Hours to Kill

by Ursula Curtiss

  “What girl?” Like all conversations with Hilary, it demanded infinite patience—and half the time Hilary was only talking to set up a screen against doing something like picking up her coat.

  “A girl at the movies. She asked me where I lived and I said Mrs. Foale’s house and she said Mrs. Foale heralded money.”

  Inherited, she must mean—but what an odd, unchildlike thing to confide about someone. It was a parroting of something an elder had said, of course, but still. . .

  Margaret must have spoken the key word aloud, because Hilary said alertly, “Like Cornelia?”

  “Like . . . ? Yes, I suppose so.”

  “How much did Cornelia inherit? It’s not polite to ask,” said Hilary, answering herself rapidly in a mimicking, mincing voice.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Margaret rather shortly. She knew it was natural, but she could not help being repelled by the interest in Hilary’s sharp yellowish eyes—prepared to admire Cornelia if it were a lot of money, and despise her if it were not. She wondered as she started for the kitchen how the child knew anything about Cornelia’s inheritance—and behind her, pursuingly, Hilary’s voice said, “How come you didn’t inherit money?”

  “I never picked up my coat,” said Margaret.

  But she went on wondering while she put potatoes in to bake, took frozen vegetables out of the refrigerator, swept up some cereal Hilary had poked under the radiator. Something Philip had said, probably; it would be very unlike Cornelia to have mentioned the money after her first glad astonishment. Philip, on the other hand, would have been self-conscious about it even though he and Cornelia were in the midst of wedding arrangements when the lawyer’s letter came.

  Miss Wilma Trumbull, of Torrington, Connecticut, had left her estate to her second cousin, Cornelia Ann Russell. After taxes, the estate was an estimated fifty thousand dollars.

  It was one of those thunderbolts which usually hit someone else and are duly chronicled in the newspapers, and Cornelia and Margaret sat up a good part of the night marvelling at it. Wilma Trumbull, a dour woman in her late seventies, was almost unknown to both of them except for a weekend they had spent with her once on their way to summer camp, Cornelia thirteen then and Margaret nine. They had both sent dutiful notes on arrival, but Cornelia had followed hers with a woven grass basket which was her group’s current project. A note complimenting her on her industry came back, and Cornelia was spurred to send a mutilated piece of leather handicraft at the end of the summer. This went unacknowledged, but after that birthday cards came regularly, and then the traditional graduation watch.

  There was certainly nothing to suggest that Miss Trumbull would make Cornelia her legatee, or even that she had a fraction of that amount to leave. In fact she had had, both sisters remembered, the air of a woman who would devote her savings to a home for aged canaries.

  . . . But how foolish, thought Margaret now, to have mentioned the inheritance in Hilary’s hearing. She didn’t know why it should seem so dismaying, but it did.

  The last streaks of a flame-and-lemon sunset dropped into darkness and a chilly wind sprang up. Margaret couldn’t hear it because of the muffling adobe, but it thrust at her through the tall windowframes over the sink and sent a suspended bird mobile into circles, vivid wings dipping and turning eerily in the silent kitchen. Mrs. Foale obviously did not believe in weather-stripping—and how quiet Hilary was, somewhere in the house.

  Margaret started to call, inquiringly, and thought better of it. On tiptoe—the worst of children was that sooner or later they reduced you to their own terms—she went in search of Hilary.

  She wasn’t in the library, nor in the huge light-pooled living room. Of course; the scrapbook. Although the hall was dark, because the bulb had blown and the ceiling was so high it would take a human fly to replace it, a line of gold showed under Hilary’s door. Margaret wrestled with her conscience so briefly that it could hardly be called wrestling and opened the door without knocking.

  Hilary, seated at the table with her scrapbook, jumped visibly, closed the book with a snap, pushed back her rocker and turned to face Margaret. Her face was flushed, her eyes bright. “Is dinner ready?”

  “No, but it won’t be long. Working on your scrapbook?”

  “Yes,” said Hilary, walking rapidly away from it. “Shall I set the table?”

  “If you like. What do you collect pictures of?” asked Margaret lightly, trying and failing to sound like a fellow scrapbook-keeper.

