The Spook Lights Affair by Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller
Authors: Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller
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won’t be the only one facing a potential lawsuit.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“No more than you’ve threatened me.”
She hurried ahead to the gate, leaving the reporter to stand sputtering to himself under the poplar tree.
* * *
Miss Hillbrand’s Academy of Art, on Post Street near Union Square, was a beloved San Francisco institution, having produced two alumna of note—Dolores Weston, a well-known watercolorist, and Eleanor Sand, whose ceramics were highly prized. Still-life, portrait, and landscape painting, as well as sculpting in clay and bronze, were taught to young ladies by Miss Hillbrand and her staff. It was de rigueur for wealthy families to send their daughters, artistically talented or not, to the academy for “aesthetic finishing.” One of those families was the DeBretts, one of the daughters Grace, Virginia’s St. Ives’s best friend.
At eleven o’clock Sabina stood waiting in front of the stone-faced building, her eyes on its wide front door. Fortunately she had had no other pressing business to attend to today; she would have had difficulty focusing on it if she had.
The mystery surrounding Virginia’s disappearance had given her a restless night, and the confrontation with Homer Keeps and the unsettling prospect of a civil suit for negligence by the St. Ives family made her even more determined to get to the bottom of it. For her own peace of mind as well for the reputation and financial security of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. Puzzles such as this nettled her to the point of distraction. No matter how many times she reviewed Friday night’s strange events, she still couldn’t quite identify the feeling of wrongness that continued to plague her. If she did … no, when she did, she was certain it would explain, or at least partially explain, what she’d witnessed. Meanwhile, she was not about to sit back and wait passively for her memory to dislodge it. That was why she was here at Miss Hillbrand’s Academy, waiting for Grace DeBrett to emerge. The more she knew about the post-deb and her various activities, the better equipped she would be to ferret out the truth.
It had been Callie, at yesterday’s luncheon, who had told her about Grace DeBrett’s art lessons. No one of her acquaintance knew the city’s social upper class more intimately than her cousin, and Callie “had it on good authority”—she always had information on good authority, although she refused to say exactly whose authority it was—that the young woman was given painting lessons at Miss Hillbrand’s from nine until eleven on Monday mornings. According to Callie, Grace was not only an unattractive girl but a rather dim-witted one, and overprotected by her mother as a result. This was evidently why Sabina had not been allowed to talk to the girl on Saturday. “It would be just like Mathilda DeBrett to shield her precious daughter from anything that hints of scandal,” Callie had said. “All that flapdoodle in the newspapers about you, no doubt. But Mathilda doesn’t accompany Grace to Miss Hillbrand’s, so she won’t be there to prevent you from talking to the girl.”
Callie was a caution. She professed to know something about nearly everyone in this city, a claim Sabina had never disputed. She would make a good detective herself if she set her mind to it, she’d said once, and then audaciously suggested that Sabina hire her on a part-time basis so she could prove it. The thought of Callie working side by side with her and John, and of his fulminating reaction to what she would surely insist on doing to “perk up” the agency offices—lacy curtains on the windows, patterned pillows on the chairs—was wryly amusing. Fortunately, the suggestion had been made in jest. Genuine detective work bewildered and worried her cousin; Callie was forever warning Sabina against its dangers.
Promptly at eleven o’clock a bevy of young women began to emerge from the
“Are you threatening me?”
“No more than you’ve threatened me.”
She hurried ahead to the gate, leaving the reporter to stand sputtering to himself under the poplar tree.
* * *
Miss Hillbrand’s Academy of Art, on Post Street near Union Square, was a beloved San Francisco institution, having produced two alumna of note—Dolores Weston, a well-known watercolorist, and Eleanor Sand, whose ceramics were highly prized. Still-life, portrait, and landscape painting, as well as sculpting in clay and bronze, were taught to young ladies by Miss Hillbrand and her staff. It was de rigueur for wealthy families to send their daughters, artistically talented or not, to the academy for “aesthetic finishing.” One of those families was the DeBretts, one of the daughters Grace, Virginia’s St. Ives’s best friend.
At eleven o’clock Sabina stood waiting in front of the stone-faced building, her eyes on its wide front door. Fortunately she had had no other pressing business to attend to today; she would have had difficulty focusing on it if she had.
The mystery surrounding Virginia’s disappearance had given her a restless night, and the confrontation with Homer Keeps and the unsettling prospect of a civil suit for negligence by the St. Ives family made her even more determined to get to the bottom of it. For her own peace of mind as well for the reputation and financial security of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services. Puzzles such as this nettled her to the point of distraction. No matter how many times she reviewed Friday night’s strange events, she still couldn’t quite identify the feeling of wrongness that continued to plague her. If she did … no, when she did, she was certain it would explain, or at least partially explain, what she’d witnessed. Meanwhile, she was not about to sit back and wait passively for her memory to dislodge it. That was why she was here at Miss Hillbrand’s Academy, waiting for Grace DeBrett to emerge. The more she knew about the post-deb and her various activities, the better equipped she would be to ferret out the truth.
It had been Callie, at yesterday’s luncheon, who had told her about Grace DeBrett’s art lessons. No one of her acquaintance knew the city’s social upper class more intimately than her cousin, and Callie “had it on good authority”—she always had information on good authority, although she refused to say exactly whose authority it was—that the young woman was given painting lessons at Miss Hillbrand’s from nine until eleven on Monday mornings. According to Callie, Grace was not only an unattractive girl but a rather dim-witted one, and overprotected by her mother as a result. This was evidently why Sabina had not been allowed to talk to the girl on Saturday. “It would be just like Mathilda DeBrett to shield her precious daughter from anything that hints of scandal,” Callie had said. “All that flapdoodle in the newspapers about you, no doubt. But Mathilda doesn’t accompany Grace to Miss Hillbrand’s, so she won’t be there to prevent you from talking to the girl.”
Callie was a caution. She professed to know something about nearly everyone in this city, a claim Sabina had never disputed. She would make a good detective herself if she set her mind to it, she’d said once, and then audaciously suggested that Sabina hire her on a part-time basis so she could prove it. The thought of Callie working side by side with her and John, and of his fulminating reaction to what she would surely insist on doing to “perk up” the agency offices—lacy curtains on the windows, patterned pillows on the chairs—was wryly amusing. Fortunately, the suggestion had been made in jest. Genuine detective work bewildered and worried her cousin; Callie was forever warning Sabina against its dangers.
Promptly at eleven o’clock a bevy of young women began to emerge from the
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