The mink farm, Sarah was thinking with sudden attention. Although it wasn’t visible from here and there was apparently no interchange between the two houses, it was a thread that appeared with surprising constancy in the pattern of these people’s lives. Miss Braceway had died there. One of the minks had killed a black-throated Golden cock. And here tonight was Peck, ex-employee . . .
She said with a lift of excitement, “Who owns the mink farm?”
“People named Hopkins,” said Evelyn, quashing this possibility, but Sarah had met her gaze first and the letdown —Hopkins, not Reeves or Elliot—was lost in shock.
What a vast mistake it had been to be sorry for Evelyn, or even to dismiss her as a long-playing bore. Somewhere, thought Sarah, seeing the shrewd cold eyes for the first time, Evelyn was keeping a list of just such people, and it seemed entirely possible for a second that she would pay them all back.
But then Evelyn said in one of her random rushes, “This friend I was telling you about has the most awful trouble with her hands, too. She tried everything, and do you know what the doctor finally told her? He said . . .” and Sarah thought that she must have been mistaken after all.
She went early to bed, up the twisting back stair that led out of the dining room.
Bess had known where to stop, aesthetically and financially, when it came to this region of the house, a long narrow steeply peaked room that overran the dining room and kitchen. It had been whitewashed, and the one end window curtained in blue, but there was no attempt to hide the chimney that thrust up in the middle of it, nor the cob-webbed chests and trunks piled at the far end near the arching door that opened onto the barn loft.
The habitable end, on the near side of the chimney, held a bed, night table and lamp, braided rug, and a pine bureau, beautifully waxed under a shadowy mirror. Sarah’s bags stood at the foot of the bed, along with the portable heater Hunter had plugged in when he brought them up.
Sarah turned the heater off, got into nightgown and robe, and went cautiously through the connecting door into the guest room. As Bess had said, the furniture was piled and wallpaper lay about in great curls on the floor. The bath that went with it was intact and she brushed her teeth, washed her pale unfamiliar face and went to bed.
Charles’s bed. But then, as she knew, a great deal of juggling went on at the farm in the way of sleeping quarters —the living room couch opened up, so did the one in the study beyond—and it was possible that Miss Braceway had slept here during her tenure. Must have, because what was now the guest room had once been occupied by Charles’s stepmother.
And what had her maiden name been?
Sarah’s mind started in its grim circle again, but the blankets were warm, the sheets had a dried-in-the-wind fragrance. The sleet had stopped, and so had the house sounds below her. Imperceptibly, she went to sleep.
In what seemed a wink she was awake again, heart hammering; for one ghastly instant she expected to hear Charles cry out in the clenching grip of nightmare. But what her groping senses strained out of the darkness was quite different: a curious ripping sound, a soft plop, the creak of a board. All in the room with her, quite near, and all, she realized, long moments ago; it had taken awareness that interval to break through the barrier of sleep.
“Yes?” she said with the boldness of fright, and then, “Who is it?” and sat up with a deliberate thrashing of sheets before she reached for the light switch. It took courage to press it because who knew, in this room where Charles had slept, what sly shadow might be cast upon the wall by someone just out of sight, someone just around the corner of understanding?
But there was no other presence, and no shadow except her own when she made herself get out of bed and look behind the chimney. Nor was there any sound other than the contact of her bare feet with the floor planks. The very stillness had a difficult quality, as though whoever had been here was now standing somewhere else, breath held, listening as she listened.
Sarah broke out of her own rigidity. Nothing could have made her walk the length of the room to the loft door, swallowed in darkness; it was probably unlocked but she was going to get out of here right away. She put on robe and slippers and turned to see what it was that had waked her.
The plop had been her handbag, on the bureau when she switched off her lamp, now on the floor. A mouse might conceivably have done that, but a mouse could not have opened Bess’s alligator travelling case and investigated the watermelon silk lining with such violence that the shirring was torn in one place. Sarah stood staring blankly down at it, and it was a measure of her own shock that she only wondered how she was going to explain the damage to Bess.
