In the Still of the Night

morning?
    Elgin groaned again as he hauled himself out of bed. He’d been such a spritely young man, and hated that he was getting old. Everybody must feel that way at his age. But it hadn’t slowed Emmaline down. Nor did the people in their fifties who’d come here this weekend seem to feel a sense of aging.
    Julian West was as energetic and rude as a twenty-year-old. And a showoff to boot. Had West been younger and less famous, Elgin would have told him to shut his mouth five or six times already.
    And Lorna Ethridge surely didn’t acknowledge her age. But then, she’d never get any older. Elgin made a trip to the bathroom and came back to sit on the edge of the bed again, getting his wits about him before dressing. Lorna Ethridge. She’d been an attractive woman. Just the right degree of plumpness. She had lovely eyes and small feminine hands, and dressed well. It was a shame she hadn’t been as good a woman as she had looked. Elgin didn’t subscribe to theories of mysterious outsiders following her to Voorburg-on-Hudson and thence to Grace and Favor Cottage.
    She had been murdered, he felt, by someone in the house. Granted, the family (he had come to think of himself and Emmaline as family with Lily and Robert) wasn’t very good about locking up all the many doors of the mansion. Some, in fact, had no keys and were either permanently locked or unlocked. But that didn’t mean that a stranger had pursued Mrs. Ethridge here. She had turned up under false pretenses for motives of her own. Who could guess what they were?
    Was she trying to reinstate a former relationship with Julian West? He was only slightly older than she, or at least he looked it, no doubt rich, and very famous. An appealing catch for a woman whose range of likely husbands was diminishing. Hadn’t he heard from someone that she’d been married and widowed several times? Or was that just his impression?
    And what on earth was that business of the note to Raymond Cameron? Another man she was after? Surely not. She was nearly old enough to be his mother. Certainly she couldn’t have caught him in her net. Maybe she was trying to blackmail him about something. But what secrets could a vapid young man like that have?
    And there was Lily’s dear friend Addie Jonson. She had a motive, he had to admit against his better wishes. Lily adored Addie, and he hoped it wasn’t she. But a woman scorned—especially a woman scorned for another woman, and an older, more beautiful woman at that—could be a powerful force. However, if Addie were given to murderous rages, wouldn’t she have acted on them before this? Apparently her betrothed’s rejection of her for Lorna. Ethridge had happened years ago and they had gone on living in the same town for some time.
    If Addie Jonson were the perpetrator of this dastardly crime, what had lit the fuse at long last? He tried to cast his mind back to the various gatherings and departings during the last two days. He’d never seen them exchanging words—heated or otherwise. Then again, he’d not thought there was reason to keep tabs on them. Or anyone else for that matter. Perhaps they’d had private words in Mrs. Ethridge’s room after dinner the night before last. The rooms did connect through a hall. Nobody would have seen Addie going into Mrs. Ethridge’s room. Addie certainly had the safest access to the woman.
    “Mr. Prinney,“ Emmaline Prinney called up to him from the yard. She always called him Mr. Prinney in public. “You need to get stirring yourself.”
    I do, indeed, he said to himself. And Walker needed to spread his investigation farther. Elgin himself realized he’d been thinking along unfamiliar lines. He was thinking about sex and passion.
    Words he would never say out loud. But the murder might not be about either.
    Howard Walker felt as old and tired as Mr. Prinney did this morning. He simply wasn’t getting anywhere. This was his first important criminal investigation and he was disappointed in himself. Lord knew he’d knocked around the state long enough to know about the full range of human nature.
    He’d been a wild kid, sensitive and belligerent about his Indian looks, even though he had only a tiny sliver of Indian heritage. His parents had been poor long before everyone else got poor and he’d fallen in with the wrong crowd when he was fourteen. He’d seen crime and criminals from the other side, until his mother found out and took him by the ear and walloped him