The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

rather childish noise, Fredericka? Your drink happens to be finished!”
    She looked up into Peter’s friendly gray eyes and tried to hide the joy and relief she felt at sight of him.
    “Have another on me, and stop that racket,” he persisted. “And then I’ll ‘see you home,’ as they say in this town.”
    “Thanks to both,” Fredericka said. She turned quickly to include Philippine and James, and to her amazement found that they had disappeared.
    Seeing her look of surprise, Peter said: “They left as I came in. You were in such a trance, you saw nothing. I expect they both kissed you goodbye and you were quite unaware of it. Now tell me what’s on your mind. That may help us to bear up under the burden of our loneliness, don’t you think so?”
    Chapter 9
    As Fredericka and Peter Mohun walked back to the bookshop together, she found it a blessed relief to forget her anxieties, to talk of ordinary things and to pretend to herself that Margie and even James were figures of her imagination and that the dead body in her hammock had been nothing more than the climax of a bad dream from which she had now awakened.
    Sensing something of this, Peter did not press her to tell him what she had been worrying about when he had found her in the drug-store, and the bad news he had for her could wait, too. He slid his arm through hers and said easily: “I’m very glad it happened to be Fredericka Wing who came to South Sutton, and not the kind of librarian I had pictured when Lucy Hartwell announced that she had found a manager pro tem.”
    “I am glad it was, too,” Fredericka answered, ignoring the implied compliment but enjoying it all the same.
    “I don’t know very much about you though—even now. You were a librarian. You are writing a book. I know that. How goes it? And what else have you written? Come clean, girl, please, and tell all.”
    “I’ve played at writing all the years of my life without success. I once actually finished a murder-mystery—” Fredericka stopped abruptly. Her words had sounded too loud in the darkness and silence of the night. They hung in the air like an evil omen. She hurried on, trying to bury them, to put them back into the nightmare from which she knew herself to have wakened. “That—that wasn’t any good, though. I couldn’t be bothered with clues. They all seemed so obvious. Now, at last, I really have hope for my present undertaking—the Victorian women one I told you about. A publisher has even written me an encouraging letter.”
    “Good,” Peter said quietly. He had observed with some anxiety the note of hysteria in her voice. This thing was getting her down—as well it might. “But you haven’t told me much about it or where you’ve got to.”
    “Don’t urge me. I’ll go on all night if you do. I’m absolutely steeped in the works of these incredible Victorians. I find Miss Hartwell has a whole shelf of the novels I’ve been looking for—some of Susan Warner, Maria Cummins and Mary J. Holmes and I’d searched every library in New York. They really are an extraordinary group of women—all bestsellers ’round about 1850-60. But I expect I’ve told you all this before or am being enlightening about something you know more about than I do.”
    “I have just heard of The Wide, Wide World —but beyond that I confess total ignorance.”
    “That is, of course, a beautiful example of the teary school but it’s interesting all the same.” She stopped and was silent for a moment. Then she went on slowly. “You know, just before I came here I spent hours copying out the quilting party scene from Susan Warner’s Queechy. It was a frightful job because the print was so fine, I couldn’t type directly from the book but had to do it longhand. It was worth the effort though, pure Americana—”
    “No doubt that’s why you won Mrs. Pike’s quilt.”
    “I know. It’s certainly one reason why I wanted it so much. But it just shows what a state I’ve got into when I confess to you that the beautiful thing is still on the rocker in my kitchen where 1 dumped it when I came in that—that night. What’s more, Mrs. Pike, herself, came into the shop today for no other reason, I’m sure, than to tell me that she had made that quilt, and to talk about it. But I was so fussed about catching Margie and asking her about that miserable box that I couldn’t even talk to her—and there was really so much I wanted to say.”
    “It’s understandable,