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disc and began to wind it aimlessly. “We might invite the Grahams for tea.”
    “And ask Mrs. Graham to bring that shovel?”
    “Do you think that’s necessary?”
    “Not at all. She’s the Girl Scout type, always prepared. Well—” Johnny glanced at her wrist watch. “I’d better run upstairs and get cleaned up. Tea time is at four, and it’s almost three-thirty.”
    She was almost to the doorway before Lisa realized what had been said.
    “Four?” she echoed. “Johnny, you didn’t—”
    “That’s the other thing I forgot to tell you. Tod Graham wants to see you about something. His wife didn’t say what it was, but it seemed important. I was curious so I asked them up today. I knew you wouldn’t mind.”
    Johnny was grinning wickedly from the doorway. The change in weather seemed to have done wonders for her humor.
    “One of these days,” Lisa threatened, “you’re going to go too far—”
    “I’ve been considering that,” Johnny said, “but I doubt if it happens in Bellville.”
    Tod Graham was a man of civic conscience, and financial investments. He was about forty, sun-bronzed and healthy, with only a slight thickness under the middle button of his shadow-plaid suit, and an even slighter thinness of the rusty-blond waves that broke into view like a smile when he doffed his straw hat. It took a man with a gambling spirit to wear a straw hat in Bellville. It might be reduced to a dripping pulp by nightfall. But there was nothing sporty about Mrs. Graham. Smart, trim, and carefully groomed, she was the perfect model of a cut-rate-house version of Christian Dior. She was also about as taut as a hawser in an ice storm.
    It took the advent of Johnny with the teatray to break the ice.
    “You’ll have to make allowances for the service,” she said. “We’re still in the throes of unpacking, and the place is a shambles. It’s all I can do to find my way back and forth to the kitchen.”
    “Oh, I know how that is,” Mrs. Graham responded. “Before Tod and I built the new house, we lived in one of these old terrors—” She stopped suddenly, flushed and flustered. “I mean, it was entirely too big for us.”
    “I know what you mean,” Johnny murmured.
    “But I’ve always loved this house. We were so sorry to lose the Mastersons when they decided to live in Europe. They were always so charming—”
    “And cooperative,” Tod added. “You could always count on Will and Lois to pitch in on any community affair.”
    Lisa poured the tea carefully. She didn’t ask questions. A man like Tod Graham would get to the purpose of his visit soon enough.
    “And Freddie, too, before he went into the Army.”
    “Freddie?”
    Lisa did ask a question, almost before she realized it was done.
    “The son,” Tod explained. “Only child. Darling of his mother’s eye. That’s why they’ve decided to live abroad now that Freddie’s married a Fraulein.”
    “So that’s what happened to Freddie,” Lisa mused. Then she looked up from the teapot, smiling. “I’ve been poking around the house. There’s an old playroom upstairs.”
    “And we do love family histories,” Johnny urged, “particularly families with big old houses, like that one that sits up on the hill.”
    “Bell Mansion?”
    There was no ice on Tod’s wife now. Her eyes sparkled. The spadework was about to begin, and Johnny took the first spadeful.
    “The house of death,” she said ominously.
    “Then you’ve heard—”
    “We have a wonderful housekeeper who eats nothing but roots and berries.”
    “Not Carrie! Why, she’s practically an institution in Bellville.”
    “An institution for the dissemination of baseless gossip,” Tod remarked. But with the big thaw now in progress, Tod was superfluous.
    “Oh, I don’t know that it’s so baseless. Some of the things that have happened in that house! Really, Miss Bancroft, you could write a book!”
    “I’m sure Miss Bancroft is capable of choosing her own fictional