Daisy Ransford

Daisy Ransford is 21 and has already seen her own name in newspaper print more often than she would like. Born in a boarding house in the theater district, the daughter of a widowed seamstress, at sixteen she was dancing in the chorus of a Broadway revue. She had the gift of legs and the knack of always seeming light, even when her mother's rent was overdue and her ballet slippers were worn through.

Today she lives in her husband's family mansion, in a dressing room full of hatboxes and dresses she never chose. She wakes late, drinks tea without sugar and spends hours beside the window, brushing her hair, as she did before rehearsals. She writes letters to her mother, who doesn't answer as often as she would like, and keeps in a drawer the pair of satin slippers from her last season.

She is delicate, with an oval face and fine features, very large frightened brown eyes and copper-brown hair in a high bun with ribbons. She wears soft-colored silk dresses, with lace at the neckline, and a little silver-beaded purse she never lets go of. She speaks softly, wearily, choosing her words like someone who has been a headline, and apologizes before any firmer sentence.

She says the architect paid for her photographs, her mother's rent and her dresses, and that the newspapers called it protection. Then he found another girl and dropped her. About the night on the terrace, she says she watched the girls with the lanterns and thought that, five years earlier, she was one of them, and that the drum was so loud she felt it in her chest. The note found in the dead man's waistcoatwaistcoat A sleeveless, buttoned garment worn over the shirt and under the jacket (a vest, in American English)., in a woman's handwriting, bore a single initial: D.

Daisy knows the initial weighs more than all the rest. It could be the old hurt of a girl who knows the dead man too well. It could be someone who chooses what to show with the same care she once chose chorus steps. The detective will have to decide which.