All But a Pleasure: An Alternate-History Role-Playing Romance Murder Mystery. Phyllis Ann Karr
Angela closed her eyes and concentrated. “Well…let me see… ‘I am the recipient of an urgent supplication’—you know Cory—‘from M. Julie Whitcomb, under immediate pressure for a second lady to assist one David Clayton, police detective, herself, and me in comprising a congenial foursome this evening.’”
“And you’re sure that was the order he named you all in?”
“Yes…yes, reasonably sure.”
“Well,” said Aunt Sally, “to me, it sounds a little ambiguous. As if the one they’ve set up with Dave is this Julie…?”
“Whitcomb, Aunt Sally. Julie Whitcomb. Oh, if you’d seen them yesterday, you wouldn’t be in any doubt. I think they must have been made for each other!”
“And yet, didn’t you tell me that he got out of that game shortly after you’d left it yourself?”
“Only because it tickled his fancy to be the first inquisitor caught out as a secret heretic and tortured and burned to death. That was the way he was playing it from the very start of their stupid game, before I even left it.”
“And promptly came over to join your Raggedy Ann scenario?”
“As Andy. Raggedy Andy.” Angela sighed again. (She would not cry, not about this!) “Best friends.”
Good old Angela—he’d never word it like that, of course, but that’d be the boiled-down gist—here’s a nice, staid, respectable, maybe slightly boring polly who should make the perfect blind date for good old Angela. Yes, she could easily imagine Julie Whitcomb wording it something like that. “Best friends,” she repeated to herself in a whisper as she headed for her guest room, not to change, exactly. To re-accessorize. “Best friends for life. Like brother and sister. That’s better than nothing.”
It might even turn out to be better than whatever Corwin thought of as hot romance. Did she even want to know?
She was already wearing her apple-green trousers and tunic, with lightly flaring legs and sleeves. She took off her daytime headband and substituted one of pale gold wire mesh with an enamel Mourning Cloak butterfly on each side—very fetching against her blond hair, which was almost exactly the same color as the gold wire. She shed the white silk scarf at her throat and replaced it with her favorite pin-necklace: a white kitten on each of her collar points, the one on the right fondling a ball of yarn and the one on the left holding one paw out to catch it, with the “yarn” stretching loosely between the kittens, glowing because it was strung with pearls only just large enough for the bead holes. She exchanged her white leather belt for a golden yellow silk sash. Last, she changed from white shoes with laces into white driving slippers. No high heels. She didn’t even own a pair of high heels. She didn’t intend to throw her body out of alignment and have later-life problems because of it. Besides, Cory was one point six eight meters tall, and she was one point six five.
Julie Whitcomb had been wearing spike heels in red Sunday. It had made her taller than him, and he didn’t seem to mind.
Well, there was still the danger of later-life posture problems.
Julie was a nurse, wasn’t she? If high heels posed a health danger, shouldn’t she be aware of it? Or did nurses think they were immune and could do anything when they were off duty?
Angela threw one glance at her reflection in the full-length mirror. One point six five meters of slim blond woman—very wholesome, very girl-next-door—dressed well enough for a blind date at Scoops and Bottles, unless the place had grown a lot more formal than it used to be.
* * * *
She knew that once Patrice Davison Hawthorne and Mike Olmstead Dickinson—Corwin’s “mater” and “pater”—had seen their first child, Corinna Olmstead Casanova, safely settled down in Arbor City as a University of Michiana librarian, and their second, Corwin, safely graduated from Astoria State, they had taken off on a world tour for their “second” (actually about their fifth) honeymoon. Money was maybe even less of a problem for the Davison-Olmsteads than for the Garvey-Johansens.
Angela had known the pleasant Davison-Olmstead family home in the Joliet Park area almost as well as her own, but had not yet had a chance to see the apartment where Corwin was living for at least as long as his parents took exploring the world: two years or longer, if they chose. After what she had seen of the newly graduated Corwin so far this fall, she approached his door just a little apprehensively.
Instead of his name, the sign on his door, right above the lion’s-head brass knocker, read: “Arnheim.” At least it didn’t read “The Dungeon” or something like that. She lifted the ring in the lion’s mouth and dropped it against the sounding plate, once, twice —
And the door was open, and he was smiling at her. “How expeditiously you located me! And how exquisitely those sable-hued butterflies set off your hair, how congenially the kittens disport themselves on either point of your collar! Have you a moment to glance over my perhaps temporary abode?”
He seemed eager, and she didn’t see anything so very lurid or “outre” over his shoulder, so she said, “I’d be delighted, Cory,” and went in.
To see at a glance that it wasn’t at all what she had feared it might be. The walls and ceiling were painted a sort of silver-gray like mother-of-pearl, the carpet was one of the richest greens she had ever seen, the couch and chairs were rattan with bright gold cushions, there was a round rattan coffee-table that held a few leather-bound books almost glowing in the soft light of a Tiffany lamp. In front of the white drapes along the far wall, one of those miniature waterfalls kept the water circulating in an aquarium of goldfish, seaweed, and white sand at the bottom. Surrounding the aquarium, Corwin’s old bonsai collection, still alive and, she thought, expanded, grew like a tiny forest, with more ordinary houseplants—geraniums, ferns, azaleas, coleus, and so on—crowding one another in a healthy-looking way on the floor around the aquarium table’s legs. Beside and above it, a canary sang in a large white cage. The mantelpiece over the gas fireplace held a row of clothbound books between one bookend with a small antiqued globe of the earth and a matching bookend with a globe of the night sky. A small, antique roll-top desk held the phone beside the doorway to the apartment’s back rooms. The pictures on the walls were Currier and Ives landscapes.
“Kept in order,” Corwin explained, “by thrice-weekly visitations of the Vermeer Domestic Service. They minister to my rooms each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, in return for which invaluable service I endorse their enterprise whenever opportunity presents itself.” He went on, indicating the canary, “Not ‘Nevermore’—as being a bird of quite a different feather than a raven—but ‘Evermore.’ With an additional courtly bow to Longfellow’s ‘Birds of Killingworth’: ‘Somewhere the birds are singing evermore.’ And here —” He scooped up a tortoiseshell tabby who had appeared out of somewhere, “soliciting in her aloof feline fashion the favor of an introduction to you, is my estimated Caterina, veteran of Forest Green’s highly-to-be-recommended Animal Shelter.”
“Very pleased to meet you, Caterina.” Angela stroked the tabby’s soft head. Caterina yawned, purred, and snuggled into the crook of Corwin’s arm. Angela took another long look around the apartment.
“Cory, it’s—it’s beautiful!”
Maybe he heard surprise and relief in her voice, because he answered her with an ironical half-smile, “You anticipated, perhaps, metal-plated walls ‘rudely daubed in all the hideous and repulsive devices to which charnel superstition has given rise,’ with a circular black rug in the center symbolizing a pit, a scimitar-pendulum depending from the ceiling in lieu of chandelier, table of rough-hewn lumber bedecked with various species of restraints, papered floor-border thick with portraitured rats, the whole illuminated only by the fitful and wavering glare of thick black candles?” He shook his head. “Such scenes are well enough to while away the coveted idle hour, but not to reside within clockround.”
“But all this —” She made a gesture to take in the whole room. “It just doesn’t look very Poesque, somehow.”