Genteel Spirits (Daisy Gumm Majesty Books) (29 page)

Nevertheless, and in spite of me, the rest of the evening passed pleasantly.

We Gumms and Majestys spent the following day peacefully, too. First came church, then a wonderful dinner prepared by Aunt Vi—roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, if you’re interested—and then general napping, dog-walking, reading, a little piano-playing, and then bed. I have absolutely no idea how Sam spent his Sunday, since he didn’t intrude into our family that day.

And then came Monday.

May was almost over, and June was looming on the horizon that
particular
Monday morning, and I decided that I’d chance fate and select a summery costume for my spiritualistic duties that day.
There’s a fine art to this dressing-as-a-spiritualist thing, as I’m sure you’ve gathered by this time. The day was going to be warm, if the past few days were anything by which to judge, yet I couldn’t be seen in any old house dress.

Therefore, I selected a plain black cotton dress with a dropped waist and short sleeves. Black isn’t a very summery color, but the fabric was thin, and besides, black fit my image. Not to mention my mood. The notion of tangling with Lola de la Monica for another week or so made my innards curl up and squeeze. However, according to Howard, now that I’d more or less frightened Lola into fearing for the future of her career, he didn’t expect filming to take much longer than another week. Providing Lola didn’t backslide into her old temperamental ways. I tried to brace up by telling myself I could always haul out Rolly again. The notion didn’t make me feel appreciably better.

Black was a good color for me, I decided as I
patted
some light powder on my cheeks. It didn’t so much wash me out as stand in contrast to my pale skin, which was a good thing for a spiritualist. We spiritualists
can’t go around looking too healthy and robust, after all.
I even had a black straw hat to go with my ensemble, so that I would look appropriately spiritualistic whilst maintaining my own personal comfort.

“Jeez, Daisy, are you going to a funeral or something?” Billy asked as I left our bedroom, ready to depart and face my day. “Not that you don’t look good,” he added, probably because he noticed my glower.

“I feel as though I’m going to a funeral,” I admitted. “I hate this job.”

“Maybe you should quit?” he said, with a little lift to the end of the sentence as if it were more of a question than a statement.

“Maybe I should.” I sank down into a kitchen chair, since Billy was still at the table and still plowing through the
Pasadena Star News
. He read every word of that newspaper every single day. Well, he didn’t have anything else to do. Oh, my poor Billy.

“I know you don’t like to give up on a job that pays well,” he said.

I heaved a huge sigh. “It’s not so much that,” I said after thinking about what he’d said for a moment or two. “It’s that I have to protect my reputation. If people started talking about me as quitting before a job was done, my business might suffer.”

Billy gazed at me for a few seconds and then shook his head. “Your business.” That’s all he said, but there was a world of meaning in the two words.

I sagged. “I know. Stupid business. But—”

“It pays well,” he finished for me.

“Yes.” We sat at the table for a couple of minutes, me staring at the table cloth, Billy doing I don’t know what—because I was staring at the table cloth.

“Do you think the family would suffer a whole lot if you, say, became a telephone exchange operator?” he asked suddenly.

I looked up. “A telephone exchange operator?” I repeated blankly. “Wouldn’t that put Mildred out of a job?” Mildred Rafferty was an old pal of mine from high school. She was the one who always placed calls for me when I needed to call an operator.

“The phone company has more people than Mildred on its payroll.”

I began drawing little circles on the table cloth. “Gee, Billy, I’d never see you if I got a regular job.”

He shrugged. “You’re gone most of the time anyway.”

“That’s not true,” I said, not defending myself
a bit
too hotly since this present job of mine seemed to be taking me away from my family day and night. “Not most of the time, at any rate. I get to spend lots of days with you.”

“That’s true,” he admitted. “But you might get to meet more . . . normal people if you worked at a regular job.”

“Normal people?” I wasn’t sure what he meant. Sure, he’d beefed at me about hanging out with rich people, and at one time he even accused me of being a social climber, but he didn’t mean it. Any more than he’d meant it when he’d accused me of running around on him with Johnny Buckingham. Johnny Buckingham, for Pete’s sake, the most moral, upright human male on the face of the earth.

He gave me another shrug. “Yeah. I mean people like us. Not rich people. You know, people like your family. Wouldn’t you feel more comfortable being around folks like us than all those rich picture people? They sure aren’t normal.”

“I hope to heck they aren’t.” I actually shuddered as I contemplated Lola de la Monica. If that was normal, I didn’t want anything to do with normality. Or “normalcy,” as our president had
called it
once. Then again, he’d offered somebody a “generalcy,” too. He might not have been too smart, President Harding, but he sure looked presidential.
Actually, thinking about politicians made my mood lighten slightly. “Picture people
may be a strange lot, but
they’re
better than politicians
, who are all crooks
,” I told Billy.

He laughed. I always felt good when Billy laughed.

“You’re probably right about that,” he said. Then he gave a little sigh. “Well, don’t take any guff from Lola today, all right?”

“I’ll sure try not to,” I said. Then I got up, feeling as if I were hefting a ninety-pound sack of sand rather than my own regulation-sized body. “I’d better go. I need to get there before Lola begins kicking up a fuss.”

Billy lifted the newspaper and snapped it open. “Say hello to Sam for me.”

That’s right. Not only did I have to deal with Lola the Lunatic, but I also had to endure another day of Sam Rotondo’s company. I don’t suppose dealing with Sam would bother me so much if I weren’t attempting with all my wits and strength to keep him from learning about the letters Lola and Monty had been getting.