Tiptoeing, she went down the small stair, through the black dining room and into the living room, the core of this sprawling house. The lamp she found by touch rocked noisily on its base but it went on, summoning up a chair and a dwindling funnel of red oriental rug, the arched shadows of the pheasant feathers above the doorway, the mantel clock that said ten after two. The black windows, surprised into color again, twinkled serenely back at her.
Sarah left the lamp on and stretched herself out on the couch, trying vainly to find a comfortable place for her head. With physical fright gone, and the primitive reaction to having been approached unaware, she began to wonder why whoever had wanted something from her handbag or luggage had waited until that inconvenient hour. After all, there had been all evening—
But there hadn’t. Hunter had started to take her bags upstairs shortly after she was in the house, but Bess had asked him to make cocktails and the bags had stood at the foot of the stairs until just before she went up to bed. After cocktails and dinner she had been in the kitchen with Evelyn, and from the sink you could look directly past the jog that contained Milo’s crow and across the dining room to the stairway door. It would have been an awkward place to get at.
And what had she said to Bess, after the first greetings were over? “I remembered your case, and the watch . . .” But Hunter had carried the case upstairs with her things— not knowing it was his mother’s? Or politely waiting for Sarah to turn it over?
Whoever it was had wanted something of Charles’s, and had thought it might be in the case. Sarah was as sure of that as she was of her own rapidly stiffening neck. Whatever else these people might be they weren’t thieves, after her wallet or whatever jewelry she might own. Unless . . . Peck?
But a man who had just been released after being held on suspicion of murder would hardly risk recapture for theft, particularly on such a dubious quest. It was too bad, because Peck’s villainous face made him such a believable scapegoat.
Sarah removed herself to a chair, tucked her robe around her cold ankles, and composed herself to remember what odds and ends of Charles’s she might have included in her packing. Because something of his was bothering somebody here, and it wasn’t anything that could be asked for openly, like the handed-down watch. . . .
The crowing of the Silkie rooster, a gunshot to city ears, woke her when the living room was turning an icy blue. She switched off the now-diminished lamp and went, stiff with cold and discomfort and sleepiness, back up to the attic room and to bed.
Milo had killed a mink during the night.
It was a matter of great triumph to everybody, and Sarah viewed the stiff caramel corpse with the rest. She had no compassion for the mink, which was only an expensive rodent and would have died by cyanide gas anyway, but she flinched from the exhibition of the short heavy stick Milo had used. There was blood on the end; she supposed that a closer examination, which Bess seemed quite willing to make, would reveal a few short hairs.
From his pride and his countless retelling of the details, Milo might have slain a sabre-toothed tiger, Sarah thought. He had been waked in the night by toothache—here he exhibited a molar to anyone who cared to look—and he had gone downstairs for some brandy to rinse it with. He didn’t know what had made him think about the prowling mink of a few nights before, but as he was wakeful anyway he had th
rown on a coat and gone out into the barn, picking up on his way the flashlight that was kept in the passage. He had no thought of going outside, not with his toothache in the bitter cold, but three of the pheasant pens opened off the stable.
And there was the mink. Sarah had not thought of Milo as a gifted teller of tales, but when he waggled his soft plump hands the mink came alive, supple, almost rippling, trying to slip through the wire mesh that protected the pheasants. It had been so intent in its greed, or perhaps so mesmerized by the flashlight beam, that not even the noise of Milo’s approach had diverted it from the appetizing cock-pale gold satin with a black-masked white face—that roosted docilely only a few feet away.
“Whango,” said Milo, hefting the stick, and that was when Sarah turned her head away, saying, “What time was this?”
They all looked at her as attentively as though the mink had spoken. “Twoish,” said Milo, sliding his glasses down his nose and looking at her over them. “Were you awake in your bower, Sarah? I wish I’d known; you could have held the flashlight for me.”
