Free Hasty Wedding by Mignon G. Eberhart

her. Automatically, too, she stripped long white gloves from fingers that were heavy and lifeless. The man who had introduced himself as Jacob Wait, a name that for an instant seemed to have a slightly familiar ring, as if she’d heard it somewhere before, simply stood there at the other side of the table looking at her. The black leather of the great chair was cold and seemed damp to her touch. She leaned back in it, a slender figure in sheath-like white satin with silver slippers that barely touched the old Turkey-red rug. On the opposite wall a steel-engraved “Stag at Bay” stared blankly down and covered a clumsy, old-fashioned safe. All around the room bookshelves covered with glass reflected their figures weirdly in disjointed, shadowy sections. The room had been used very little since Pennyforth Whipple’s death; was, in fact, rather avoided, and it had the indescribable air of desuetude such rooms take on with years.
    Jacob Wait thrust his hands in his pockets and said: “You knew Ronald Drew?”
    “Certainly she knew him. So did I. So did hundreds of other people.” It was Jevan answering for her. Wait said abruptly:
    “I’m talking to Mrs Locke. Let her answer for herself. Did you know Ronald Drew, Mrs Locke?”
    Mrs Locke? She moistened her lips and said: “Yes,” almost inaudibly.
    “How well did you know him?”
    Jevan took a quick step forward and said: “See here, you can’t——”
    “I’ll ask what I need to ask. Do you want to stay in the room?”
    “Certainly.”
    “Then keep quiet. How well did you know Drew? Answer me, Mrs Locke.”
    How well had she known Ronald? The three faces—Wait’s in the center—all three like searchlights, pinioning her with inquiry, waiting inexorably for her reply. Jevan moved over to stand beside her. And all at once she saw her danger.
    Jevan had foreseen it. He had known it was to come and had warned her. She sought back frantically in her mind for the things he had told her to do. She was trapped; she had to fight for herself; no one else, now, could do it for her.
    What had he said? Oh yes, deny. Deny everything. Deny …
    “I knew Ronald Drew,” she said in a small but fairly steady voice. “I don’t know anything about his death.”
    Wait blinked and one of the men beside him lifted thin sparse eyebrows as if in surprise. Jevan did not move. Wait said:
    “You knew he was murdered?”
    “Yes.”
    “Who told you?”
    “It was in the paper. I saw the headlines.”
    “Do you know anything of the circumstances of the murder?”
    “No.”
    Wait looked impatient. “Mrs Locke, you talked to Drew last night. We have the record of his telephone call to you at seven o’clock last night. It’s the last telephone call he made. Why did he call you?”
    Then they didn’t know she had actually been in the apartment! Or did they know and were they merely trying to trap her into acknowledgment of it? Jevan had said deny; deny everything.
    Instinctively, more frightened than she knew, she clung to it. Later there would be time to think, to reason, to seek a way out of the thing. Just now he had said to deny. But she’d have to admit to that telephone call if they had the record of it.
    “Yes, he called me. He wanted to talk to me. He knew my wedding was today.”
    “What did he say?”
    Jevan was so rigidly motionless that it was as if he had spoken a warning.
    “He—he spoke of my approaching wedding. He wanted to say good-by to me.”
    “What else?”
    “That’s—that’s all.”
    “How long did you talk?”
    “Only a moment or two.”
    Again Wait made a little gesture of impatience.
    “See here, Mrs Locke, we’ve been told that until your recent engagement Ronald Drew was your constant escort and that people were under the impression that you were to marry him. We’ve been told, too, that he was very much—ah—affected by your coming marriage to Mr Locke and that, in fact, when the news of his suicide came out the general impression