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Show GEOG F. WORTS W.N.U. RELEASE 'iM--iZ&j. CHAPTER I The giant moths of Kokee those damp black ghosts and the smell of sour honey, which were so trivial as facts but so vital to Zorie Corey's fears, were among the things that made it hard for her to put a proper valuation on the events themselves. There were moments of terror which, when she awoke in the night, she could now contemplate with amused detachment. And there were moments of lesser danger which, even in retrospect, could bring a scream into her throat. Perhaps Paul Duncan could have explained all of it, ' in his clever, analytical way. Some of it he did try to explain, because, in his jealous jeal-ous heart, he adored her. And some of it was better left unexplained and even unremembered. It might have hastened her recovery if she could have wiped from her memory that night in mid-Pacific when she fell down and down through endless blackness, with that soft, terrifying whisper in her ears "Ah-nah! Ah-nah!" Ah-nah!" And she could have well forgotten, too, the jasmine-scented dawn when she stood beside a stunted tree three thousand feet above the green and purple depths of the tropical canyon with an automatic pistol kicking in her hand, although it would always seem that it had happened not to her but to an unbelievable girl who had stepped out of her just long enough to attempt murder. Yet all of it fitted into the one bright romantic pattern of intrigue and adventure which she would always al-ways cherish, even unimportant trifles tri-fles the quarreling of the minah birds just at dusk and again just at dawn; the annoying habit Grandfather Grand-father Duncan had of saying, "You understand hm?" and the metallic luster of moonlight on palm fronds leaping in the trade-wind; the gleam in Pierre Savoyard's eyes whenever he ate meat; and the pride that Amber, the girl from Martinique, took in herself; and the strange urbanity ur-banity of the man who called himself him-self Winthrop Lanning. Her memory of the rest of that ordeal or-deal was vague. - r But she was never vague about Stephen Decatur Duncan, with his languid manner, his mocking blue eyes and his treachery. Probing about in her mind on these sleepless nights, in a blacked-out blacked-out room on an island at war, she saw herself, on that dismal afternoon after-noon in early December, in a drowsy little university town, sitting at her desk and wishing, among other things, that she was not so meek. She was privately very certain that her wishing had started it and that every step she took that day was an unerring step in the direction of her destiny. From her typewriter desk, in the English Department, Zorie Corey could look out across the small campus cam-pus and over some of the rooftops of this town in which she had grown up and of which she was now, she told herself, a helpless victim. She had just uttered the fraudulent wish so often voiced by youth when it is overcome by a sense of frustration she wished she'd never been born. She then uttered three wishes, all related, in a row. She wished she wasn't so meek. She wished she had courage. She wished she'd had the gumption to tell the wife of her distinguished dis-tinguished employer to jump in the river. "My dear Miss Corey," Mrs. Fol-some, Fol-some, in her gushing way, had said over the telephone a few minutes previously, "would you mind terribly terri-bly distributing the invitations for my tea next week? They really should go out tonight and I think it's so much nicer having them delivered deliv-ered by hand, don't you? And Professor Pro-fessor says you're so dependable. So will you drop around for them when you're through?" "I'd love to, Mrs. Folsome," Zorie Corey had said in her melodious young voice, instead of any number of appropriate things she might have said. She might have mentioned that she didn't possess a car; that it was going to rain; that she was terribly rushed. She might have suggested that Mrs. Folsome neatly affix a two-cent stamp in the upper right-hand right-hand corner of each of the envelopes enve-lopes and drop them in one of the green receptacles that an all-seeing government has placed at numerous street corners for the convenience of its citizens. "Why," Zorie Corey rebelliously muttered, "don't you deliver them with your own hand, you old tightwad?" tight-wad?" Zorie Corey wished she was a war nurse. Then she wished she lived in California. But anywhere would do. Anywhere but Elleryton. "Professor says you're so dependable." depend-able." And well he might! Professor Profes-sor Bowdoin J. Folsome was head of the English Department. Zorie Corey Cor-ey was his half-time secretary, and his notion of the hours that a half-time half-time secretary should keep was from noon sharp until she slid from her chair with exhaustion. The half-day was supposed to end at five, but she often worked until six-thirty nine sometimes midnight. She expertly estimated that the work he had piled on her desk would keep her occupied until seven-thirty. After that she must deliver his wife's invitations. There would be about thirty of them and the addresses ad-dresses would be scattered all over town. And she had a date tonight with Paul Duncan. Paul did not like to be kept waiting. Next to cleanliness, with Paul, came punctuality. She gave herself the brief luxury of contemplating, in a private archive ar-chive of her mind, her fiance's lean, good-looking face, his clear gray-green gray-green eyes, his strong, slender hands. She loved Paul's hands. They were clever and nervous and yet they were very masculine. Paul had a brilliant mind, and his understanding of human foibles, his amusing way of pricking the bubbles of vanity and conceit and hypocrisy was a source of delight to Zorie. Paul was an instructor of psychology. psycholo-gy. And he was much too good for this small midwestern university. She would, she decided, knock off at five-thirty. At six, she was still typing in her fast, efficient way. At six-thirty, she called Paul's boarding-house. He Ml As she looked at the wishing Buddha Bud-dha a curious thing happened. It began to glow. wasn't home. The voice that answered an-swered didn't know when he would return. At seven, Zorie called again. Paul, she was told, had dined out. He was probably in the library doing research on his dissertation. At seven-twenty-eight, she finished the last of her typing and laid her afternoon's production, in neat piles, on Professor