The Spook Lights Affair by Bill Pronzini, Marcia Muller Page B

then frowned, and said accusingly, “She didn’t like her parents hiring you to watch over her.”
    “They felt it was necessary for her own good.”
    “But it wasn’t, was it? For her own good?” Abruptly Grace’s face scrunched up and two large tears trickled down her cheeks; she dabbed them away with her napkin. “Virgie … oh, God, I can’t believe she’s gone. She was so full of life, so … here . I miss her terribly already.”
    “I’m sure you do. Grace, do you have any idea why she would want to do away with herself?”
    “None at all. It’s just so … so unbelievable.”
    “Did she seem depressed or disturbed recently?”
    “No, she was just … Virgie.”
    “And at the party Friday night? I noticed you and she talking not long before she ran out. Did she seem in any way despondent then?”
    Grace shook her head again. “She seemed … I don’t know, kind of nervous and excited. I thought it was because she was going to meet someone outside, on the overlook.”
    “Oh? Who? Lucas Whiffing?”
    “I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. She said I’d find out when I went out there with her.”
    “… I’m not sure I understand. When did Virginia ask you to go with her? Friday night?”
    “No. A couple of days before.”
    “Why did she want you there?”
    “Well … to sort of act as a lookout. So no one would bother her while she was with whomever she was meeting. But then at the party she said she’d changed her mind.”
    “Did she give you a reason why?”
    “No, she merely said she wouldn’t need me after all. I guess it was because she’d decided to … you know, do what she did.”
    Sabina stirred her tea, digesting this information. Then she asked, “Did Virginia ever confide in you about her beaux?”
    “Sometimes. Well, not everything about them. I think there were some things she kept to herself.”
    “Such as?”
    “Well…” A faint blush colored the girl’s cheeks. “You know, intimate things.”
    “Do you think she’d been intimate with one of her beaux?”
    The blush deepened to a rose hue. “Of course not! You don’t think Virgie wasn’t a … that she … no, not before marriage. Never.”
    Protesting too much? Sabina wondered. She said, “I’m sure you’re right,” though she wasn’t sure at all. “Did Virginia ever mention Lucas Whiffing?”
    “Yes, but not as if he was anyone special. They rode bicycles and flew kites in Golden Gate Park and lunched a few times, that’s all. She liked him, she said, but not enough to go against her parents’ wishes when they objected. They didn’t want her seeing him because he’s only a clerk in a sporting goods emporium … well, you know that.”
    “I understand that’s where she first met him, in F. W. Ellerby’s.”
    “No, that’s not right. She met him through David.”
    “Did she? How did that come about?”
    “I don’t know. Virgie never said.”
    “But she did say definitely that her brother had introduced them?”
    “Not introduced them, just that he was somebody her brother knew and that’s how she met him.”
    So Lucas Whiffing had lied. To conceal his relationship, whatever it was, with David St. Ives? If so, why? In any event it confirmed Sabina’s suspicions that he was not the charming, trustworthy individual he pretended to be.
    She said, “What can you tell me about David?”
    “Well … I probably shouldn’t say anything, but…” Grace lowered her voice to a near whisper. “He likes girls, the wrong kind of girls, if you know what I mean. And he gambles. Mama says he’s lost thousands of dollars playing poker.”
    Sabina had already heard about David St. Ives’s profligate ways. At yesterday’s luncheon, Callie had referred to him as “one of these young men celebrated for doing nothing.” He had trust funds from relatives on either side of his family, she’d said, and an indifferent attitude toward business matters that until recently had been tolerated by