The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

soothing.
    “Poor Margie,” Peter said. “I can’t blame her. Catherine will always look out for Catherine and get away with it and the plain kids like Margie will have to fill the breach.”
    “It won’t hurt Margie,” Fredericka couldn’t help saying, and then at once regretted it when she saw Peter’s frown.
    But soon Margie and everyone else was forgotten in the fun of that hot summer afternoon. Peter and Fredericka went from booth to booth, and then sat under the shade of a nearby tree to drink lemonade and discuss life. The lazy contentment of those hours would never be forgotten by either of them even when, later, they knew them to be an overture to nightmare.
    Supper was laid in the Church Hall at six—long trestle tables covered with flowered crêpe paper and dotted with steaming bowls of baked beans, platters of ham, salad and rolls. As they entered the barracklike room now crowding with people, Peter and Fredericka stopped to admire a quilt for which the ladies of the Church Guild had been selling tickets all the week. A carefully printed notice said that over five hundred tickets had been sold and that the lucky number would be drawn after supper.
    “Please let it be me,” Fredericka breathed. “It’s the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve taken all of five tickets.”
    “Trousseau?” Thane Carey asked, coming up quietly behind them in time to hear her prayer.
    “No, only hope chest,” Fredericka said, laughing, as they found Connie and then joined the scramble to get places together at one of the tables.
    When they had settled themselves as comfortably as possible on their hard chairs, they discovered that Margie had landed, either by accident or design, on the other side of Peter, and Fredericka sat between Peter and Thane Carey, who at once began to talk about his interest in crime and in detective fiction. Connie, on his other side, listened quietly and hardly ever spoke.
    “I’m not all that knowledgeable,” Fredericka said at length. “But I am interested, and one thing that fascinates me is the way you detectives always say that crime in real life is a very different thing from crime in fiction.”
    “But isn’t it? How much crime have you met in real life?”
    “I confess—not much. But I do know that often the writer of detective stories can in fact be good at detection himself. I’ve just been reading John Dickson Carr’s Life of Conan Doyle . The Oscar Slater case and the Edalji case at Great Wryley were both solved by Doyle himself in order to free innocent men—and, I may add if you’ll let me, in spite of the attempts to cover up made by the authorities.”
    “That was England, of course, not America,” Carey said quickly.
    Peter turned from Margie who was still grumbling about her wasted afternoon, and the fact that Catherine never had turned up at all.
    “You know, Carey,” he said, leaning across Fredericka, “Miss Wing is determined that South Sutton is the perfect place for a murder in the grand manner—”
    “On the grounds,” Carey said easily, “that the country is the place for crime. Of course, Miss Wing, you’ve sent your arrow to the heart. You were talking of Doyle just now. Remember this—”
    “Are they not fresh and beautiful?” I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.
    But Holmes shook his head gravely, “Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at the scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought that comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there… But look at these lovely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places and no one the wiser?”
    “Goodness, do you know Doyle by heart?” Fredericka asked.
    “No, but I wish I did. The Hound of the Baskervilles used to scare me silly when I was a kid. I read it over and over in a kind of orgy of pure horror and—well—I’ve loved Doyle ever since.”
    They all laughed and then Peter said: “Speaking of being scared to death at a tender age, I remember almost every word of a book written by Celia Thaxter which described the