The Father Hunt

As for her background, he knew she had come from Wisconsin, some small town near Milwaukee, and that was all. He didn't know how long she had been hi New York, or where she had gone to school, or how she had got the job with Mrs. Jarrett.

So much for her entrance. Where he flunked worst was on her exit. Since starting with Mrs. Jarrett she had lived there, town and country; and in the early spring of 1944, he thought late in March, she suddenly wasn't there, but she might still have been doing something for Jarrett because she came to the house three or four times in the

next six or seven months. The last time he saw her was in late September or early October 1944, when she spent part of an evening with Jarrett in the library.

Exit. Curtain.

He wasn't much more helpful on relationships. He had liked her and admired her, and he thought she had liked him, but he had been married just the year before, at the age of thirty, and his first son had just been born, so his intimate concerns were elsewhere. He remembered vaguely that he had got the idea that something might be developing between her and Jarrett's son Eugene, who was twenty years old in 1944, but he recalled no specific incidents. On her relations with Jarrett himself, he had an internal tussle that was so apparent that I had one too, to keep from grinning. Of course he knew from Ballou what we expected to get on Jarrett, and he would have loved to help by supplying some good salty evidence, but he had been born either too honest or too shy on invention. He rang the changes on what was obvious, that Jarrett and Carlotta were alone together a lot, but when he tried to remember that he had seen things that had made him suspect that Carlotta's services weren't exclusively secretarial, he couldn't make it.

That's what my memory took home for me. I accompanied him on the short walk back to bis job, for a look at the main office of the Seaboard Bank and Trust Company from the outside, thanked him for the lunch, and spent ten minutes on the toughest job in New York, finding a vacant hack. I finally beat a guy with a limp to one. When it rolled to a stop in front of the old brown-stone at twenty minutes to three, I had arranged in my mind a draft all ready for the typewriter. As follows:

CARLOTTA VAUGHN RESUME

from Bertram McCray, August 24, 1967

Up to May 1942

Not known, but according to her via McCray, somewhere in Wisconsin for most of it.

May 1942, to November 1943

Mrs. Jarrett's secretary. Lived there.