The unfamiliar “Wilhelmina” scrawled across the page had made her heart give a sharp jump of apprehension. Grace had almost forgotten about it until the letter from Stockholm had arrived. It was a fanciful schoolgirl arrangement that they hadn’t used for years.

Thus, a secret cry for help could be made. When they were in their teens and had been sent to different boarding schools, Grace and Willa had made a pact that if Willa were in trouble (it was never suggested that Grace might be in trouble), she would sign her full name, the old-fashioned Wilhelmina which she hated, to a letter.

Yet there is simply no other way…Īnd there was the crux of the matter. I’ve made a decision, but I’m not sure if it’s the right one. Don’t say, doesn’t it always, because this one is different. I must tell you that a situation has developed. That was why, after reading her apparently happy letter, Grace had felt the shock of the last brief paragraph Īll the same. Though only Grace knew the tension that lay beneath Willa’s gaiety and her uniform of eccentric hair styles and daring clothes. She was very different from herself, Grace thought, with her sober ways. Willa, with her skinny body and sharp eager face, had always wanted to be larger than life, so she made all the events with which she was associated subjects of exaggerated importance. The people she had met, the parties she had been to, the kind of food the Swedes ate, even the weather-it was all treated with drama. The first page was Willa’s account of life in Stockholm written in her usual compulsive way. In any case Grace almost knew it by heart. It was too late to read Willa’s letter again. THE SOMBER SWEDISH COUNTRYSIDE tipped beneath the wings of the plane, endless spruce forests lighted at intervals by autumn-tinted birches, outcrops of rocks like bare bones, small dark-red houses that looked as if they had been dropped haphazardly into the forest.

Waiting for willa by dorothy eden