn’t just succumb to tears in public. She needed privacy for grief like that. Or was it grief? The question puzzled Connie. She couldn’t decide whether fear or sadness had been dominant in the girl’s eyes. She’d like to know Grace better, Connie decided. Of one thing she was entirely certain. Grace Blair needed a friend. 68

“Why so pensive?” Interrupting Connie’s reverie, Marcia came through the door. She walked to the mirror and started to repair her lipstick, smiling at Connie in the glass. Connie didn’t feel like confiding. She shrugged and managed a fairly convincing grin. “Just trying to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders,” she said. “Don’t,” Marcia advised. “Just carrying these clothes ought to be enough.” She yawned. “It’s going to be a hot afternoon.” Only the first floor of the store was air-cooled, and Connie remembered Marcia’s prediction an hour later, as she sauntered through the third-floor Baby Bazaar and the Junior Miss Shop wearing a flannel sports dress. August in Philadelphia was anything but cool! Surreptitiously Connie ran a forefinger across her damp upper lip. “Hot to be wearing winter clothes, isn’t it?” “It is!” Connie replied succinctly to a portly woman with a flowered hat and straight gray hair worn in an old-fashioned bun on the nape of her neck. She smiled her thanks for the older woman’s solicitude, and the woman smiled back and looked after the girl as she walked away. Customers, sales girls, wrappers, comparison shoppers—all sorts of people seemed to want to talk to Connie Blair, to reach out and share for a moment 69

some of her freshness and charm. As she walked about the store, she collected new acquaintances as a butterfly bush collects bees, and before she had spent one full day at Campion’s she could nod a greeting to half a hundred people and call at least a dozen by name. Most of these names belonged to girls or women. There was pretty Miss Potter, at the jewelry counter, Miss Lilian in cosmetics and a girl with a slight lisp, by the name of Dotty Smith, in lingerie. There were the other models, and the sales girls in the College Shop, and, of course, there was Grace Blair, who had captured Connie’s concern and interest more than anyone else. Only two among her new acquaintances were men, with the exception of Larry Stewart. These were the first- and second-floor floorwalkers, Mr. Kurt and Mr. Goudge. Mr. Goudge was a plump gentleman who rather alarmed Connie with his heavy efforts to be amusing whenever she came into sight. Youngish Mr. Kurt, on the first floor, was prematurely bald, dapper and—Connie thought—a little too obsequious to the customers. She found herself hurrying a little whenever she passed him, as though he might try to engage her in conversation if she loitered, as, indeed, he finally did. It was late in the afternoon when this happened, 70

just before closing time, and Connie was making her final round of the main floor. She had met the stock clerk, Grace, back by the elevators, and had stopped to ask if she was feeling better and to repeat her assurance that she’d be only too glad to do anything to help. Grace had mumbled that she was all right now, and then had scurried away like a frightened rabbit. Connie was still bemused by the stock girl’s attitude when, a few seconds later, she passed neatly dressed Mr. Kurt, who was standing with his back to her at a counter. He glanced over his shoulder, smiled, and a second later fell into step beside her as she sauntered down the center aisle. “I see you’ve already won a staunch admirer, Miss Blair,” he said. “I?” Mr. Kurt nodded knowingly. “Your namesake, the little stock girl.” “Oh!” Connie laughed. “Only our last names are the same.” “But that’s a lot to have in common,” Mr. Kurt said, and there was a smoothness in his manner that could almost be described as oiliness, Connie thought. Before she could think of a suitable reply, the floorwalker, with a slight inclination of his head, added, “Of course we have something in common, 71

too—you and I.” Connie edged away slightly. “I don’t understand.” “Why, we’re both novices around here, aren’t we?” “I—I guess so.” Connie remembered that old George had described Mr. Kurt as “new.” Still, she couldn’t see where this conversation was leading. “I’m only here for ten days,” she felt impelled to add. “I know,” Mr. Kurt seemed to know everything. “It is too short a time.” There was something in the way he looked at her out of his narrow eyes that made the attempt at a compliment fall flat. Connie was seized with an impulse to get away. She started to walk faster, but Mr. Kurt matched her stride. As a final recourse she changed the subject abruptly. “You were talking about Grace Blair. She seems a sad sort of girl.” “You’re right. She isn’t very attractive,” said Mr. Kurt. “Oh, I didn’t mean that.” Connie stopped and faced the floorwalker. “I mean sorrowful. Sort of beaten down. She acts as though she were scared half out of her wits.” “What has she been telling you?” “Telling me? Nothing. Nothing at all.” Now 72

Connie wished she had never mentioned Grace. She felt that Mr. Kurt’s eyes were searching, almost accusing. What, she wondered, did the floorwalker know about Grace Blair? Oddly, Mr. Kurt shrugged. “Don’t you worry your pretty head about her,” he advised. “But—” Connie started to insist, really puzzled now. Then a clerk, wanting the floorwalker’s signature on a charge slip, nipped her remark in the bud, and she found herself alone near the front elevators, with more questions buzzing in her brain than she could possibly answer, and a vivid desire to talk to somebody nice and normal like Larry Stewart or Aunt Bet. She considered going down to the basement, to seek out Larry in his lair, but she was afraid it would look too forward, and besides, it was probably out of bounds for models on duty. With a sigh she followed some last-minute shoppers into the car waiting under the green light. She had scarcely left the elevator on the third floor when the closing bell sounded. Immediately the activity in the store underwent a change. Customers began drifting toward the stairs and elevators, while clerks hurriedly closed their books and cleared their counters. Connie trotted back to the models’ dressing room behind the College Shop to find it already deserted by all of the girls but 73

Suzanne, who was standing in front of the mirror dressed in her own street clothes, admiring the reflection of a beautiful shoulder bag Connie had modeled with one of her costumes. Connie crossed the carpeted floor quietly, and her reflection met Suzanne’s as she greeted her with a casual “Hi.” “Oh, hello.” Suzanne started, made a gesture to remove the bag from her shoulder, then stopped and turned, measuring Connie with her eyes. “Looks all right with this dress, doesn’t it?” Connie nodded, starting to unbutton her flannel fly front. “It’s a heavenly bag.” Suzanne turned back to the mirror and considered herself again critically. “I’ve got a dinner date with a guy who’d appreciate this,” she murmured. From the clothes rack where Connie was hanging the flannel dress she replied, “Anybody would.” “I might borrow it, just for tonight,” Suzanne said, her head on one side, her sharp eyes watching Connie closely. Connie reacted spontaneously. She turned, shocked, then relaxed as Suzanne laughed and slipped the bag off her shoulder. “For a minute I thought you meant it,” Connie said, embarrassed. Suzanne’s smile was cynical as she picked up her own rather worn purse. “Maybe I did,” she replied. 74

Slipping her own cotton dress over her head after Suzanne left the room, Connie considered this last remark thoughtfully. For girls like Suzanne, who had to live on slender incomes, the beautiful clothes they wore must be tempting. To have the looks, to have the figure to carry these costumes, and then to have to change back into the everyday clothes that could be bought on a model’s salary— Connie buckled her belt and shook her head. She was glad that she had no intense craving for expensive clothes. It would be such a frustrating passion. The brown-and-white striped chambray she wore was cool and comfortable and made her quite happy. She ran a comb through her hair, slipped on a brown velvet band, and started for her aunt’s office. Miss Easton was gloved and hatted and ready to leave. She smiled at Connie and tucked her hand through her niece’s arm as they went through the half-deserted store together. “Well, what kind of day did you have?” she asked. “A wonderful day!” Connie replied. “I like my job!” “Fine.” Aunt Bet grinned. “But now confess and tell me your feet are killing you.” “They’re not, really.” “It’s an occupational disease,” Aunt Bet cried. “They must be!” 75

“Have it your own way.” Connie pretended to limp along, groaning. “That’s better,” Aunt Bet approved. “Now you look as though you really work at Campion’s, instead of standing around talking to Larry Stewart all day.” “I never!” Connie started, then laughed because she had bitten so readily on her aunt’s sly bait. “He’s a nice lad,” Miss Easton said. “You could go far and do worse. Did he ask you for a date tonight?” “I think he started to,” Connie admitted. “I’m not sure, but I think so. We were interrupted.” Aunt Bet looked pleased. “Never mind,” she said gaily. “The phone will be ringing when we get home.” It was.

76

CHAPTER

7

Stop, Thief!

After the movies, like a couple of kids, Connie and Larry bought double-decker ice-cream cones and walked back to Aunt Bet’s apartment by way of Rittenhouse Square. Lights from the hotels and clubs and apartment houses twinkled down at them, and the air was soft and stirring. The trees in the little old park spread like sheltering umbrellas over their heads, and the water in the fountain pool caught wavering reflections from the passers-by. It was a night for romance, despite the incongruity of the ice-cream cones, but Connie’s thoughts were elsewhere. “Larry,” she asked thoughtfully, as she ran the tip of her tongue expertly around the cone, “d’you think something queer’s going on at Campion’s?” “Queer? Campion’s?” Larry stopped and looked at Connie in astonishment. “Campion’s is the least 77

queer place I know.” “I,” Connie replied, “don’t think so.” “What are you getting at, anyway?” Suddenly Connie was wary. She didn’t want to be considered absurd, especially by Larry Stewart. “Oh, forget it,” she said, shrugging. “Maybe I’m making mountains out of molehills.” She had been intending to tell him about finding Grace Blair in tears, but she realized that it would sound like sheer feminine gossip, unrelated to the other things that were troubling her. “It’s a beautiful night, I think Philadelphia’s wonderful, and I listened to too many five o’clock radio programs when I was a child.” She grinned disarmingly and spread her arms to embrace the excitement of the city. Larry smiled back. “I go for small towns, myself.” “You and Kit.” “Who’s Kit?” “My twin sister,” Connie told him. Larry whistled softly. “Does she look like you?” “Exactly,” Connie said. “We could fool you if we wanted to.” “I doubt it.” “If I were back in Meadowbrook,” Connie chuckled, “I’d make you a bet.” Larry asked questions about Meadowbrook and her family, and Connie found herself telling him 78

things about her mother and dad, Toby and Kit. Larry was easy to talk to; he was so interested in everything. And he was a good listener, with an attractive habit of drawing his companion out. Connie herself bubbled like a zestful spring until she realized she was doing all the talking. Then she was contrite. “I’m boring you?” she asked. “Not at all.” Larry seemed to be thinking. “If you like the city so much, why don’t you get a permanent job here?” “I’d like to,” Connie replied, “but in the first place, I’m supposed to be going to college next month, and in the second place, I wouldn’t know how to begin.” A street light illumined her face for an instant, and Larry looked at her closely. “You’d rather get a job in town than go to college, wouldn’t you?” Connie admitted it. “I like action.” “What kind of job would you want?” Timidly now, because the subject was close to her heart, Connie told him. “I’d like to work in an advertising agency, or at least in the advertising department of a store. Is that a funny thing to want?” “Not at all,” Larry assured her. “If you could get a job, do you think your family would let you try working for a year?” “I don’t know,” Connie said thoughtfully. “I really don’t.” Then she turned hopeful. “They 79

might!” “Bet and I each have a few contacts with agencies around town,” Larry told her with a certain pride. “We’ll talk over this job idea of yours sometime, we three.” Sometime wasn’t soon enough for Connie, who was frankly ecstatic at the mere idea. She rounded the corner into the side street where her aunt lived, with quick, skipping steps. “Now!” she cried as she looked up and saw lights in the apartment. “Aunt Bet’s home. Come on up and talk it over now!” Larry grinned at her impetuosity and flicked the end of his cone into the gutter. “Just a minute, lady!” he begged. “You make my head swim.” But he followed Connie into the entry and up the stairs to Aunt Bet’s second-floor apartment amiably enough, and waited while Connie fitted her key into the lock. “Aunt Bet! Larry’s with me. May he come in?” Connie waited a second for her aunt’s answering hail, then pushed the door open and looked down the lighted hall. “Aunt Bet!” There was a creaking noise from the kitchenette that Connie, after two days, could identify as the stiff hinge on the door to the service entrance, then silence. “That’s funny,” she said, then called again 80

