“Yes,” she said. It was astonishing how much her eyes were like her mother’s, while her mouth and chin weren’t Hawthorne at all. “I want to tell you something.”
“Go ahead.”
“Well... I suppose you know that in my parents’ opinion I’m no good for anything.”
“We didn’t get around to discussing that point. Do you agree with them?”
“I haven’t made up my mind. The trouble with me is that I’m the daughter of one of the Hawthorne girls. If they had had a lot of daughters, I suppose it would have been different, but there’s only one, and I’m it. I was sick of it by the time I was ten years old, and I had an inferiority complex about the size of the perisphere. It was awful. At college they kept looking at me as if they expected suns and stars to begin shooting out of my ears. So I revolted. I ran away from college and from home too, and got a job and made enough to live on. But because I was a daughter of a Hawthorne girl I had to figure out an inexpensive way of being eccentric and audacious, and the best I could do was get a secondhand camera and take pictures of people when I wasn’t supposed to. I still do it. Isn’t it pathetic? You see, I have no imagination. I think up plenty of dashing things to do, but they’re all either dumb or impossible or plain silly. I have no confidence in myself, not really. The glib way I’m talking to you now, that’s just bluff. Inside of myself I’m trembling like a coward.”
“There’s nothing to tremble about.” Wolfe put down his beer glass and wiped his lips with his handkerchief. “You say you ran away from home?”
She nodded. “Over a year ago. I told my mother — oh, that doesn’t matter. Anyway, I severed connections, you know? I was going to carve out a canyon that would make the Hawthorne girls look like turtles in a ditch. So I got a job at twenty dollars a week selling antique glassware in a Madison Avenue shop, and bought a camera. Pretty good, no? On going home, even for a weekend visit, I was adamant. The first time I came close to weakening on that was last Monday, when mother came into the shop to ask me to come to her silver wedding anniversary. I had already refused, in a letter. Next morning, Tuesday, Mr. Prescott came to the shop and tried to persuade me. I still refused, but when I quit work at six o’clock he was in front waiting for me, with his car. I tried to carry it off, but he carried me off instead. And, then, when we got there, we found — Uncle Noel was dead.”
Wolfe said patiently, “That was too bad. A sad greeting for your first visit home in a year. I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about it. Was that what you wanted?”
“No.” She was keeping her eyes aimed straight at his. There was nothing disconcerting about them, as there was about Naomi Karn’s, but their fierce steadiness gave the impression of a thrust rather than a stare. “No,” she said, “I told you that only because you need to know it if you’re going to help me. I was going to see District Attorney Skinner this morning, but I thought it over and realized I couldn’t do it without help. It has to be done in a way to convince him, and everybody else, that it was I who told Uncle Noel about that Argentina loan, and I who shot Uncle Noel Tuesday afternoon.”
My penpoint caught and spattered ink on the paper. Wolfe demanded, “What? Say that again.”