Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [52]
But the deadly ambush laid for us Thursday as we walked in all innocence across the hotel lobby reduced the rest to little more than specks of dust on our way.
We'd had a pleasant breakfast—or Holmes had, while I drank coffee and ate a piece of toast while reading the newspapers. Holmes had the Call, I had the Chronicle, working my way from NEW WOMAN IN POISON CASE and past an advert for MJB coffee with two finger-prints accompanied by the statement “No two are alike—People differ in their coffee tastes as well as their thumb prints.” I consulted Holmes, and we agreed that the prints in the advert were those of fingers, not thumbs, so I went on to GAY GATHERING ON YERBA BUENA FOR SWIM PARTY and RESCUED GIRL TELLS COURT BONDAGE STORY.
All in all, a satisfying day's headlines.
We drained our cups, dropped our table napkins beside our plates, and made our way towards the lift.
The first volley of the ambush rang out across the dignified lobby, startling every inhabitant and sending Holmes and me into immediate defensive posture. The next shot fired hit home and froze me where I stood.
“Mary! It's Mary Russell, I'd never be wrong about that, you're the spitting image of your father. When I read you were in town I—”
I straightened: The previous night's argument notwithstanding, I had no wish to inflict on Holmes a bullet aimed at me. I fixed him with one of those glances married people develop in lieu of verbal communication—in this case, the urgent glare and slight tip of the head that said (to give its current American colloquial), “Scram!”
Holmes faded away as no man over six feet tall ought to be able to do, leaving me alone to face my attacker.
The top of her hat might have tucked under my chin, had I been foolish enough to allow her that close. Its waving feathers and bristling bits of starched ribbon were ferociously up-to-date, her well-corseted figure was wrapped in an incongruously youthful dress whose designer would have been outraged at the sight (although it testified well to the tensile strength of the thread), and her hair might at one time have been nearly the intense black it now was. Her fingers sparkled with a miscellany of stones, and the mauve colour of her sealskin coat came from no animal known to Nature. She was making for me with both arms outstretched, and although she looked more likely to devour me than to embrace me, I did the English thing and resisted mightily the impulse to place the outstretched heel of one hand against her approaching forehead to keep her at arm's length. Instead, I allowed her to seize my forearms and smack her painted lips in the general direction of my jaw.
It appeared that I had a dear friend in San Francisco.
“Mary, Mary, why on earth did you never write? My, you've become so grown-up, and so tall! Taller than your mother, even, and I thought she was a giraffe! Oh, dear, you poor thing, whisked away from your friends and your home like that—I said to Florence—you remember little Flo, your good friend?—that someone should just get on a train and go fetch you back. Imagine! Nothing but a child, and all alone in the world.”
“Er,” I managed.
“And you've kept your blonde hair, like your dear father—it never did darken like your mother said it would, now did it? Do you rinse it in lemon, like I told you to when you were twelve years old? It looks a nice thick head of hair, too, although this fashion for men's haircuts is so unfortunate.”
“I'm terribly sorry,” I pushed out into the storm of words. “I'm not sure I know who you are.”
The sound she emitted—laughter, I suppose—was a string of seven notes descending from a soprano's high shriek to a low sort of chortle. The gaiety of it was somewhat undermined by the hurt expression