Free Dorothy Eden by Lamb to the Slaughter

will be us who really find out what happened to Camilla, whether she’s safely married or not. We have no ulterior motives like men have. And Camilla was a scamp with men. But she was good to me when I was a new kid at school and I’ll never forget that. So I must be sure she’s all right before I go away.’
    All Margaretta’s response to that was her reiterated, ‘You oughtn’t to stay.’
    ‘Give me one reason,’ Alice said practically.
    ‘My father likes women like you. Small.’
    The unexpected answer, almost wrung out of the girl, was so quaint and pathetic that Alice was both relieved and sympathetic. Poor kid! She was filled with no more complicated emotion than jealousy.
    Before she could make any answer, however, Katherine had burst into the room carrying a pair of high-heeled black suède shoes.
    ‘There was just nothing suitable in that white cupboard,’ she said. ‘You ought to make your father buy you some new shoes, darling. But I found these in the bottom of that old wardrobe. My, what a lot of clothes in there. But they’re frightfully out of date. Did they belong to your mother?’
    Margaretta nodded. Her eyes were fixed on the shoes in Katherine’s hands.
    ‘If you were good at sewing you could alter some of them, I’m sure. Although I do think clothes kept for years are dreary, almost a bit haunted. Were these shoes your mother’s, too? See if they fit.’
    Margaretta put out her foot as if in a dream. For all her height she had slender feet and the black shoes fitted perfectly.
    ‘Cinderella!’ Alice cried. ‘That’s grand. Look at her hair, Katherine. It’s really lovely, isn’t it? With that scarf of yours—’
    ‘And some lipstick,’ said Katherine eagerly. ‘The men just won’t know her.’
    Margaretta was now utterly silent. She sat like a doll being dressed up. Alice was conscious of two things: that Katherine’s lovely face had exactly the eager childish look of a small girl dressing her doll, and that those shoes on Margaretta’s feet were somehow too modern, too new… Shouldn’t they have been dusty and dingy if they were several years old?
    Margaretta herself kept looking uneasily at her feet. Then suddenly, just as Katherine had given her face a last triumphant dab of powder, she burst out crying.
    ‘I don’t want to go. I won’t go. You’re just enjoying humiliating me.’
    The tears ran down her face, ruining her make-up. Nothing would calm her. She kicked the shoes off her feet and stormed at them, ‘Go away and leave me! I won’t be treated like a child! It’s ridiculous. You’re worse than Daddy. I wish you’d go away.’
    Finally they had to leave her and go back to the hotel. The three men were waiting for them, but now nobody wanted to dance.
    Katherine said listlessly, ‘Let’s go home, Dalton. I’m tired.’
    It seemed that her brother was relieved to take her, and it seemed that Dundas, too, was anxious to go home. But that would be because of his strange stormy daughter. He tucked his hand inside Alice’s arm and said, ‘It was good of you to do that for Margaretta. But she’s a touchy creature. She probably got stage-fright about this boy, too. She’s very shy.’
    ‘It was something about the shoes,’ Alice said, almost to herself. ‘Had they an association?’
    ‘Shoes?’ said Dundas. Suddenly he exclaimed, ‘Black suède shoes? High heels?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Oh, but they are Camilla’s. She left them one night last week when it was raining cats and dogs and wore Margaretta’s gum-boots. I’ll have them packed with the rest of her stuff.’
    Alice stared at him.
    ‘Then why on earth didn’t Margaretta say so?’
    Dundas laughed. ‘I think between you and Katherine, such a pair of beautiful girls, you had the child tongue-tied.’ He patted her arm gently. ‘If Margaretta doesn’t appreciate you, I do.’
    One couldn’t doubt his sincerity. Already Alice liked and admired this rather odd, kind little man very much.
    But