Someone to watch over me

a likely spot for a key to be hidden, he heard the two young men approaching. “I guess we’re going to have to take the hinges off the door,“ he said, when they got closer.
    “We could break it down,“ Jim, the younger one, said.
    His brother Harry cuffed him. “And wreck the wood? Mama would smack you to Cincinnati if she heard you say that.”
    Harry put his heavy toolbox down on the ground and laid out several items: a short pry bar, a couple of screwdrivers that looked to be fifty years old, and three hammers in different weights.
    Fortunately, the hinges were on the outside. The older brother stuck a screwdriver in the lower hinge and pounded at it with the smallest hammer. After a moment, the hinge was free. He did the same with the lower one, and all three men stood in front of the door to lower it to the ground.
    A musty smell wafted over them. Robert lighted a flashlight and shone it into the windowless icehouse.
    “ Holy Toledo! There’s a body!“ he exclaimed.

Chapter 2

    One thing nobody could claim accurately about Edith White was that she was a snob. She expected women to dress in their best, but she also understood that “best“ for some was a flexible measure.
    She was glad not to have suffered as much from the Depression as many others, just as deserving as she. Her present husband, Henry, had a good job supervising a chain of insurance agencies and had made sensible investments in property. Her first husband, Bernard, likewise had been well-to-do, though he wasn’t the cheerful man Henry was. Bernard had been a smart and tough-minded expert in livestock concerns in the stock market. He made excellent consulting fees with brokerage firms. So when she was widowed at thirty-nine, she had a financially comfortable life.
    In her mid-forties now, she looked older. A tall, portly woman, she wore very good clothes, but they looked like they’d been passed down for a couple of generations and, though of excellent quality and in good condition, they were out-of-date. Her expensive shoes were primarily practical lace-up oxfords with sturdy heels. Most of her clothing budget must have gone to the best, most confining corsets available. Hips flattened, bosom upthrust, her figure was impressive. Her fair and only slightly graying hair was always in place, marcelled into perfect waves and lacquered to her head. She always wore a stylish but practical hat made by Phoebe Twinkle.
    The efforts she probably had once lavished upon the orphaned child of her first husband’s sister were now aimed at her community instead. She believed, as did President Hoover, that charity begins (and ends) at home. Unlike the President, however, she was always careful to not call it charity but rather “a little help.”
    She made a visible effort to be friendly and casual and insisted on being addressed as “Edith“ in the privacy of the meetings. She spoke of her husband as “Henry“ to the members of the Voorburg Ladies League, as few upper-crust women would have done, except with close friends. In public, of course, he was Mr. White.
    But for all her native kindness, she was a magnificent force of nature. She seemed to feel she always knew the “right“ thing to do and could never be talked out of her views. Edith White had organized people all her life, often saying, “It’s for their own good.”
    And it usually was.
    The Voorburg Ladies League had started out as a sewing club in mid-1930. Edith solicited donations, somewhat brutally, from everyone who could spare an outgrown suit or dress or bed or table linens. Before the weekly meeting, she’d have her maid wash the donated items, and Edith herself cut the fabric from these old topcoats, cotton blouses, table runners, and napkins to exact four-and-a-half-inch squares, laid them out by color and texture, and the VLL turned them into quilts and coverlets for the poor.
    Edith White was suspected of buying the batting, backing, and thread, though she pretended that they were also donations from some mysterious source who didn’t wish to be named.
    She was the ultimate clubwoman, a new breed of female who believed a woman’s thoughts and efforts counted as much as any man’s. This shocked and dismayed most men and some women.
    As Lily and Phoebe sat and changed their shoes, Lily said, “I’ve run across Mrs. White at church and have an idea of what she’s like. Is there anything I should know about the other women in the club? I don’t want to say