Miss Withers Regrets by Stuart Palmer Page A

bottom, Miss Withers tagging along at his heels. But while he was pulling open closet doors and looking under beds, the schoolteacher turned her sharp scrutiny on the rooms themselves, the furniture, the personal possessions scattered around. It was, she felt, necessary for her to know Huntley Cairns and the rest of his household better than she did at the moment, and this was one way.
    Her first impression of Huntley Cairns’s room was that it was aggressively masculine, interior-decorator masculine, with heavy oak furniture, sporting prints and La Vie Parisienne pictures on the walls, and an unusually large collection of shaving lotions, hair remedies, deodorants, and the like. He also had three straight razors, three electric shavers, and one battered silver safety which seemed to have carried most of the burden. There was a large framed photograph of Helen on the bureau but no other sign of her in the room.
    Helen’s domain, consisting of bedroom, dressing-room, and bath, was surprisingly simple, the schoolteacher thought. There was but one bottle of perfume, and that nearly empty. Too, there were fewer dresses in the closet than Huntley Cairns’s wife would be expected to possess. A large floppy doll, reminiscent of Josephine Baker, sat at the head of the bed, and nearby was a little bookcase filled with travel books, cookbooks, several eyewitness accounts of the war, and some sentimental poetry. None of the books had a red jacket, or any jacket at all, for that matter.
    To Miss Withers’s disappointment, there were no letters, no knick-knacks, but that was to be expected when one realized that the family had only just moved into the place and hadn’t had time to accumulate the usual flotsam and jetsam. “She hasn’t even a mink coat,” Miss Withers said. “I don’t think that Helen made the most of her opportunities.” She briefly studied the weekend case which Helen had kept packed on a shelf at the rear of the closet, but there was nothing in it except a few light rayon and cotton dresses, underwear, and two pairs of nylons.
    “Come on.” the inspector urged. “What do you expect to find that the police haven’t found?”
    “I won’t know until I find it,” she told him. “But, Oscar, how odd of the girl to pack a bag during a family quarrel and then forget to unpack it!”
    “There is,” said the inspector, “no telling what any woman will do.” He led the way on into Thurlow Abbott’s room, small but luxurious, and crammed with photographs, old clipping books, mash letters, and other relics of his theatrical past. There was a bottle of cognac tucked away in a riding boot in the closet, another in the bottom bureau drawer beneath his winter underwear, and a third stuck in behind a cabinet photograph of himself in hussar’s uniform which stood on the chest of drawers.
    “He certainly takes no chances of being caught in a drought,” Miss Withers observed.
    Last of all the master bedrooms, whose windows opened on the balcony, was Lawn’s room, but by this time the inspector was getting so impatient that Miss Withers had only time to gain the impression that, for all her straightforward simplicity, the girl did herself rather well. There were silk sheets on the bed, the bedside table had a portable radio-phonograph with a great many records, and the pictures were reproductions from the Museum of Modern Art of Picasso’s Clown and two or three of Marie Laurencin’s dreamy pre-Raphaelite girls.
    High on the chest of drawers sat a worn, furry monkey grinning down enigmatically, and beneath it was a silver candlestick well guttered with wax, a large incense burner, and a dozen or so bottles of perfume. Miss Withers’s personal tastes ran to rose and violet toilet water, but she realized that most of these scents were rare and expensive, almost unobtainable now.
    While the inspector fidgeted impatiently she took a peek into the closet. It appeared that Lawn’s wardrobe was largely confined to