Cover

Femmes Fatales

The Femmes Fatales series restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-twentieth century. From mysteries to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.

Faith Baldwin

SKYSCRAPER

Vera Caspary

BEDELIA

LAURA

THE MAN WHO LOVED HIS WIFE

Gypsy Rose Lee

THE G-STRING MURDERS

MOTHER FINDS A BODY

Evelyn Piper

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

Olive Higgins Prouty

NOW, VOYAGER

STELLA DALLAS

Valerie Taylor

THE GIRLS IN 3-B

STRANGER ON LESBOS

RETURN TO LESBOS

Tereska Torrès

WOMEN’S BARRACKS

BY CECILE

Title Page

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

1

LAUREL WAS THIRTEEN years old. Her hair was the color of ripe horse-chestnuts, and had the same gloss. She wore it in a long smooth bang in front, which reached nearly to her eyebrows, and in long smooth curls behind, which reached nearly to her waist. Laurel’s mother always placed one of the curls over each shoulder after she had made them perfect by brushing and smoothing over a dexterous forefinger. Laurel always, with a quiet, almost imperceptible, little motion of her head, placed them behind as soon as her mother turned away.

Laurel’s clothes were consistent with the extreme bang and the long curls. There was never anything casual or careless about her costumes. When she appeared for breakfast in the big hotel dining-room dressed in one of her violet ginghams, smocked in seal-brown, with seal-brown stockings, and seal-brown shoes, and a seal-brown hat, she was like an Elsie DeWolfe room in the perfection of her color scheme.

She always changed for luncheon, as did her mother and most of the other smartly dressed women in the hotel, and again for dinner; and always the shoes and stockings, ribbons, hats, sweaters, and what-not harmonized with her various linens, pastel-shaded Japanese crêpes, organdies, or hand-embroidered serges for cool days.

“That Dallas woman must spend about all her time over that child’s clothes,” Laurel had one day overheard from behind the high back of one of the hotel-piazza rocking-chairs.

Laurel was sitting by an open window in an empty cardroom just behind the chairs. Laurel liked to sit and listen to what the women talked about on the other side of that high cane wall of chair-backs. Sometimes, however, she heard things that made her grave, contemplative eyes still graver and still more contemplative. There had been scorn in the voice which had referred to her mother.

I wonder, she thought, if we didn’t dress quite so well, people mightn’t be nicer.

She waited for more enlightening remarks from behind the chair-backs, but none were forthcoming, so she rose, sauntered out of the cardroom, wandered down a long deserted corridor, and drifted into the hotel foyer.