Yearly Lease

(Above) Cover to Lewton's follow-up to
No Bed of Her Own.

CHAPTER ONE

The coachman’s whip snapped and reins moved in agitated motion over the glossy backs of the two matched bays that drew “Lucky” Larry Bishop’s umbrella-top surrey. For a brief moment the two horses fidgeted nervously, legs moving in sharp motion, before they surged forward into the shining breast straps. The carriage rolled away, the wheels crunching through the thick gravel of the depot square.

A more showy equipage had never been seen in Sawpits. The two horses, blooded German coach stock, the black carriage body, the red wheels, the ecru whipcord of the upholstery and umbrella top, the nickeled lamps, the oiled harness bright with silver, and a coachman austere in the correctness of linen dust coat and cockaded hat would have looked more at home in Central Park than in this small village. Of the three persons who sat in the back seats of the carriage, man, woman and child, only one, the man, thick-set and beatle-browed, looked as if he belonged in this setting of sun-warmed gravel, yellow paint, railway cinders and horse dung. The woman beside him and the little girl on the dickey seat were obviously creatures made for less earthy environments.

Doc Meade, whose instinctive knowledge of horse ailments was equaled only by his taste for good whiskey, tipped his chair back so that his bald head came into mild contact with a yellow can of harness soap on the wide shelf along the wall of the office in Burns Brothers’ Livery Stable.

“That’s a right smart turn-out,” he commented drily. “He’ll probably beat his bills when he leaves town.”

Ned Burns looked out at the brightness of the equipment now turning into King’s Road.

“He’ll leave plenty of collateral behind him,” he said.

“That house?” Doc Meade laughed. “That house ain’t worth nothin’. Nothin’s worth nothin’, unless you can use it. You can’t use that house for nothin’.”

“Some house ! “

The two men laughed together.

The house “Lucky” Larry Bishop had built on King’s Hill as a country place for his wife was an unusual structure. Square, high-built, ungainly, it had only one advantage, that of size. It was the only advantage “Lucky” Larry ever thought about. It was large, it had cost him a lot of money; therefore it was good. That its red brick sides, rising in sheer lines from sodded lawn to flat roof, looked like nothing more than the walls of a tenement house did not concern him. Inside there was more gilt work and more dew-dabs than in the newly erected Hippodrome in New York. That was what mattered to him. It looked expensive. It reminded him a little of the red-velvet and yellow-gilt bawdy house he had once visited “down the line” in Butte, only it was a thousand times more gorgeous. His ideas of luxury and magnificence ran in such channels.

Now rolling along under the arching elms of King’s Road, “Lucky” Larry, who had made his fortune in copper, chuckled to himself. His wife glanced over at him, contempt and anger in her glance. She could not understand the source of his satisfaction. He had built the house on King’s Road for her as a surprise. He had explained this trip to the far suburbs as a visit to an old crony with whom he had worked in the mines. She had not questioned his story. She had questioned very little since their marriage eight years before when he had come like a conqueror into New York, followed by a legion of copper stock certificates. A Hobcraft, proud of her traditions, she had been practically sold into marriage with “Lucky” Larry. There had been in her story all the details of the old melodramas: a gambling brother, a mother who could not live without luxury and “Lucky” Larry Bishop, broad, forceful, overflowing with adoration and money. He had dropped the ring when he tried to slip it on her finger and with a grin had said aloud:

“That’s the only copper that ever rolled away from ‘Lucky’ Larry.”

When he picked it up, she looked at the ring. It was of copper, yellow and shining. The thought of a copper ring had been the one touch of poetry that had ever occurred to this practical man, and yet, for some reason, it was this incident which had set a contemptuous smile on her face, a smile she had worn habitually since her marriage day.

It had been with that same smile she had looked at him when he bent over her bed to look at the newborn girl baby nestling at her side, and a big tear had dropped from his eyes onto her hand.

As a child, Lily Hobcraft had believed that the affairs of the world wore ordered for her pleasure. As Larry Bishop’s toy, she had found her own will thwarted again and again. But, strangely, it was not when he crossed her that she hated him most, but when he showed whatever love he had for her, a love that she well knew was only the love engendered by pride of ownership.

