Black Widow [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONE I met Nanny Ordway at one of Lottie Marin's parties. It was a very ordinary beginning for an episode that dragged us all into disaster. My wife had taken her mother to Jamaica to recover from a gall-bladder operation, and I had too much work on hand to go with them. That same day, around midnight after the show, Lottie Marin called from upstairs. "Come on up, Peter. There's a party." I didn't want to go to a party or to encourage Lottie Marin's obvious determination to organize me as a grass-widower. But I was missing Iris, and the apartment, which reminded me of her at every turn, wasn't helping. I thought: I might as well go up just for a while. So I went. Lottie's apartment, which was immediately above our own, was full of assorted guests, the way it always was on Saturday nights. I didn't notice Nanny Ordway for quite a while. She wasn't at all a conspicuous person. "Peter, darling!" Lottie came to the door for me herself. "I knew you'd be lonely. I knew you'd just be sitting there moping for Iris." Lottie and I had known each other around the Theater for years. But recently, since she and her husband had become our neighbors and I had produced and directed her latest show, Star Rising, she had developed one of her sudden and celebrated infatuations for Iris and myself. Most people in the Theater, although Lottie was a great star and a world-wide celebrity, avoided intimacy with her because she was nosy, bossy and insufferably demanding. But Iris and I had put up with her bullying crush not only because I had to work with her but because we were both, in a funny way, fond of her. She was a bitch and a bore, but she didn't mean to be. She