loudly, “Aunt Bet!” Larry waited on the threshold. “Maybe she isn’t home yet.” “But the lights are on. She must be home.” As she spoke, Connie moved down the short hall to the living room, then stopped with a gasp. “Larry! For—” In the doorway she stood stockstill. “Somebody’s been here!” “That’s putting it mildly,” Larry muttered as he peered over her shoulder at a scene of wild disorder. The closet door stood open, and every box and carton it contained had been pulled down from the shelves. The doors of the Pennsylvania Dutch water bench were unlatched, and the lid of a pine chest was thrown back. Its contents obviously had been pawed through hastily, then tossed aside. Larry whirled around and glanced into the bedroom, which showed even greater upheaval, then pushed open the swinging door to the little kitchen, which was undisturbed. Suddenly Connie found herself staring at the door that led to the service stairs. Her eyes met Larry’s briefly, carrying a wordless message. In two steps Larry crossed the room, tugged at the sticking door, and went through it with Connie at his heels to peer down the stair well to the floor beneath. The night light in the hall was small and dim, but Connie was certain that she caught a glimpse of a 81

dark coat. She snatched at Larry’s arm, anxious to confirm her half-sight, but before she could whisper a question there was a soft slam that could be nothing but the door to the areaway. With Connie not two steps behind him, Larry raced pell-mell down the cement stairs. He shouted as he ran, though he didn’t realize it. Connie herself felt an almost uncontrollable impulse to yell “Stop, thief!” like the heroine of a bad melodrama. She clutched at the railing as her feet carried her so fast that she almost tumbled, letting herself slip and slide along in Larry’s wake. Not for a moment did it occur to her that it might be foolhardy to follow in pursuit of the suspected intruder. She was filled with righteous indignation that anyone should have dared to enter and ransack Aunt Bet’s apartment. She wanted to catch the burglar personally, and she didn’t for a second count the cost. It wasn’t forty seconds after Connie had fitted her key into the lock that she and Larry reached the deserted first-floor back hall. Larry grabbed at the knob of the heavy rear door, flinging it open almost in Connie’s face, and they found themselves in a narrow alley between the small apartment house and the private dwelling next door. A wooden gate at one end opened on a back street, and this was swinging gently, as though someone had just made a 82

hasty exit. Shouting “Hey!” at the top of his lungs Larry hurtled the length of the brick-paved path and, without breaking his stride, burst through the unlatched gate. The moon had passed under a cloud, and the narrow street was as black as pitch. The facades of small, mean houses faced a dozen gates like the one to the apartment house. These were used in the daytime by garbage and trash collectors, but tonight not a soul disturbed the quiet, no sound of heels rang on the cobbles, not a movement betrayed a fugitive. Connie’s eyes flicked along the row of dingy houses. Only one or two of them were occupied and showed feeble lights. Then, standing in the middle of the narrow roadway, she looked at the closed, black gates. A shiver ran like lightning up her spine. Behind any one of the dark gates the intruder they sought might lurk. Belatedly cautious, she grabbed Larry’s coat sleeve. “We’re too late,” she said. Larry was breathing hard, turning his head this way and that, as though he couldn’t believe that the chase could end here. The moon swam out from under the cloud and painted the cobbles with silver, but the bulk of the houses was still in shadow. Connie tugged harder at his arm. “We’re too late,” she said again. 83

Larry’s eyes were dark and his brows met in a frown. “By golly, we just missed,” he agreed. Then suddenly he seemed aware of his responsibility for Connie. He, too, glanced at the closed black gates, and sensed that behind any one of them danger might lurk. “Gosh, Connie, you oughtn’t to be here. And the apartment’s all open, too!” he exclaimed. Gently he urged her back the way they had come, and breathed more easily when the door to the apartment house was closed behind them. Together they trudged up the cement stairs and into the little kitchen, the swinging door of which still stood open, revealing Aunt Bet standing in the middle of the living-room debris, her lips parted in astonishment and in her eyes an expression of complete incredulity. “What under the sun—?” “Somebody,” said Larry inadequately, “was going through your things.” The understatement was so apparent that Elizabeth Easton couldn’t stifle a chuckle. “A burglar,” Connie added, her eyes blazing. “Right here under our very noses. Well, practically.” “Not quite close enough under our noses, I’m afraid,” Larry added, and together they pieced out the story for Aunt Bet. “It’s just fortunate,” said Miss Easton soberly, 84

“that neither you, Connie, nor you, Larry, is lying out in the back street with a broken head. Well, let’s get this stuff cleaned up and see what’s missing.” She took off her hat with energy and threw it on the couch. “Did you have any cash lying around?” Larry asked as he began stacking boxes on a chair. Aunt Bet snapped her fingers. “My Meadowbrook expense money.” She walked quickly to her desk and pulled open one of the small drawers. Connie heard her give a sigh of relief as she took out some folded bills and counted them. “Well, that’s luck!” she said. “I meant to take this back to the store this morning.” She tucked it in her handbag. “I won’t be so forgetful again.” Rapidly, now, Aunt Bet checked her other valuables—the sterling silver she had inherited from her grandmother, the few trinkets of some worth in her jewel box, the antique brass samovar she cherished. “I can’t find a thing missing,” she murmured in surprise. Even when everything had been set to rights both in the living room and bedroom, there seemed to be no loss. The thief—if now the intruder could be called a thief—evidently had been surprised before he could collect whatever loot he sought. Larry said as much, but Connie, sinking cross-legged to the bedroom floor, shook her head thoughtfully. 85

“I think the person who was here must have been looking for one certain thing,” she said, “and I don’t think he found it.” “Why do you say ‘he,’ dear?” Aunt Bet asked. ‘Couldn’t it have been a ‘she’?” “It could,” Connie admitted. “Certainly.” “But what could he, she, or it, have wanted?” Larry asked. Connie shook her head again. “I can’t imagine,” she said. Then she turned to her aunt and asked abruptly, “Can you?” Aunt Bet answered with candor. “I haven’t the foggiest idea.” Connie began musing to herself. “It wasn’t something small. The desk drawers weren’t turned out.” Larry began to tease her. “And it wasn’t something edible, because the kitchen wasn’t touched.” Connie looked up from under her dark lashes with an expression meant to be scathing. “It must,” Aunt Bet said, leaning her chin on a finger, “have been my mink coat.” “What mink coat?” Then Connie sprang up from the floor. “This is no time for teasing.” Restlessly she wandered from the bedroom back to the living room. If only the intruder had left some clue. If only— 86

She walked back along the hall to the apartment door, opened it and glanced down the stairs. Nothing disturbed the peace of the front hall. She came back, shut the door and examined the rug. On a rainy night, now, there might have been footprints. She retraced her steps to the living room again, head down, thoughtful. Finally she sank down in an easy chair, tapping the table beside it impatiently with her fingers. So far as she was concerned, this forced entrance of Aunt Bet’s apartment was one strange occurrence too many. Somehow, in some way, Connie felt that this incident was connected with others, with the face she had seen in the mirror, with the disappearance of the fur hat, with all the recent happenings at Campion’s. But what thread could tie them together; what needle could weave them into one? “At least,” Connie called after a few minutes, “we should report this—this housebreaking—to the police.” “We should,” agreed her aunt, coming into the living room with Larry. “I’ll phone now. Though it probably won’t do much good.” She made the call, then said, as though she intended to dismiss the whole matter from her mind, “I’m hungry. It’s past eleven o’clock, and the police say there’s no use sending a man over, since nothing was taken and we 87

couldn’t any of us identify the intruder.” “It is practically morning,” Larry agreed, and yawned behind his hand. “And tomorrow’s a working day. But,” he admitted, “I’m hungry too. Have you ever tasted Bet’s fried egg sandwiches, Connie? They’re out of this world.” In five minutes they were all crowded into the tiny kitchen, Connie and Larry swinging their legs from the porcelain-topped table while Aunt Bet broke eggs into a pan of sizzling bacon fat. “Onion?” she asked. “Onion,” pronounced Larry definitely. “And once over lightly?” “Right.” “Mm-m-m!” he said, after he had tasted the result. “When you get tired of being a stylist, Bet, you could open a lunch wagon.” He made a feint at dodging, then grinned. “And I’ll be your first customer,” he added loyally. Connie took her sandwich and wandered back through the other rooms. “Come on, bird dog, quit stalking,” Larry called after her. “Bird dogs don’t stalk,” Connie called back. “What do they do?” Connie wasn’t sure. “They—they—” Then, abruptly, she stopped trying to think and gave a long, low, boyish whistle. A second later she 88

appeared back in the kitchen door with the halfeaten sandwich in one hand and a large pottery ash tray held like a torch in the other. “A clue!” she announced dramatically. “An honest-to-goodness clue.” Together Larry and Aunt Bet asked, “What?” Connie came forward, lowering the ash tray to convenient eye level. In it was a single, crushed, cigarette butt. “Aunt Bet doesn’t smoke. I don’t smoke . . .” “Make it three,” said Larry, “and so—?” “There’s no lipstick on the cigarette,” Connie announced triumphantly. “The housebreaker must have been a man.” “Might have been a man,” Aunt Bet corrected. “Not all women use lipstick.” “Tut, tut,” chided Larry, refusing to be earnest. “I’ll bet all housebreakers do.” But Connie was staring down at the stub in something close to amazement. The person who had been here had left it, because the ash tray had been clean at suppertime. It seemed as though this were a proof of his presence more tangible than all the ransacked shelves put together. The intruder, with his own hand, had crushed this out. She was so absorbed in thought that she didn’t notice when Larry moved close to look down at the ash tray too. 89

“I’ll bet it was a man at that,” the boy said with an unexpected return to seriousness. “I’ve never seen a woman who’d smoke a cigarette that close.”

90

CHAPTER

8

Lost, Strayed or Stolen?

In the morning Connie and her aunt overslept. They made a marathon of dressing, gulped orange juice and coffee at a drugstore counter, and sprinted the last three blocks to Campion’s. “Whew!” Connie gasped as they reached the employees’ entrance. “Now I know how you keep that waistline. You certainly can run.” Aunt Bet laughed aloud. “I’m only twenty-eight, after all. You make me feel like the Ancient of Days.” Connie went to the models’ dressing room and Aunt Bet went up to her office. “I have a tea date this afternoon,” Miss Easton told her niece as they parted “Can you take care of yourself until I get home?” “Of course I can!” Connie told her competently. “I hope it’s a nice man because you look lovely!” 91

Then her eyes twinkled roguishly and she added, “Incidentally, you make me feel like a Child in Arms.” “Touché!” Aunt Bet said as the elevator door slid shut. She touched a hand to her forehead and grinned at Connie, who had just time to grin back. Connie was still grinning as she walked across the carpeted floor of the College Shop. Aunt Bet was such fun to be with, so easy and casual, so full of quips and small talk. She felt like a very lucky girl. “Here comes Little Miss Sunshine,” said Suzanne glumly as she entered the dressing room, and for a moment Connie was brought up short and the smile faded from her face. “Pay no attention to Suzy,” Marcia said as she pulled her street dress over her head. “She’s got a toothache, Connie, and that automatically “makes cheerfulness a sin.” “Oh, I’m sorry, Suzanne!” Connie said sympathetically. “I’ve got some aspirin, if that would help.” Suzanne accepted the aspirin, and, without further comment, changed to the pajama-and-robe ensemble she was to model. “At least,” Marcia comforted her, “you’ll spend the morning in the lingerie department. There’s a rest room with a couch right off there, you know, 92

and if things get too bad you can go lie down.” Suzanne managed a wan smile. “It isn’t my feet this time, it’s my face,” she said, and left them. Connie, modeling a long suede coat, reached the main floor shortly after the street doors had been opened. At once she was aware of a little knot of people gathered at the jewelry counter—not customers but store personnel. Almost automatically, her feet carried her toward that section of the store. She recognized Mr. Kurt in the group, and Miss Potter, who seemed flushed and upset. “It’s ridiculous,” she heard the floorwalker say as she approached. “When costume jewelry runs into three figures it should be kept in a safe. An amateur could pick the locks on those undercounter drawers. Why, I’ll bet I could do it myself.” Connie, curious, edged closer. “It isn’t my responsibility to determine store policy on where jewelry shall be kept,” she heard Miss Potter flash back. “I only work here.” Mr. Kurt raised his eyebrows. “I’ll take it upon myself, therefore, to tell Mr. Campion that this floor appears to need special protection I cannot give it,” he said. “This thing is reaching absurd proportions, in my opinion at least.” What “this thing” was Connie didn’t then learn, though she could guess what the floorwalker meant. 93

