The Seventh Sinner - Elizabeth Peters [1]
In her present state of collapse she looked quite different. A huge purse had gone flying at the impact, and its contents littered the floor for yards around, like the debris left by a miniature tornado. The demure knee-length skirt had been disarranged, displaying legs that drew an admiring whistle from Michael. A shaft of sunlight fell across the woman’s head and shoulders, spotlighting a face whose features looked pallid and austere—high cheekbones, a firm chin, long, curved lips like the mouth of an archaic Greek statue. The hair was spectacular. It had been loosened by the fall, and lay about the peaceful face like a pool of molten bronze, gleaming with amber highlights.
“Did we kill her?” Michael demanded.
“Don’t be ridiculous…. I hope not!”
Suddenly, without preliminary fluttering or blinking, the closed eyes opened. They were a true, clear green, an unusual color for human eyes. They looked translucent, like seawater, and they focused on Jean with an expression of concentrated malevolence made all the more alarming by contrast with the placidity of the face in which they were set.
The woman’s compressed lips parted.
“Here, too, O Lord?” a plaintive voice inquired.
Jean, who had been thinking in terms of concussion, revised her diagnosis. Clearly there was some kind of brain damage. She dropped to her knees.
“Don’t try to talk,” she said agitatedly. “Just don’t move. Did you break anything? Did you—”
“Did I break anything?” The implacable green eyes moved on to examine Michael, who stirred uneasily. “I have no intention of moving. I may stay here for the rest of the day. It seems to be the safest place. Unless you trample on helpless bodies around here.”
Jean sat back on her heels.
“I think you’re all right.”
“I am all right. Not good, but all right. No worse than usual…I talk like this all the time. Who are you?”
“Jean Suttman, Michael Casey,” said Michael. “Do you want me to help you up?”
“No,” said his victim distinctly.
Michael sat down on the floor.
“Who are you?” he asked conversationally.
“Jacqueline Kirby.”
“Hello.”
“Hello.”
Jean looked from Michael, cross-legged on the floor like an Indian mystic, to Jacqueline, still prone and looking as if she had every intention of remaining in that position indefinitely. She began to laugh. The others contemplated her with disfavor, and their sour expressions only made her laugh harder. When she had calmed herself, Jacqueline said severely, “If you have quite finished, you might start collecting my belongings.”
“Sure,” Jean said. She added meekly, “Would you mind getting up, Miss—Mrs.—Doctor—”
“Considering the informality of this meeting, you may call me Jacqueline. Why do you want me to get up? I’m perfectly comfortable.”
“She doesn’t care how you feel,” Michael explained calmly. “She just wants to get the evidence of her crime up off the floor before one of the senior fellows comes along. They’re meeting pretty soon to decide which of us gets a second year here.”
“Oh, really,” Jacqueline said thoughtfully.
Jean stopped in her crawling pursuit of compacts, pens, postcards, and a small bottle of what appeared to be crème de menthe.
“That ‘really’ has a blackmailing sound to it,” she said. “You wouldn’t…. Would you?”
“I guess not,” Jacqueline said with regret. “Ah, well. You may help me up, Michael.”
Michael obliged, with a last appreciative look at Jacqueline’s knees. Jacqueline saw the look; stepping gently away from Michael, who was brushing haphazardly at her back, she remarked,
“Thank you. For everything…Show’s over. I now revert to my real self.”
She gathered in the fiery hair rippling down her back and began to knot it up.
“What are you doing that for?” Michael demanded. “Let it hang out and down and all like that. You have beautiful hair, lady.”
“I know,” Jacqueline said coolly. “It’s my