Blood in the Water(11)

Miss Vaile was actually from Paoli, and had gone to a very good secretarial school.

She came into the room with her steno pad in her hand. The steno pad was useless—Miss Vaile did her work on a computer, too, and she was good at it—but Horace liked the effect it made, and he insisted on it. She came across the carpet to his desk, glancing just a moment at the fire burning in the fireplace. Horace had heard her complain that he acted as if he thought the club’s furnace was going to destruct at any moment.

She stopped by the desk and waited, patiently. That was also something Horace had taught her to do. He was not unaware that the job at the club was a very good one, and that he made it better in a thousand different ways that added up over time. Horace was one of those people who expected to get what he paid for.

“The cotillion,” he said now. “I was supposed to have the paperwork on my desk this morning. How many tables in the dining room, how many girls to be introduced, everything. We have to have the paperwork or we don’t know what to do next.”

“I quite agree with you.”

“And?”

Miss Vaile did not shrug. Horace did not like people who shrugged. Instead, she looked up out of the great tall windows that gave a view over the eighteenth hole and pinched her nose ever so slightly. When Miss Vaile pinched her nose, you knew that something truly impossible was happening.

“We don’t have the paperwork,” she said. “At least, it hasn’t come to my attention, and that’s where it should have come. There’s no sign of it anywhere.”

“And this is—who? Who was supposed to bring it in? Caroline Stanford-Pyrie?”

“No,” Miss Vaile said. “Mrs. Stanford-Pyrie is the head of the committee, but it’s Mrs. Heydreich who has charge of the paperwork. I did talk to Mrs. Stanford-Pyrie, of course, but she told me to talk to Mrs. Heydreich.”

“And?”

There was the pinch of the nose again. “I haven’t been able to reach her.”

“What do you mean, you haven’t been able to reach her?”

“I’ve called several times,” Miss Vaile said, “but there’s been no answer. She was supposed to be at a meeting in the dining room this morning, but she did not show up. I’ve talked to both Mrs. Stanford-Pyrie and Mrs. Carstairs. There’s been no sign of her. I called her house. The maid said she was out.”

“Extraordinary.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so,” Miss Vaile said, “there have been other things to attend to this morning. There’s been that business with the security cameras. I thought it was going to be a fairly simple sort of thing, but the more I look into it, the more complicated it gets. I know you told me to handle it myself, but I’m not sure I can.”

“You’re not sure you can handle a broken security camera by yourself,” Horace said. “What can there possibly be to handle? You call the repair company and they come right out and fix it.”

“I did call the repair company.”

“And they haven’t come out?”

“They have come out,” Miss Vaile said. “They came out immediately. We would expect them to. We pay them a significant bonus to make sure that they always come out immediately.”

“Then I don’t understand what the problem is. They’ve come out, they should fix it. Or is it very badly damaged? Do we need a new one? That shouldn’t be a problem.”

It was Miss Vaile’s turn to look somewhere else. She looked into the fire. “It’s not damaged,” she said finally. “In fact, at the moment, it’s working perfectly normally.”

Horace frowned slightly. “That can’t be right,” he said. “There was dead time this morning. I saw it.”

“Yes, I know.” Miss Vaile sighed. “The gentleman from the security company saw it, too. I saw it. But the fact is that there is nothing wrong with it. With the equipment, I mean. The equipment is functioning normally. It’s just that, last night, between ten forty-five and twelve thirty, it stopped functioning normally, and nobody knows why.”

Horace stared at her, amazed. “And that’s it?” he said. “That’s all anybody’s going to say about it? It stopped functioning normally and nobody knows why? There has to be a reason for these things. They don’t just sort of happen out of nowhere, for no reason.”

“I do understand that,” Miss Vaile said. “And the man from the security company also understands it. That’s why he’s still here. But it’s all we’ve got at the moment, except for the fact that it wasn’t the only camera that malfunctioned last night. They all did.”