Muddy came out to help me with my stuff just like he’d been expecting me; I suppose he thought I’d already spoken with Blue. In a minute I saw Blue in one of the front windows watching us, and went inside to talk to him. “I’m moving in,” I said.
“So I see. May I ask why?”
“My father closed the house up and put it on the market. You know that?”
Blue nodded.
“This big place ought to have lots of bedrooms, and there’s only the three of you living in it.”
“We have guests occasionally; besides, some of the original bedrooms have been converted to other uses.”
“No room for me?”
I was trying to look down, and I must have pulled it off, because Blue’s voice got softer. “We’ll make room for you, if we must. But what are you doing here?”
“My father set it up for me to stay with Les and her folks. I’ve still got a year before graduation, and he said he didn’t want me to have to switch schools. He’s got a townhouse down on the Gold Coast. That’s in Chicago, next to the lake.”
“I know where it is.”
“Only Les’s folks don’t really go for having me around all that much, and living in the same house, Les and I don’t hit it off like we used to. So I thought of you. I get an allowance—I could pay fifty a month, and I know you could use it. Besides, there’s some questions I have to ask you.”
Muddy came in then with my stereo and said, “How about the room in back?”
Blue shook his head. “The big turret. It’s traditional.”
So that’s how I got to be a princess, captive in her tower. Don’t ask me what Blue thinks he is; he’s no giant, for sure. A dragon, maybe, or a warlock. If that’s what he is, then I’m a warlock’s secretary. I do his typing for him (he’s only a two-finger typist, and he doesn’t have a machine of his own anyhow), and when I answer the phone I say, “Aladdin Blue’s office.”
Only I’m getting a little ahead of the story. That evening we had a vegetarian dinner, the whole thing picked right out of Tick’s garden, and I got my questions in. Muddy wanted to know about some letter Blue’d gotten, and Blue said that judging from the tone of it there wouldn’t be any money in the job unless he could find some on the side. That gave me my opening. I said, “Do you remember that morning in our living room? You said the letter in the paper had been written by a woman. How did you know?”
“You have a fine memory.” Blue looked thoughtful for a minute. There was some pretty good summer squash on his plate—I happen to like squash—and he picked up a piece with his fork and then set it down. “For one thing, there was a great deal of underlining. Most people agree that women have a penchant for that type of emphasis, although you could probably find quite a few men who underline more than the average woman. What seemed to me more telling was the use, in a brief letter, of the words
“You said that was the second indication you had that my … Elaine …” I drank a little coffee to get my voice straightened out.
“Holly, are you sure you want to talk about this?”
“I have to. So tell me. What was the first one?”
“The rose you found in the bouquet in your hospital room, of course.”
“You said I had a memory. I’d nearly forgotten about that, and anyway I don’t see what it means.”
“It meant that the police were wrong in thinking your uncle had been shot when he arrived at the hospital. You said it was a florist’s rose, remember? And that he must have persuaded the florist to insert it in your mother’s bouquet. That seemed very improbable to me. What appeared much more plausible was that he had bought a single rose, which would have cost only a couple of dollars, and brought it to the hospital himself; or that he had gone into some other room—one in which the patients were asleep—and taken the rose from an arrangement there. Once he’d done that, the natural place to put it would be the vase that already held your mother’s bouquet. But either explanation implied that he had been not only in the hospital but in your room; and your mother, we knew, had been in that room with you for a good part of the night.”
“So she’d seen him. Wasn’t his name on the register? And why did she kill him, anyway?”
“No, he wasn’t on the register. But then he would not have dared to register. To be admitted, he would have had to explain his relationship to you, and hospitals, especially, are alerted when a mental patient escapes. However, I doubt that a man who had succeeded in escaping from a mental institution would find it difficult to slip past a sleepy receptionist. Perhaps he was in your room when your mother arrived, though it is more likely that he came somewhat later. In any event, they left together and he died in the parking lot.”
“She was carrying my father’s gun around, then.”
Blue nodded.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Possibly simply because she was frightened. If her love letters to Larry had not been found, she would have had to see to it that Larry’s to her were, in order to provide a motive for your father. She may have been afraid of what Molly might do when they were made public. Or perhaps she had planned all along to kill someone with your father’s gun. Perhaps she planned to kill him and make it appear a suicide, though I doubt that.”
“I guess I still don’t understand what she was after.” I took another swallow of coffee and made a face.
“Freedom.”
“Yeah, and money. For her I guess there wasn’t any freedom without money. But what was she doing? Why
