Hanged for a Sheep Read Free

projecting corner of the apartment house next door cut off her view. The projecting corner of the apartment house on the east cut off her view toward Madison Avenue. Directly across the street, which was the only way left to look, another apartment house rose haughtily. The view, Pam decided, was not inspiring. She wondered absently why her first inclination on entering any room was to look out of it and decided that she would have to ask Jerry. He, she was sure, would have a theory.
    â€œHe always has theories,” she told the cats, which sat on the bed and stared at her, turning their heads in unison. “I wish Jerry were here. Particularly if there’s going to be arsenic.” She paused and shook her head at the cats. “Not for him, sillies,” she told them. Ruffy talked back, cat fashion, in an affectionate growl. Toughy jumped on Ruffy’s head, evidently intending to smother her. Ruffy hissed and wiggled, emerged and instantly regained calm. She began to wash behind her right shoulder. Toughy looked at her in surprise, got the idea and began to wash his tail. Ruffy jumped down, landing on the carpet with a soft plunk, and began to smell the room. It was, Pam thought, going to take Ruffy a long time if she did it all. It was interesting to discover that houses still had such large rooms.
    But when you thought of it, as Pam idly did, it was odd that people should still be living in New York in such houses as the old Buddie house, which could hardly have been really a new house when Major Alden Buddie was a small boy and neither a major nor, by any reasonable stretch of the imagination, a prospective husband for so different and—well, remarkable—a woman as Flora Pickering, who was then an even smaller girl and living on a farm in Upstate New York. The house was older than any of them and, even considering Aunt Flora herself, more unexpected. More unexpected, certainly, as a final home for Flora Pickering, afterward Flora Buddie, afterward Flora McClelland and Flora Craig and Flora Anthony and now, as of this morning, Flora Buddie again.
    â€œWell,” Pam told Toughy, her mind reeling a little, “Auntie got around, when you come to remember it. And now back here, with somebody trying to kill her.”
    The old house was too dignified for such absurdities as Aunt Flora and attempted murder. Even now, when it had been hemmed in and, seemingly, pushed back, it was too dignified. It went up five stories and had a bow window on the second floor—the second floor if you counted the anomalous layer which was half under the earth and half above it as the first. Once it had been one of a row of dignified houses, all very like it in essentials, all representing good addresses for the right people. It had stood after most of the others had come down. Because Aunt Flora had been stubborn, it now stood in retreat, with a mountain of an apartment house on each shoulder.
    It would once have been easy for Aunt Flora to sell it. The company collecting land parcels for the building on the Fifth Avenue corner had been willing to buy first, and after that the company building the apartment next door to the east had made an offer. But Aunt Flora had refused both, and the companies had shrugged corporate shoulders and gone on about their building. They had used all the ground the law allowed, coming flush to the building lines along the sidewalk, so that the Buddie house, which had once withdrawn genteelly from passersby and only licked at them with the tongue of its brown front steps, now looked merely sunken in.
    â€œAnd,” Jerry had once told Pam as they stood in front looking at it, preparing to confront Aunt Flora and pay their somewhat awed respects, “and now it’s merely something called ‘permanent light and air.’ Which means that nobody will ever make another offer.”
    The permanent light and air did not, however, belong to the house itself. In the house itself