Free Miss Withers Regrets by Stuart Palmer Page B

to get him out. Or at least sworn to get to the bottom of this mystery.” She beamed at them. “Come now, can’t either of you suggest a reason why somebody would want to kill Huntley Cairns?”
    Adele shook her head. “It’s early in the evening for me to play guessing games.”
    “I know from nothing,” Midge said. “I wouldn’t even have gone to that party if I hadn’t been dragged by the scruff of the neck.”
    “Well, you enjoyed it after you got there, I noticed! I saw you dancing with Helen, and if you’d had a sandwich in your pocket it would have been on toast in two minutes!”
    Midge blinked. “Okay! I’ll bet your only reason for insisting that we go to the party was so that you could see Huntley Cairns again! Why don’t you tell the lady why you once crowned him with a plate, darling? That was before we were married, when you were going around with him. Weren’t you even making a pitch to marry him?”
    Miss Withers sank deeper and deeper into her chair, trying to look as if she weren’t there. The Beales’ hangovers made them seem inclined to play truth and consequences.
    “That was years and years ago! If you think I’m still carrying a torch for Huntley …” Adele whirled on the schoolteacher. “Just so you won’t get any wrong ideas from my loudmouthed husband, it all happened one night when we were out at the Sands Point Country Club. Huntley had been drinking boilermakers—”
    “What?” Miss Withers interrupted blankly.
    “Whiskey with a beer chaser. Anyway, he got a little tight—”
    “Stinko!” corrected Midge. “I was there.”
    “So I broke our engagement, that’s all,” she concluded.
    “You broke the engagement and the chicken-sandwich plate and all over his head because he suddenly went on the prowl for Helen Abbott,” Midge reminded her, his voice a little louder than was necessary. “Helen was at the next table—she’d come as usual with Pat, and Lawn was tagging along. Pat decided to give kid sister a thrill by waltzing with her—that was the time when her teeth were still in gold bands—and Huntley noticed that Helen was sitting all alone and looking very luscious in one of those strapless evening gowns. I was across the room with the Baldwins and the little Harper girl—”
    “Bug-eyed and flat-chested,” Adele cut in. “No wonder you were staring elsewhere—”
    “Anyway,” her husband continued dreamily, “jolly old Huntley insisted that you bring Helen over to your table, and pretty soon you got mad and flounced out of the place. Later on in the men’s room Pat hung a right cross on Huntley’s jaw and knocked him into the—”
    “Midge Beale!”
    “Into the middle of next week, I was going to say. That was how the romance started, really. A few weeks later Pat got himself selected into the Army. Helen carried the torch for a while and then I guess she got fed up with going out with only her father and kid sister all the time. Anyway, word got around that she and Huntley Cairns had been seen in town at the Stork and El Morocco, and pretty soon they were sitting in corners at parties studying House and Garden .”
    “Sealed-lips Beale,” commented Adele.
    “Well, it’s common knowledge,” Midge reminded her. “Relax, baby, nobody is going to think that you drowned Huntley Cairns because he got away from you three or four years ago.”
    “I’m afraid he’s right,” Miss Withers agreed in a somewhat disappointed tone. “There is still no apparent motive for anybody to kill Cairns—anybody but Pat Montague, that is. But I don’t like to gamble on favorites, nor on extreme long shots either. Now what do you think of a nice in-between selection for the murderer—the commander, for instance, or Jed Nicolet?”
    Midge laughed. “Sam Bennington might haul out a service pistol and blaze away at some poor unlucky guy that Ava had lured into her bedroom, but I can’t see him drowning anyone. That’s too subtle for Old Annapolis,