Page 2

ONE

I can’t believe Anne is gone.” Matty Bingham blotted her eyes with a handkerchief. “She was always so spirited. So charming. So full of life.”

“Yes, she was.” Ursula Kern tightened her grip on the umbrella and watched the gravediggers dump great clods of earth on the coffin. “She was a woman of the modern age.”

“And an excellent secretary.” Matty tucked her handkerchief into her satchel. “A credit to the agency.”

Matty was in her mid-thirties, a spinster without family or connections.

Like the other women who came to work at the Kern Secretarial Agency, she had abandoned any hope of marriage and a family of her own.

Like Anne and the others, she had seized the promise that Ursula offered—a respectable career as a professional secretary, a field that was finally opening up to women.

The day was appropriately funereal in tone—a depressing shade of gray with a steady drizzle of rain.

Ursula and Matty were the only mourners present at the graveside.

Anne had died alone. No family had come forward to claim the body.

Ursula had paid for the funeral. It was, she thought, not just her responsibility as Anne’s employer and sole heir, but also a final act of friendship.

A great emptiness welled up inside her. Anne Clifton had been her closest friend for the past two years. They had bonded over the things they had in common—a lack of family and haunting pasts that they had very carefully buried.

Anne might have possessed a few faults—some of the other secretaries at the agency had considered her a fast woman—but Ursula knew there had always been a distinct twist of admiration in the remarks.

Anne’s bold determination to carve her own path in life against all odds made her the very model of the Modern Woman.

When the coffin vanished beneath the growing mound of dirt, Ursula and Matty turned and walked back across the cemetery.

“It was kind of you to pay for Anne’s funeral,” Matty said.

Ursula went through the wrought-iron gates. “It was the least I could do.”

“I will miss her.”

“So will I,” Ursula said.

Who will pay for my funeral when the time comes? she wondered.

“Anne did not seem like the type to take her own life,” Matty said.

“No, she did not.”

—

U RSULA DINED IN SOLITUDE , as she usually did. When the meal was concluded she went into her small, cozy study.

The housekeeper bustled into the room to light the fire.

“Thank you, Mrs. Dunstan,” Ursula said.

“You’re certain you’re all right, then?” Mrs. Dunstan asked gently. “I know you considered Miss Clifton a friend. Hard to lose a connection of that sort. Lost a few friends, myself, over the years.”

“I’m quite all right,” Ursula said. “I’m just going to sort through Miss Clifton’s things and make an inventory. Then I’ll go to bed.”

“Very well, then.”

Mrs. Dunstan went quietly out into the hall and closed the door. Ursula waited a moment and then she poured herself a stiff shot of brandy. The fiery spirits took off some of the chill she had been feeling since Anne’s death.

After a while she crossed the room to the trunk that held Anne’s things.

One by one she removed the items that had aroused in her a deep sense of unease—an empty perfume bottle, a small velvet bag containing a few pieces of jewelry, Anne’s stenography notebook and two packets of seeds.

Taken individually, each was easily explained.

But as a group they raised disturbing questions.

Three days earlier, when Anne’s housekeeper had discovered the body of her employer, she had immediately sent for Ursula.

There had been no one else to summon. Initially, Ursula had been unable to accept the notion that Anne had either died of natural causes or taken her own life.

She had called in the police. They had immediately concluded that there was no sign of foul play.

But Anne had left a note. Ursula had found it crumpled on the floor beside the body.

To most people the marks made in pencil would have looked like random scribbles.

Anne, however, was a skilled stenographer who had been trained in the Pitman method.

As was the case with many professional secretaries, she had gone on to develop her own personal version of coded writing.

The note was a message, and Ursula knew it had been intended for her. Anne had been well aware that no one else could decipher her unique stenography.

Behind water closet.

Ursula sat down at her desk and drank a little more brandy while she contemplated the items. After a while, she pushed the empty perfume bottle aside.

She had found it on Anne’s little writing desk, not with the other things.

It was unlike Anne not to have mentioned the purchase of new perfume but aside from that there did not appear to be anything mysterious about it.

The notebook, the jewelry pouch and the seeds, however, were a very different matter. Why had Anne hidden all three items behind the water closet?

After a while she opened the stenography notebook and began to read. Transcribing Anne’s cryptic shorthand was slow-going but two hours later she knew that she had been wrong about one thing that afternoon. Paying for the funeral was not to be her last act of friendship.

There was one more thing she could do for Anne—find her killer.