  “Oh, things,” said Hilary, and there was no doubt about it; she could not get herself and Margaret out of the room fast enough. And her flushed cheeks, her unnaturally brilliant eyes . . . Margaret’s uneasily roving gaze lit on the bed, lumpy again, as though the mattress led some bumbling life of its own. She said firmly, “Whatever you collect, you mustn’t cut anything out of Mrs. Foale’s magazines.” A horrifying thought struck her. “Or books. Hilary, you haven’t touched anything of Mrs. Foale’s, have you?”

  Hilary was already down the hall. She said over her shoulder with dignity, “I have my own magazines. Cornelia bought them for me,” and Margaret could not help admiring the adult quality of the evasion.

  She must, she thought as she followed, get over her own ridiculous obsession about Mrs. Foale’s privacy. People who rented furnished houses to total strangers always undertook a certain amount of risk, not only of cigarette burns and liquor rings but of rampant curiosity. Presumably they locked up, along with their silver and other valuables, bank statements, income tax records, everything in the personal area of their lives. If they didn’t, they should. Certainly people with dangerous secrets did not rent houses at all. (Where had that unpleasant adjective come from?) Walking briskly, Margaret went into the kitchen to put on the chops.

  That done, she fixed her own drink and Hilary’s ceremonial tomato juice, which they always had just before dinner in the library—but Hilary said instantly, “Can’t we have it in here tonight?” and gave a theatrical shudder. “It’s freezing in there.”

  “Is it? All right,” said Margaret amiably. Hilary had taken something out of the library, then, or disarranged the shelves, and she had probably secreted whatever it was she found under her mattress, or moved it hastily from there to her scrapbook. Suppose, just possibly, she had matches?—although she was much too complicated for mere arson.

  They had dinner and, after the dishes, a game of checkers which Hilary won handily. She offered to play again but Margaret glanced at the clock and was firm. “Time for your bath. In fact, you ought to be in it by now.”

  Hilary was spinsterish about her bath. She collected her pajamas and robe and powder mitt before she even began to run it, and although Margaret insisted that the door be unlocked while she was actually in the tub, it was locked for long fussy intervals before and after. As Hilary got up to leave the room, Margaret opened her book and reached abstractedly for a cigarette; two minutes later, with the water rushing behind the bathroom door, she was in Hilary’s room.

  The mattress had been hastily lifted and dropped, but there was nothing under it now. The scrapbook held, instead of cats or dogs or horses, pictures of people—all, Margaret realized bewilderedly as she flicked the pages, in evening or formal daytime dress, and all very handsome. They had been clipped from newspapers and magazines, in color and black-and-white; recognizable celebrities mingled with sleek befurred or tuxedoed advertising models. Margaret had never seen Hilary’s parents, but she was suddenly and uncomfortably sure that they were legendary Village types: sneakered, turtleneck-sweatered, so casual as to be, to this particular eight-year-old mind, ramshackle. It was the only possible sense to be made of Hilary’s clippings.

  The scrapbook underwent a change toward the end. A burnt match had been carefully taped in, and what looked like either a dessicated moth or a long-pressed flower. Hilary had evidently not known how to affix the folded white handkerchief, brushed lightly with lipstick in one spot and bearing an “I” in forget-me-nots.

  Do
ssier on Mrs. Foale, thought Margaret, trying to push down with amused tolerance a little welling coldness. She turned another stiff gray page, but the scrapbook was empty from that point on.

  No, not quite. A small photograph was stuck into the binding near the end. It showed a man standing on an adobe porch—this porch, from the odd mosaic beside the door, the trickles of ivy, the white iron chair with the lacy heart-shaped back on which he rested one hand. His head was a little bent toward what seemed to be a letter, and from his air of absorption he was unaware of the camera.

  Margaret picked up the photograph for an incredulous closer look, even though familiarity had leaped at her at once. The man was Philip—Philip with a mustache.

  The bath water stopped running, the lock gave a warning click. Even though the door stayed closed Margaret thrust the photograph rapidly back, closed the scrapbook, and went soundlessly from the room almost as though, it occurred to her later, Mrs. Foale and not a child of eight might have appeared without warning.