The group broke up as a customer approached, and poor Miss Potter was left to make a sorry attempt at looking interested. Passing behind the customer’s back, Connie could see that her eyes were bright with unshed tears and her cheeks brilliant with unaccustomed color. What, she wondered, could have disappeared now? It was afternoon before she learned. Then, to the models’ luncheon table in the Mirror Room, Marcia brought the startling news that a necklace of cultured pearls, the most valuable piece of costume jewelry that the store offered for sale, had unaccountably vanished from the jewelry department. “Things always seem to happen in threes,” Connie murmured, her fork poised in mid-air. “What do you mean?” Marcia asked. Then Connie remembered that the other models probably knew nothing of the disappearance of the hatbox, nor would it be very likely that they would learn of the missing negligee. She looked down at her plate in confusion. “I was just thinking out loud,” was the best she could do. Fortunately there was so much interest in story of the necklace that her slip went practically unnoticed. “Who discovered it was gone?” one of the other models wanted to know. “Larry Stewart—you know, that good-looking lad 94

from the display department—” came the surprising answer. “He was supposed to photograph it with some baum martens and a Paris hat and when the sales girl went to get it for him, it just wasn’t in the drawer where it was usually kept.” Marcia seemed to have such a complete story that it was evidently store-wide gossip. “Mr. Campion’s wild,” she said, and Connie couldn’t contain a smile at the immediate mental image of big, florid Mr. Campion tearing his sparse hair. “I think it looks like an inside job,” Suzanne offered thoughtfully. “Unless a customer could have been trying it on, and then slipped it into her bag while the clerk’s back was turned.” “They say Miss Potter at the jewelry counter says she hasn’t shown the necklace for a week. It’s been right in the showcase during store hours and locked up in the drawer below at night.” Suzanne shrugged and started to yawn, then remembered her aching tooth and stopped. “Well, it’s not my funeral,” she murmured. “I’ve got to go phone the dentist. Anybody else going downstairs?” “I am,” Connie said, remembering that she hadn’t yet bought the present she wanted to send Kit. Impulsively she decided to make it a link bracelet instead of the nylons. She wanted to talk to Miss Potter and it would furnish a logical excuse. She followed Suzanne to the elevators and left her on the 95

main floor, sauntering over to the jewelry counter and waiting while Miss Potter finished writing up the charge on a pair of earrings. Idly, she examined the bracelets hanging from a display rack. She considered broad links versus narrow ones and chose the latter, selecting a silver one to match a clip Kit wore a lot. She’d have it sent, she decided. It was always such fun to get a package in the mail. “Now. What can I do for you?” Miss Potter pushed the hair back from her low forehead and came toward Connie, very correct and professional in her manner until she recognized the girl as a College Shop model. Then she relaxed and leaned on the counter with a sigh. “Excuse me. I didn’t even look up to see who it was.” She sighed again. “It’s been an exhausting day.” Connie said, “I heard about the necklace. I’m terribly sorry.” Miss Potter nodded. “It’s the strangest thing.” “What do you mean by strange?” “How it could have disappeared from a locked drawer—how it could have been stolen without the lock being sprung? There’s no sign at all of it’s being tampered with, the lock, I mean.” Miss Potter seemed weary and distrait, and no wonder, Connie thought. She had been alone at the 96

jewelry counter for the past two days, because her superior, the buyer, had been in New York. “You hadn’t had the necklace out at all?” Connie asked. “Only yesterday afternoon, when Mr. Stewart and Miss Easton looked at it, to decide whether it should be photographed. It was in its box, on the counter, for just a few minutes, with a chiffon scarf and the furs.” “And you put it away yourself?” “Of course. Just as soon as Miss Easton okayed the picture idea. Mr. Stewart was standing right here when I locked the box in the drawer.” A matron shopping with two small children stopped to price a choker, and Connie glanced at her wrist watch and realized that the time left on her lunch hour was short. She waited while the shopper considered, reconsidered and finally said, “I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll stop back.” Then Connie paid for the bracelet she had chosen, gave Miss Potter her home address along with Kit’s name, and dashed upstairs again to change to the corduroy slacks and jacket she was to model in the afternoon. But during all of her promenading through the store, the new complication of the necklace occupied her mind. She had an irresistible impulse to seek out Larry Stewart and see what further light he could throw on the situation. Finally, during the 97

fifteen-minute, mid-afternoon rest period, instead of joining the rest of the models in the dressing room, she took the elevator to the basement and found her way to big double doors boldly lettered with the single word, DISPLAY. For a moment she hesitated. This was unexplored territory and she felt a natural timidity. Then she remembered Larry’s urgent invitation and his promise of an introduction to Armless Alice and the rest. Cautiously she pushed one door open and peered inside. Larry was nowhere to be seen, but a boy in shirt sleeves was sitting at a drawing board working on a large square of sky-blue cardboard with a vermilion-tipped paintbrush. Connie let the door swing to noiselessly behind her, walked a few steps toward him and said hello. “Hel-lo!” The boy looked up, apparently startled but not displeased. He eyed Connie’s costume appreciatively, put down the paintbrush and made an elaborate gesture of covering his eyes with his hand. “Don’t tell me! Let me guess. You’re Connie Blair.” Connie smiled. “How did you know?” “I was told,” said the young man, whose hair exactly matched the freckles that peppered his face, “if the prettiest girl I’d seen since Easter came through those doors and asked for Larry Stewart, that was Connie Blair.” 98

“But I didn’t mention Larry.” “That,” said the boy, “is why I had to guess.” Connie laughed at his foolishness and Larry’s coworker laughed with her. “I’m Chipper White,” he introduced himself, and while Connie didn’t say as much, she thought it a very suitable name. With interest, she came closer and inspected the blue oblong on which Chipper was working. It turned out to be an elevator car card illustrating a very dashing dinner dress. “Mmm!” Connie admired. “Not for you,” Chipper said instantly. “Strong colors would kill that hair.” He considered Connie critically, with an artist’s eye. “A corn-colored organdy,” he decided. “Wedding ring waist and yards and yards of skirt.” Connie looked at the boy and chuckled, and the dreamy expression instantly left Chipper’s eyes. “What’s the matter?” “It’s just funny,” Connie said, “to hear a boy that looks like you talk like a dress designer.” Chipper was offended. “What’s wrong with dress designing?” he asked, waving his paintbrush. “Look at Adrian.” Connie turned around, half-expecting the master stylist himself to appear in the doorway, so insistent was Chipper’s tone, but instead she met Larry Stewart’s amused eyes. 99

“Don’t let Chipper threaten you,” he said companionably. “He’s a mean fellow.” “Really? You know, I rather like him,” Connie retorted, and Chipper looked decidedly mollified. “Why is it that if girls find out a guy knows anything about clothes they immediately think he’s a sis?” he muttered as he dipped his brush into the water-color paint at his elbow. “Be patient with Connie,” Larry told him with a sidelong glance at the girl. “She’s never run across a couple of window dressers before.” “Window dressers,” Chipper snorted. “This is the display department, my lad. Or did I spend four long years at art school for nothing?” “Come away from here,” Larry urged, catching Connie’s wrist. “He’s apt to get violent, and I want to show you the shop before he starts breaking things up.” Led by Larry, Connie began looking around the big, cluttered room. Fluted columns of odd lengths, some dingy and marred, some freshly painted, cluttered a triangle of floor space. Two enormous wire bird cages, painted bright yellow, hung from the ceiling incongruously upside down. Larry pointed to them. “Left over from spring.” Synthetic palms leaned against the wall, dusty and forlorn, and a miniature sleigh was upended 100

beside them. In another corner and ranging along a whole side of the room was a weird collection of window dummies—smartly coifed, vacant-faced maidens in various stages of undress and in appalling dismemberment. Some lacked arms, others, legs, and there were several headless ladies and a torso or two that made Connie shudder distastefully. Larry put an arm around a beautiful blonde and made her bow toward Connie. “Armless Agatha.” “You will keep forgetting the poor girl’s name. Alice!” Connie hissed. “She can’t hear me,” Larry shot back. “It’s a very sad thing, but she’s deaf.” The construction of the dummies fascinated Connie. They were made on lines impossibly slender and elegant, yet they had a lifelike quality and incomparable style. She said so and Larry agreed. “Yet styles in these figures change,” he told her and led her to a group of chipped, discarded models. “Look at these five-yearold jobs,” he said. “Don’t they look dowdy now?” “They certainly do,” Connie agreed. “Like something out of the attic in comparison to the new ones.” “The world,” Chipper commented from his drawing board, “do move.” “I want to see the Lucy,” Connie exclaimed after 101

a few minutes. “What a memory!” Larry crossed the floor to a contraption that looked like a cross between a movie projector and a large, square camera laid on its side. “Here she is.” Connie was disappointed. “That? What’s that?” “The Lucy,” Larry repeated. “It blows things up.” Connie stepped back a pace and Larry laughed. “Not like dynamite,” he told her. “Like this.” He picked up a small photograph of a model in a lounging costume and slid it into an opening at the base of the machine. Then he leaned over, clicked a switch, and turned a wheel to focus. Finally he straightened and beckoned to Connie. “See?” The photograph, against a canvas curtain, was magnified to many times its original size. “Interesting,” Connie said. But she led the conversation away from the Lucy after a few minutes. What she had really come to talk about was the pearls. Larry was willing enough to discuss their disappearance, but he had no new light to throw on the subject. “I went up for them this morning and they were gone, that’s all,” he said. “The box was there, but the pearls weren’t.” “The box was there?” repeated Connie. She felt that this should mean something to her, but it didn’t. “The box is like half a hundred other boxes for 102

Campion jewelry,” said Larry. He shrugged. “So what does that prove?” “You were planning to photograph them, weren’t you?” “That’s it. For a larger-than-life backdrop for the east window. Very plush.” “Maybe they’ll turn up,” Connie remarked, but Larry shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said. “Well, it’s certainly all very mysterious,” Connie murmured, cocking her head thoughtfully. “For once,” Larry told her as he went with her to the elevators, and pushed the “Up” button, “I’m inclined to believe you’re right.”

103

CHAPTER

9

Clue Conscious

It was by pure coincidence that Connie met Grace Blair on her way home from work that night. She had stopped in a cut-rate drugstore on Chestnut Street to buy some facial tissues and there was the little stock girl, sitting with her legs curled around a stool at the soda fountain, drinking a coke. Connie made her purchase and, because she was in no hurry and was also a little thirsty, slid onto the stool beside her. Grace didn’t look up from her straw, so Connie said with a friendly smile, “Hello. May I join you?” Grace’s head jerked around. “Oh. Miss Blair.” For an instant there was the same expression in the girl’s eyes that had confounded Connie the day before, when she had found her weeping in the models’ room, only this time Connie didn’t mistake it for grief. She knew it for what it was—naked, 104

deep-rooted fear. Then Grace dropped her lashes and when she looked up again the fear was veiled. “Certainly,” she said. Connie ordered a milk shake. “And you mustn’t call me Miss Blair,” she told Grace, smiling. “You make me feel like Methuselah, and I’ll bet I’m not much older than you.” “Probably not as old,” Grace told her. “I’m small, but I’m seventeen.” “Something else we have in common, besides our last names. So am I.” Grace had a suit box with the Campion label on it laid across her lap, wedged between the counter and her knees. Connie glanced down at it and Grace said, “This is a special delivery that was too late for the truck. I make a little extra money, sometimes, delivering specials in town.” “Good idea,” Connie said, and read the address on the label. “You’re going my way, if that’s Rittenhouse Square. We can walk over together, if you’ll wait until I finish this drink.” Grace waited, but Connie had the feeling that she would have preferred to go on ahead. The girl trotted along beside her in comparative silence, seeming to feel a little out of her element, a little lost. Connie did her best to put her at ease, and her best was usually very good, but Grace failed to 105

respond. She answered questions in monosyllables and let the conversation drop like a stone. Before they had gone two blocks Connie found herself hard-pressed for subjects of possible interest. As a last resort she asked Grace about her family. “Do you live right in town here?” “Over south,” Grace said. “Oh, near the river? That must be nice.” A look that was almost sullen crept into the stock girl’s eyes. “You must never have been in South Philadelphia,” she said. Then, as though it were wrung out of her, she volunteered her first unsolicited remark. “In the summer it’s hot and crowded and dirty. You feel like you can’t breathe.” Connie began to understand, but she had no reply. It was her turn to feel ill at ease, and to cover her discomfiture she asked, “Do you have a big family, Grace?” “Nope,” Grace shook her head. “My mother works, and I have a sister—younger than me— who’s been sick with rheumatic fever a long while. She knits things for the Baby Bazaar at the store. She’s real good,” Grace added proudly. “You ought to see them.” “I’ll certainly try to,” Connie said. “That ought to be interesting work.” “In the winter it’s not bad,” Grace said, “but in the summer the wool gets soiled and sticky if you 106