But Sarah had had time to think, and to realize that any mention of what had happened in the night would make her position here completely untenable—and was that, just possibly, the point? She said indifferently, “Not really awake, but I had a notion I’d heard something.”
Which one of them had moved secretly about her room and knew she was lying? Bess had turned away and was feeding lettuce to a sweet-faced brownish hen which, unlike the violently snatching Silvers and the dartingly shy Japanese Coppers, took the morsels gently from her fingers. Evelyn was looking at the dead mink thoughtfully, as though measuring it for a scarf; Milo, seeing that the general interest had flagged a little, gazed around at them all and stood his stick in a corner of the stable. Hunter, hatted and coated for his morning departure for Boston and looking almost military among the rest of them, took a step toward the car, nodded back at the mink, and said in a clipped voice, “You don’t suppose Peck’s letting them out, to get back at Hopkins?”
There was a shocked silence as he left, and a few little curls of gray on the icy air as mouths opened involuntarily. Then Bess said violently, “Peck would never—besides, he’s a country man and he’d know exactly where the mink would—”
The second argument was no more convincing than the first; in fact, it was disastrously less so. It outlined an almost classic scheme of revenge, Sarah thought: letting one person’s mink loose to kill another’s pheasants. Everybody lost, because the bludgeoned mink pelt would hardly be salable and even if it had not savaged the pheasant Bess Gideon would have eaten a neighbor sooner than one of her own beautiful birds.
Peck might harbor a grudge against Hopkins because he had been fired from the mink farm; Sarah turned her mind wilfully away from the one thing he might want to pay the Gideons back for. She was relieved when Kate Clemence arrived to borrow some sugar.
Kate had looked smart but ill at ease in New York; here in her own setting she had regained her magnificent, cope-with-anything calm. She was tall, and she ought to have looked masculine and muscular in the man’s beige weatherproof parka, its hood up to show only an uneven fringe of black hair, but she didn’t. It was a tribute to her that they were all diverted from the unpleasant notion that still hung on the air.
She greeted Sarah with a politeness that might have passed for warmth if nobody was listening. She said to Bess when she asked for the sugar, “I could do very nicely without it, but”—she grimaced out of what seemed to be habit— “you know Rob.” Rob was evidently the brother Charles had mentioned, and well known to the Gideons, although Sarah had never seen him. “What are you all standing around and freezing for?”
The mink was exhibited, and Milo’s tale retold. Kate said with unflattering surprise, “Well, good for you, Milo!” and Milo answered modestly, “Oh, come, I’m not all brain.”
“You’ll have coffee, won’t you, Kate? Even Rob can wait five minutes. But first come and see my Manchurians, although they won’t have settled down yet; I only got them yesterday . . .You haven’t seen them either, Sarah,” said Bess, and in spite of the afterthought quality of the invitation Sarah went with them.
The stable had been shadowed, and the silver-polished morning broke upon her like a wave of sound. After the night of freezing rain and sleet, light lay along every twig of every tree, gates and pens were glittering, the grass shattered crisply underfoot. The pheasants, unperturbed by the cold, made patterns of warmth and motion as they began to pace at the sight of Bess.
The blue-eared Manchurians were in the end pen of the row against the pines. Sarah thought at once that every other hen on the place must be hating this one, because instead of the usual quiet variations of brown she wore her mate’s soft slate blue, arced with white at the sides of the head. Only his spurs set the cock apart. They were dowager-like birds, moving with calm slow dignity.
“Aren’t they lovely?” said Bess pleasedly. The water in the rimmed holder had frozen lightly although she had put it out less than an hour ago. She opened the door of the pen and broke the film of ice with a gloved finger. The Manchurians retreated a little, but without haste. “I’m not sure about this end spot for them,” Bess said, frowning as she closed the door. “The man I bought them from had them more enclosed.”
Kate considered. “You could put up pliofilm. Or you could move the Reeves.”
Bess laughed dryly. “You could move the Reeves, thank you. Frightful-tempered things. I only got them because I wanted something that came into color the first year.”
