Lucy leaned toward her grandparents. “And when Mr. Dorn met me at La Guardia Airport on Thursday afternoon I was terribly nervous about meeting you! He had to talk quietly to me for about half an hour before I’d even get in the car.”
Another lie, Vicki thought angrily. Or had this girl returned to the airport two afternoons later and pretended to Mr. Dorn that she had just got off the plane? So this was why, Vicki realized, Lucy Rowe did not want any mention of her having been on the New York-bound plane on Tuesday afternoon. Vicki said guardedly:
“New York is a wonderful place but so is your city, Miss Rowe. I’m just getting to know San Francisco on occasional visits. It’s a fascinating place. In what part of the city did you live?”
“For a while I lived on Telegraph Hill, wonderful views from there. Then three other girls and I took a beach house one summer. It was fun, but such a lot of commuting to my job.”
No mention of the women’s hotel, Hotel Alcott. No mention of sharing an apartment with Mary Scott and her mother. That did not tally with what Vicki had learned. Lucy had answered readily, even glibly. Vicki tried another tack.
“Some of the best views in New York,” she said, “are from high up in the office buildings. Is that true in San Francisco? Was it so on your job?”
Lucy looked amused. “I worked so hard at Whitney Decorators that there wasn’t much time to admire the views.”
“Poor darling,” said her grandmother.
“Oh, no, it was a perfectly nice job with nice people,” Lucy said. “But I was awfully happy to give it up and come to you.”
No mention of working for the Interstate Insurance Company. Was the interior-decorator job a fact or another lie? If a fact, when had Lucy worked for a decorator? And why didn’t she mention her job with Mrs. Heath? Lucy made it sound as if she had been employed in a San Francisco office building at the time when Mr. Dorn had found her a week ago. Vicki knew she had resigned from Interstate about a month earlier, and had gone to Pine Top a couple of weeks later. Why all these lies? If this girl was actually Lucy, she was trading on the love of her grandparents. Or if she was an impostor, she must be very clever to have fooled Mr. Dorn.