don’t watch it.” Connie nodded understandingly. “I’ll bet!” Then she asked, sympathetically, “Can your sister get out at all?” Grace frowned unexpectedly. “That’s the trouble. The doctor says she ought to, but she hasn’t any interest.” She stopped abruptly and sighed. Typically, Connie began to plan. Impulsive generosity bubbled up like a spring within her, and she said, “The weather’s beautiful now, and Aunt Bet has a car. I wonder if maybe this week end—” Concern suddenly showed in Grace’s dark eyes. “Oh, no,” she burst out. “Miss Easton’s a fine lady, and she’d do anything for anybody, I know, but I’d be obliged if you didn’t mention this to her. Please!” “But—” “Please!” “All right.” Grace was so insistent that there was nothing for Connie to do but acquiesce. Yet she couldn’t avoid appearing puzzled. Grace made a clumsy and not very ingenious attempt to explain. “It’s that my—family problems—shouldn’t get mixed up with things at the store. It wouldn’t be right.” She looked up at Connie appealingly. Connie nodded. “I understand,” she said, though she didn’t really understand at all. One thing was obvious, however. Her unfortunate 107

remark about Aunt Bet’s car had nipped in the bud any further confidences from Grace. They walked along in silence past the expensive shops on Walnut Street. At the entrance to Rittenhouse Square Grace left Connie abruptly, hurrying down Eighteenth Street with her parcel as though she were relieved to get away. Connie crossed the park slowly, stopping to watch some children who were sailing boats in the pool around the fountain, but without really seeing them at all. Suddenly she snapped her fingers and said “Darn!” under her breath. She had forgotten to question Grace Blair on one of the things that interested her most. She had neglected to make any attempt to find out what possible connection the little stock girl might have with Mr. Kurt. Oh, well—Connie shrugged—there was always another day. She gave herself up to the beauty of the late afternoon, with the sunlight filtering through the green trees that formed an oasis in the square of tall buildings. She passed an old man feeding crumbs to pigeons from a rumpled paper bag and stepped aside to avoid a pair of dowager dachshunds waddling along in the center of the path on the ends of a split leash. She was full of the joy of living and intrigued by everything and everyone she saw. The city spelled fascination and Meadowbrook seemed much 108

more than a hundred miles away. But when she reached the apartment, Meadowbrook was there, in the shape of a postmark on a letter addressed in her twin sister’s handwriting. Just the faintest twinge of homesickness swept over Connie as she tore open the envelope. She realized that in all their lives she and Kit had never been separated for more than overnight before. Then she got her chin in the air and refused to succumb to sentiment. After all, separation from one’s family was just part of growing up, and Connie decided that it was high time she gave the process a prod. If she wanted to be a city girl— Larry’s offer to help her get a job flashed into her mind—such an attitude would never do! The letter was characteristic of Kit, smooth and newsy and agreeable, without the dashes and exclamation points with which Connie’s efforts were always dotted. She was enjoying helping out at Blair Hardware— “I told you I was a country girl at heart,” she wrote. Everyone in the family, including Ruggles, was busy and well, “but it seems as though you’d been away a month, Connie, instead of just a few days.” Ruth and Ginny and Kit had been going swimming evenings, since the August weather was so warm. Toby had built an addition to his tree house and his gang had formed a club called the “Gropers”—“I suppose,” wrote Kit a bit 109

ambiguously, “because they hold their meetings up in the tree at night.” Connie read the letter twice, lying back among the cushions on the couch. She could imagine Toby and his pals startling passers-by with weird noises from the dark leafiness of the walnut tree. Toby and she both loved a lark; they were a lot alike. Toby would get an enormous kick out of the very situation in which Connie found herself now. Toby was a persistent sleuth, always trying to figure out in advance the outcome of the mystery books he adored. But this was no child’s play. Theft and assault and the ransacking of Aunt Bet’s apartment were quite different as Connie faced them in real life than similar crimes would have seemed in one of Toby’s books. She let the letter fall in her lap and propped her head on her arms thoughtfully. Somewhere, to this whole series of episodes, she felt certain that she should be able to find a key. The pearls, now. The most recent disappearance. Here, certainly, was a real robbery. There was no chance of loss, as in the case of the hatbox. Some person—Connie made herself think the word thief— had taken them from the drawer. But the drawer had been locked, and the lock was still undisturbed. Abruptly Connie sat up straight on the couch and snapped her fingers. Aloud she said, 110

very slowly, as though each word were being weighed and considered for flaws, “They—didn’t— have—to—be—taken—then.” “Connie!” So absorbed had she been in her own reflections that she hadn’t heard her aunt open the door. “Aunt Bet! You home already?” Miss Easton came into the room and tossed her hat on a table. Dropping into a chair facing the couch, she said, “I never even got to the tea.” “Never got there?” Aunt Bet shook her head. “Mr. Campion called a meeting of all department heads and such. He’s in a perfect tizzy about the disappearance of those pearls.” “I don’t wonder,” Connie murmured sympathetically. “I don’t either, but I know how poor Miss Potter feels,” said Aunt Bet. “She hasn’t any more idea what could have happened than—than I have about the hatbox.” “Or than Miss Jean had about the chiffon negligee,” said Connie slowly. “You and Mr. Campion see eye to eye, don’t you? He thinks we’ve got a shoplifter in our midst.” “Well, the things can’t just walk away.” “On the other hand,” mused Miss Easton, “the store exercises all the ordinary precautions to avoid 111

theft. Inspectresses check things at the wrapping counters. Department heads are trained to be watchful. And a checker stands at the rear door to make sure that no undeclared packages are carried out by employees at night.” “Still, couldn’t there be slips?” asked Connie. “Oh, yes,” Aunt Bet admitted with a shrug. “When the girls go to lunch nobody checks them out. They go at all hours; it would be next to impossible. And there are always certain employees who practically have the run of the store—stock girls, buyers, people like you and me—” “The pearls,” Connie said with consideration, “would have been the easiest.” “They’d have been a cinch,” Aunt Bet agreed. “Why, they could have been worn right out of the store in broad daylight. Everybody wears pearl chokers these days and I doubt that even an expert, at a few yards, could tell junk jewelry from the real thing.” Suddenly Connie swung her feet to the floor, sat forward and clasped her hands. “Aunt Bet,” she said, “when you and Larry were looking at the necklace yesterday afternoon—when you were deciding on whether to photograph it, can you remember exactly what happened?” Miss Easton’s eyebrows shot upward. Then she threw back her head and laughed. “Don’t tell me 112

you suspect Larry Stewart!” “Be serious, Aunt Bet. I’d really like you to try to think back.” Miss Easton reached down and slid her heels out of her high-heeled pumps. “Well, let me see. I was supposed to help dream up a montage effect for a background for fall suits. I talked with Larry in the morning, and we decided on furs and a French hat and maybe a scarf and some pearls. We wanted something that looked luxurious and would photograph well and we selected the martens and hat before lunch. Then I had to do the Mirror Room show so Larry and I made a date to meet at the jewelry counter at two-thirty.” “Yes?” “He was there when I got there,” Aunt Bet continued. “He was chatting with Ruth Potter—” “Had they started to look at the pearls?” Miss Easton shook her head definitely. “No. They were just standing and talking. Then I came along with the furs and a square of chiffon—I couldn’t get the hat because Estelle had a customer who was trying it on, to decide whether she wanted it copied in brown or beige. We told Miss Potter what we wanted, and she suggested the cultured-pearl choker right away. She said it was made in a design like a thick collar, and would show up well.” “And so—?” Connie prodded. 113

“She got it out of the drawer and showed it to us, that’s all.” “Was it in a box?” Connie asked. Miss Easton looked at her niece quizzically, then apparently decided to humor her. “Yes, I guess it was. In fact, I’m sure it was.” She hesitated, then went on. “But she took it out of the box so that we could get its effect with the scarf and furs.” “Now try to remember everything very carefully,” Connie urged. “Larry asked the price and Miss Potter told him and he whistled.” “Any man would whistle.” Connie smiled. “We considered the whole ensemble for a few minutes, and Larry said he thought the choker had enough bulk to be effective with the scarf and furs. He played with an arrangement on the counter for a while, and I said he had my okay to go ahead, so we arranged to do the initial photograph today. I was just ready to go back upstairs when Miss Estelle came up with the hat we needed.” Miss Easton paused, now, and leaned back against the cushion of the chair. “Miss Potter had to attend to an impatient customer and just as Estelle came up, Mr. Kurt asked Larry if he might speak to him for a second about some wiring mix-up in a side window. I started to walk back toward the elevators with Estelle, and then I suddenly remembered the 114

value of the pearls and thought I shouldn’t leave them unattended. I glanced back, and Miss Potter was already putting the box away.” “The box,” said Connie, half to herself. “That’s right.” “Did you see her putting the pearls into the box?” Aunt Bet tried to remember. “No. I think the box was closed. She had it in her hand.” “Then there were a few seconds when the pearls were on the counter, alone.” “Well, if you want to call it that. After all, we were all right there, along with a few dozen other people, customers and such. People do keep going past in the aisle.” “And any one of them could have picked up the pearls,” Connie mused. “They could, but who would? To the average customer they’d look like any other ten-dollar item.” “But if someone did know their value.—” Connie persisted. Again she returned to the conclusion she seemed to share with Mr. Campion—that it was an inside job. “Can you remember anyone who went past while you were standing there?” she asked her aunt after a moment. “Plenty of people.” Miss Easton yawned as though she were getting a little weary of this inquisition. “Chipper White from the display 115

department, Suzanne, two clerks from the shoe department who had no business dawdling along, and that little stock girl, Grace, who always looks like a scurrying rabbit. Also the new house detective.” “Who is the new house detective?” Connie asked.

116

CHAPTER

10

Why, Aunt Bet!

The moment Aunt Bet mentioned the new house detective she bit her lip, and her reply to Connie’s question was a negative shake of her head. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell. I’m not even supposed to know myself.” Connie looked puzzled. “But why?” “Mr. Campion is very anxious to keep the identity of the detective a secret,” Miss Easton said. “For two reasons. In the first place, he’s pretty upset at being forced to engage one at all. Campion’s has always prided itself that a detective on the premises wasn’t necessary. The standard of the personnel is pretty high, you know. Then there’s a second reason. He feels the detective can do a better job if the employees are kept in the dark. That’s logical, I think.” Connie agreed, but nevertheless, she was bitten 117

by a curiosity bug so active that it kept her eyes dancing around the store all the next morning. Who could the detective be? She considered every man who seemed in the least likely, from an elderly colonel type with a Vandyke beard, who seemed bent on buying perfume for his lady, to a small, rabbity fellow without a hat, who kept scurrying up and down the main-floor aisles in apparent search of a mislaid department. But each of these likely prospects disappeared within half an hour, not to return again, at least not to Connie’s knowledge. She kept a firm picture of each of them in mind, however, in case she should encounter them at another time or on another floor. In the meantime, she had her job to do, and by now she felt that she was actually beginning to look like a model. Adaptable by nature, she fitted into the scene in which she found herself, and even adjusted her walk to the clothes she wore. When she was modeling a dance frock she looked very soft and feminine and took shorter steps than when she wore the rugged country tweeds and loafers designed for the classroom and campus. More and more people returned Connie’s smile and called her by name. She was becoming one of the most popular of the models. Also, according to the clerks in the College Shop, she was selling clothes. Customers, after seeing her 118

on the main floor, or at the luncheon show in the Mirror Room, would come to the shop and ask to see “the dress that blonde model was wearing.” Imagining themselves feeling as glamorous as Connie looked in the costumes, they made their purchases happily. Then they went home to parade before their mirrors and wonder why the effect wasn’t quite the same. Much of Connie’s appeal came from the fact that she was innocent of any vanity. She modeled with none of Marcia’s arrogance, with none of Suzanne’s air of bored condescension. Possibly, if she had been a little less interested in the strange happenings behind the scenes at Campion’s, she would have patterned her behavior more closely on that of the other models. As it was, she developed a style of her own that was individual because it was natural. She seemed like the essence of the college girl whose clothes she wore, wide-eyed with the excitement of her first week on campus, starting out on a four-year career that promised to be fascinating and fun. Walking through the Baby Bazaar on the way to the suit department at midmorning, Connie happened to notice a handmade blanket and some tiny knitted sacques and booties in the palest shades of pink and blue. “Oh, are these the things that Grace Blair’s sister knits?” Connie asked an idle salesclerk impulsively. 119

