Jane Carter Investigates: Episode Three
“About five minutes.”
“Then meet us outside as soon as you’re ready to leave.”
Emma nodded and returned once more to the kitchen. A minute later,
Mr. Ridley brought me a fresh cup of chocolate.
“I am sorry you have been annoyed. Is everything quite
satisfactory now?”
“No, it is not, Mr. Ridley,” I said. “I don’t care for the flavor
of your chocolate. In fact, I don’t care for the flavor of anything about this
place!”
I slammed a quarter down on the table, stood up, and walked out of
the café.
Florence followed me, but once we were outside, she protested.
“We might at least have eaten the food since we paid for it,” she
said.
“I’d starve before I’d touch anything at that place, Flo. I’ll
never set foot in there again—not after the way he acted.”
We waited in Bouncing Betsy. Emma came out wearing her hat and
carrying a paper bundle under her arm. Florence made room for her in the front
seat.
“It was kind of you to wait.”
“We’ll take you home,” I said, starting the car.
Emma said that she lived at a rooming house on Bancroft Street,
and I turned the car in that direction.
We rode along in silence until Flo said, “Have you any idea what
you’ll do, Emma?”
“I’ll try for another job. If I don’t get one, then I may starve.”
“Oh, surely it’s not that serious,” I said.
“Well, not quite. I have about ten dollars saved. And if the worst
came, I could go to Chicago and live with a cousin—if she’d take me. But Ann
has four children and can’t afford to help me much.”
“Maybe Dad could use you at the newspaper office,” I said. “Can
you run a typewriter?”
Emma shook her head.
“It’s very kind of you, Jane, but I am not trained for newspaper
work.”
“Perhaps you could find a position as companion to someone,”
suggested Florence. “Didn’t you study French and music?”
“I’d like such a job,” said Emma. “Unfortunately, I can’t locate
any. I do know of a place where I might find housework.”
She opened her purse and withdrew a clipping torn from the morning
edition of the Greenville Examiner.
“Wanted—girl for general housework,” Emma read aloud. “Board,
room, $2.50 a week. Apply at Old Mansion, White Falls.”
“The pay isn’t very high,” I said.
“No, but with my room and board, I’d not have many expenses.
Unfortunately, I can’t apply for the place because the bus doesn’t run down
that way.”
“My bus does,” I said. “I’ll take you to White Falls if you want
to go there.”
“I’d be grateful.”
“How soon can you be ready?”
“Not more than twenty minutes. It won’t take me long to pack my
suitcase.”
I dropped Emma off at her rooming house on Bancroft, promising to
return for her in a very few minutes.
If we were heading off as far as White Falls, we really ought to
let somebody know where we were going. I’ve learned from hard experience that
even though I may be a grown woman of twenty-four when I don’t turn up for
meals on time, Dad—not to mention Mrs. Timms, our housekeeper—tends to fear the
worst. I stopped off at home intending to inform Mrs. Timms, but she was out,
so I telephoned my father at the Examiner
office.
“What time do you expect to get back from White Falls?”
“Probably not until after dark,” I said. “Please let Mrs. Timms
know I’ll not be home for dinner, Dad.”
“You’ll be missing out on her black pepper chicken, you know,” Dad
said, “and who knows what other assaults on the stomach lining. Mrs. Timms got
another package from her sister in Calcutta today, and I’ve no doubt it was
packed to the brim with spices.”
Mrs. Timms, who hasn’t traveled outside a fifty-mile radius of the
city of Greenville more than a handful of times in her fifty-three years of
life—and then only to go as far away as Chicago—has a sister Henrietta who
married a diplomat. Henrietta has made it her mission in life to make Mrs.
Timms’ vicarious experience of her own world travels as vivid as possible. This
is how our household came to—as Dad puts it—consume more spices per annum than
the entire subcontinent of India. I’ve grown to love Mrs. Timms’ curries, but
my father has never adjusted. The odd thing is, I’ve been expressly forbidden
to breathe a word of the discomfort my father endures on account of his
over-spiced diet. I suspect my father harbors feelings for the widowed Mrs.
Timms, which are far deeper than ordinary friendship.
But then Mrs. Timms is no ordinary housekeeper. My mother died
when I was ten, so she’s practically raised me since. They have a lot in
common, Mrs. Timms and Dad. My father is disappointed in me because I refuse to
become a member of staff on his newspaper, and Mrs. Timms is disappointed in me
because she never managed to turn me into a proper lady who doesn’t go out with
tears in her stockings and remembers to apply a conservative coating of
lipstick.
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