  And she still wasn’t used to the altitude; couldn’t be, because her heart was pounding.

  Four

  THE wind strengthened during the night until not even the thick walls and recessed windows could hold it at bay. Margaret woke at three o’clock to a pour of cold air and a rustling of papers on the bureau. When they began to skitter about the floor she turned on the light, got up, groped after the papers through narrowed lashes, closed the windows, and went back to bed.

  At once, a branch began to scrape against the wall behind her head, a raking gravelly sound that had no regular pattern to lull her mind. How odd that Philip hadn’t mentioned knowing Mrs. Foale, or at least the house—had, indeed, given the opposite impression, turning to Cornelia with an inquiring, “Mrs.—what’s her name?” and gazing up curiously at the black iron chandeliers in the living room when Margaret noticed them.

  It might have been a different house, of course; adobe and white iron lawn chairs and ivy were standard in this part of the country. But the distinctive mosaic beside the door . . . Then again, thought Margaret, turning over resolutely, people were said to have doubles.

  But if you had once loved a face you knew it instantly, in any setting, even behind a mustache. (What had ever possessed Philip to grow a mustache? Although it became him, in a peculiar way.) Margaret realized with a little trickle of clarity through her drowsiness that at some point in the last forty-eight hours she had gotten over Philip, and was looking at him impersonally. It was like the pleasure of a stopped toothache, and she warmed herself with it for a while before she drifted back to sleep.

  The house and the wind might have been waiting for just such a signal. Doors, including her own, began to slam and suck open and slam again like pistol shots. Although she had locked both front and kitchen doors, something was obviously open. With a dim glance at the clock—a quarter of four—Margaret got up, put on her robe, and went to investigate.

  The dark hall, the long black spaces beyond it, were so nightmarishly alive with air and stirrings that she was shocked wide awake; it was as though the seeking night had broken loose in here at last, and lights might show her some unseeable tiling. With a feeling of near panic she got a lamp on, closed a yawning, swaying casement window in the dining room, followed a strong curl of cold air into the kitchen. When she found the light switch, the bird mobile was spinning wildly, one pair of red wings smashed when the window from which the mobile hung had been flung open against a cabinet. The broken body dipped and flew with the others with a sickening impervious grace. Before Margaret could reach the window it slammed against the cabinet again and the little red head wrenched downward and hung there.

  She got the window closed, trembling, and nearly cried out at a sound in the doorway behind her. It was Hilary, of course; it couldn’t very well be anybody else but Hilary, waked by the wind, as she had been—

  And terrified. Chalk white, pupils pinpointed in eyes that looked yellower than usual, jaw set to keep her teeth from chattering. Margaret said, quieting her own alarm as well, “What a night—windows have been blowing open all over the house. Are there any open in your room?”

  Hilary stared speechlessly and then shook her head. She seemed to be shivering in her quilted robe. Margaret said conversationally, “Well, let it blow, everything’s nice and tight now. Would you like some warm milk before you go back to bed?”

  Hilary got her locked lips open. “I hate warm milk.”

  “So do I, and so does everybody I know and everybody I ever heard of. Who got this warm milk business up, do you suppose?” Margaret was talking at random, babbling, really, because the child was so tense and terrified. Now, of course, was the time to say without warning, “Where did you get that picture of Philip, and the other things?” But Margaret could not; she was still so appalled at Hilary’s face that she delayed along the bank of windows, saying idly aloud, “That’s locked, and that . . before she moved toward the light switch. Hilary said rapidly, “Is the cellar door bolted?”

  “Always,” said Margaret, hiding a further sense of shock, “but I’ll check while I’m up. And then, Hilary, you must go back to bed. It’s four o’clock, and you’ll be as cross as a witch in the morning. There, that’s that, and now let’s go.”

  Hilary’s mouth had lost its desperate tightness, but Margaret went back with her to her room and examined the window fastenings ostentatiously. “A hurricane couldn’t get in here now, and if you hear anything in the night it’s me, getting up for a cigarette. All set? I think,” said Margaret casually, “that I’ll leave my door open, and yours. With all this running around in the middle of the night, you might have to wake me up in the morning ”

  “Mrs. Foale’s bird is broken,” said Hilary suddenly, and even Margaret, unfamiliar with children, recognized the driven and scapegoat quality of this utterance.