“Grace Blair’s sister?” The clerk looked confused. “The little stock clerk on the main floor,” Connie explained. “She was telling me she had a sister who did hand-knit things for the Bazaar.” “That’s right.” A more seasoned salesclerk, coming up, asked, “Were you interested in buying something, dear?” “Oh, no, thanks.” Connie, whose acquaintance with particular babies was not large, looked a little abashed. “I was just interested in seeing some of the work. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” The second clerk lifted a sacque from the case. “Terribly painstaking. And when you think what a knitter like that gets paid for her time, the price really isn’t high.” Connie glanced at the price tag and pursed her mouth to pantomime a whistle. “That seems expensive to me,” she said. Then, for the first time, Connie was introduced to a department store’s markup system, and the reasons behind it. The clerk, who was also the assistant buyer in the department, took time to explain it to the interested girl, and when Connie walked away she said to her companion. “There’s a character with a head on her shoulders. She’ll get along.” The other clerk shrugged and yawned. “What does she care? She doesn’t have to sell the stuff. 120

Why addle your brain?” But Connie, well out of earshot, did not hear them. She was trying vainly to think of someone to whom she might give a small sacque as a gift. She’d like to buy one, she decided, even if it was expensive. She’d like to help out Grace Blair and her sister in some little way. An idea occurred to her. Maybe Aunt Bet had a friend with a small baby. On her tour of the third floor she could pop her head in Miss Easton’s office and ask. Too impatient to wait for an elevator, she hurried up the carpeted steps. The Bridal Salon, when she crossed it, was entirely empty, even of salespeople, but at the door to the advertising department, right next to Aunt Bet’s office, there was an excited little group. Everyone was talking at once. Then one of the salon clerks turned, saw Connie, and nudged the girl next to her in dismay. There was a hush as sudden as the quiet after snapping off a radio switch. An embarrassed voice was raised in some forced inanity; then the quiet descended again as Connie passed. Ill at ease, and feeling that she must in some way have contributed to the excitement, yet at a loss to understand why, Connie went to the door of her aunt’s office and glanced in. It was empty, which wasn’t unusual. Aunt Bet was always flitting like a 121

busy butterfly around the store. But the group of people outside the advertising department glanced at Connie covertly as she passed them again, and she found herself almost running back across the Bridal Salon, her chest tight with premonition. Something—something she knew nothing about— was wrong! Now she wanted to find Aunt Bet in the same way that a child, lost in a store like Campion’s, would want to find its mother. Connie needed her aunt’s reassurance and protection. She felt uncomfortable and uneasy, as though she were about to take an exam for which she was totally unprepared. Hastily she traversed the entire third floor, looking for Aunt Bet in each department. Then she went down to the second floor, and from there to the first. At the back elevators she saw Mr. George Campion talking with a portly woman in a flowered hat. Connie was about to go past them and on to the offices in the rear, where Aunt Bet might possibly be engaged, when Mr. Campion stopped her. He simply reached out and touched her arm. “Aren’t you Miss Easton’s niece?” “Yes,” Connie answered, astonished that the head of the big, busy store could identify her. “I am.” “Miss—?” he hesitated. “Connie Blair.” 122

“Oh, yes. Miss Blair, I’d like to talk with you for a few minutes. In my office. Do you know where that is?” Connie wasn’t quite sure. “On the top floor?” “That’s right. Will you go up and wait for me?” Quite without reason, Connie felt as though she were being sent to the principal’s office for some grammar school misdeed. She wore a puzzled frown between her dark eyebrows as she rode up in the car, and walked slowly and uncertainly down the corridor until she came to a corner door with a glazed glass pane and the impressive lettering: GEORGE R. CAMPION President She had a moment’s hesitation. Should she knock? Then she pushed the door open and walked in. A dark girl with harlequin glasses looked up from a secretary’s desk directly in front of the door. “Yes?” “I’m Connie Blair. Mr. Campion asked me to come up here and wait for him.” “Oh, yes,” said the girl, as though she understood everything that Connie didn’t. “Have a seat.” She 123

waved her hand vaguely toward a long bench by the wall. Connie sat down and looked around. Behind the secretary’s back was a door to an inner office, paned with the same opaque glass as the one she had just entered. This, she decided, must be the sanctum sanctorum. She wondered if she’d get a chance to see the inside. Then she became aware of a shadow behind the glass pane. Someone was already in that office, someone who was pacing back and forth, back and forth, so that the shadow wavered and flickered across the door. The someone was a woman, Connie decided after a few minutes, because the shadow had none of the squareness that a man’s shoulders would give it. She wondered who it could be. Then the telephone rang and the secretary answered it and Connie’s attention was distracted. “No,” the secretary said, “Mr. Campion will be in conference. Yes, it is important. No, I can’t tell how long he will be.” Was she the conference, Connie wondered? It scarcely seemed possible; she almost grinned at the thought. Then the outer door opened and the president of Campion’s was standing before her. “Come in, Miss Blair,” he said with a wave of his hand toward the inner door. “Miss Carpenter, see that we aren’t disturbed.” 124

Connie walked toward the door that the owner of the store held open for her and went through it, to stare straight into the startled eyes of the young woman who whirled around from the window to meet them. “Why, Aunt Bet!” she said. Elizabeth Easton, for the first time in Connie’s memory, seemed to have lost some of her usual polish and poise. She seemed younger, as though she were trying to cope with something quite beyond her. She looked from Connie to Mr. Campion and then said, “I’m sorry you felt it necessary to bring my niece into this.” Mr. Campion eased himself into his desk chair with a sigh. He seemed far less disturbed than Aunt Bet when he replied, “I’m sorry, too, Miss Easton, but I felt that any light we could cast on the situation would be to the good.” Connie could contain herself no longer. “What situation?” she burst out. “I feel as though everybody were in on some kind of a secret—” Then, remembering to whom she was talking, she paused, feeling foolish. Surprisingly, Mr. Campion chuckled, but his face soon grew grave again. “You’re not far from wrong,” he told her. “Miss Easton, do you want to explain?” He turned and seemed to be watching Connie’s aunt very carefully as she spoke to her 125

niece. “The missing pearls,” Miss Easton said tonelessly, “have been discovered.” This, to Connie, seemed no cause for alarm. “Oh, good!” she exclaimed. “Where?” Ruefully her aunt smiled. “Wrapped in a square of cleansing tissue,” she said, “in my handbag.” “Oh, no!” Connie cried. “Why, that’s impossible. How could they have gotten there?” Then she seemed to realize the implications of the statement and whirled on Mr. Campion. “You surely don’t think—?” “We don’t think anything, Miss Blair,” Mr. Campion broke in a little wearily. His face seemed less florid than usual, almost pasty, but Connie noticed that his gray eyes held no hint of accusation. He simply looked tired. “We’re just trying to get to the root of a situation that none of us likes.” “Of course,” Connie said, feeling quite chastened. “But make no mistake!” Steel suddenly glinted in the gray eyes. “There is no one in the store who is not under suspicion until proven innocent.” Mr. Campion looked from Connie to her aunt and back to Connie again. “That,” he said slowly, “goes for everyone.” Now Connie knew why her Aunt Bet did not seem to be at all herself. This man of variable moods was inclined to be kindly, but underneath he had a 126

core of hardness that would permit no favoritism. Miss Easton might be a trusted employee of standing, but she would get no more consideration than the most menial worker in the shop until this mystery was cleared up. And suddenly Connie guessed how she herself fitted into the picture. She was new around here; she had the run of the store; she might have had an opportunity to steal the pearls, and then, frightened at the furor it created, slipped them into her aunt’s handbag because she thought Elizabeth Easton would be above suspicion. If Mr. Campion and his elusive house detective were bent on exploring every possibility, this was one. “I’d like to ask you a few questions,” Mr. Campion was saying, and Connie met his eyes and nodded, keeping her hands clasped very tight in her lap. “Do you remember what your aunt usually does with her handbag when she goes into her office?” “I think,” said Connie, “that she usually puts it on her desk.” “Tosses,” she felt belatedly, would have been a better word, for Aunt Bet, when she was working, showed an utter disregard for personal belongings, flinging them from her to make room for the paraphernalia of her job. “Did you see it there at any time this morning?” 127

“I wasn’t in her office this morning.” Then Connie corrected herself. “Until just a few minutes ago, that is, when I happened to be looking for her.” “Why were you looking for her?” Connie knew it sounded silly and far from the sort of thing she should have been doing during working hours, but she was determined to be truthful. “To see if she knew a baby I could buy a sweater for,” she said. Mr. Campion looked confused and Miss Easton’s eyebrows lifted perceptibly. “It’s awfully involved,” Connie admitted. “Do you want me to explain?” “No,” Mr. Campion barked quickly, passing a hand graphically across his high forehead. “One thing more,” he continued, and cleared his throat. Connie had the feeling that he was watching her with particular interest as he asked the next question. “Do you remember the color of the cleansing tissue currently in use in the models’ dressing room?” “Why, yes, I do,” she replied with careful certainty. “It’s blue.” Mr. Campion took from his desk drawer a small package and laid it on the blotter. Wrapped in a square of pale-blue cleansing tissue was the choker of cultured pearls.

128

CHAPTER

11

The Missing Hatbox

It wasn’t until Connie was alone with her aunt, walking down the corridor toward the elevators, that she had a chance to ask the actual circumstances of the pearls’ discovery. “We were having an advertising confab, sort of an impromptu get-together with the buyer of the fur department—Larry Stewart, and Mr. Macom from advertising and myself. I needed some notes I had left in my bag, and one of the stock girls happened to be passing, so I asked her if she’d run back to my office and get my pocketbook for me. I reached in the bag to get my notebook. When I pulled it out, the cleansing tissue had caught on one of the wires of the binding. The pearls, dramatically enough, simply dropped on the floor.” “It’s absurd to think you’d carry stolen goods around in your handbag,” argued Connie. 129

“Absurd,” Aunt Bet agreed. “But there seems to be a good deal of absurdity in this case.” So now, thought Connie, it has become a case, even in practical Aunt Bet’s eyes. That, she decided, was all to the good, if they were ever to solve the mystery. “And it isn’t as though,” Connie murmured, her mind off on another tangent, “there weren’t plenty of blue cleansing tissues in the world.” She didn’t want to think that the pearls were wrapped in tissue from the models’ dressing room. She liked and trusted those girls; she shook off the slight doubt she had been harboring about Suzanne. “Blue’s not a popular color, though. Peach and white are the common shades.” Aunt Bet added, “The reason we have blue in the dressing rooms just now is because the store has been closing it out.” “Will all the models be questioned, do you suppose?” Connie asked abruptly. “I don’t know. It’s not unlikely,” Miss Easton said. “Look, Aunt Bet, just because a girl loves clothes with a passion, just because she can’t help imagining herself in the things she models—after hours, I mean, when she has a date—that doesn’t mean she’d feel it was all right to—to sort of borrow things, does it?” “I should hope not!” cried Aunt Bet. Her eyes as 130

she looked at Connie were penetrating. “What are you driving at?” But Connie wouldn’t tell. She might herself be concerned about Suzanne’s integrity, but she couldn’t discuss it until she was more certain. She couldn’t disclose a suspicion that might be unfounded, even to her aunt. Fortunately, there was no more time for conversation. The hour for the luncheon fashion show was at hand and Miss Easton didn’t even have time to powder her nose before her appearance in the Mirror Room. Connie thought the other models looked at her rather curiously when she appeared, late, to make a lightning change. She had already noticed how rapidly gossip traveled around the store, and she was sure they had heard of the discovery of the pearls. Probably because Miss Easton was her aunt they were loathe to mention it. She watched Suzanne closely, but her attitude seemed no different from the others’—pleasant enough, but just slightly constrained. Connie was modeling a sweeping, taffeta dinner dress, walking between the tables of the mirrored restaurant with a conventional smile curving her lips, when suddenly she stood still. She had thought of a question she should have asked Aunt Bet—an important question. With an effort she remembered 131

