Jane Carter Investigates Episode Ninety-Nine
A
blanket of early spring fog, thick and damp, swirled across the decks of the
excursion steamer, Flamingo, which was cautiously plying its course down
the Grassy River. Above the steady throb of the ship’s engines, a foghorn
sounded a mournful warning to smaller craft.
“I hope we don’t collide with another
boat before we make it to the dock,” my friend Florence Radcliff said as we
stood together at the railing.
“That would be a perfect ending to an
imperfect day,” I said, pulling my coat collar more snugly around my neck.
“An imperfect day? I call it a
miserable one. Rain and fog. Fog and rain. It’s made my hair as straight as the
shortest distance between two points.”
“Mine’s as curly as a wooly lamb’s.” I
brushed a fog-dampened lock of hair from my eyes. “Well, shall we go inside
again?”
“No, I’d rather freeze than be a
wallflower,” Flo said. “We haven’t been asked to dance once this evening. I can
understand no man asking me to dance. The foundation of my charm is my sterling
character—unlikely to cause a strange man to see me across a crowded dancefloor
and experience a lightning-strike epiphany that I’m the oyster’s earrings and
the tree from which the fruit of his future happiness hangs. But you, you’re
tall and elegant and blond, and that wasn’t even enough to get you a second
look.”
Flo is always griping about being short
and stout, as she puts it, and not
having the (supposedly) good fortune of being born blond. I keep telling her
that if she wants to be blond so badly she can find her life’s dream at the
bottom of a peroxide bottle, but she won’t hear of the notion of bleaching her
hair. Flo is the daughter of a prominent local minister, and her mother is a
pillar of the community. Flo’s mother nearly had a fit of vapors when Flo
bobbed her long brown hair. Who knows what Mrs. Radcliff’s reaction might be to
Florence turning towhead.
Flo has a closet dream of becoming a
flapper, or at least of rolling her stockings and having the occasional gasper,
but even though she’s the same age as I am, twenty-four and a grown-up woman in
her own right, she still bows to the slightest wish of the Reverend and Mrs.
Sidney Radcliff—or at least she does when anyone’s looking.
“Everyone else is dancing because they
came with their own friends, Flo.”
“I’m surprised that Jack didn’t come
with us,” said Flo, “or didn’t you invite him? Now there’s a man who’s clearly
noticed you’re the tadpole’s teddies.”
I ignored Flo’s reference to Jack. Jack
Bancroft is a reporter for the newspaper my father owns, and although he does
show definite symptoms of thinking I’m the caterpillar’s kimono, I do not
encourage him. It’s not that I don’t like Jack. He’s a reasonably appealing
specimen of manhood—he may be no sheik, but there’s no question that he’s
terrific husband material.
The problem lies with me. I’m not
looking for any specimen of manhood to marry, reasonably appealing or
otherwise. I’ve been married once. There was no happily-ever-after. The last
newspaperman I married—Timothy Carter—ended up dead in an ally after coming in
between a mafia hitman’s bullet and its intended target. Now I’m Widow Carter and intend to stay that
way.
Late last fall, in a moment of
weakness, I almost let Jack kiss me, but ever since then, my better senses have
prevailed, and I’ve been keeping him on ice. I don’t know how many times during
the last few months I’ve turned down invitations to go to the pictures with
him.
“We’re practically the only people aboard who didn’t come with a crowd,” I told Florence, “except for that couple over there.”
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