As they drove along, little Laura Bishop, sitting with hands carefully folded in her lap, stiffly erect in her starched dimity dress, a leghorn sailor hat on her brown curls, looked at the red wheels of the surrey. The horses were trotting briskly now and the wheels turned so rapidly that they seemed a shining disc in the bright June sunlight. She smiled happily. This was so much better than sitting with Miss Betty over Le Chardenal, trying to memorize French verbs. It was like a holiday to be driving along this way under arched trees and through sunny stretches, facing her beautiful mother and that loud-laughing, confident father whom she hardly knew.

“Well, how’s this, Laura?” Bishop thundered, bending forward toward his daughter, as if she were too small to hear the greatness of his voice unless he thundered in her ear.

“It is very pleasant, father,” she answered as Miss Betty had taught her. Then, remembering that she could speak when spoken to, she said, “What makes the wheels look so solid?”

Bishop looked at the red discs.

“I guess it’s because we’re going fast. Wheels didn’t look like that out in the prairies when I was a kid. Big wheels on the wagons out there with big, dusty spokes. They went slow. They had to go slow. The roads were rotten.”

The word “rotten” made the little girl blush. Her mother frowned. She had never been able to get Bishop to speak decently before the child. Their ideas of decency in language and conduct did not jibe in any way.

The two bay horses, trotting smartly, the shadow of the coachman’s tilted whip falling across their withers, swept around a wide turn in the road. Bishop’s estate came into view.

“Look, Lil, look!” he said, taking her by the elbow.

She withdrew her arm from his hand.

“I see,” she said. “It’s a house, isn’t it?”

“It’s your house,” he told her, looking closely, waiting for her smile of pleased surprise.

She looked at it. It was an ugly house. She could not understand the man’s sentiment and pleasure in building it for her. She hated even this first view of it, grim and square-sided on the hillside.

“It’s your birthday present,” he informed her.

“Thank you,” she said. Little Laura used the same tone of voice when thanking one of the Bishops’ Wall Street cronies for some baby gift in which she could take no pleasure.

Bishop took off his stiff straw hat and wiped his red and perspiring forehead. He grinned with pleasure. He had not understood.

“It’s a swell place! It cost me plenty! You know the name? Wally Baxter wanted me to call it Bishop’s Retreat. I told him the Bishops never retreat. I call it Lila. See? Lily and Laura; got you both in.”

Lily smiled her thin smile.

With a flourish, the coachman turned his horses into the gray stone gates.

“Fifty-five rooms and twelve baths. All brick. All fireproof. I’ve got two Stanley Steamers in the garage and a flock of horses. A little black gelding for you to ride and a pony for Laura. The house is equipped to the last towel. Twenty servants on the place. All ready for you to move right in. I knew you wanted a country place.”

Lily smiled. A country place would only make it all the more difficult for her to see Dexter Aldred.

The carriage rolled along the graceful curve of the crushed stone drive and drew up smoothly beneath the porte coctere. A butler threw open the double doors of the mansion and waited, erect, his chin forward. A groom ran out from behind the house and held the horses’ heeds. The footman dropped down from his seat beside the coachman and helped Bishop to alight. Turning, Bishop took Laura under the armpits and swung her out of the carriage. He set her on her feet.

“How’s this for a place to play?” he asked, sweeping his hand about to show her the wide lawns.

She made no answer. Miss Betty’s training was completely forgotten in her joy at these rolling lawns and the pony her father had mentioned.

The footman helped Lily to alight.

“Good day, Mrs. Bishop,” the butler said as she passed him. He was smiling, expectant of her pleasure. Bishop had ordered him to bring the servants out by an earlier train. Now everything was ready and he was proud of his work.

She nodded curtly and passed on into the dark, square hallway of the house. She shuddered at the walls covered with mustard-yellow wallpaper splashed over with immense designs of tiger-lilies and roses. She shuddered even more as all the ugliness of gilt, velvet and cut stone was revealed to her in her march from room to room. As they went, Bishop kept pointing out special features, pleased as any child.

“Real gold, those doorknobs in your room,’ he told her, touching one of them.

“Not copper?” she asked.

“No. But the roof’s copper and the leaders. All the plumbing’s brass. Good for the ages this house.”

“Not copper?” were the only words she spoke on their tour of inspection. She went tight-mouthed and quiet through the whole house, saw everything and then went out the front door and stood at the head of the steps.

“Call the carriage,” she said. “I am going back to New York. I hate the house.”

In his surprise he dropped his thick cigar. It rolled down the stops and lay smouldering under the yellow blossoms of a spring primrose in the foundation bed.