Folsome's desk. She would be late for her date with Paul, and he would tell her again that the trait he admired most in the wives of the men he knew was punctuality. One of the troubles with being meek, of always saying yes and never nev-er no to a request, Zorie reflected, is that you're always getting yourself your-self into hot water. She paused and looked about the gloomy office, with its littered desk, its overflowing wastebasket, the pamphlets and catalogs and books scattered and stacked about all so typical of Professor Folsome's untidiness. un-tidiness. At the back of the desk, a confusion con-fusion of books, memoranda, pens, pencils, and bottles ,and pots of ink of various colors, was presided over by a gilded cast-iron Buddha about eight inches high. Most of the gilt was gone. He was fat, benign and rusty. A student from Siam the son of a prince had given the Buddha Bud-dha to Professor Folsome. It was, the sallow Siamese princeling had mentioned with a drolly disparaging air, a wishing Buddha from a jungle temple near Chengmei a genuine jungle wishing Buddha. Zorie Corey was a sensible girl and she took no stock in heathen idols or any of the nonsense you hear about them, but as she looked at the wishing Buddha, a curious thing happened. It began to glow. The explanation of this phenomenon phenome-non was prosaic and simple, but Zorie wasn't instantly aware of that. The glow was greenish and ghostly and it seemed to come on as if the jungle Buddha were trying to call her attention to himself and his reputation. rep-utation. What had happened was that the shifting clouds above the Fenwick Body Plant had glowed brightly for a moment in the glare from the floodlights which surrounded the buildings one of the measures being be-ing taken to discourage saboteurs and this glow had let the curving surfaces of the Siamese Buddha catch and momentarily hold a ghostly ghost-ly gleam. Even' his eyes seemed to glimmer. . "I wish ..." Zorie Corey began impetuously, and hesitated. Then she made her wish. She wished she could be whisked to a leisurely land of palms and jade-green seas, of strange flowers with intoxicating scents, of birds that left bright flames in their wake, and of delightful de-lightful people too gallant to take advantage ad-vantage of her meekness. She next wished that Paul Duncan was there with her. Then she wished that she would lose her meekness. That made a total of three wishes, and three wishes were, according to tradition, the correct number. There should be, of course, some sort of ritual. She bent down quickly quick-ly and kissed the cast-iron jungle Buddha three times on the brow, one kiss for each wish. He tasted dusty and rusty. She stepped back and gazed somewhat some-what defiantly at the Buddha, who no longer glowed, but sat there in the jungle of a fusty old English professor's desk, a dark lump in the darkness, as if, in glowing once, he had spent his magic force and would never glow again. Zorie waited and a curious tingling went along her spine. Nothing noteworthy happened. Zorie Corey did not find herself speeding through the night on a Persian Per-sian rug, nor did she feel one degree de-gree less meek. The telephone in her cubicle began be-gan to ring. She ran down the hall with her heart racing out of all proportion to the amount of exercise exer-cise she was giving it. As she ran, she pictured the man who was calling call-ing her, and the man was, curiously enough, not Paul Duncan. He was a total stranger. He was tall, bronzed and big-shouldered with merry eyes and curly hair and a big easy smile and a lazy, romantic way about him. He would say to her in a deep, resonant, cheery voice: "Miss Corey? Cor-ey? I have just been authorized to offer you an opportunity to leave Elleryton El-leryton at once and take a very interesting in-teresting journey." But the voice that responded to her breathless hello was neither deep, resonant, nor cheery. "My dear," it said, with just a hint of severity, "I thought you'd be over for these invitations ages ago. Had you forgotten?" "No, I hadn't forgotten," Zorie answered in her melodiously meek voice. "I'm just leaving." It was an unseasonal December night, rainy and warm the kind of night that might be transformed by a sudden north wind into a glitter of ice-clad trees and telephone wires. As she started along the campus, with her head bowed, as if in shame, against the drizzle, she indulged In still another wish. She wished she had had the courage to ask her Aunt Hannah for her coupe for a couple of hours. Zorie went up on the wide porch of the big old fashioned gray house where the Folsomes lived. A colored col-ored maid answered the doorbell and brought Zorie the stack of invitations invi-tations in a cellophane wrapper. Zorie was on the point of asking her if she could borrow an umbrella, but the door was quickly closed, and she decided against pressing the button again, for the maid had looked cross. She examined the invitations under un-der the porch light. They were addressed ad-dressed in Mrs. Folsome's spidery handwriting. The addresses were faculty wives and a few of the more prominent townswomen. There was no envelope addressed to Zorie Corey. Cor-ey. She went down the steps and into the rain. Less than one hundred feet from the Folsomes' front porch, on the corner, was a telephone pole to which was affixed a street light. The street light clearly illuminated two objects, a mailbox and a large trash basket on the side of which was a stencilled sign. Zorie stopped. Two temptations were tugging at her. The first w' to buy thirty two-cent stamps ai mail the invitations. The other ternr tation appealed strongly to the renegade rene-gade in her, but it was as spurious as her wish that she'd never been born. Thinking of the malicious gossip that flew around at these faculty teas, she gazed at the sign on the trash basket. KEEP YOUR TOWN CLEAN USE THIS! "How I'd love to!" she murmured. Across the street was a taxicab with the meter ticking. She was too preoccupied to notice it Yet she would remember every other detail of that night, of that moment: the sound of it, the look of it, the smell of it, the feel of it; all the little things that make a great moment so real in afterthought the rattle of the rain on the bare branches of the maple trees, the smell of the wet earth, the gleam of lighted windows on asphalt, the feel of the cold trickle of water that began to run down the back of her neck. (TO BF rOVTTNITFTll |