“Was and had,” I corrected.
“Oh. Yes. Her income was enormous. After a few months of the Village all of a sudden she was off, and do you know what her excuse was? Her maid — that was Margaret — she had to take Margaret to New Orleans to see her sick mother! Did you ever hear anything to beat it? Off she went, leaving me to close up the place in the Village, We were still friends all right; she wrote me from New Orleans raving about it, and the first thing I knew, here came a letter saying that she had found her prince and married him, and they were off for Peru, where he had an option on the Andes Mountains, or approximately that.”
Mrs. Jaffee finished the coffee, put the cup and saucer down on the tray, and wriggled back until she was against the cushions. “That,” she said, “was the last letter I ever got from Pris. The very last. Maybe I still have it — I remember she enclosed a picture of him. I wondered why she didn’t write, and then one day she phoned me — she was back in New York, and she was alone, except for Margaret, and she was calling herself Miss Priscilla Eads. I saw her a few times, and when she bought a place up in Westchester I went there once, but she was a completely different person, and she didn’t invite me again, and I wouldn’t have gone if she had. For nearly three years I didn’t see her at all, until she had been to Reno and come back and joined the Salvation Army — do you know about that?”
I said yes.
“She was through with that too at the time she heard of my husband’s death and came to see me. She had decided to take up her father’s business where he had left off, only of course she wouldn’t own it until she was twenty-five. She seemed more like the old Pris, and we might have got together again, but I had just lost Dick and I was in no condition to get together with anyone, so, the way it went, I didn’t see her again until last week, and then I didn’t—”
She stopped abruptly and jerked her chin up. “For God’s sake, my not doing what she wanted — that didn’t have anything to do with her being killed, did it? Is that why you wanted to see me?”
I shook my head. “I can’t answer the first one, but it’s not why I wanted to see you. Did she get in touch with you again? A phone call or letter?”
“No.”
“Did any of the others, the Softdown people?”
“No.”