  “It’s her own fault for hanging it up on a window that opens in,” she said, “and anyway there are enough birds here to stock a good-sized forest, so don’t worry about it. Goodnight, Hilary.”

  But how basically cruel, she thought presently, listening to the balked and muted sounds of the wind, to have a houseful of lifeless birds at all, no matter how beautiful the medium; to take pleasure out of contemplating, in total stillness, something whose element was freedom.

  And the gay, worn little shoes. And the handkerchief . . . the wonder was that the initial hadn’t been made out of humming-birds rather than forget-me-nots. And the inheritance . . . with a deeper exhaustion than she had felt in years, Margaret slept.

  The morning was gray, with Hilary totally recovered. Except for the branches and twigs that littered the front lawn, and the broken bird which Margaret cut down, mocking at herself, the night before might never have happened.

  It was a busy morning. Margaret was in the middle of the breakfast dishes when the phone rang and a woman’s voice said expectantly, “Isabel?”

  “Mrs. Foale is away—abroad, I believe.”

  “Oh, and who is this?”

  It was a form of rudeness which Margaret disliked immensely. She said crisply, “Miss Russell. And this is . . . ?”

  “When did Mrs. Foale leave, do you know?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Oh, dear. How very—” From the exasperated tone, Mrs. Foale might have been up Margaret’s sleeve. “I suppose you have no idea when she’ll be back?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  Pause. “Then I might—well, thank you so much,” said the voice dismissingly, and the receiver went down.

  Might what? Come to the house to get something, or leave something, and discover Hilary’s forbidden presence? Margaret, reflecting rather grimly on this, was interrupted by a distant crash.

  Cornelia had indeed put a number of breakables away, but she had put them at the back of the high shelf in the closet in Hilary’s room, not foreseeing the possibility of Hilary’s shooting a rubber band up, climbing on her suitcase to grasp the shelf with both hands, a
nd pulling the whole business down. A glass candlestick had splintered, and a black pottery bowl which looked horrifyingly valuable. A number of hats and a mass of purple wool still on knitting needles had cushioned the trip for several other objects.

  Teeth-grinding would not help here. “Get me the broom, Hilary,” said Margaret in measured tones.

  “I was only—”

  “I am trying very hard not to beat you, but I will need help. Get me the broom, and the dustpan.”

  Cornelia was keeping a list, conscientiously, and now a glass candlestick and a pottery bowl must be added to it, along with the cup Hilary had dropped yesterday. Margaret picked up the knitting and the hats, shook them free of glass splinters, and retrieved a pair of crystal cocks, one now beakless and combless; a small inlaid box, and a white vase encrusted with purple violets. It wasn’t empty, as it looked; when she lifted it a photograph fell out.

  Was this Hilary’s treasure trove? No, that was the library. And here came Hilary, trailing the broom. Margaret dropped the photograph instantly back into the vase, only registering the impression of a small plumpish dark-haired woman, rather pretty, with bangs.

  No rubber band appeared, and Hilary was so exaggeratedly aggrieved about it that Margaret knew it had never existed. What was to be done with her—prying by day, terrified by night? And it had been a genuine and disturbing terror; Margaret had felt an echo of it in herself. Damn Mrs. Foale, she thought with surprising vehemence, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Hilary, it’s time you and I had a talk.”

  She realized at once that it was a mistake. If she admitted having examined Hilary’s scrapbook, Hilary would go underground like a mole and Margaret would have no clue at all as to what was going on. And if she hammered away at the necessity of not finding out anything more about Mrs. Foale, she would inevitably put the stress in the wrong place and Hilary would be lured to further efforts.

  But it was too late to retreat, and she embarked on a long and effortful lecture which she might as well have delivered to the broom. She covered the value of privacy, the responsibilities of living in other people’s houses and the necessity for honesty, and when she had droned to a conclusion Hilary said, “Will you play a game of checkers?”