Free The Murder of a Fifth Columnist by Leslie Ford

couldn’t have gone without his coat, and not realized it,” she said blankly. “Could he?”
    “You wouldn’t think so,” I said.
    We looked at the dining-room door, and both of us started toward it, with a kind of mutual agreement that he must be there if he wasn’t anywhere else. The silver tray with the half-empty decanters on it stood at the end of the table, the empty glasses doubling themselves in the black mirror surface. Corliss Marshall wasn’t there. The room was quite empty, and without the saving touch of the women’s colored gowns its black-and-white decor made it look cold and rather theatrical. I wouldn’t be surprised if I hadn’t intended to say that when I turned to Ruth. But I didn’t.
    She’d stopped dead, the color drained from her face, staring across the table at the white rug in front of the terrace window. I suppose my eyes followed hers automatically, because I was only conscious that I’d gone suddenly taut and staring—aware only of the scarlet mark of a pointed shoe on the white velvet surface of the rug.
    We stood there silently. Then Ruth Sherwood moved forward. She stepped around that livid spot on the white ground, reached her hand out in a kind of awful slow motion, and opened the terrace door. I stood where I was.
    “Grace!” she said. “—Come here!”
    She didn’t really say it, and I didn’t hear it. It was a hoarse vibration that I felt and understood without needing to hear. I went around the end of the table and followed her out.
    The moonlight lay over the rooftops and the trees in the park below like a silver coat, and sifted through the ring of pollarded evergreens around the balcony terrace. Ruth’s white figure was like a column frozen there half a dozen feet from the open door. I went quickly along and stopped by her.
    A dark mass was lying by the tubs of evergreens. A strayed moonbeam played white and red and green on the diamond and ruby and emerald hilt of the stiletto that lay beside the black inert form, and played another and more dreadful color on the slow viscid pool around it.
    I don’t know how long we stood there, or what Ruth Sherwood was thinking, or what I was thinking, or if either of us was thinking at all. I remember feeling her hand on mine a long time after she must have put it there.
    “—You’ve got to help me, Grace!” she whispered. “You’ve got to help me again!”

8
    “You’ve got to help me, Grace! You’ve got to help me again!”
    Ruth Sherwood’s tense whisper and her hand tugging at my arm penetrated through the extraordinary sense of unreality that held me as if in a spell. The dance music from the Willow Room downstairs stopped abruptly. The applause pattered like rain on a hollow wooden box. Corliss Marshall lying there, Ruth Sherwood and I, might have been on another planet… we seemed so far away and so utterly alone in the darkened parabola cast over the terrace by the green-and-white awning. The lighted windows scattered up the concave semi-circle of the Randolph-Lee’s park elevation looked out blankly into the frosted night. The sound of traffic along Connecticut Avenue might have come from miles away. It was so remote from anything that concerned us, caught in the terrible unearthly stillness that grew like some monstrous plant from the silent mass that had been Corliss Marshall.
    “Come, quickly, Grace!” Ruth Sherwood whispered. She pulled at my hand.
    I nodded and we went back on tiptoe to the open door and into the dining room. The same unearthly stillness had seeped in before us, and lay over the room like a pall. The empty glasses on the black glass table seemed as if they had been there for years, untouched so long that their reflections had taken on substance and form, and would always be buried indelibly in its crystalline surface.
    Ruth Sherwood looked back toward the door, her breath catching sharply. I looked too. There were new shadows on the white velvet rug where her feet and mine had