At the Villa Massina Read Online Free

hold-all with which Norma had presented her only an hour or so before they had parted. It held the passports and papers, Juliet’s return ticket and some Spanish money which Ruy had pressed into her hand at the last moment. There was a safe, she had been told, behind a picture in the dining-room, and it seemed that that would be the best place for valuables. So Juliet reached across to the table near the wall and transferred the square bag to her lap.
    She drew out the passports and the manilla envelope bulging with paper money, felt around the soft kid lining for anything else she might have dropped into the bag during the voyage. There was Rina’s thin blue necklace, a couple of safety-pins ... and a hard angular object which seemed somehow to have secreted itself within the pocket of the bag. She pulled the zipper, took the four-inch square package into her hands and unwrapped it from the sheet of notepaper. For quite some seconds she thought there must have been some curious error which could probably be traced to the assistant from whom Norma had purchased the bag; then she recognized her cousin’s writing on the pale blue sheet, and saw that it was a note addressed to herself.
    It said:
    Juliet, dear, I’m sorry this has to be done this way, but I was afraid you’d argue if I talked it over with you. This little package contains something which I want you to post to its owner. You will see that it is already addressed, but you will have to buy Spanish stamps, of course. I would have posted it from England, but as you know, it is difficult to send anything abroad without declaring it—in which case one has to state one’s name and address. That was my only anxiety—I had no thought of avoiding the customs duty, even though it might be fairly heavy. I daresay you will find this while you are at sea, and I want you please to post the packet, in Cadiz if possible, as soon as you arrive. If you have the bad luck to be caught with it, you must say it is something you have had a long time and that it’s of small value. Pay up without question and rewrap it for posting. You have my assurance that there is nothing in this business which could possibly injure Ruy or the children in any way. By returning a gift, I am merely closing a rather boring episode, so you must be sure to destroy this note; once the thing is posted you can forget it. I know I can depend on your discretion...
    There were words of flattery at the end which Juliet did not take in; but she reread most of the note more than once. Then she sat back, a little frightened and angry. Here was the packet with a small typed label on it. “Mr. Lyle Whitman, Los Pinos, Cortana.” Who in the world was Mr. Lyle Whitman? What had he to do with Norma? And what was she returning to him in so roundabout a manner? She had been married for nearly nine years—happily married—and yet here was unsavoury evidence of ... of what?
    Juliet slipped the small packet into her pocket and furiously tore the note into pieces. She got up determinedly and took the passports, papers and money into the diningroom. There she removed a portrait of Ruy’s heavy-faced aunt and opened the round door of the wall safe with the minute key which was in the lock. The safe was empty, and after she had slipped her own things into it, she locked it and took the key to her bedroom.
    But there, in the lamplight, she paced across to the window and back to the foot of the bed. The expensive little hold-all in fine leather, for which she had been so grateful, had not been a gift at all. It had merely been a blind, a disguise for what had lain within. Juliet recalled how Norma had handled it over openly in front of Ruy, the faintly patronizing smile with which she had received Juliet’s delighted astonishment and thanks. The rich cousin doling out largesse to someone who was being entrusted with her children! The nerve of it!
    Juliet’s normal gaiety was quite gone; she couldn’t rest. She went