“But—” he began, then collected himself and was silent for a moment.

“But,” he said again, “you haven’t seen half of it yet. You haven’t seen the stables or the garden or anything.”

“I want to go back to the city.”

Laura, who had followed them about, silent, unnoticed and very happy at the thought of the pony, began to cry quietly. Her mother looked at her and said:

“Never mind, Laura, we are going home. I know how you feel about this house.”

The child wanted to say something, to tell her about her love of green lawns and her desire for this pony, but she said nothing. She did not stop crying, however, until they reached the station and took the train back.

On the ride to the station, Bishop was sick with disappointment and anger. What a fool he had been to give this woman a weapon to her hand! Twice he cursed aloud and the straight back of the coachman quivered with suppressed laughter. Lily sat still, gloved hands folded in her lap, smiling, yet cold of eye. She felt pleased and radiant with strange victory. The child cried and tried to visualize the pony she had not seen. Getting out at the station she asked:

“Was it a black pony?”

No one answered her question.

Neither Bishop nor his wife ever saw the house again.

For twenty years it rotted in the sun, in the snow, in the wind and in the rain. The people of Sawpits told the story with laughter: Bishop’s Folly!

In these twenty years, Sawpits changed greatly in character and in name. More frequent train service and a more general use of the automobile made the place accessible to New York. The location of the village, on a wide cove of Long Island Sound, and its thickly wooded, rolling hills, attracted city residents. At first, only the very wealthy, like Larry Bishop, built their country houses in Sawpits. They bought up the land along the Sound, erecting huge residences surrounded by acres of neat lawns leading down to sandy beaches at the water’s edge. Then, like children playing follow-the-leader, came the less wealthy, building their houses on small lots inland and within the boundaries of the town. It was those last who fretted at the homely name of Sawpits—fretted, and then, as their numbers increased, in town meeting put through a resolution to change the name to Chester Manor.

“Chester Manor? Who in hell was Chester?” Doc Meade used to ask. “The name don’t mean nothin’. Sawpits! That meant somethin’. They used to saw the lumber here for all the early frame houses in New York. Down by the river, back of Purdy’s, you can still see the pits where they used to stand; one man in the pit, one man on a platform, draggin’ the saw up and down. Chester Manor! Bah.”

But Doc Meade was no longer a power in town meeting and the impromptu forums at Burns’ Livery Stable had long ago dissolved. Even the livery stable was no longer in existence. The building was still there, but a sign above the wide doorway announced that the proprietors were experts in Ford, Buick and Cadillac repairs. Now Doc Meade held forth in the last stronghold of the Sawpits regulars. Wells’ Drag Store, the windows of which, chastely decorated with two huge flasks of colored liquids, frowned with dignity at the solidly packed, glaringly lighted windows of a chain drug store on the opposite side of Liberty Square. It stood where Bryan’s Grocery had once stood. Then the whole square had been known as Bryan’s Corner. The grocery had been a famous landmark, a huge, open building, the sidewalks on two sides shaded by sloping wooden shelters. The pillars supporting these shelters had been gnawed thin by horses hitched there. It was during the war that Bryan’s had given up the fight against the chain stores and the delicatessen dealers. Only the older residents of Sawpits remembered the bottle of sherry wine and the huge bag of striped stick candy which Bryan’s had sent along with the Christmas delivery as a gift to its regular customers.

Sometimes Old Man Bryan would walk past the tall, brick building which had taken its place on the former site of his store. Standing on the curb he would survey the store fronts, The Merry Heart Jewelry Shoppe, Shapiro’s Stationery, The Army and Navy store, and the Beehan Drug Company. Then his eyes would go up to the office windows above: Bergdorf and Fink, Attorneys; Bartholdi, Chiropodist (I Make Your Feet Smile), Connolly and Bernstein, Specialists in Real Estate, and Susan Featherstone, Interior Decoration. Looking, he would remember that above his store there had been only one office, Andy Merritt’s law office, and that Andy’s red setter dog, King, used to sit at the window, his head and forepaws out on the sill, his red tongue hanging down right over the “y” in Bryan. Then the old man would turn toward the curb and spit dolefully, the tobacco-dyed spittle splattering in a long splash onto the smooth concrete which had taken the place of cobblestones.

