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cigars in a long amber holder. His eyes told her nothing at all; he had the practiced aplomb of the European. A hard nut to crack, she thought.
    Then there was Rollo Bayles, a background artist. He was a pale, somewhat wispy man with a face that might have been handsome if the sculptor hadn’t left the clay half-finished and unsmoothed. His hand, when Miss Withers grasped it, was dampish and thin—yet his nervous grip made her wince a little. A true introvert, she said to herself; a man, as the English say, with a maggot.
    Finally there was Janet Poole, a warmish, most generously proportioned girl whose blue-violet eyes made one forget that she was plain—or was she really plain, after all? A young man, Miss Withers shrewdly decided, might have a difficult but no doubt most interesting time making up his mind about that. She liked the girl on sight—and at the same time she mistrusted her reaction, knowing well that a person can smile and smile and be a villain still and that no one, not even herself, had the power to see the mark of Cain.
    “But I’ve seen her somewhere before,” the schoolteacher added to herself. “Or else she looks like somebody in the movies. Darken that lovely hair and she’d be a dead ringer for Loretta Young.”
    Then they got down to cases. None of the three admitted taking the poison-pen valentines very seriously, now that they had had a chance to think it over. Miss Withers’ eyebrows went up, and she turned to Mr. Cushak. “You haven’t told them yet?”
    “Told them what?”
    “Told them that Larry Reed has been murdered—and that somebody left one of the valentines in his office, which I just found!” She told them some of the details and showed them the valentine.
    The announcement fell heavily upon those in the office. Karas stiffened and Bayles quaked and Janet Poole tried to laugh and wound up almost crying. “Us four!” she cried. “One down and three to go.”
    “Not necessarily,” pronounced the schoolteacher firmly. She turned to Karas. “And just what was the content of your message?”
    He hesitated and drew a deep breath. “Filth,” he said. “It was all a lie.”
    “What was, in particular?” Miss Withers asked reasonably.
    “The nasty verse, which I do not remember. It intimates that I have abandon my wife in the old country when the Russky swine take over, and that I make my escape leaving her to disappear and probably to die in a slave-labor camp in Siberia.”
    “Your wife Lucy ?”
    Her name, he stoutly maintained, had been Anastasia. He himself had been away in Italy on a concert tour when the Iron Curtain had clamped itself down on his unhappy homeland; because of his past political background it would have been sure death for him to go home. He had tried vainly through the Red Cross and all other possible sources to get word of her or to her. And he had never known anybody anywhere named Lucy and had no idea at all why that name should have been signed to the valentines.
    Nor had either of the others ever known a Lucy, Miss Withers found out on further exploration. Rollo Bayles diffidently admitted that his valentine had been addressed “To the Cowardly Apostate;” some fifteen years ago while still in his late teens he had briefly studied for the priesthood to please his mother, but he had been more interested in art and other worldly affairs and at the gentle but firm advice of his superiors he had renounced his vocation before taking vows. “But who would want to drag that up now?” he complained in a high, brittle voice. “Who would even know ?”
    “Perhaps we deal with a mind reader,” Miss Withers suggested dryly. “Or perhaps you let something slip in a careless moment of conversation; people often do. A friendly bartender, or something like that?”
    Bayles slowly shook his head, but he frowned thoughtfully.
    Janet Poole, next in line, was less cooperative. Her soft red mouth set itself firmly. “Tell you or anybody else what was