The D.A. Breaks an Egg

2

Dorothy Clifton, coming down the winding mountain grade in second gear, swung abruptly over to a wide spot on the left-hand side of the road to survey the panorama beneath her.

Behind her, jagged crests of granite seemed to have been pushed upward by creeping fingers of firs which were banked in solid green on the sides of canyons but diminished into triangular patches on the higher levels. Below was the rolling sweep of foothills, then the orderly squares of orange orchards.

Some two thousand feet below, Madison City glistened white in the sunlight. The deep blue of the sky served to emphasize the hard, white edges of the clouds which drifted along so sedately they seemed like animals moving slowly, grazing as they walked.

At the spot where Dorothy Clifton’s convertible was parked, the pine trees had given way to thickets of manzanita, buckthorn and greasewood. Lower down, the hills were studded with sagebrush, then below the level of the sage were slopes covered for the most part with the remnants of grass which had sprouted with the winter and spring rains and was now baked a dull brown. These slopes were contoured with the trails made by feeding cattle. The paved road wound in a series of loops and turns down into the valley below.

At this elevation, there was still some tang of mountain freshness in the air, still some faint scent which had oozed from the pine forests above. And the silence of the high places still clung to the hillsides, so that the sound made by the motor of a big truck a thousand feet below came to Dorothy’s ears bereft of the snarling grind of straining gears, sounding only as a low drone, as though the truck and trailer might be some huge heavy-laden bumblebee assisting itself up the grade by using its wings.

“Well,” Dorothy said to the scenery below, “here we come. Mother-in-law to be, get out your lorgnette and prepare to administer the maternal squelch. Regardless of what Horace says, I know you’re not going to like me — which is one hell of an attitude with which to approach an important interview, according to all the books on salesmanship.”

Dorothy made certain the road behind was clear, turned her car back to the highway, threw it in second gear, drove rapidly down the steep grade to the outskirts of Madison City.

She looked at her watch as she approached a service station. It was four-fourteen.

Dorothy swung into the service station, said to the attendant, “Fill it up, if you will, please.”

Then, as her eye caught the telephone booth, she reached a sudden decision. It would be two hours later in Chicago. She could probably catch Horace with a telephone call. He would think it foolish and extravagant, but Dorothy could be grateful for the fact she was self-supporting, had her own money and, so far at least, could do with it as she pleased.

She entered the telephone booth, put through a person-to-person call to Horace Lennox in Chicago, and some two minutes later was dropping quarters into the coin box, listening to the reverberations of the gong which registered a series of resonant chimes.

Bong... Bong... Bong... Bong... Bong...

“There’s your party,” the long-distance operator said. “Go ahead, please.”

“Hello,” Dorothy said.

She could hear the eagerness in Horace Lennox’s voice.

“Hello, darling. You’re at Madison City?”

“Yes.”

“Why the pay station? Why aren’t you calling from the house?”

“I haven’t officially arrived yet. I’m just getting my nerve up.”

He laughed, and said, “Your nerve. You won’t need any. They’ll be crazy about you and I do hope you’ll like them.”

“Oh I will, Horace. I’m just being a goof, and I wanted to hear the sound of your voice.”

“But,” he said, “you’re just a little dubious or you’d have called after you’d seen them. Are you afraid you aren’t going to like them, Dorothy?”

“Heavens, no.”

He said, “Mother’s inclined to be a little formal at times. Particularly when she’s trying to put her best foot forward, she becomes a grande dame; but you’ll love her, and Moana will welcome you with open arms. I’ve written her so much about you she feels she knows you. Steve is a darned good kid brother. Just let him talk about the junior college football team. I know you’ll like them, Dot.”

“I know, darling. I just wanted verbal reinforcements. How is it back there?”

“Hot.”

“How’s the office?”

“Pretty good.”

“Making dough?”

“Upper brackets.”

She laughed, knowing that Horace, as a young lawyer, was struggling along with only an occasional client, but making contacts, playing for the future, unable at present to afford a stenographer.

“How was the trip?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“And the car?”

“Running like a top.”

“Leave it to me,” Horace Lennox said. “Getting married to a secretary who has invested her savings in a brand-new car. Nothing dumb about me.”

“I resent that,” Dorothy said. “The shrewdness is entirely on my side of the deal. I invested my savings in a nice shiny automobile so I could catch an up-and-coming lawyer... Do you miss me?”

“And how!”

“I won’t be away long,” she promised. “I’ll make the proper obeisance to the family, and then be headed back.”

“You be careful about night driving, honey.”

“I will,” she promised, knowing that once she had started back she’d burn up the roads from before dawn until midnight every day.

The operator said, “Your three minutes are up,” and Dorothy said, “ ’By, lover,” and hung up.

From that point on, events seemed to march through Dorothy’s consciousness with the sense of unreality which characterizes a dream so unreal that even in sleep one knows it must be a dream.

There was the big old-fashioned house on Chestnut Street, the moment of anxiety while she stood on the porch, which she had seen so often in pictures, the feeling of panic as she pressed her finger against the button on the doorbell and listened to the reverberating chimes.

Then Mrs. Lennox was answering the door in person, greeting her with a cordial clasp of icy fingers and the hard kiss of thin lips. “My dear, I’m so glad to see you! You’re one of the family, and I know you so well, and yet, my dear, this is the first time I’ve seen you. You’re just like your pictures!

“Children! It’s Dorothy!”

Mrs. Lennox put a thin arm around Dorothy’s waist and led her through the door into the spacious interior of the big frame house.