The commuters who had come to Sawpits and made it their own were not like the older residents. Having come to the country for the sake of the country, they tried to make it as much like the city as possible. City people, they loved outward neatness, hurry, improvement, green lawns, golf courses and efficiency. It was their love of efficiency which had prompted them to build, through subscriptions and the income of a huge annual kermis, the big, stucco General Hospital facing the Post Road. It was a monument to their love of regulating, zoning and organizing.

Dr. Aquila Faber did not fit well into the organization of the hospital.

Dr. Faber had been born ugly. His face was puckered and brown as a monkey’s. He was bow-legged. His figure was ungainly. This exterior ugliness had bred an ugliness of spirit, as if the man had determined to make his face a model for his character. He was mean, petty and grasping. Neither his face nor his manner, hesitating and yet bitterly sarcastic, were of the type that breed confidence in the sick. Yet he was a popular doctor among the lower middle class of Chester Manor. Perhaps in choosing him as their family physician, these people were guided by the old theory that only bitter medicine is good.

This popularity persisted despite the fact that he was not a good doctor. He hated the practice of medicine— this choice of a career had been his father’s—and he neglected his patients for shrewd speculation in local real estate. There had been unpleasant scandal about his treatment of Mrs. Franklin. She had died on the operating table. Hearing of her death as he checked over the floor records in the hospital once, Dr. Wright, the superintendent, had flushed red and stalked off to the operating room muttering about “incompetent nincompoops.” On the heels of this scandal had come a story, never authenticated, about Dr. Faber having left a sponge to take the place of Herb Wing’s appendix. In the pool room where Herb spent the major portion of his time it was a standard witticism to ask him if he would like to wet down the sponge with a little beer.

The exact cause of Dr. Faber’s being forbidden the hospital operating room was never known. But he was not one to take a blow like this with philosophical calm. Driving home from the hospital after the stormy session in the board room which had ended by barring him from the hospital facilities, Faber went past Bishop’s Polly. He put on the brakes and guided his car to the curb. Por a long time he sat looking at the deserted mansion. An idea had occurred to him, an idea which would make his ex-colleagues at the hospital envious and resentful; therefore a good idea.

When Larry Bishop had built the ugly pile as a birthday present for his wife, there had not been another house in sight. Since then the residential district had crept out into the country, and now the place was surrounded by a development known as Ravenswood Park, community of half-acre estates, highly restricted, and with a population of “the better element,” as Ivan Hawks, the real estate man in charge of sales, always explained to possible purchasers.

In the midst of this tidy development with its smug frame houses, the ugly house and its weed-choked grounds, with all the lawns gone to hay, was an eyesore. The iron fence surrounding Bishop’s Folly was rust eaten and broken. School boys had stoned the house until not a single pane of glass remained in the windows. The grass on the lawns, never mown, was beaten down into untidy flats by the wind.

Sitting in his car, looking over the neglected estate, Dr. Faber smiled. In the morning papers he had read of “Lucky” Larry Bishop’s latest stroke of luck. He was dead. The estate would be anxious to get rid of this useless place. On a hill, with a view of the Sound and plenty of air and sunshine, it would make an ideal private hospital. He grinned at the thought and repeated aloud the words, “private hospital.”

A month later, with the deed to Bishop’s Folly neatly folded in a safety deposit box at the First National Bank of Chester Manor, Faber walked through the house with Neil Pond, the architect who had designed the General Hospital.

Standing in the lofty entrance hall, with the gilding peeling from the walls in scabrous strips, Pond looked around him and pretended to shudder.

“Good Lord, you couldn’t have designed an uglier place if you tried,” he said cheerfully. “We’ll fix that up, don’t you worry, Doctor.”

“I don’t care what it looks like,” Faber said. “I want it to be convenient and right for my purposes.”

Pond shrugged his shoulders.

Ugly as it was, the house was well built. Pond found it an easy task to remodel it. The alterations, much to the disgust of Ivan Hawks and the residents of Ravenswood Park, did not improve the appearance of the building to any extent. This did not matter to Dr Faber. He was well satisfied with his hospital, especially so when a malicious friend repeated to him the remark Dr. Wright had let fall on hearing of the new venture. Wright had said:

“Now he can murder them in private.”

This amused Faber. It seemed to him that Dr Wright’s words had a shadowing of angry impotence. There was the hospital, it was Dr. Faber’s, and Wright could do nothing about it.

