The Christie Caper - Carolyn Hart [19]
“Neil—” Miss Marple’s look-alike spoke sharply but, to Annie’s relief, in a distinctly American voice.
Bledsoe ignored her, keeping his blazing eyes on Annie. “You the one running this thing?”
In six short, snarled words, his tone rude, insolent, and patronizing, he propelled Annie from anger to fury.
A suave, Miss Manners rejoinder was not for her. “What’s it to you?” she snarled back, forgetting, as Max had pointed out to her many times, the advantages of inhabiting a morally superior plane.
“You put me in that goddam room.” His obsidian eyes had the shine of vitreous rock and unsatiated anger.
“Now, Neil, it’s just one of those things. Not intentional, I’m sure.” His companion peered myopically at Annie and once again the resemblance to Miss Marple waned. “I know it’s a sensitive matter. So touchy. But, please, don’t quarrel.” She tugged futilely on his elbow.
Annie stared at Bledsoe blankly.
“The room with that goddam picture,” he raged. “You knew what would happen. You did it to me deliberately. And you’re going to regret it.”
Before Annie could reply, tell him (a) to shove it, (b) that she hadn’t known him from a hole in the ground until the harrowing ride that afternoon with Emma Clyde, and (c) that the hotel management had been responsible for room assignments, he’d turned his back on her.
“Wait a minute,” she snapped, but Bledsoe was striding away, his companion trailing unhappily behind, her face puckered with distress.
Following Bledsoe’s progress down the aisle was like watching blight spread.
Bledsoe did nothing overtly offensive.
If he had, Annie would have been quick to upbraid him, demand that he leave.
In fact, if she’d had to accuse him, she would have been hard put to frame a charge.
He merely walked, arrogantly, down the central aisle, pausing now and then to glance at titles. Or at people. Selected people.
Not a word was exchanged.
Yet blight touched their faces, turned them grim and stony.
Not everyone, of course. Most of the party-goers paid him no heed, continuing their bright, excited chatter.
But Annie easily pinpointed the ones who knew Bledsoe.
There was the chunky mid-thirties man in a tweed jacket, holding an unlit pipe. He had a stiff brush of wiry black hair frosted with gray, horn rim spectacles that had a tendency to slip, and a salt-and-pepper mustache. He wore an orange rosette in the lapel of his light blue seersucker summer suit. Annie was pleased to see an editor who looked like an editor. But his mildly studious look, his air of civilized inquiry dissolved, when Bledsoe approached. After an instant of blank surprise, hatred twisted his face. And hatred sat uneasily there. This was a countenance intended for sunrise and summer, an optimistic face creased with laughter lines. The transformation was shocking. The editor put down a just-replenished glass of champagne, untasted, atop the espionage/thriller book section (Annie hoped no one spilled it; the three books on display were pricey indeed: Erskine Childers’s Riddle of the Sands, John Buchan’s The Thirty-nine Steps, and Martha Albrand’s Without Orders), and walked heavily, as if drained of energy and purpose, toward the front door. As he passed, Annie noted his name tag: NATHAN HILLMAN, Hillman House, CEO and Executive Editor. She wanted to reach out, stop him. But what could she say?
The blight next touched the face of the sandy-haired young man who had rushed away from Bledsoe’s panic attack that afternoon. She looked at him closely. He, too, still wore the orange rosette in the buttonhole of his blazer, but now, in Bledsoe’s presence, he no longer looked eager and attractive. Without a smile, his snub-nosed face appeared heavy, almost belligerent. He jammed his hands into his pants pockets, hunched his shoulders, and headed for the front door. He strode past Annie as if she were invisible. Whatever he saw, it was not here and now, and it was not pleasant. She noted his name tag: DEREK DAVIS, Hillman House, Publicity.
A customer approached her and she lost sight of Bledsoe, but even as she rang up the books