XI
The Lemon Pie and the Monkey-Wrench
VALINA SMITH was a morbid young person who loved to dabble in the supernatural. Her taste in literature was for Edgar A. Poe. In religion she inclined toward spiritualism. Her favorite amusement was to gather a few shuddering friends about her, turn out the gas, and tell ghost stories. She had an extensive repertoire of ghoulish incidents, that were not fiction but the actual experience of people she knew. She had even had one or two spiritual adventures herself; and she would set forth the details with wide eyes and lowered voice, while her auditors held one another's hands and shivered. The circle in which Evalina moved had not much sense of humor.
One Saturday evening St. Ursula's School was in an unusually social mood. Evalina was holding a ghost party in her room in the East Wing; Nancy Lee had invited her ten dearest friends to a birthday spread in Center; the European History class was celebrating the completion of the Thirty-Years War by a molasses-candy pull in the kitchen; and Kid McCoy was conducting a potato race down the length of the South Corridor—the entrance fee a postage stamp, the prize sealed up in a large bandbox and warranted to be worth a quarter.
Patty, who was popular, had been invited to all four of the functions. She had declined Nancy's spread, because Mae Van Arsdale, her particular enemy, was invited; but had accepted the other invitations, and was busily spending the evening as an itinerant guest.
She carried her potato, insecurely balanced on a teaspoon, over one table and under another, through a hoop suspended from the ceiling, and deposited it in the wastebasket at the end of the corridor, in exactly two minutes and forty-seven seconds. (Kid McCoy had a stop-watch.) This was far ahead of anyone else's record, and Patty lingered hopefully a few minutes in the neighborhood of the bandbox; but a fresh inrush of entries postponed the bestowal of the prize, so she left the judges to settle the question at their leisure, and drifted on to Evalina's room.
She found it dark, except for the fitful blue flare of alcohol and salt burning in a fudge pan. The guests were squatting about on sofa cushions, looking decidedly spotty in the unbecoming light. Patty silently dropped down on a vacant cushion, and lent polite attention to Evalina, who at the moment held the floor.
"Well, you know, I had a very remarkable experience myself last summer. Happening to visit a spiritualist camp, I attended a materializing séance."
"What's that?" asked Rosalie Patton.