It then occurred to me that ever since I’d met him, my entire life seemed to have been involved in keeping things from Sam Rotondo. It got darned tiring, too, curse it.

And then something
much
better occurred to me: it was way past time I dropped by to see how Flossie Buckingham was getting along
; you know, now that she was going to have a baby and all
. Flossie, having come from very dire circumstances, was easy to talk to about stuff. So was Johnny, who, as
a
captain in the Salvation Army, had seen and heard darned near everything and knew all there was to know about Billy’s situation. And mine.
Maybe I’d just pop by the Salvation Army after I got off work today. Heck, I might even leave
the wretched set
early.

Life didn’t seem so bleak after I’d made that decision. Mind you, I wasn’t exactly cheerful, but
thinking about friends made me feel not so alone
with my problems
, if you know what I mean.

My mood lifted even more when I set out to drive to the Winkworth mansion. The Chevrolet tootled down the p
epper-tree-lined Marengo Avenue
where our modest bungalow sat, and it seemed to me as though the entire neighborhood
shone
in the morning sunlight. Mrs. Killebrew, our neighbor across the street, waved to me as I drove past, and I waved back. Mrs. Killebrew had been most grateful for a service I’d rendered the citizens of Pasadena a few months earlier, and recalling that made me feel not nearly so glum. I
did
do some good in the world, even when, as then, I didn’t much want to.

Everyone’s gardens were looking lovely. Even our garden looked good. Pa had planted rose bushes near the porch
, along with a hydrangea plant that was budding already. Pa was careful to prune the bush so that the blue clusters, which would burst into bloom any day now, would be huge. It was a good thing that Pa liked tending to the garden, since Billy wasn’t able to do it and all the women in the family had to go out to work. Gee, that seemed so backward. But it worked for us. Anyhow, we didn’t seem to have much choice in the matter.

But there I went again, thinking negatively. I sucked in a big breath of fresh May air and turned my mind to other people’s yards, which were very pretty. What was more, the house—or estate, I
suppose
is a better word—to which I was at that moment driving
by
, had spectacular gardens and magnificent green, rolling lawns. The fact that it also contained a crazy actress
was an aberration. A single
blot on an otherwise perfect setting.

Well, except for those thrice-cursed letters. Oh, bother. I wished I hadn’t thought about those
blasted
letters.

Anyhow, m
y nominally sunny mood didn’t last
much
past the great gate of the Winkworth estate. Even before I parked the Chevrolet
, my heart sank. An entire delegation seemed to await my
arrival, and I darned near turned around and motored the other way. But there was no escape. By the time I got the Chevrolet headed in the right direction, the gate would be shut against me. I was trapped.

Harold was the first to greet me. He rushed to my door and flung it open, in fact. Not bothering with pleasantries, I asked, “What’s wrong now?”

“Lola got a letter, and your detective friend got hold of it. Now Lola’s hysterical and Detective Rotondo is furious.”

Oh, goody. Just what I wanted to hear. “Why’s Sam mad? Does he know about Monty’s letters?”

“No, but he suspects you knew about
Lola’s
letters and didn’t tell him.”

“Is that what Lola told him?”

“No. He guessed.”

“Darn him anyhow! How come he always thinks I’m at fault when
bad
things happen?”

Harold grinned. “Because you are?”

“That isn’t funny, Harold Kincaid.”

He sobered at once. “I know it’s not. We’ve got to keep him from finding out about Monty’s letters. Even if the writer doesn’t aim to expose his secret, we have to keep it from the police.”

“Mrs. Majesty, I hate to bother you so early on a Monday morning, but could you please come? Quickly? Lola’s in a state, and that detective fellow isn’t helping matters.”

I
glanced
over Harold’s shoulder to see
the man who’d spoken:
a grim-faced John Bohnert
, who looked as if he wanted to murder someone. My guess would be Lola.

Lillian Marshall stood beside him, wringing her hands, and Gladys Pennywhistle’s eyeglasses glared in the sunlight much as I
suspected
Gladys herself was glaring behind them. I didn’t see Homer Fellowes anywhere. If the man was still enamored of Lola de la Monica, I’d have to reassess my notion of pairing him with Gladys. If he still had what my friends called a “crush” on Lola after all her shenanigans, he was definitely not the right person for Gladys, who wouldn’t have a crush on an idiot like Lola for worlds. Well . . . all right, so I guess she had a crush on Monty Montgomery, but at least he wasn’t
always throwing fits and tantru
ms.
I suppressed a sigh.

“Sure,
John
. I’ll be there as soon as I can be.”

And, with a sinking feeling in my
middle
, I walked with Harold
,
John
and the others
to the marble dressing-room building, where Harold told
me
Lola was in the process of pitching her fit.

I’d barely rounded the corner of the building and had only just taken in the mob scene, when one man broke away from it and stomped toward Harold, John
, Lillian, Gladys
and me.
Sam. Naturally. I gave him a little finger wave.

He didn’t wave back. In truth, he looked kind of like a thunderhead that was about to burst and rain all over us. Not that we in sunny Southern California had much to do with thunderheads as a rule, but Billy had shown me a picture in the
National Geographic
, so I knew what one looked like.
The thunderhead
in that
National Geographic
photograph had
looked a lot like Sam Rotondo
did at that
very
moment
.
Dark and dangerous and unpredictable.

As he approached, more or less like a speeding freight train, Harold
,
John
and their outriders
seemed to melt away from me. Cowards. I frowned at
all
of them to let them know my opinion of
people
who deserted
other people
in times of crisis. On the other hand, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference. Sam was a force of nature when he was riled.