“Thanks, no.”
“Just ask my advice if anything turns up,” Mr. Hunter said wistfully. “I can’t say that I’m much help to my own family. Joyce seems to be a very competent girl.”
“We’re supposed to be going downstairs,” Chad said. “What for, I don’t know. I was doing all right up here.”
Mr. Hunter looked mournful. “Probably Miss Seton is at the bottom of it. She’s one of these women who gets ideas and then expects other people to carry them out. The very worst type, take my word for it.”
“I will,” Chad said abruptly. “Coming?”
“I suppose I’ll have to.”
In the sitting room Mr. Hunter’s fears were realized. Isobel had taken a stance in front of the fireplace and she was looking both angry and determined. She said in the brisk voice of a woman accustomed to giving commands to horses, dogs and men:
“Are we all here?”
“Miss Morning isn’t,” said Mrs. Vista.
“She’s upstairs with Miss Rudd,” Isobel said. “Mr. Crawford and I decided...”
“You decided,” Crawford said.
“... that we had better meet to decide what we’re going to do about Floraine and how we’re going to get out of here this morning as soon as it’s light.”
“I don’t think we should worry about getting out of here,” Herbert said. “The people at the Lodge will have sent out a party looking for the bus and when they find the bus they’ll trace us here.”
“You have more confidence in people who run lodges than I have,” said Isobel coldly, “and much more confidence in the bus driver. How do we know that he was even taking us to the Lodge? How do we know he was on the right road? It seemed to me that the road was nothing more than a lane. Has anyone been to this place before?”
“I have,” Paula said. “I was here last year, but I can’t remember the road that well.”
“I think,” Isobel continued, “that he turned off the right road, that it was all part of a plan to get us here in this house.”
“To get us here?” Herbert echoed. “But that’s fantastic! I mean, why should anyone want us here? Why, we don’t even know each other.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that,” Mrs. Vista said loudly. “Here we are and we have to stand each other anyway, so I don’t think we should inquire too closely. My life is an open book, of course, but I don’t care to have it a best seller.”
“I can see I’m going to get very little cooperation,” Isobel said.
“You’re going to get none, sister,” said Crawford.
Isobel raised her eyebrows. “Mr. Crawford is an interesting case to start with. In the first place his name is not Crawford. In the second, he’s carrying a gun. In the third, he deliberately destroyed a piece of evidence that the bus driver actually came to this house.”
“You forgot the bottle of brandy,” Crawford said cheerfully. “I stole it from the kitchen.”
Isobel flushed. “You admit the other things?”
“I admit everything.”
“How Oxford-Groupish,” said Mrs. Vista. “These things get very embarrassing sometimes. I remember in London once...”
“That’s a fact about the brandy, is it?” Herbert said with interest. “I don’t suppose you’d care to pass it around?”
“Not sanitary,” said Crawford.
“Please!” Isobel shouted. “If you’re all going to launch into private conversations how are we going to decide anything? I gave Mr. Crawford as an example. He may have his reasons for this extraordinary behavior, and as far as I know it’s no crime to change your name. But the point is he could easily be the one who arranged this set-up, for all we know about him.”
“But he was the one who tried to start the bus again,” Maudie said.
“And failed,” Isobel said dryly.
“Don’t get into an argument over me, ladies,” Crawford said, grinning. “I’m not worth it.”
Chad Ross leaned forward in his chair. “Just why are you carrying a gun, Crawford?”
“I’m an international spy,” Crawford said. “And I have a license.”
“Yeah?” Chad said. “Let’s see it.”
“Come and get it,” Crawford said in a hard voice, “if you want a clip, Redhead.”
“I’ve been clipped before. It doesn’t take.”
“Please!” Isobel shouted again.
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Hunter said. “A little more attention, please. These are grave matters.”
“Oh, be quiet, Poppa,” Joyce said petulantly. “I wanted to see if he really would clip him.”
“That girl,” said Mrs. Vista, “is a troublemaker if I ever saw one. I consider clipping very vulgar myself. If there’s any to be done, kindly advise me and I shall leave the room. You too, Anthony.”
The crisis passed and Isobel was able to continue. She seemed, however, to have lost the thread of her discourse and started in on personalities.
“The difficulty is,” she said heatedly, “that you’re all too bone-selfish to care what happens to anyone else. You don’t care that two people have disappeared from this house. You don’t care what happens to Miss Rudd. You’d all walk out and leave her here with no one to look after her!”
“Oh, I wouldn’t!” said Mrs. Vista, shocked. “I’d leave Miss Morning here, too.”
“Please keep quiet. Personally, I don’t want to sit around and wait to be rescued. Mr. Hunter has found a pair of snowshoes and I think one of us should go out and get help. It’s a matter of a few miles...”
“A few miles in what direction?” Crawford said. “And don’t look at me. If you think I’m going to do penance for my life of sin by rescuing a bunch of crackpots...”
“Who’s a crackpot?” Chad said with menace.
“Oh, it’s you again, is it? You still want that clip? Or do you want to go snowshoeing?”
Isobel shouted, “As for direction, that’s easy enough. Go in the direction the bus was pointed towards.”
“Even if he was on the wrong road,” Crawford said, “that sounds fine. You have a very peculiar mind, Isobel. Your left brain lobe doesn’t know what your right brain lobe is thinking up. Let’s have no more of this tripe. Action, I don’t mind. I’ll tear up floorboards and crawl down drainpipes looking for Floraine, but no snowshoes.”
“Well, why don’t you suggest something?” Isobel cried.
“As much as I’d like to get away from the all-too-familiar pans which surround me, I can make only one concrete suggestion. Breakfast.”
“We haven’t settled anything yet!” Isobel said, but Crawford’s suggestion was too near to the hearts of the others and Isobel found herself without supporters.
There was a general exodus to the kitchen. Mr. Hunter stayed behind to comfort Isobel.
“I think everything you said was perfectly right,” he said, giving her shoulder a timid pat.
“Well, everything I said wasn’t perfectly right,” Isobel said crossly.
“All the more reason why you should be flattered,” Mr. Hunter said with an enigmatic look, and followed the rest of them out the door. Isobel arrived in the kitchen in time to hear the news that the stove was an electric one and wouldn’t work.
There was, however, a small battered-looking wood range which Herbert volunteered to light. The question of what to cook and who was to cook it turned out to be a delicate one. All of the ladies present claimed to be at a complete loss in a kitchen, with Joyce going them one better and insisting she had never even seen a kitchen before.
Mr. Hunter was considerably agitated and said, “Tut, tut. Surely we must have one womanly woman in the group.”
He looked at Isobel, who returned the look well laced with vinegar.
“Anyone can make toast or something,” he said anxiously.
“I can’t,” Isobel said firmly.