The Wrong Woman

A celebrated cellist’s townhouse hums with Brahms, yet beneath the parquet civility a tinderbox of desire smolders: Doris Marshall, porcelain heiress to her father’s gilded name, is pledged to Franklyn White, a man whose affection calcifies the instant Viola Sherwin—ward, will-o’-the-wisp, and unclaimed constellation—drifts through the music room. Viola, allergic to possession, escapes to Philadelphia’s ink-stained newsrooms, where Harold Foster, a rake in reporter’s garb, beguiles her into a clandestine matrimony that feels more like a dare than a vow. Months later, Harold—now sporting his mother’s diamonds and the ennui of the over-privileged—waltzes back into Manhattan’s most phosphorescent ball, instantly betrothed to Doris, ignorance squared. Viola, unwilling to let innocence be devoured by chandeliers and lies, crashes the Barrett mansion; a pistol barks, Harold collapses like a marionette with severed strings, and Viola stands cruciform in the smoke. Yet the twist is baroque: Peter Barrett, haunted by the specter of his wife Lauretta—another casualty of Harold’s serial seduction—claims the murder, exorcising both guilt and narrative expectation. The bullet, meant for a ghost, liberates the living: Viola walks into foggy dawn, Doris and Franklyn rekindle a love scrubbed clean of artifice, and the city’s nocturne resumes, indifferent.