Unnoticed, Sarah went back into the house. Evelyn had made fresh coffee and was setting out cups and saucers; she said over her shoulder, “Kate’s coming in, isn’t she?”
“Yes, in a minute. They’re looking at the Manchurians.” How peculiar her voice sounded, but then it had to filter through the wild amusement that filled her head. “Evelyn, has Bess any Elliots?”
“Now there’s the sugar Kate wants . . . Elliots? Yes, those kind of dark gold ones in the stable. You didn’t get chilled out there, did you, Sarah?”
Reeves and Elliot. Not menacing figures in some hidden segment of Charles’s life, when he wrote down their names on that last day, but pheasants on a farm two hundred and fifty miles away.
viii
IT WAS MID-MORNING before Sarah got an opportunity to give Bess the travelling case and gold watch.
She had sewn the tear in the shirred lining of the case, managing with a great deal of difficulty to get the dangling pink thread through a needle, and although the repair job was far from expert it wasn’t noticeable at a casual glance. Then, because it occurred to her that someone might have thought she would put the gold watch in the suitcase, to be handed over in one gesture to Bess, she took the watch from a compartment in her handbag and opened the back. It shone emptily at her, and although there was another inner casing, that was empty too. She supposed that she ought to have felt ridiculous even in looking, but she did not.
Bess said, “Thanks so much, Sarah; the travelling case was a birthday present from Charles last year. You’re absolutely sure you don’t mind about the watch? It’s one of those foolish family things but I suppose we ought to keep up tradition and hand it on to Hunter.”
Who looks, said Sarah silently, like not having anybody to hand it on to after him. Why? He would be attractive to women, with those cool eyes in the weathered face, and further enhanced by his very inaccessibility, like a fruit at the top of a thorny tree.
They were upstairs in Bess’s room, at her suggestion; she was clearly creating the opportunity for a talk to settle the future ownership of the farm. Not surprisingly, it was a brisk and almost austere room, requiring a minimum of care. The books in a neat student-like pile on the bedside table seemed to be mostly about game birds in captivity. The only wall decoration was a Currier and Ives print of a quail with her progeny, entitled “The Cares of a Family.”
“This is all quite difficult, isn’t it?” said Bes
s with an air of candor. “Talking business like this—but then it does have to be talked about. What do you think about the price for the place?”
Two could play at candor, and Sarah, at the agency, had learned to smile when she was bubbling with rage, look enthralled while smothered yawns were forcing tears to her eyes, use, straight-facedly, the terms to which advertising conversation had been reduced. She said, “I’m being foolish, I know, but it’s just that Charles loved this place so . . . I’m all for things going on just as they have been, but if you won’t have that, couldn’t we arrive at a rent?”
“Charles did love the farm, yes. As—if I can say this without being offensive—a visitor. It was always very comfortable for him when he came here, and I don’t imagine it occurred to him how many wheels went around to make it that way. Under normal circumstances he would have outlived me, and so the question never came up, but I’m quite sure he would have wanted me to have the farm.”
Was it the total arrogance it seemed? Perhaps not. Sarah said with a rueful air, “When I make my will I’m going to have everything perfectly clear in it, to cover all eventualities.”
Bess was far too self-controlled to react to that. “I only broach it at all because, of course, you would never want to live here.”
“Probably not. Somehow or other I haven’t been able to make plans yet.”
“You’ll marry again,” said Bess in a tone of certainty. “Perhaps that sounds shocking now but you’re only— twenty-four, twenty-five? Of course you will. But after all you only got here last night, so let’s shelve all this until you’ve had a little more time to get your bearings. Oh, and wasn’t there something else you wanted to talk to me about?”
Sarah had had time to think about this answer. She looked at her hands for a long moment of silence before she said, “Charles was going to a psychiatrist before he died.” (Odd that Hunter was the only one who had ever said bluntly, “killed himself.” The rest of them skirted the issue, as though Charles had had a respectable disease and the very best of attention at the end.)
So Dies the Dreamer Page 6