But Dr. Wright had a reputation as a wit. Although his remark had struck Faber as being merely the expression of his lack of power, others thought it funny. It was repeated everywhere in Sawpits. When Helen Freeman, a spinster lady who kept a small stationer’s shop near the High School, announced with some pride that she was going to be the first patient in the new hospital her young customers teased her by saying, “So you want to be murdered in private?”

Unfortunately, Miss Freeman died. It was not Dr Faber’s fault. He performed an operation for sinus. The operation was successful, but Miss Freeman was a weak, sickly person. She contracted pneumonia and died four days after being admitted to the new hospital. The joke about being murdered in private was not forgotten. She was the first and last patient in the new and private hospital.

At this time, everywhere in Westchester Count,, speculators, taking advantage of easy capital, were erecting apartment houses. So far none of these had been built in Chester Manor. Dr. Faber, looking about for some way in which he might recoup his losses, called in Neil Pond again. Could Bishop’s Folly be made into an apartment house? Pond’s enthusiasm took fire at the question. In his mind’s eye he could see the huge pile of Bishop’s Folly divided into sections, each section served by its own elevator, and the sections sub-divided into apartments. Two wings could be added to make a courtyard, and in the courtyard he could have a fountain surrounded by cypress trees. A garage for the use of the tenants could be built in the deep basement of the original house with a subcellar for laundries, heating plant and elevator motors. There could be tennis courts and a play yard with a wading pool. He described his plans to Faber.

“How much will it cost?” Faber asked.

Pond gave him a rough statement. The doctor made some calculations on the back of an old envelope. If he could get enough tenants for the place it would pay for itself within a few years.

But with the arrival of workmen at the Bishop place came the first hitch in his plans. Ivan Hawks and the residents of Ravenswood Park got out an injunction to halt work on the new apartment house. The zoning laws were explicit. There were to be no apartment houses within the sacred precincts of Ravenswood Park.

Dr. Faber appeared before the board of selectmen. He exhausted all arguments in favor of a high-class apartment house in that district. Ivan Hawks, a selectman himself, sat and grinned as Faber spoke. Turning to leave after two hours of argument, Faber suddenly stopped dead, facing the door. Then a grimace of malicious amusement spread along the simian wrinkles of his brown face. He turned back to the selectmen, smiling.

“Very well then,” he said, “so long as you won’t allow me to use my property profitably, I’ll donate it to charity. To-morrow I’m deeding the place to the Negro Orphanage.”

He walked out.

That night, almost at midnight, a deputation of selectmen, headed by Ivan Hawks, rubbing his hands and sweating with anxiety, called upon him. They had revised the zoning laws. He could have permission to build his apartment house.

He said he had changed his mind, now he was intent upon giving the place to the colored orphans. They needed just such a place for their health and happiness. In the end, they had to beg and cajole him into accepting permission to remodel Bishop’s Folly as an apartment house.

Unlived in as a private home, unused as a private hospital, Bishop’s Folly was converted into an apartment house. The work went rapidly. Faber, anxious to have the work done by the Spring renting season, hurried the contractors, and they, in turn, drove their men. By the first of May the house was ready for its tenants. Faber called in Ivan Hawks, put him in charge of rentals and at his suggestion named the new tenement The Bishop’s Arms Apartments.

“Now that we’re out in the country, we may as well do something,” Laura Bishop Sauvage Singleton said to her companion as she tooled her long, shining roadster off the Post Road and onto the Hutchinson River Parkway.

“Let’s just drive,” Reynardine Field suggested, trailing her arm out of the car to enjoy the rush of the warm, vernal air against the palm of her hand.

“Too aimless for such a nice day,” Laura decided. “I’d like to do something.”

“Let’s go and see Anne,” her friend suggested.

Anne was an actress of their acquaintance, a woman whose newly-founded theatre and long-established perversities were equally famous. Laura grimaced at the idea.

“No,” she said, without taking her eyes away from the road. “No. I’ll be damned if I’ll hang around there all afternoon just to watch her husband-and-wife act with Henriette.”

Reynardine glanced out of the corner of her eye at Laura but said nothing. A few moments later, Laura smiled.

“I have an idea. Let’s go and see the house that was my father’s. We never lived there. I’ve only a faint idea of what it looked like. All I remember is that it’s in Chester Manor. Do you know where it is?”

