Prisoner's Base

Priscilla Eads's life had been complicated by a series of phases she had gone through. After her father's death when she was fifteen, her home had been with the Helmars, but she had spent most of the time away at school, where she had made a brilliant record, including two years at Smith. Then suddenly, a few months before her nineteenth birthday, she had quit in the middle of a semester, announced to friends that she intended to see the world, rented an apartment in Greenwich Village, hired a maid and cook and butler, and started giving parties. In a few months she had had enough of the Village, but Lon's information on her next move was a little vague. The way a Gazette man had got it, her maid had decided she must go to New Orleans to see her sick mother, and Priscilla, glad of any excuse to get away from the Village, and particularly from her guardian, Perry Helmar, who was pestering her to return to college, bought plane tickets to New Orleans for herself and her maid, and off they went.

Probably in New Orleans, but anyhow somewhere around there, she had met Eric Hagh. On this Lon was even vaguer, but it was definite that she had met him, married him, and gone off with him to some part of South America where he had something to do with something. It was also definite that three months later she had suddenly appeared in New York, accompanied by the maid she had gone away with, but not by a husband; bought a house in the woods not far from Mount Kisco; and started in on men. For two years she had raised some miscellaneous hell with men, apparently with the idea that the higher you jacked up an expectation the more fun it was to watch it crash when you jerked it loose. In time that lost its appeal, and she moved to Reno, stayed the prescribed time, got her divorce, returned to New York, and joined the Salvation Army.

At that detail I had given Lon a stare, thinking that surely he had pulled it out of a hat. Priscilla Eads as I had known her, in the peach-colored dress and tailored jacket, was mighty hard to picture as a consecrated tambourine shaker. But obviously Lon was dealing it straight, with no fancy touches for effect.