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Updated: September 11, 2025
Pink-and-white were the miles of orchards surrounding Santa Ysobel, pink-and-white nearly all the dooryards, every tree its own little carnival of bloom with bees for guests. Already the streets were full of life, double the usual traffic.
The necessity to reel out the whole thing to whomever would listen was on him like a sneeze. It's always so at this stage of the game. For all the hullabaloo in the streets, we were quiet enough here, since the lock-up at Santa Ysobel lurks demurely, as such places are apt to do, in the rear of the building whose garbage can it is. Our pacing captive could keep silent no longer.
While yet he shook hands with the girls, and swapped short replies for long questions, I became conscious of something odd in the air. Plain enough sailing with the young ladies; all the noise with them echoed the bride's, "After all these years." They clattered about whether he looked like his last photograph, and how perfectly delightful it was going to be to have him back in Santa Ysobel again.
Then I opened and looked. Some list! The social and financial elect of Santa Ysobel: bankers' ladies; prune kings' daughters; persons you couldn't doubt, or buy. But at the top of all was Laura Bowman's name. We had halted for the turn at the end of the court. I held the paper before her. "How about this one? Do you think she was in the room all the time? Or have you any recollection?"
Married at Santa Ysobel this afternoon. Local society event. Whole place standing on its hind legs, taking notice." So he had been down to the little town to see his father after all. And he wasn't going to talk about it. Oh, well. "Friends of yours?" I asked perfunctorily, and he gave me a queer look out of the corners of those wicked eyes, repeating in an enjoying drawl. "Friends?
"I wasn't excited; not in the sense of being confused," he spoke slowly. "The book was there; he'd been writing in it. I remember looking at it and thinking that as soon as I was gone, he'd sit down in his chair and put every damn' word of our row into it. That was his way. The seamy side of Santa Ysobel life's recorded in those books.
"Go on, Barbara; you had thought of something." "Yes. Father died in January of that year, and in March I had to vacate the house. It had been sold, and they wanted to fix it over. I left Santa Ysobel on the eighteenth of March, but they didn't get into the house until June first." Again Worth interrupted. "Which jogs my memory for an unexciting detail." He smiled enigmatically.
"They lived next house but one to us; the professor had the rest of the Santa Ysobel youngsters terrorized, backed off the boards; but I wasn't a steady resident of the burg. I came and went, and when I came, it was playtime for the little girl." "What was her father? Crank on education?" "Psychology," Worth said briefly. "International reputation.
And then above the rush of hurrying feet, above the cries of blasphemous wonder and alarm as the Palace vomited out its raucous filth, there arose a cackling horror that Douglass would never forget as long as he lived, the vacuous gibbering of Dolores Ysobel de Tejada, kissing her blood-stained cuchilla and screaming weird endearments to two dead men in Jalisco.
It showed me that the cook, anyhow, had not seen Worth last night in Santa Ysobel. "Just now I hea' 'bout Boss." Chung's eye went straight to the stain on the rug, exactly as Edwards' had done, but it stopped there, and his Oriental impassiveness was unmoved. "Too bad," he concluded, thrust the fingers of one hand up the sleeve of the other and waited. "Where you been all day?" I said quickly.
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