The Horror Expert
9781465681928
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The heat had been oppressive all night, but now the streets were glistening, washed clean by rain, and there was a holiday freshness in the air. The rain had stopped, but the taxi moving slowly down Fifth Avenue in the wake of the storm was still wet and gleaming and had the same washed-clean look. The woman who sat staring out of the cab window at the cluster of pedestrians waiting to cross 42nd Street had dressed at leisure, eaten a light breakfast of orange juice, toast and three-minute eggs, glanced briefly at the morning headlines, and descended in a private elevator through a tall, gray house in the East Eighties without manifesting the slightest outward strain. But once in the taxi a fierce impatience had taken possession of her—an impatience which far exceeded that of the pedestrians who were waiting for the Don't Walk light to vanish at New York's most crowded intersection. Helen Lathrup had been chain-smoking and was now on her fourth cigarette. It was burning the tips of her fingers a little but she seemed not to care about the pain. She inhaled deeply, blew a cloud of smoke from her nostrils and fanned it away with her hand, her lips tightly compressed. The hurry and bustle of shopgirls, clerks and early morning shoppers annoyed and angered her. She had no sympathy at all with the look of keen anticipation on many of the faces, for she was not in a holiday mood. There was no reason why she should be, she told herself with considerable bitterness. The long Fourth of July week-end had not yet begun—was, in fact, a full day away. An interminable Friday stretched out before her, with important work piling up, work neglected or improperly handled, and there was no one except herself she could depend on to see that no mistakes were made. It wasn't just the avoidance of costly stupidities she had to concern herself with. There were a hundred minor annoyances awaiting her. A grinning fool like Macklin, with his head in the clouds, could joke about them and call them "office headaches." But she knew that they could be serious, like grains of sand clogging the moving parts of a complex and very expensive machine.
