Murder in Little Egypt by Darcy O'Brien Read Free Book Online Page A

regarding him with spaniel eyes. Even Noma, while she remained cool toward Helen Jean, deferred to him.
    Pressed as he was by his studies and by being president of his fraternity, Dale found time to take Helen Jean to movies and sporting events. They saw a lot of another couple: Chet Williams, a medical classmate, and Marian Newberry, a nurse at Barnes who was a lot of fun. The four of them took weekend excursions together, picnics in the countryside, drives over to Champaign-Urbana to watch the Fighting Illini play football. Chet and Marian were not serious about one another; she had dates with other fellows, too. Sometimes Chet would come over to share pizza and a couple of beers with the Cavanesses by himself. Dale considered Chet one of his best friends.

    * * *
    One afternoon in June of 1950, Marian Newberry was working at her station in Chest Service at Barnes when Dale dropped by to chat. Dale asked her whether she would be interested in a blind date for next Saturday night.
    “Oh, gee,” Marian said, “no, thanks, Dale. Blind dates just aren’t my cup of tea.”
    “You’d like this guy,” Dale said.
    “What’s his name?”
    “Elad Senavac.”
    “What?”
    “Name’s Elad Senavac.”
    “My God, what kind of a name is that?”
    “Don’t worry. You’ll really like this guy.”
    “I’ll let you know,” Marian said. “Let me think about it.”
    That evening Marian telephoned Helen Jean to find out about this mysterious stranger. If he was a medical student, Marian could not imagine why she had never heard of him. With a name like that he would stand out.
    “Who is this Elad Senavac?” Marian asked. “Dale dropped by today and asked whether I’d like a blind date with this guy. Is he a friend of yours or something?”
    “Marian, I think Dale means himself,” Helen Jean said.
    Marian felt like an idiot, not having caught on to Dale Cavaness spelled backward. What was all this about? One of Dale’s jokes, she supposed. He was always kidding around.
    “We’re separated,” Helen Jean said. “Dale and I are no longer living together.”
    Marian could only mumble that she was sorry. She hadn’t heard the news. She hoped the Cavanesses would reconcile soon.
    “I doubt it,” Helen Jean said.
    Marian had not seen the Cavanesses for about a month, and she had had no inkling of troubles between them. She had thought them well-matched and had never noticed signs of friction. Helen Jean was not as jovial as Dale, but her relative quietness and seriousness had seemed to complement his constant joking. Marian thought that it was typical of Dale to have asked her out in the form of a joke—one that had misfired under the circumstances. She had no intention of accepting a date with him. She had never thought of him as anything but Helen Jean’s husband: The two might be separated now, but they could get back together, and in that case, Marian knew, she would be caught in the middle and lose both of them as friends. She thought it was foolish of Dale to have asked her out.
    But when Dale telephoned Marian, he apologized:
    “I know I didn’t handle that very well,” he said. “I’m pretty upset. I’m not myself. Let’s get together and I’ll tell you what happened.”
    Marian Rose Newberry had grown up in the Webster Groves and Kirkwood sections of St. Louis, pleasant middle-class districts first settled in the 1850s and resembling small midwestern towns, with broad, tree-shaded lawns, big brick houses, white churches, and tidy little stores with colorful awnings. Her father had been a paperhanger, an amiable man but a heavy drinker whom her mother divorced in 1929, when Marian was only a year and a half old and her brother, Bill, five. Her mother received neither alimony nor child support from Harry Newberry—it would have been futile to ask; he was always broke—and she supported herself and her children by working as a housekeeper for a high school Latin teacher.
    Marian’s mother had started