where she was and walked onward, but her mind was far away. The answer to that question might mean a great deal! She wanted to get to her aunt as soon as she could. But, as luck would have it, after the show Elizabeth Easton was unavailable. She had dashed off to another appointment before Connie could reach her, with the result that her niece was left to spend an impatient and—she felt—a fruitless afternoon. Then, about four o’clock, she remembered that Larry Stewart had been with Aunt Bet at the advertising conference. She could ask him the question if she could find him. Without a second’s hesitation she took the elevator to the basement and almost ran along the cement-floored corridor to the display room. Larry was inside talking to a stranger, a thin young man with his hat on the back of his head. “We want to get a montage effect,” he was saying as Connie came quietly into the room. “Luxury angle. Here are the props. And for Pete’s sake, take good care of those pearls!” “Watsamatter?” asked the young man, who was apparently a photographer. “Are they worth some dough?” Larry frowned. “They’re not only worth some dough, “but they’ve got a habit of disappearing and 132

turning up in the wrong places.” The young man picked up the choker and weighed it critically in his hand. Then he collected the furs, the scarf and a hat that Connie recognized with a shudder as the one with the birds’ heads that had so fascinated her on that first Sunday morning. “Have ’em back tomorrow,” he promised. “Watchagonna do with the photo, blow it up?” “That’s it, for an arty backdrop,” Larry told him. Then he saw Connie over the photographer’s shoulder and dismissed him rapidly with a “Be seeing you, boy.” Connie was flushed with excitement. Her eyes were dark and intense and she looked vivid and very pictorial in a dark-red wool jumper with a paleyellow shirt. “Larry,” she said, as soon as the door had closed behind the thin man, “I’ve got to ask you a question. It won’t take a minute.” Larry looked at her admiringly and grinned. “At your service,” he said. “Think hard,” Connie urged him. “Can you remember who it was that went—this morning—to get Aunt Bet’s bag?” “That’s easy. It was that skinny kid, the one with the stringy hair and big eyes. Grace—” he snapped his fingers. “What’s her last name?” “Grace Blair,” Connie said. She wasn’t surprised. It was as though this had to 133

be the answer, as though she were building in her mind some unconscious pattern, and that this morsel of information fitted in. Only one thing nagged at her; the pattern was flawed. It did not include the face in the mirror; it did not include the ransacking of Aunt Bet’s apartment. Part of it was ragged and incomplete. “Do me a favor, Larry?” “Sure.” “Forget I asked you that question.” “ ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ ” Larry quoted, scratching his head. “Promise?” “Sure, I’ll promise, but can’t you tell me why?” “Maybe I can later,” Connie told him, “but not now.” “You’re concerned about those pearls turning up in Bet’s handbag, aren’t you?” Connie nodded. “There’s nothing to it, of course.” “But it’s unpleasant, and it could be extremely awkward,” Connie murmured. “Aunt Bet’s upset— more than a little. I can tell.” “There’s bound to be a lot of confounded gossip,” Larry muttered, kicking at a papier-mâché prop with the toe of his shoe. He was confirming Connie’s own suspicion, that in a woman’s specialty shop like Campion’s, such a story could gather momentum 134

like a snowball racing downhill. And when it finally came to rest it might be unrecognizable, with Aunt Bet crushed in its core. From that moment on, the solving of what Connie now frankly faced as a real mystery became more than a game with her. It became a crusade. That her beloved young aunt should be in any way connected with thievery was more than distasteful; it was of the most serious concern. Granted that Elizabeth Easton’s reputation was of the first order, it was still imperative that she should be completely exonerated from any blame in connection with the pearls. And to clear her, Connie knew that the real thief somehow must be disclosed. “Even if it meant hurting someone?” Connie asked herself, and admitted sadly that her answer had to be yes. That night she and her aunt spent a quiet evening. Connie did more than her share of the supper-getting and dishwashing because Aunt Bet seemed depressed and self-absorbed. They didn’t discuss the reappearance of the pearls at any length. There seemed to be little else to say. And they went to bed early and slept with the exhaustion that frequently follows overstrain. “Thursday morning,” Connie murmured when she awoke. It seemed to her that the week was slipping by very fast. 135

“Thursday morning,” her aunt echoed with more decision. “We’ll be busy today. There are several sales scheduled at the store.” They were busy indeed, so busy that Connie had no chance to give any attention to anything but the strict business of modeling. The College Shop salesclerks had such a big day that there was more than one murmur of relief as they closed their books. The models, to a girl, kicked off their shoes as they came into the dressing room for the last time. “Whew!” Marcia breathed, sinking down on a chair with her feet stretched out straight in front of her. “Give me a nice quiet circus any time.” “With elephants to ride,” agreed Connie. Tonight her feet were burning with fatigue. “I’d rather be a trapeze artist,” put in Suzanne dryly. Marcia grinned. “Because they never touch ground at all?” “They hang by their ankles, though, or is it their toes?” Connie asked. “Ouch,” Suzanne cried. “I take it all back.” She pulled a silk jersey dress over her head, reached for a belt and clasped it around her slender”, waist, ran a comb through her hair, freshened her lipstick with a single, vivid stroke and was gone. Connie changed without hurrying. She called good-bye to one after another of the girls, then 136

finally left the dressing room to seek out her aunt in her office. But Mr. Macom from the advertising department met her before she reached Miss Easton’s door. “Your aunt has gone down to the hat department,” he said. “She wants you to meet her there.” Connie thanked him and took the elevator to the second floor, wandering slowly through the deserted suit section back to Miss Estelle’s domain. She passed a few clerks, homeward bound, and wove in and out among the mirrored tables toward the stock room, from which came women’s voices, one shrill and excited, another unmistakably her aunt’s. “It could,” Aunt Bet was saying thoughtfully, “have been there all the time.” It was the first remark Connie heard as she pushed open the door. “May I come in?” she asked with more assurance than she would have shown a few days before. The hat buyer’s back was toward her, but she could see that both Miss Estelle and her aunt were bending over an open box. “Come in, come in,” called Miss Estelle crossly without turning around. Then she responded to Miss Easton’s previous remark with obvious impatience. “The entire thing’s just too silly for words. But what I want to know is where’s my hat?” 137

“I’d like to know that too, Estelle.” Connie’s aunt faced the buyer and met her eyes with a calmness that must have cost her an effort. Miss Estelle’s shoulders jerked in a shrug. “You don’t seem too excited.” “I just can’t see that getting excited will help.” Connie, meanwhile, had crossed the floor to the wrapping table where the two women stood. Before them was a small, round hatbox in Campion pink and gray, identical to the dozens that were piled along one side of the room; but within it the tissue paper was mussed, and at the bottom was a brown pouch bag. “The hatbox?” Connie’s eyes were round with surprise. Aunt Bet nodded. “But without the hat.” “Where did you find it?” Connie breathed. “One of our wrappers found it,” said Miss Estelle, still crossly. She spread her hands and shrugged again. “It was stacked in with all those empty boxes. At the bottom. We had a big day today and just happened to work down to it. She opened the box to pack a hat in it, and there was all this crumpled tissue paper and the bag.” “So that’s what Aunt Bet meant by saying it could have been here all the time,” Connie murmured. Miss Estelle looked at her sharply. “I suppose it 138

could, but what difference does that make?” “I don’t quite know,” Connie answered, a puzzled frown gathering between her eyes. “But it might make a lot.” “What day did they stack this new shipment of boxes? Can you remember, Estelle?” Miss Easton asked. “Certainly I can remember,” the buyer snapped, as though she felt an implied criticism in the question. “It was last Friday—no, Saturday morning. I phoned for them Friday, but the boys didn’t get up with them until the next day.” Connie and her aunt exchanged a glance. “That would tie in,” Connie said. “You missed the hatbox Friday, remember?” “I remember,” said Aunt Bet. Miss Estelle glanced at her wrist watch. “Well, I can’t stand here forever,” she decided wearily. “I have a dinner engagement.” She looked at the hatbox as though it annoyed her and gave it a little push with her hand. “Do you want to take charge of this, Elizabeth?” “I guess it’s my responsibility.” Aunt Bet smiled. “I’ll take it to my office and deliver it to the powers that be in the morning.” She closed it, tied it and carried it out of the stock room, Connie trailing behind her. “I wish this hatbox could talk,” she said ruefully as she unlocked her office door and put the 139

box on her desk. “Wait a minute.” Connie untied the box and took out the pouch bag, weighing it in her hand. It was made of glove leather and was very light. Then she examined the outside of the box itself, which looked fresh and completely unmarred. “I think you’re right, Aunt Bet,” she said, as she replaced the bag and tied the box up again. “I don’t think this box has ever been out of the store.” “Why?” “There isn’t even a dent in the rim of the hatbox, top or bottom. It looks as though it has never been used.” Aunt Bet nodded, and walked toward the back elevators slowly. “There’s another thing,” Connie added. “Whoever took the hat might have missed completely the fact that the bag was there.” Miss Easton looked puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean.” “The hat,” Connie explained, “was probably fairly heavy, being made of fur.” “Yes?” “And the bag is unusually light. In the bottom of the box, covered by tissue, it could have been overlooked.” “That’s an angle,” her aunt agreed as she stepped into the car. They were so late that the regular 140

elevator operators had gone off duty, and it was old George, the watchman, who greeted them. George looked worried. “You know, Miss Easton,” he said almost at once, “somethin’ queer’s goin’ on around here. Mr. Campion hisself sent me a note, wantin’ to see my night book. It’s the first time in twenty year such a thing has happened. I don’t like the look of it, and that’s a fact.”

141

CHAPTER

12

Connie Pays a Call

In old George’s night book were the signatures of all employees of the store who had been admitted to the premises after hours; and on Friday morning, Elizabeth Easton, Chipper White, Mr. Kurt, Miss Estelle and four members of the advertising department who had been working overtime, received invitations that were really command performances. They were asked to meet in Mr. Campion’s office the following morning, and Connie almost wished her name had been down in George’s book too, because she suspected that at that time they would learn the identity of the house detective. She also wondered whether she should tell someone in authority about the strange man’s face in the mirror, then decided against it, since neither old George nor her aunt had given credence to the tale. 142

Even with the implicit belief she felt in the evidence of her own eyes, Connie felt that the Sunday encounter confused the issue. It didn’t fit in with the rest of the evidence she was collecting. It never had. Otherwise, she felt that she was thinking in a fairly straight line now. She had asked her aunt a question at breakfast, and she felt that the answer had been important. “Aunt Bet,” she had said, “remember, back in Meadowbrook, after you phoned the store and discovered that the hatbox was really missing, what you said?” “No. What did I say?” Connie could repeat the exact words. “You said, ‘It isn’t the first time—’ What did you mean?” “Oh, there’s probably no connection, but for several months now, it seems to me things have been disappearing. Not big, important things like the fur beret and the pearls, but things like a silk scarf, or a bottle of toilet water—things I’d been using as props. They’ve just seemed to vanish into thin air for a day or so; then they’ve turned up in odd places. It’s given me the creeps, rather—” Her voice trailed off. “That’s very interesting,” Connie had said. “Interesting, but not very illuminating.” But Connie was not inclined to discount this 143

observation, as Aunt Bet did. She mulled over it all day long, and it tied in so inevitably with her own uncomfortable suspicions that she felt sick at heart. Throughout the day, as she changed from one costume to another, as she quoted prices to interested customers and walked about the store with her head held high and her shoulders well back, she felt as though she were carrying about with her a secret too big to be borne. “I could be wrong,” she kept telling herself. “I still could be wrong.” Much as she wanted to confide in someone—her aunt or Larry Stewart— she didn’t feel that she had the right to do so until that last small doubt was eliminated. During the afternoon rest period for the models, Connie simply couldn’t sit still. The chatter of the girls, as they relaxed in the dressing room, seemed superficial and pointless. To escape it, Connie went downstairs to pay a visit to the display department. Larry’s nonsense, she thought, might divert her where this small talk couldn’t. Besides, he had made her promise that she’d come and see the Lucy at work. They were enlarging the photograph of the pearls, the bird-trimmed hat, the scarf and furs when she arrived. Larry was adjusting the machine, which looked rather like a streamlined magic lantern, so that it threw a clear image against a big oblong of 144

tinted cardboard. The props from which the photographer had made his eight-by-ten-inch glossy photograph still lay on the long table. “Want to be an errand girl,” Larry asked Connie as she inspected them idly, “and return those things?” “Why?” Connie asked with complete candor. “Because I’m busy.” Connie chuckled and raised her eyebrows impishly. “You?” “Atta girl!” called Chipper White from behind a wire bird cage which he was repainting a violent shade of green. “You’ve got the right angle on our Larry.” Connie relented suddenly. “I’ll take them back,” she told the young display man. “I was just teasing. It won’t be any trouble at all.” Larry really looked busy this afternoon. His hair was rumpled, his shirt sleeves rolled up, and there was a smear of paint across one cheek. He bent and squinted as he focused the delineator. “There!” he said finally. “Does that look right to you?” Connie looked at the enlargement of the photograph. “Yes,” she nodded, “but I’m no authority.” Then she stepped closer to brush her fingers over a section of the cardboard on which the image was thrown. There seemed to be a thread or a flaw in the paper that ran right behind the enlarged 145