Reynardine Field knew the road on which the house stood. Laura had long ago forgotten. Two marriages, two divorces, lovers in droves, and now Reynardine, had been her antidotes for unhappy memories of childhood. Until her debut, Laura had been an unhappy, brooding child, keeping strict score and accounts of all the slights, all the lack of love she had from her mother. Then, at her coming-out party, she discovered suddenly that one could forget all this, that there was other love to be had in the world. Since that time she had kept herself always drugged with love of one sort or another. The two husbands and the drove of lovers that had passed through her life had left her satiated. In her boredom she had turned to Reynardine and her little coterie of strange friends. Now she was growing tired of them.

She felt that tiredness creep over her as they drove along the Parkway. On either side wooded land and meadows stretched away, brown-green in the thin sunlight of Spring. Her attention went to the woods and the fields and the straight road before her. She hardly listened to her friend’s chatter.

On the outskirts of Chester Manor, Laura drew the roadster to a halt alongside a motorcycle policeman who sat astride his machine, goggles pushed back, under a tree.

“Do you know where the Bishop place is?” she asked.

The man grinned.

“Bishop’s Folly? Sure. Turn to your right at the next crossroad You can’t miss it. Old Doc Faber—he murders ‘em in private—he’s making an apartment house out of the old place.”

Reynardine laughed when Laura put the car into gear and started off again.

“Bishop’s Folly?” she said. “How utterly romantic! Aren’t you proud?”

Laura grinned, lips rouged scarlet and cheeks tanned brown moving slowly away from white teeth.

“It’s not so damned romantic,” she said. “I missed a pony all my life. I’d even buy one now if I had a—”

She broke off to laugh. Reynardine, who made it her business to be a successful sycophant, was wise enough to say nothing.

As they made the right-hand turn which was to bring them to Bishop’s Folly, Laura glanced over at her companion. She was tired of Reynardine. There was no doubt of that. She felt a loathing for that masculine profile, that short-cropped yellow hair and the mannish ensemble of tweeds, shirt and tie. The Spring day reminded her of her childhood. For once her memories were not unhappy ones. She remembered herself as she used to play in the Park, her brown braids floating back as she chased a hoop, the nurse walking behind in sedate attendance. She looked at Reynardine. Was it possible that that little girl with the brown braids flying could have gone through so much vileness? She felt a physical shudder go through her flesh.

They came to Bishop’s Folly. Laura recognized the place immediately. She put her foot on the brake and the car slowed to a man’s foot pace. They rolled slowly along by the curb. Men were tearing down the rusted iron fence. Other men were picking up building litter. A small steam roller was chugging back and forth across the newly-graded lawn.

Laura turned in at the gate. As they drew up to the entrance of the house, she could see a little gold- lettered sign with the words, “Renting Agent.” She looked at it blankly for a moment. She had forgotten what she had come for; that horrible Victorian furniture for which she had been so avid earlier in the day had slipped her mind.

Hearing the lush sound of tires on thick gravel, Ivan Hawks peered out of the window. Still looking, he unconsciously straightened his tie.

“Sixteen-cylinder Cadillac, boy!” he said to himself as he started out, working his face muscles in order that he might be ready with a truly amiable smile. He achieved it as he stepped through the doorway.

“Anything I can do for you?” he asked.

Laura looked at him for a second or two without answering.

‘About that furniture,” Reynardine prompted her.

“Oh, yes! But I’ve changed my mind.”

Hawks rubbed his fat hands together

“But wouldn’t you just like to stay in and take a look around?’

Laura gazed up at the walls of the house. They seemed tremendously tall. She looked at the grounds. They were spacious. And her mother had flung it all into her father’s face as if it wore some worthless bagatelle he had offered. True, the place must have been ugly, but then the sentiment which had prompted Bishop was not ugly. She opened the door and climbed out from behind the wheel.

“Wait for me, Reynardine. I’m going to live here.”\

“What ? ,,

“I’m going to live here.” She grinned. “It was built for the Bishops. One of us ought to live here.”

“You’re mad.”

“Exactly. I’m mad. But here’s where I take the cure and become sane.”

Hawks, listening and trying to comprehend, rubbed his hands together again.

“I have a lovely duplex, Madame, with its own balcony and the very best view of the Sound. Let me show it to you.”

Laura tried to feel a sense of humility when she answered:

“No. I want to see the smallest, cheapest cubbyhole you have.”

She was remembering how magnificently her mother out of the front door to announce:

“I’m going back to New York.”

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