Free You Live Once by John D. MacDonald

here for the past four years.
    It was typical tippy-toe Warren coverage. No mention of the family killing. No mention of Mary’s abortive marriage and annulment. No hint of her mother’s incurable illness. They’d even had her going home from the club at a more reasonable hour. I was glad that the police had apparently kept the name of her dinner dance companion to themselves. Otherwise I would have had a reporter or two hanging around. Or maybe not; perhaps the Warren papers thought there was something uncleanabout going out and tracking down the principals in a disappearance of this kind.
    I knew where Highland was. It was a small rural community about fifteen miles from town. Mary had driven me out through there to the Pryor farm one day to show me a horse. The horse had rolled his eyes, laid his ears back and tried to make a meal off my arm. She had said he was “spirited.” I watched from a safe place while John Fidd saddled the horse and Mary took him out and ran him. He was foaming and wilted when she brought him back. Fidd took him and started walking him around. She showed me most of the farm and then we went back to town, with Mary smelling faintly of horse.
    The paper had run a cut of Mary. It saddened me to look at it. It had been taken some years ago, before life had put that look of mockery and hardness in her eyes. She looked very young, very earnest.
    My girl came in at quarter to nine. Her name is Antonia MacRae. She is a slim pleasant morsel, and satisfyingly bright. She decorates and implements an office adequately. Italian and Scots combine to make an intriguing woman. Her mother gave her her coloring, her suggestively rounded figure with its promise of languor and lazy Sundays in bed. But from Papa she inherited a cool, canny eye, a lot of skepticism, and a brain that goes click like an I.B.M. machine.
    She came in wearing a blue jumper over a white blouse. With her crow-wing hair and white white teeth, the effect was good. The beltless waist of the jumper was so beautifully fitted to her figure that, had I not had Mary on my mind, it would have been distracting.
    It makes for a peculiar relationship to share an office with a girl who is lovely and desirable, as well as efficient. When work piled up I could forget everything except her quickness and her loyalty. It was during the lulls that I would become aware of other things. As when she would sit on her heels and dig for something in thebottom drawer of a file cabinet, and I would find myself staring at the way her waist would curve richly into the fullness of hips. Or she would bring something to me at my desk and, out of the corner of my eye, I would see the impertinence of breast under a sheen of office blouse, a bare six inches away. Or I would be standing over her, dictating to her, and, while hunting for the right phrase, realize I was bobbing my head around like a fool trying to find a vantage point from where I could look down the front of her dress.
    Toni MacRae was quite aware of my interest, my speculative admiring interest. It caused her to change certain postures rather quickly. It often caused a very delicate blush. I had made a pass the second week she was in my office. It had been repulsed with unmistakable firmness, and no anger. She made it clear for the record. Another type of girl in those same circumstances, quite aware of her figure and of the boss’s interest in it, might have done a certain amount of flaunting and posturing. Not Toni. She couldn’t very well wear a Mother Hubbard, but she dressed and carried herself so as to minimize office tension.
    “Good morning,” she said, putting her purse in her desk drawer.
    “Morning. I’m reading about Mary.”
    “You were one of the friends she had dinner with, weren’t you? I heard you talking to Mr. Raymond about it Friday.”
    “I was one of the ones, yes.”
    “Funny thing,” she said, frowning thoughtfully. She leaned back in her little secretarial chair. Her desk