picture of the pearls. But there was nothing that could be brushed off. Connie’s eyebrows crinkled and she hesitated a moment, then inconspicuously walked back to the table and took the choker out of its box. Both Larry and Chipper were so absorbed that they didn’t notice when she examined it carefully, turning the pearls this way and that under the brilliant overhead light. They didn’t hear her catch her breath as she found what she had been seeking. They didn’t see her eyes grow dark and troubled as she gently replaced the choker in the silk-lined box. Against the creamy background she could see the dismaying evidence even more clearly. Caught in the intricately strung pearls was a fragment of a thread of pale-blue knitting wool. Connie shut the box lid carefully. She picked up the hat and the rest of the props and called a negligent “Good-bye” to Larry. The boy came out of his trance of concentration abruptly. “Are you and Bet going to be home tonight?” he asked. “I thought I might stop around.” “Do that,” Connie told him, but without the enthusiasm she would normally have felt. “I’m sure we’ll be in.” Then she walked very slowly down the cementfloored corridor to the service elevators. She wasn’t pleased by what she had discovered, but in her own 146

mind the last small doubt was eliminated. At the elevators, waiting to go up, she met Mr. Kurt, who said, “You seem to have an armful, Miss Blair.” “I seem to have gotten a new job. I’m an errand girl now,” Connie told him with a routine smile. The floorwalker, always suave and often, Connie thought, annoyingly unctuous, said, “Can’t I relieve you of some of your burden?” Connie shook her head. “Oh, no, thanks.” Mr. Kurt’s eyes were on the red hat. “But I happen to be going right to the hat department,” he told her blandly as he reached out a hand for it. “It won’t be any trouble at all.” The elevator door rasped open and the operator stuck his head out. “Going up.” Connie had no recourse. She couldn’t get into a tug of war with Mr. Kurt. More graciously than she felt, she acquiesced. “Well, all right. Thank you, then.” At the first floor she got off and took the pearls directly to Miss Potter. “Hang on to these,” she told the salesclerk ruefully. “Maybe I ought to get a signed affidavit of their return.” Then, because she was afraid she had sounded caustic, she grinned and said, “I’m teasing, really, but I must admit I’m glad to get them out of my hands.” She dropped off the furs and the scarf on the way 147

back to the dressing room, exchanging pleasantries with the clerks who received them, although her thoughts were elsewhere. She was trying to decide what would be the right thing to do with the information she now possessed. The other models noticed her absorption when she returned, and teased her about it. “Connie’s in love,” Suzanne insisted. “Her mind’s a million miles away.” Marcia retorted slyly. “It isn’t a million miles to the display department.” At that Connie awoke. She whirled around, searching for some flippant retort, but at the same time she could feel a red flush staining her cheeks. “I’m not going to fall in love for years and years yet,” she told them feebly. “I’m going to be a career gal, didn’t you know?” Somehow, although she meant what she said, it sounded unconvincing, and Marcia and Suzanne both laughed. Connie joined them, in spite of her discomfiture. She had learned in these few days the value of being able to laugh at herself. Connie changed into a pair of hunter-green slacks and a plaid wool shirt, and then wandered down to the hat department—not to check up on Mr. Kurt, she told herself, but just to make sure that her responsibility was discharged. The red hat was already occupying a position of honor in a front 148

showcase, she saw with satisfaction. And tomorrow, she thought grimly—or at the very latest, on Monday—the fur beret should be beside it. Because now Connie thought she knew how the beret had disappeared. More important, she also thought she could get it back, singlehanded. Once it was returned, at least a part of Aunt Bet’s worries would be over. As to her future course of action, Connie wasn’t quite clear. It seemed to her that the recovery of the fur hat was of the most immediate importance. After that, there would be time to decide . . . “Anything wrong?” Miss Estelle stood at Connie’s shoulder and the girl came out of her brown study with a start. “No. Nothing at all.” Telling the little white lie, Connie forced a smile. “I was just admiring this red sailor. I think it’s my favorite hat. The birds’ eyes are so unusual, like—” Like stars, Connie had been about to say, but as she actually examined them now, they seemed different to her. They lacked their old sparkle, their former gleam. But Miss Estelle seemed to see nothing amiss. “These French designers do remarkable things with paste jewels,” she agreed. “Now who’d ever think of using those fake stickpins for birds’ eyes?” Who indeed? 149

Connie turned the question over in her mind as she made a tour of the second floor. She wondered whether her imagination was running away with her, whether there was even a morsel of common sense in the wild idea that was growing in her mind like a genie emerging from a bottle. She shook her shoulders, as though she could shrug the notion off. I’m getting to be worse than Toby, she told herself. Deliberately, now, she put this new possibility from her mind and began to plan a course of action that would result in the return of the fur hat. She went to the personnel director and asked if she could glance through the address file of employees, then carefully noted down two addresses on a slip of paper, and put the slip into her wallet. One she might never use, but the other she needed immediately. After work, that very evening, she intended to make a call. Connie told her aunt nothing of her real destination. She manufactured an excuse and promised to be home for dinner by seven o’clock. The store closed at five-thirty. That left her a full hour and a half. On Seventeenth Street Connie took a southbound trolley. Within a few blocks of Walnut the neighborhood began to change, and the car lurched and rattled along between close-packed houses, dingy shops and ill-kept streets. It was a different 150

Philadelphia into which Connie was taken, as remote from the section of luxury apparel shops as anything she could possibly imagine. For block after city block, the dreariness was unchanging. Even the softness of the late summer twilight could lend it no charm. Connie consulted the address in her wallet, then asked the conductor’s advice. “I’ll tell you when to get off,” he told her. “Just sit down there.” The car, crowded when it had passed through the center of town, was almost empty when the man beckoned to Connie. “It’s west from here about half a square,” he said. The word “west” made it easy. The sun was sinking rapidly behind a screen of houses, a fat golden ball that touched dusty windows with a rosy glow. Connie walked rapidly toward it, winding in and out among playing children and empty ash cans waiting to be reclaimed from the brick sidewalk. She began checking off the numbers above the doors— 1720, 1722, 1724. Finally, before one that seemed tidier than its neighbors, she paused. Now that she was actually here, she scarcely knew how to proceed. Because she was at a momentary loss, Connie walked on a few paces, then turned back toward the scrubbed marble stoop. An older woman, as thin and 151

wan as Grace Blair herself, had appeared on the steps to shake out a mop. and Connie took her courage in hand and approached her. “Are you Mrs. Blair?” she asked. The woman looked at her as though she were seeing an apparition, and it was small wonder, because Connie looked more than ever like a magazine-cover girl as she stood alone and vivid in the dingy street. “Yes, I’m Mrs. Blair,” came the reply. “I’m a friend of Grace’s, from the store,” Connie told her. “Grace isn’t home yet,” Mrs. Blair said, as though she mistrusted her own ears. Connie knew that Grace would have had to do some special hustling to have reached here ahead of her, but she pretended disappointment. “Oh, isn’t she? I particularly wanted to see her.” She smiled disarmingly, then asked, with some hesitation, “Could I, perhaps, come in?” Mrs. Blair hesitated on her part for. a moment, then, apparently unable to find a plausible excuse, stood aside. “You can wait in the front room,” she told Connie. “It used to be the parlor, but now it’s sort of torn up, because my other girl’s been sick, and we had to move her in there.” Nothing could have suited Connie’s convenience more perfectly. “Don’t apologize,” she told Mrs. 152

Blair, giving her arm an impulsive squeeze of comfort. “Grace has told me about her sister, and I think having her on the first floor is a fine idea!” There was such genuine friendliness in Connie’s voice that Mrs. Blair warmed to her. “Ellie ought to be up and out by now,” she said in a lowered voice, “but she just can’t seem to grab hold of any interest in life. Grace and I have tried and tried—” “I’m sure you have!” Connie replied when Mrs. Blair seemed at a loss to go on. “Let me talk to her while I’m waiting. Maybe a new face will help.” By now they were in a narrow, dark hallway which ran along the wall of the row house. It was hard for Connie to adjust her eyes to the gloom, and she groped along in Mrs. Blair’s wake to the archway which led to the front room. “Ellie,” she heard her hostess say, “this is a young lady from Campion’s, come to see Grace.” She turned again to Connie. “I didn’t get your name.” “Connie. Connie Blair. My last name’s the same as yours.” Again Connie made this remark companionably, as though it established terms of intimacy between them. She looked toward the windows, where Ellie was no more than a shadowy silhouette propped against pillows on a couch. Blinking and fighting to see clearly in the darkness, Connie walked forward. “I’m so glad to meet you, Ellie. I’ve been seeing 153

a lot of the beautiful knitting you do for the store.” Connie couldn’t see that the girl had bone needles in her hands now, but she could hear their muted clack-clack. “Ellie always could knit just beautifully,” Mrs. Blair was saying proudly, “from the time she was a little thing.” To Connie, whose vision was now clearer, the girl on the couch still seemed a little thing, and so fragile that she was almost transparent. She was like her mother and sister in some ways, yet in others quite different, as though the same family characteristics had been molded in finer clay. For the first time she spoke, raising her gray eyes directly to Connie’s brown ones. “Won’t you sit down,” she said. Connie sank into the chair she indicated with a grateful sigh of relief. She had scarcely dared hope that the invalid would accept her. But now that she was inside the Blair house the solution of the mystery that was baffling Campion’s seemed actually at hand!

154

CHAPTER

13

Part of the Story

When Connie Blair made a special effort to be charming she was very attractive indeed, and her friendly overtures were irresistible to Grace’s sister, who thawed perceptibly as the minutes passed. “I think the things you knit for the store are perfectly lovely,” Connie complimented her. “You should see the way they’re displayed in the Baby Bazaar. You’d be terribly proud!” The clack-clack of the needles continued, and although the younger girl merely nodded, a light of interest came into her eyes. “This is a new design for a sweater,” she offered after a while, smoothing out the garment on which she was working. Connie moved forward to examine it more closely. “Oh, it’s sweet!” It was a tiny sacque of the palest blue wool, as fine and soft as a duckling’s down, and Connie put 155

her next question carefully. “How long does it take you to make a sweater like that?” “I’ve been working on this for three days.” Up to this minute, Connie realized that she had been hoping against hope that this visit would disprove her theory, but Ellie’s answer sounded a death knell to such a fancy. Her chest felt tight with dismay and it was hard to make her answer sound casual. “Such a short time! You must be fast.” Ellie was smoothing the wool with her thin hand. “If it takes more than three days for a garment, it doesn’t pay me,” she said. Connie, conscious of the passing time, tried a new tack. “You love pretty things, don’t you?” Ellie stopped fondling the wool abruptly. “I guess most girls do. Why?” “You have such sensitive fingers,” Connie said. “My aunt is a stylist and she loves to touch fabrics and run her hands over materials and furs. I’ve watched her, often.” “Does she, really?” Ellie sounded surprised. “You should meet Aunt Bet!” Connie found herself saying. “She’s a marvelous person. She’s young and full of enthusiasm. And she has a terribly responsible job at the store.” “I think Grace has told me about her,” Ellie said. 156

