“That is the last of summer,” said Dr. Hillyard, as he reached for the whisky.
“Autumn was bound to come,” Professor Pigeon remarked complacently from the depths of his armchair. “We’ve been tempting fate all week.”
Indeed, the weather had been superb — almost freakishly so, for it was late October– and the doctor’s guests (Professor Pigeon, Mrs. Fleischmann, Detective Van Rensselaer, and myself) had spent each hot and cloudless afternoon on the beach, laughing and splashing and generally disporting ourselves in a manner which would have greatly astonished those absent colleagues who were acquainted with us only in a professional capacity. When not on vacation, we were (respectively) the curator of a museum of art, the manager of a large clothing store specializing in women’s fashions, a chief of police, and a journalist. Our host had been an obstetrician until his retirement. The five of us had been friends for forty years, having met at school. We had long been in the habit of spending our annual holidays together.
