Hours to Kill

by Ursula Curtiss

  “Oh, certainly,” said Margaret, and opened the door. The morning flooded briefly in on the white walls, turning the dark vigas lustrous with reflected light until she closed the door again. A faint new astringency, not quite a fragrance, had entered with them. When Margaret turned, her visitor was gazing with fond approval at the beaded peacocks, the formal brocaded chairs and settees, the shadow-sunk Orientals. “Christina did love this house,” she murmured to Margaret. “The first Mrs. Foale, you know. She was a cousin.”

  “Oh,” said Margaret, recognizing belatedly the autocratic lids over the middle-colored eyes. Christina had been austere but sweet, this woman was austere and embittered. Hastily, because her eye had fallen on some of Hilary’s drawings on the desk and Miss Honeyman looked like the kind of woman who would cable Mrs. Foale at once, she said, “I haven’t come across the cookbook, but you’d probably know where it’s kept?”

  “In the pantry, I believe,” said Miss Honeyman, starting away. .

  Her back, her every footstep, claimed the house as familiar, well-loved territory. There was no trace of Hilary in the pantry, but to get there they would have to pass the jigsaw puzzle on the dining-room table. Margaret paused, turned a piece, and fitted it into place under Miss Honeyman’s small saturnine smile. “You care for puzzles?”

  “Now and then,” said Margaret nonchalantly, and proceeded into the kitchen. Beyond her, as she put the sherbet in the freezer and dropped the magazines and cards behind the breadbox, she heard the pantry drawers open and close. Miss Honeyman appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Now, I wonder where . . .” She was giving cabinets and surfaces an inventorying stare, pausing hard at the mobile with one bird missing. “Of course, Isabel left so suddenly . . . Might it be in a bookcase, I wonder?”

  Margaret agreed that it might, realizing as the other woman set off for the library that Miss Honeyman was only bored and weary when other people were talking; she followed up her own utterances with a keenly attentive stare.

  How hard it was, how almost impossible, to imagine either her or Mrs. Foale in serious possession of a cookbook.

  Of course, Jerome Kincaid might have mentioned Hilary in the course of lunch, and Miss Honeyman might well be inspecting the house, on her friends behalf, for crayon on the walls, jam on the slipcovers, modelling clay on the floors. Certainly her glance at the bookshelves was cursory. Straightening, she proceeded to put Margaret through an interrogation whose full insolence did not register at the time.

  No, she hadn’t taken the house herself; it had been rented by her sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Philip Byrne. Her sister had been ill with flu, so they were off on a recuperating trip while she, Margaret, looked after the house.

  Oh, didn’t they, Miss Honeyman inquired rather discontentedly, have help?

  Margaret, beginning to bristle, explained about the housekeeper’s fall and broken hip and their feeling of responsibility in leaving a furnished house vacant. She could not have hit upon a happier theme; Miss Honey-man’s face grew almost benign. “Very wise, oh, very wise indeed. Isabel regards this house quite as a trust; she’s most particular about it. I must confess that I was surprised to hear that she had rented it at all.”

  “A trust?” repeated Margaret. Two could play at this game, and she arched her own eyebrows at Miss Honeyman.

  “Yes. You see, she and Mr. Foale were married in the East—he had gone there for diagnosis and surgery, which unfortunately he did not survive—and Isabel’s first trip out here was of course a very sad one. There was the house to be put in order, family things to be stored. . . Fortunately a relative came with her to help.” Miss Honeyman looked around for her purse and her gloves, found them, and donned both. “There is nothing like one’s own at such a time. I know that when poor, poor Christina died, although she had been ill for some time, Hadley would not have known where to turn except for me.”

  She studied her gloved hands while Margaret murmured indistinguishably, and then, moving briskly toward the door, she said, “Still, I’m afraid it was all too much for Isabel, poor child. If she had only let me know, or waited until I came back from a short trip of my own —but perhaps Europe, a complete change of scene, is best. I do hope your sister will be the better for her vacation, Miss Russell.”

  “Thank you, I’m sure she will.” Margaret held the door. “What’s the name of the cookbook, so that if I find it I can put it aside for you?”

