Nero Wolfe 16 - Even in the Best Families Read Free

secret anyway, and I want you to understand why I must have help. I have never been sure exactly why my first husband married me, because he had money of his own and didn’t really need mine, but it wasn’t long until he hated looking at me just as my father had. So I—”
    “That isn’t true, Sarah,” Calvin Leeds objected. “You imagined—”
    “Bosh!” she quashed him. “I’m not that neurotic! So I got a divorce with his consent and gratitude, Ithink, though he was too polite to say so, and I hurried it through because I didn’t want him to know I was pregnant. Soon after the divorce my son was born, and that made complications, but I kept him—I kept him and he was mine until he went to war. He never showed the slightest sign of feeling about my looks the way my father and my husband had. He was never embarrassed about me. He liked being with me. Didn’t he, Calvin?”
    “Of course he did,” Leeds assured her, apparently meaning it.
    She nodded and looked thoughtful, looking into space and seeing something not there. She jerked herself impatiently back to Wolfe. “I admit that before he went away to war, he got married, and he married a very beautiful girl. It is not true that I wished he had taken one who resembled me, even a little bit, but naturally I couldn’t help but see that he had gone to the other extreme. Annabel is very beautiful. It made me proud for my son to have her—it seemed to even my score with all the beautiful women I had known and seen. She thinks I hate her, but that is not true. People as neurotic as I am should not be judged by normal standards. Not that I blame Annabel, for I know perfectly well that when the news came that he had been killed in Germany her loss was greater than mine. He wasn’t mine any longer then, he was hers.”
    “Excuse me,” Wolfe put in politely but firmly. “You wanted to consult me about your husband. You say you’re divorced?”
    “Certainly not! I—” She caught herself up. “Oh. This is my second husband. I only wanted you to understand.”
    “I’ll try. Let’s have him now.”
    “Barry Rackham,” she said, pronouncing the name as if she held a copyright on it, or at least a lease on subsidiary rights. “He played football at Yale and then had a job in Wall Street until the war came. At the end of the war he was a major, which wasn’t very far to get in nearly four years. We were married in 1946—three years and seven months ago. He is ten years younger than I am.”
    Mrs. Barry Rackham paused, her eyes fixed on Wolfe’s face as if challenging it for comment, but the challenge was declined. Wolfe merely prodded her with a murmur.
    “And?”
    “I suppose,” she said as if conceding a point, “there is no one in New York who does not take it for granted that he married me simply for my money. They all know more about it than I do, because I have never asked him, and he is the only one that knows for sure. I know one thing: it does not make him uncomfortable to look at me. I know that for sure because I’m very sensitive about it, I’m neurotic about it, and I would know it the first second he felt that way. Of course he knows what I look like, he knows how ugly I am, he can’t help that, but it doesn’t annoy him a particle, not even—”
    She stopped and was blushing. Calvin Leeds coughed and shifted in his chair. Wolfe closed his eyes and after a moment opened them again. I didn’t look away from her because when she blushed I began to feel a little uncomfortable myself, and I wanted to see if I could keep her from knowing it.
    But she wasn’t interested in me. “Anyway,” she went on as the color began to leave, “I have kept things in my own hands. We live in my house, of course, town and country, and I pay everything, andthere are the cars and so on, but I made no settlement and arranged no allowance for him. That didn’t seem to me to be the way to handle it. When he needed cash for anything he asked for it and