EVERYBODY knew Fred and liked him. Liked Dorothy too. It was almost time for her baby to come, and at least a dozen women I knew were knitting an afghan for it. Not Fred. There must be some mistake. He had been at the club for five years or so, and his sturdy figure and old cap were as familiar to us as the water hazard at the eighth hole, or as the very greens he watched so carefully. Tony Rutherford brought me the news. He had been at the club when it happened, and he looked more indignant than I had ever seen him. “It’s an outrage,” he said. “These county policemen! What do they know? Why on earth pick on Fred? I doubt if he ever saw Juliette, and as for the Jordan woman—” He merely voiced the resentment of the entire colony. Yet it had its advantages, that arrest of Fred Martin; at least so far as we were concerned. It was obvious that if Fred was guilty Arthur was innocent, and the result was that almost the entire summer colony, by ones and twos, dropped in for tea that afternoon.