  The haughty gaze returned hers with fixity. “The Art of Spanish Cooking. A dark green book. Thank you so much, Miss Russell, and good day.”

  Margaret closed the door slowly, and, with the sun pouring down and Lena moving distantly around the house, locked it. Hilary was either asleep or otherwise content, and she had time to look at a number of things.

  “Poor child”—but to Elizabeth Honeyman, so painedly perfect, anyone who had not attained to her own age, wisdom and discrimination would be a child. Still, the frivolous shoes—and the elderly gibbon. Isabel Foale had obviously been far younger than the man she married, but odd and unexpected idylls did occur in that line from time to time.

  Had it been an idyll, or did Miss Honeyman merely believe it to have been so, or was she only pretending to believe it? Certainly she had seemed to accept and even approve of Christina’s successor, in a patronizing way. On the other hand, a woman of such pride and bitterness might dissimulate for a number of reasons— because she was jealous of Hadley Foale’s name, or wanted continued access to a house she loved possessively, or wanted to shape the second Mrs. Hadley Foale in her own thin competent hands, or was, purely and simply, a meddler.

  In spite of the woman’s ready description of it, Margaret did not believe in the cookbook. Jerome Kincaid had tried to enter the house, thinking it empty; he had lunched with Miss Honeyman; Miss Honeyman had turned up on what seemed more and more a transparent errand. She had inspected the bookshelves in the library, she had opened and closed the pantry drawers—

  Lena’s soft voice in the hallway said hesitatingly, “Ma’am?” and Margaret answered, “Just a minute, Lena, I’ll be right there.”

  She went rapidly into the pantry. She looked in both drawers, and even in the cabinets above and the cupboards below, but the letter Hilary had found on that first misbegotten day, the letter out of which she had spelled “pregnant,” wasn’t there.

  Six

  LENA had come to tell Margaret that Hilary wanted her, which was just as well, as Margaret wanted Hilary. In the cool apple-green and white room where Hilary lay with the covers pulled primly up to her chin, she said in an off-hand voice, “I got your magazines and your paste . . . feel better?”

  “No.”

  “What is it—your stomach? Your throat?”

  “I get these attacks,” said Hilary morosely, and Margaret had an instant vision of the Greenwich Village apartment, Hilary tottering off to bed to recall her parents’ attention, Mrs. Reverton saying anxiously to friends and pediatricians, “She gets these attacks.”

  “Hilary, do you remember the letter you found in the pantry drawer?”

  “What letter?”

  It was going to be one of those conversations. “The one you spelled a word out of, when you were looking for shoelaces, and I told you to put it back.”

  “And I did,” said Hilary with suspicious promptness. “Are you sure? Because it’s important.”

  “You never believe anything I say,” said Hilary, but she looked so flushed and injured that Margaret could not bring herself to pursue it. She got the thermometer instead, and found presently that Hilary’s temperature had gone up a degree and a half. Margaret glanced at the clock, gave her another aspirin, and went quietly off to find the doctor’s telephone number.

  A curled piece of cellophane tape still clung to the pantry wall over the phone, but the slip of paper with telephone numbers it had held was gone.

  Margaret knew dismally what had happened. The warmth of the pantry radiator had dried the tape, the paper had fluttered do
wn, Lena, inured to the litter left everywhere from Hilary’s scrapbook work, had swept it up and thrown it away.

  She went back to the bedroom and Hilary. “What doctor did Cornelia have, do you remember?”

  Hilary stared up from her magazine. “She didn’t have a doctor.”

  “She did, she must have. The number was here, but it’s lost.”

  “Well, he never came,” said Hilary practically. “Am I going to have a doctor?”

  “Yes, I think you’d better.”

  Hilary’s flushed face went reverent. “Am I very sick?”

  “No,” said Margaret dampeningly. “You have a cold that we might as well get rid of, that’s all. Would you like some soup now?”

  Hilary said almost in a croak that she would not, and Margaret, leaving the room, controlled a smile that flickered out by itself. Hilary must be mistaken about Cornelia’s not having had a doctor, of course; he might have made late-evening visits, or come while the child was out. (Out where?) In any case, she had the telephone number she had found with the thermometer in the bedside drawer.

