Shrines of Gaiety

Freda runs into a girl she used to go to dance school with, Cherry Ames. Cherry boasts that she’s in a play, The Co-Optimists: “Freda wondered what [Cherry] had to do to get the part in The Co-Optimists. Although she didn’t need to wonder, she knew” (447).

Freda arrives at the Sphinx, where Ramsay and Freda discover a girl unconscious in the Sphinx’s kitchen. The girl reveals that a man tried to strangle her; she survived by faking dead. The girl also reports that, while playing dead, she overhead her attacker call the police and report a murder: “I thought that’s a bit rum, blabbing against himself” (452). The attacker was Oakes, which the reader learns through the narrator, but the other characters don’t know yet. Oakes wanted to kill Freda but got the wrong girl—he reported the supposed murder (not realizing the girl was still alive) so that the police would come to the Sphinx and Nellie would get in trouble.

Frobisher arrives at the Sphinx, and he and Nellie meet officially. Nellie says that there was a mistake and there was no murder. While searching the premises, Frobisher and his men find a silver shoe—Frobisher recognizes it as the other silver shoe of Minnie.