Mrs. Blair appeared in the doorway. “Grace ought to be home in a few minutes,” she said. “I have to go down the street to the store.” Her glance roved from her daughter to Connie nervously, as though she couldn’t quite figure out what this visit meant. “You go right ahead. We’re having a fine time.” Connie felt like a hypocrite as she smiled back at her, but the pale woman in the doorway accepted her assurance, and managed a thin, tired smile in return. There was a quality in Mrs. Blair’s smile that affected Connie with the force and directness of a blow. She felt like more than a hypocrite now; she felt like an interloper. Her impulse to help Aunt Bet, to exonerate her from any connection with the disappearance of the pearls or the fur hat, was supplanted by a sudden welling of desire to protect these people, who looked so beaten, who seemed so much less able to get along in the world than she. She wished she hadn’t come. She wanted to get out of this house. She never wanted Grace to know that she had pried. Frantically she began to seek for an excuse to leave. But now that Ellie had accepted her she was growing more talkative. “What do you do at the store?” the girl asked. “I’m a model, just for two weeks. I don’t work there regularly,” Connie said. “A model!” Again a shy gleam of interest 157

awakened Ellie’s eyes. “It must be wonderful to wear pretty clothes.” “It is fun,” Connie told her, and in spite of herself she began to respond with a description of her job. She told Ellie about the other models, about the fashion shows in the Mirror Room, about life behind the scenes in a big store, painting such a vivid and exciting picture for the invalid that Ellie stopped knitting and sat forward attentively, her hands clasped in her lap. “You make it sound different than Grace does. I think I’d like to work in a store like that,” Ellie said at last. “I think you would too. Why don’t you try to get a job there when you get better!” Connie cried. Then, carried away by her own enthusiasm, she began to plan. “I could speak to Aunt Bet—” “What are you doing here?” The voice that came from the doorway was cold and level. Connie got to her feet as one would prepare to meet an adversary, and turned to face Grace. “What are you talking about to my sister?” In the stock girl’s voice there was both belligerence and fear. “We were just talking about the shop. I was telling her about my job,” Connie added hastily as a glint of suspicion appeared in Grace’s eyes. 158

“Why?” Connie shrugged lightly, and tried to make her smile natural and friendly, although she felt decidedly ill at ease. “We were just passing the time, waiting for you.” Ellie raised confused eyes to her sister’s. “I think it might be fun to work at Campion’s, someday,” she said thoughtfully. “Miss Blair makes it sound like a lovely store.” Grace’s shoulders sagged in obvious relief, and at the same time she seemed surprised at her sister’s interest. “It’s better than most,” she agreed. Connie glanced at her wrist watch. “Goodness, I’ve got to run! Walk to the trolley with me, Grace, will you? I can tell you what I came to see you about on the way.” Grace recognized this for a ruse, but she reluctantly agreed. Connie said good-bye to Ellie, and was rewarded with a request. “Come see me again, won’t you?” the girl on the couch urged. “I’d love to,” Connie told her, “and I will!” But she wondered, as she followed Grace down the narrow hallway into the twilight, whether she would ever be permitted to see the inside of that house again. The stock girl stopped at the foot of the marble steps and whirled to face Connie. “All right, what is 159

it?” She spoke barely above a whisper, but she reminded Connie of a terrified fawn that the headlights of her dad’s car had picked out, one night on a lonely country road. Connie knew that now she must think and talk fast. “Don’t mistrust me,” she begged, reaching out a hand to touch Grace’s arm. “I want to help you, really I do.” Again Connie’s winning personality stood her in good stead, for the expression in Grace’s eyes softened slightly. “Help me? Why?” Together the girls had turned toward the corner, and were walking slowly along the narrow street. “I think you know why,” Connie said. “Don’t let’s pretend any more.” But Grace still had the fighting instinct of the trapped. “Pretend?” she said, her voice unnaturally shrill. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “I think you do.” Connie’s direct brown eyes met Grace’s gray ones for a fraction of a second; then Grace’s slid away. “Don’t think I blame you too much,” Connie plunged. “I know you’ve been—borrowing—things from the store to bring home to your sister, and—” Grace stopped and turned, her eyes narrowing. “Did you get her to tell you that? You—!” Connie shook her head in vigorous denial. “No! Grace, honestly, I didn’t. I came here to see you. I 160

wouldn’t—involve—Ellie for the world.” Slowly, as she realized that she had betrayed herself, a red flush climbed up Grace’s neck. “I’ve always taken them back,” she mumbled, her eyes on the ground. “Ellie loves pretty things so— loves to see them and touch them. I was just trying to get her to want to get well.” “I know,” Connie said, and waited. Grace raised her head, a spark of defiance in her pale eyes. “It wasn’t really stealing,” she insisted, “I’ve always taken them back.” “Always?” Connie asked, forcing the girl to meet her eyes. “Why, of course. What do you mean?” Connie could be blunt. “What about the fur beret?” “Beret?” Grace looked sincerely puzzled. “Oh, the fur hat! I felt badly about that. I didn’t know Miss Easton wanted it for her fashion show.” “But it was on my aunt’s desk, wasn’t it? You must have known—” In a low voice, little more than a whisper, Grace replied, “I was only borrowing it. I was going to bring it back.” “But then you couldn’t?” “Oh, yes, I did get it back on Monday,” Grace said earnestly. “But there was such a hue and cry about it I didn’t dare take it to the hat department. I 161

just put it down in the display room, on a shelf behind some dummies. I thought sure one of the boys would find it before now.” Connie caught hold of Grace’s arm. “Grace,” she said slowly, “will you tell me how you got that box out of the store without being seen?” A look of surprise replaced the fear in the stock girl’s eyes. “Why—why, all I took was the fur hat. I—I hid it in my blouse,” she said. It was Connie’s turn to look surprised. “But what did you do with the box?” she exclaimed. Grace’s eyes did not meet Connie’s. After a moment’s silence she muttered sullenly, “I took the box down to the hat department and hid it among some empties along the wall.” “Didn’t you notice a leather purse in the bottom of the box?” asked Connie. “All I saw was a lot of tissue paper,” the girl replied in a dull voice. “I didn’t steal anything. I brought everything back that I ever took.” She began to sniffle. Connie shook her head. The devious workings of Grace’s childlike brain puzzled her. “Don’t you realize how much trouble this has meant for my aunt?” she asked. Grace’s eyes dropped again. “I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I never thought—” Connie bit her lip. Scolding wouldn’t help at this 162

point. But she couldn’t resist asking, curiously, “Why don’t you like my aunt?” “Miss Easton? Oh, but I do like her!” Grace cried. “She’s a wonderful person. And she’s always been awfully nice to me.” “Then why in the name of common sense,” Connie asked, spreading her hands, “would you want to plant that choker of pearls in her handbag and make her look like a thief?” The word, coming close to home, seemed to strike terror to Grace’s heart. She backed up against a board fence, her hands behind her, her eyes fixed on Connie’s. “I didn’t put them there,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t do a thing like that.” It was Connie’s turn to show puzzlement. “You didn’t put them there?” “No. Honest!” Connie’s face expressed her disbelief. “Honestly, Miss Blair. I’m not lying.” In Grace’s eyes there was utter candor. Connie’s own brows knit and she tried to think clearly. “But you did bring them home to Ellie.” “I—” Grace started, but Connie said quickly, “Don’t tell me you didn’t. I know. There was a thread of pale-blue knitting wool tangled in the pearls.” Grace’s shoulders straightened a little. “I was just going to tell you that I did bring them home. I 163

wasn’t going to deny that. They were lying on the counter, and they had such a pretty glow. I didn’t dream they were worth a lot of money. Don’t you see?” Connie tried hard to see, to understand the impulse that would lead Grace to “borrow” the pretty things with which she prodded her sister’s lagging interest, but she was too essentially honest and normal to really comprehend this distortion of right and wrong. “Tell me the whole story, Grace, from the time you took them to the time you brought them back.” Grace clasped her hands in front of her, the knuckles showing white under the thin skin. “It was Monday,” she said. “In the afternoon. I just happened to be going past the jewelry counter and there was the choker, with nobody near it. I know I never should have touched it, especially now. But I couldn’t seem to resist it! I just slipped it in the pocket of my jumper. There were lots of strings of pearls on the rack, so I thought nobody’d miss it overnight.” “And then?” Connie asked, not enjoying her role of inquisitor but knowing that for Aunt Bet’s sake she must get the truth from Grace. “I took the choker home. Ellie held it in her hand and wore it that night. In the morning she begged me to let her keep it one more day, and I did.” 164

Grace paused and looked up and down the narrow street, empty now except for a lean gray cat foraging in a trash can. “So you brought it back on Wednesday,” Connie said. “But how did it get into Aunt Bet’s handbag if you didn’t put it there?” Suddenly Grace’s expression became guarded. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t, really. I was just as surprised!” Connie frowned, conscious of a missing link somewhere. “When you brought it back, just what did you do with it?” she asked. But Grace’s eyes had darted toward the corner, around which Mrs. Blair was coming with an armload of groceries. She said, “I’d better go help my mother,” and without any further good-bye she scurried off.

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CHAPTER

14

Display Room Quest

All the way home, on the northbound trolley, Connie tried to find the missing link. Somehow, she believed that Grace hadn’t planted the pearls in Aunt Bet’s handbag, but if she hadn’t, who had? Did Grace know? Connie couldn’t be sure. She felt that Grace at least suspected the culprit, and Connie was determined, before another day went by, to force the information from her. For who, in all of Campion’s big store, could hate Aunt Bet to such an extent? Who could want her to be suspected of shoplifting, of thievery? Who could want to have her reputation smirched? It seemed incredible to Connie that her attractive young aunt should have an enemy. It didn’t quite make sense. It was very close to seven o’clock when Connie reached the apartment. Elizabeth Easton was making 166

French dressing, crushing a clove of garlic in the bottom of a wooden bowl. She looked up with a cordial “hello” but did not inquire into her niece’s whereabouts. Connie appreciated her tact. Conversation during dinner was sporadic. Aunt Bet seemed preoccupied and Connie was busy with her own tangled thoughts. It wasn’t until they had finished dessert that the girl put the question that was troubling her most. “Aunt Bet, is there anybody at Campion’s who seriously dislikes you?” Miss Easton looked up in surprise, then chuckled. “Not that I know of,” she said, “unless it could be the person who slipped the pearls in my handbag.” “That’s what I was thinking about,” Connie said. Further conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Larry Stewart, who breezed in with the suggestion that they all go out to the last of the summer concerts at Robin Hood Dell. “Wait till I call my family,” Connie persuaded him. “I haven’t had time to write, and Mother will think I’m lost or strayed.” “But not stolen?” Larry asked. “Not stolen,” said Connie firmly. “Please let’s not even mention the word. It’s getting me down.” The evening was a pleasant interlude. Connie, warmed by the conversation with each member of her family, who took turns at the telephone, let the 167

music of the famous orchestra lull her as she sat in the great, dim bowl which was the open-air dell and looked up beyond the fireflies to the stars. Larry was on one side of her, Aunt Bet on the other, and they seemed like the most perfect companions a girl could wish. They had driven out to Fairmount Park in Elizabeth Easton’s car, and as they walked back to the great parking lot after the concert, Connie enjoyed the feeling of being anonymous, of being lost in a crowd. It was part of her liking for the city, the sensation of being one with many. A little shudder of pleasure ran through her, because she was here, because the night was so beautiful, and because she was young. “A penny for that thought,” Larry said at her elbow, but Connie shook her head. She couldn’t put the feeling into words. It was too close to the core of living to be expressed. Why she didn’t want to tell Larry or her aunt about her interview with Grace, Connie wasn’t quite sure. Perhaps it was because she felt that their conversation was unfinished, incomplete, or perhaps it was because she felt that Grace had the right to make her own confession, had an obligation to do so if she were to regain her self-respect. In any event, Connie went to bed with her secret unrevealed, and slept unusually soundly, to awaken 168

in the morning to rain pelting against the windows and the city turned dun-colored. She yawned aloud and stretched, and said to her aunt, “A lovely day!” “The day of inquisition,” Aunt Bet said. “Inquisition?” “In Mr. Campion’s office. ‘The Case of the Missing Necklace’ or ‘Who Stole the Tools?’ “ But behind her nonsense Connie felt a genuine concern. She knew that her aunt did not like the situation—not one little bit. The conference was called for ten o’clock, and at ten-twenty Connie, who was modeling a ski suit, was tapped on the arm by the assistant buyer in the coat department. “You’re wanted in Mr. Campion’s office,” the woman told her. “They’ve been calling all over the store.” Connie could guess the reason why. Old George, conscientious and loyal to his employers, had revealed the fact that she, too, had been in the store last Sunday. Connie hurried upstairs hoping that this would not cause fresh difficulties for her aunt. In the Campion inner sanctum quite a little group was assembled, seated on office chairs around the big mahogany desk of the president. “Send her in,” Mr. Campion called brusquely when his secretary announced Connie. As she walked through the door, Chipper White rose and pulled up another chair. 169

Connie had hoped to meet the house detective, but there was no strange face here. Mr. Kurt nodded to her blandly, the advertising men acknowledged her with little jerks of their heads, and Miss Estelle, fingers drumming on her chair arm, ignored her completely. Her aunt caught her eye and smiled, and Chipper made an indistinguishable noise of encouragement as he