  When she dialled it, the line drawled emptily back at her. Well, it was a little after noon on Saturday, but wouldn’t a doctor have an answering service? Frowning, she got the directory, leafed through the back to “Physicians,” and went examiningly through the names. She had only thrown a glance at the slip of paper when Cornelia taped it up; still, she ought to recognize the name when she came across it.

  It began with M, she was fairly sure of that. And here were Martinez, Mendoza . . . Muir, that was it. Dr. Thomas Muir, General Practice.

  It was not the number on the envelope, but Margaret dialled, and explained Hilary’s fever to the nurse who answered. Could Dr. Muir come to the house? Just a moment, please; the nurse would ask.

  She came back presently with the information that Dr. Muir could not make a house call that day. Margaret could bring the child to his office if she didn’t mind a considerable wait, or, if she preferred, he would prescribe an antibiotic.

  Margaret gave the receiver a look of astonishment. Prescribe for a new patient without even seeing her? But she said only, “I think in that case I’d better wait and see how she does. This is the Dr. Muir who treated Mrs. Philip Byrne recently, isn’t it?”

  After another delay and some ruffling of papers, it was. Aware of the impatience in the nurse’s voice, Margaret said persistently, “Dr. Muir saw Mrs. Byrne, of course?”

  “I really couldn’t . . . if you care to hold the line,” said the nurse coldly, “perhaps the doctor can speak to you himself.”

  Margaret held the line. Twice she almost hung up, but something forced her to go on listening to distant waiting-room sounds: doors opening and closing, a child’s fretful wail, a voice making an appointment. Why was she doing this? If doctors here were so busy, or so reluctant to make house calls, Cornelia and Philip would hardly thank her for stirring up any kind of dust . . .

  “Dr. Muir speaking.”

  The low soft voice caught Margaret by surprise. She said rather stumblingly that she had been quite concerned about her sister, Mrs. Byrne; what had Dr. Muir thought of her when he saw her?

  “I didn’t actually see her,” said Muir equably, and went on to explain. The flu epidemic had been widespread and in many instances severe, and when he was not in his office he had been at the hospital. Mrs. Byrne’s case had been typical of the intestinal type; he had therefore prescribed the usual antibiotic with instructions that she was to report on her progress and let him know if improvement was not rapid.

  He was surprisingly patient with Margaret, or perhaps only very tired, and when he had finished he said politely, “How is Mrs. Byrne now?”

  “Oh, much better. In fact she’s gone off for a vacation,” said Margaret, feeling foolish and embarrassed. “Thank you, doctor.”

  She hung up, bothered by the fact of her own reassurance, rubbing absently at the tiny tight headache that had sprung up at both temples.

  What to do about Hilary? Her own mother had been a firm believer in aspirin, fluids, and alcohol rubs, but a whole new generation of complicated germs had grown up since then, and suppose she was taking Hilary’s “attacks” too lightly? Suppose Hilary were prone to some sort of condition that could be dangerous? If the fever hadn’t gone down by evening she would go through the directory until she found a doctor who would come, and after that she would call the Revertons, reconciliation or not—

  No, she wouldn’t. The Mexico City number had been on the slip of paper with the doctor’s.

  Margaret discovered herself pacing distractedly around her room, half in worry over Hilary, half in anger at Cornelia and Philip for getting her into this. She knew both attitudes to be unreasonable—Hilary undoubtedly had only a touch of flu, and they had left her in the best of health—but that didn’t help her own increasing headache.

  She went in to look at Hilary, and found her asleep, hot face turned into her pillow, one hand clutched about a comer of the scrapbook that protruded from under it. If she had taken the letter from the pantry drawer, wild horses wouldn’t drag it out of her, Margaret thought, gazing down at her, and now that the letter had become an issue she would have secreted it in some wily undiscoverable place.

  Not that it could be of any real importance, or it would not have been left lying about in a house that was to be turned over to strangers; it would probably not have been preserved at all. A gossipy note about mutual friends from Grace, the sender of the postcard? Now that Margaret concentrated on it, her one tempted glance had caught small cramped writing.

  What did seem to matter was the fact that, with Mrs. Foale away, both Jerome Kincaid and Elizabeth Honeyman were markedly curious about her.

