The door to the suite opening? A footstep?
My eyes were wide open. I narrowed them slightly. I was lying flat on my back. My head was facing the door, my hands were outside the covers.
I kept my breathing slow and regular.
The clouds must have cleared away outside. A slab of moonlight slanted across the room and painted a rectangle of colorless design on the dark Oriental carpet.
I listened.
I heard the faint ticking of my watch on the night table. Nothing else.
With my eyes still narrowed, I peered through the gloom toward the door.
Was there something there, someone there, a lighter shade of gray lurking over there in the darkness?
There was. Something tall and thin. Something the color of ash. It had moved toward me.
It moved again. Very slowly. Silently.
I found myself wishing that I had taken the Colt from the suitcase and tucked it beneath my pillow. I hadn’t thought I would need it tonight.
The thing came closer. It was only a pale smudge against the sooty background and it made no sound at all. And then it floated into the spill of frosty moonlight and I saw that it was a figure shrouded from head to toe in white. It wore a hood that made an empty hole where the face should have been. It held something in its right hand, something that gleamed for an instant in the light of the moon.
It came still closer. It glided out of the moonlight and it became a silhouette, black against silver.
Four feet away.
Three feet.
Two feet from the bed.
It leaned toward me.
I whirled over, swinging my arm. Aiming my fist into the hood, at the spot where its chin should be.
My knuckles clipped the corner of something.
The figure toppled to the carpet, boneless and slack.
I sat up, turned on the light, jumped from the bed, bent down and turned the figure over. The hood fell away
Cecily Fitzwilliam lay there, out cold.
I said an impolite word.
Cecily's eyes opened. “What?” she said. She blinked.
I took the damp washcloth away from her face and dropped it into the ceramic basin I’d set on the floor. “Everything’s okay,” I said.
She blinked again. Her eyes were still unfocused.
I moved the lamp on the nightstand a bit farther away. “Everything’s okay,” I said.
She looked at me. “What happened?”
She was lying on my bed. It wasn’t a shroud she was wearing, it was a white silk robe with an attached hood. She was naked beneath it. I had learned this when I scooped her up and stretched her out along the bed.
“You tripped,” I said.
“I…” She winced. She reached up and put her fingers to her chin. “I hurt, ” she said. She looked vulnerable and lost and about twelve years old.
“Must’ve banged yourself when you fell. Probably what knocked you out.”
Suddenly her eyes opened wide. She looked quickly around the room, then back at me. I was sitting on the edge of the bed in my bathrobe. Her own robe was belted shut but she clutched at it with both hands and tried to draw the front of it closer together. She moved to sit up and then winced again and fell back to the pillow. “What are you doing here?” She was whispering now.
I smiled. “I was just going to ask you the same question.”
“But this is Mr. Houdini’s room!”
“We switched.”
She frowned. “Switched?”
“Exchanged rooms. What did you want with Mr. Houdini?” She lowered her eyebrows. Her hands still gripped the front of her robe. “I don’t see that it’s any of your business.”
Her flat, bored drawl was gone. Maybe it was something she hung up at the end of the day, with her clothes. Before she started wandering into other people’s rooms.
“I handle his appointments,” I said. “Usually he doesn’t have any at two o’clock in the morning.”
“I… If you really must know,” she said in a ferocious whisper, “I wanted to ask him something.” She winced again and she brought her left hand up to her jaw. “ Ow. ”
“Ask him about these?” I held up the object she had brought into the room. I had found it on the floor after I picked her up. A pair of handcuffs.
Her hand dropped to her chest and she blushed. It was a spectacular blush, a deep crimson that tinted her face from the hollow of her throat to the top of her forehead. It told me everything I wanted to know about her coming here, and then some.
I tossed the handcuffs onto the bed.
She looked down at them and then looked back at me. She raised her head. “They’re my grandfather’s,” she whispered defiantly. “Part of his collection. I thought it might be amusing if Mr. Houdini taught me how to unlock them.”
I nodded.
“It’s the truth,” she hissed.
“You don’t have to whisper,” I said. “No one can hear you.”
She glanced toward Houdini’s door. Looked back at me. Carefully, as if trying to decide whether I was telling the truth. She caught her lower lip between her teeth. She blushed again. Not as spectacularly, but still fairly well. She opened her eyes wide and she said, “Are you saying that, about no one being able to hear me, because you have designs on my virtue?”
“Your virtue is safe,” I said.
She looked down at her hands again, and when she looked up into my eyes she was smiling. She was trying for boldness and she got there. “Are you quite certain of that?” she said.
I smiled. I think it was a paternal smile, but I could be wrong. “Time for you to get back to your room,” I said.
She watched me. She lifted her left hand from her chest and ran her index finger down my own hand, from the back of my wrist to the first knuckle of my thumb. She canted her head slightly to the right. “Are all Americans so noble?”
I nodded. “We take an oath.”
Her fingertip was soft and warm. So was the second fingertip, when it joined the first. So was the third. She was still watching me, saying nothing.
I should have stood up. I should have moved away from her. I told myself I was only sitting there because I was curious. Someday I’ll sell myself the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Bedtime,” I said.
“You probably think,” she said, “that I’m a nymphomaniac.” “A nymphomaniac?”
“A woman who desperately-”
“I know what the word means.”
“I had a friend, Gwendolyn, who was declared a nymphomaniac. They put her into an lunatic asylum. She was smitten with one of the footmen at her father’s estate. I’ve always felt that one couldn’t blame her for it, really. Peters was absolutely dishy, and we all had a crush on him, all of us girls. But her parents took her to the family doctor and he signed some papers saying she was a nymphomaniac, and that was that. Now she’s locked away with all the lunatics.”
“Why didn’t her parents just dump the footman?”
“Dump? You mean dismiss him? Oh, they did that, first thing, of course. But Gwendolyn ran off, to be with
