The War Against Miss Winter by Kathryn Miller Haines Page B

seriously going to work for this Raymond Fielding person, are you?”
    “I sneezed his dough, so I probably owe it to him to do something. I’ll look through the files to see if I can find out what Jim learned, maybe make a few phone calls. After all, the widow McCain asked me to do the same.” I chewed my lip. “Besides, I feel like I need to do this. It’s not like I have anything else to fill my time.”
    Jayne nodded solemnly then downed her drink. “Doesn’t it seem strange that he’d ask you to follow up on this when he knows you’re just a file clerk?”
    I fished a bottle from the bottom of her closet and refilled our glasses. “Like I said, his main concern was privacy. He didn’t want to start over with another agency.”
    “But if privacy is so important to him, wouldn’t it be better to not say anything to you since you clearly didn’t know anything to begin with?”
    I was about to ask her to put me wise to what she meant when she squealed. “Rosie! Your bag’s moving!” The valise jerked and let out an unholy cry. I opened the clutch and Churchill leaped from his bing and landed with a hiss on the drapes.
    “Jayne, meet Churchill. Churchill, meet Jayne.” The cat dropped to the floor and prowled about the room, gunning for something to attack. When nothing worthwhile appeared, he dashed beneath my bureau and receded into darkness until he was nothing but a pair of golden almond-shaped eyes.
    Barely a minute passed before someone knocked on the door. Before we could tell her to scram, the knob turned and Ruby Priest popped her head into the room. “Hello, girls.”
    “Hello yourself,” I said. Jayne cheesed the glasses under the bed while I braced the door to keep it from opening any wider. Ruby had been at the Shaw House since July and had already worked more thanany of us. Worse yet, every project of hers was so visible you couldn’t leave your room without being confronted by it. Ruby was on Times Square billboards. Ruby was hawking war bonds with Betty Grable on WNYC. Ruby was modeling dresses in Macy’s newspaper ads. It wasn’t her success that made me hate her; she was one of those women who got everything they asked for without lifting a finger and rather than being gracious about it, she constantly rubbed her achievements in my face. She’d done it so much that she didn’t even have to say anything to make me feel worthless. Like some Pavlovian dog I immediately beefed up my failures in the face of Ruby’s accomplishments.
    Ruby flashed me a smile worthy of one of her tooth-cream ads and wrapped a glossy black curl around her finger. “How were your holidays?”
    “Fine,” I said. “Thanks for asking.” She was pushing ever so slightly against the door, but I held it steady. “And yours?”
    She sighed. “Not much to report. Night Falls had its run extended, so I spent a quiet Christmas with Lawrence.” Ruby never talked about her family; nor had she ever gotten a phone call or piece of mail that would’ve verified her ties. It was sad in a way since it was clear Ruby wanted to hear something from someone. She was always the first to the mailbox and the first to the ringing phone. A lesser person might’ve been intrigued by her family’s silence, but I’d assumed her relations were as irritated by her as I was.
    I tossed Jayne a look and rolled my peepers. “And how is Lawrence?”
    Ruby smiled more delicately and widened her eyes. “Lawrence is wonderful. Naturally he’s still riding high on the tail of our resounding success.”
    “Naturally.” I said. “Congratulations, by the way. I heard about your review.”
    She pushed her hair back from her face with a practiced gesture. “Which one?”
    “There was more than one?” I asked.
    “I should hope so. Otherwise, why bother acting?”
    “There are people who do it for the joy and the art.”
    “Oh, Rosie dear, those people—if they exist—don’t live in New York.” She flipped her hair and laughed.