Hastily I tried to figure it out. Lucie Waldon, as everybody knew, was a famous beauty, a marvel of charm and daintiness, slender, with big, soulful, wistful eyes. Her marriage to Tracy Edwards, the wealthy plunger and stockbroker, had been a great social event the year before, and it was reputed at the time that Edwards had showered her with jewels and dresses to the wonder and talk even of society.
As for Valerie Fox, I knew she had won quick recognition and even fame as a dancer in New York during the previous winter, and I recalled reading three or four days before that she had just returned on the Kronprinz from a trip abroad.
“I don’t suppose you have had time to see Miss Fox,” I remarked. “Where is she?”
“At Beach Park now, I think,” replied Waldon, “a resort a few miles nearer the city on the south shore, where there is a large colony of actors.”
I handed back the letter to Kennedy.
“What do you make of it?” he asked, as he folded it up and put it back into his pocket.
“I hardly know what to say,” I replied. “Of course there have been rumors, I believe, that all was not exactly like a honeymoon still with the Tracy Edwardses.”
“Yes,” returned Waldon slowly, “I know myself that there has been some trouble, but nothing definite until I found this letter last night in my sister’s room. She never said anything about it either to mother or myself. They haven’t been much together during the summer, and last night when she disappeared Tracy was in the city. But I hadn’t thought much about it before, for, of course, you know he has large financial interests that make him keep in pretty close touch with New York and this summer hasn’t been a particularly good one on the stock exchange.”
“And,” I put in, “a plunger doesn’t always make the best of husbands. Perhaps there is temperament to be reckoned with here.”
“There seem to be a good many things to be reckoned with,” Craig considered. “For example, here’s a houseboat, the Lucie, a palatial affair, cruising about aimlessly, with a beautiful woman on it. She gives a little party, in the absence of her husband, to her brother, his fiancée and her mother, who visit her from his yacht, the Nautilus. They break up, those living on the Lucie going to their rooms and the rest back to the yacht, which is anchored out further in the deeper water of the bay.