Someone to watch over me

their handbags and the canvas bag with their good shoes and set out to take the shortcut through the woods and down the hill to town. Though there wasn’t much traffic on the road, it wound around so much that it was at least four times the length of the old Indian path from the hills overlooking the river.
    They would change from their sturdy shoes to their nice ones once they were close to the village of Voorburg-on-Hudson. Phoebe had alerted Lily that Mrs. White was obsessed with appearances, and while they wouldn’t admit it to Robert, neither of them wanted to be accused of bad taste in footwear. Especially not by Mrs. White, who was always immaculately dressed, thoroughly corseted—and well shod.
    Phoebe Twinkle, who had been in Voorburg longer than Lily and seldom had access to an automobile, was much more surefooted on the steep path than Lily, but she held back with good grace and set her pace to her companion’s.
    “I don’t really know very much about Mrs. White except that she scares me to death,“ Lily said to Phoebe. “Has she lived here long?“
    “All her life, as far as I know,“ Phoebe said, pulling aside a branch of a decrepit maple that really should be trimmed. “My former landlady talks about knowing her since childhood—Mrs. White’s childhood, not my landlady’s.”
    Phoebe, whose main claim to fame was that she made hats for Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, had rented her millinery shop from a recently widowed woman who went to live with her sister and let Phoebe live in a furnished room above the shop. But the landlady made so many inroads into the belongings she’d left behind that Phoebe was at her wits’ end when Lily offered her one of the many rooms at Grace and Favor Cottage for her own.
    The move meant she had to walk to work down the hill instead of just down the stairs, but the food at Grace and Favor was better than Mabel’s cafe and so was the company.
    She and the other women in the mansion—Lily, Mrs. Prinney, and Mimi Smith, the housekeeper—had adjusted well to communal living by being polite and friendly, but not going out of their way to interfere in each other’s private lives and interests except in emergency situations. Mimi cleaned like a demon and helped in the kitchen when Mrs. Prinney asked her to, but she kept to herself, in what little free time she had, in the third-floor room down the hall from Phoebe’s larger room. This was where Phoebe did her other job, sewing and repairing clothes for local ladies.
    Lily took care of the household finances and constantly huddled with Elgin Prinney, Esquire, who was executor of the estate Lily and Robert would inherit after they served their ten years at Grace and Favor. Lily had become a fanatic penny-pincher after their father had lost the formerly vast family fortune in the Crash of 1929 and had to live in utter poverty until Mr. Prinney found them. Lily was determined to know everything about the vast holding of properties Great-uncle Horatio had left to them.
    Mrs. Prinney did the cooking. The Prinneys’ four daughters were grown and married, and she was pleased to be cooking for a crowd again. But hersudden spurt of obsessive vegetable gardening this past spring worried Lily. In the year—almostsince she and Robert moved here, Mrs. Prinney could get food of such good quality that Lily half wondered about the portly older woman’s true relationships with the Voorburg butcher and greengrocer. Now she was growing beans, carrots, broccoli, and celery, not to mention horseradish, and canning the produce like mad nearly all night, when it was cooler in the kitchen.
    “Do you have any idea what Mrs. White has discovered? Why this is a special meeting?“ Lily asked, as they approached town and sat on a flat slab of granite behind the defunct bank to change their shoes.
    Phoebe shook her head and shrugged. “But it must be good. She’s never called a meeting before on such short notice and with so much insistence.”

    Robert looked over the old icehouse deep in the woods beside the mansion while he waited for the two workers who were going to tear it down. There was very good wood in it—good enough to repair homes and even possibly make some furniture from the better pieces. The workers, brothers Harry and Jim Harbinger, would get the benefit, since the icehouse hadn’t been used for years, and this was a waste not, want not society these days.
    He tried the door and found it locked. Glancing around for