The Silken Web — Miriam Lynch

Night Walk…

They body lay sprawled in the sand at the foot of the veranda stairs of the Mirarosa Beach Manor, stiffening fingers clutching a handkerchief with the initials “M M,” -- her initials, Monica Merrill thought, dazed, but not her handkerchief. She recognized the man through she didn't know him. She had seen her Aunt Kitty quarreling with him…was it only that morning? It seemed like days since Monica had arrived at the hotel, running from a broken romance, turning to her favorite aunt for comfort. But instead of a warm, sympathetic welcome, she had been greeted with a look of panic and “Why have you come?” from a Kitty she hardly recognized. Not a pretty, merry widow but a haggard wreck. A woman afraid…but afraid of what? Of him, Monica wondered, looking down at the body? And then she made her mistake. She reached for the handkerchief with her initials -- and sprang a murderer's trap…


Monica Merrill had realized that her sudden arrival in Florida would be a surprise to her aunt, but nothing could have prepared her for the abject horror that crossed Kitty Fowler's face when Monica entered the lobby of the Mirarosa Beach Manor that Christmas Day -- as nothing could have convinced her that a woman could age as drastically in five years as Kitty did.

In the confusion and heartbreak following a broken romance, Monica had fled New York, to this aunt, her only relative; but she saw now that it had been a mistake. This was a Kitty she had never known, a haggard, shrill woman who shied from the niece who had once been so dear to her.

Puzzled and lonely, Monica headed for a Christmas night walk -- and discovered the body of a man at the Mirarosa Beach Manor. He was familiar -- Kitty had been arguing bitterly with him when Monica arrived that morning -- even as the whole scene before her now, the body at the bottom of a flight of stairs, was one she had witnessed only minutes before in an old-time murder movie on television. And who was M. M? Fascinated, Monica had picked up the woman's handkerchief that had fluttered from the dead man's hand -- an old-fashioned chiffon handkerchief that bore the initials, the same was Monica's own.

Thus was lovely Monica caught up in a silken, insidious web, for in fear she thrust the handkerchief into her skirt pocket -- fear for herself because of those damning initials, and for the aunt whose unpleasant dealings with this man could implicate her in his death.