  Better, much, if it were Hilary, because then it was only a child’s secretive fancy. Might she have slipped the letter into the vase on the closet shelf, to join the photograph of the dark-haired woman? On this note of bald self-deception Margaret turned from the bed, opened the closet door without sound, reached for the violet-encrusted vase and tipped the photograph into her hand.

  It was no more revealing on a long look than it had been at a glimpse, except that a sense of recognition grew. The face under the dark bangs wasn’t exactly pretty, but something about it—the perfect crescent brows, possibly, or a certain enamelled stillness—held the eye. She seemed to be in her late thirties or early forties, with a firm almost-plumpness that became her. Mrs. Foale?

  It was a snapshot and not a very good one; there was nothing to learn from the dim gray pattern of background. Margaret turned a little, seeking a better light, and met Hilary’s interested marble-like stare. Hilary said obligingly, “That’s Mrs. Foale.”

  What folly to have believed that simply because her lashes were down, her mouth a little open, her breath coming regularly, the master spy had been asleep. The virus did not exist, thought Margaret a trifle resentfully, that could get the better of Hilary. But the child’s calm certainty was chilling, almost as though she had some unthinkable means of summoning up Mrs. Foale’s face . . . Margaret said deliberately, “You can’t possibly know whether it’s Mrs. Foale or not.”

  “Yes, I can. I asked this girl what Mrs. Foale looked like,” said Hilary, heaving violently up out of her bedclothes, “and she said she was little and had black hair and bangs.”

  It took Margaret a moment to remember that “this girl” was Hilary’s acquaintance of the movies. “What’s her name?”

  Hilary gave her a surprised look. “Isabel.”

  Patience. “No, your friend, the girl you met.”

  “Rosina.”

  Just in time Margaret stopped herself from pursuing, “Rosina what?” It was not so much her impression that Hilary didn’t know the girl’s last name as an appalled realization of what her own motive would be in asking it. To go about the town seeking out a stranger, and a child at that. . .

  “Her mother worked for Mrs. Foale,” said Hilary, mind-reading, “and that’s how Ro
sina knows what Mrs. Foale looks like. And one day her mother came to the house and there was a note on the door telling her not to come any more. I guess that was when she went away.”

  And now was the time, wasn’t it, when the issue stood more or less squarely between them? Margaret said directly, “Hilary, where did you get this snapshot and— the other things?”

  She would not mention Philip, because it was possible that Hilary hadn’t recognized him with a mustache, hadn’t even related the doorway or the white iron chair with the porch of this house. She held her breath and Hilary, subsiding on her pillow with a markedly invalidish air, said, “Down behind some books in the library. Can I have some soup?”

  “In a minute. Which books?”

  “I don’t know, I was only trying to get things tidy,” said Hilary. Her tone and her wriggle under the sheet implied that sheer hard work had reduced her to her present state. She swallowed, apparently with difficulty. “I’m so thirsty.”

  Margaret heated clear soup and buttered toast, on Mrs. Foale’s stove, in Mrs. Foale’s toaster. Mrs. Foale of the light-minded shoes, the rum bottles, the inconsiderateness of a note tacked to the door rather than due notice to a woman who had worked for her . . . How very driven she must have been—perhaps by the shadows, the stilled birds, the solemn clock; perhaps even by Elizabeth Honeyman—to have fled so precipitately.

  Hilary consumed her soup and toast with appetite. She can’t be so badly off, Margaret told herself reassuringly, and then stood hastily back as Hilary rushed for the bathroom and was sick.

  That was at one o’clock. At two, freshly pajamaed, sponged off with alcohol, cooler-looking against tightened sheets and plumped pillows, Hilary drank a cup of tea without incident. Margaret played checkers with her until three, losing with dignity, and then removed her propping pillow firmly and thrust the thermometer under her tongue.

  Almost 103, and if it went as temperatures usually did it would climb toward evening. “Going down,” said Margaret carelessly to Hilary’s sharp too-bright yellow gaze, “but have another aspirin, just in case . . . Lena’s vacuuming, so I’m going to close your door for a few minutes. Try and take a nap, will you? And then have some nice cold sherbet when you wake up.”