Hours to Kill

by Ursula Curtiss

  How angry Philip would be, Margaret thought irrelevantly, if he knew about the things Hilary had found: the snapshot of himself, the other one, and apparently the only one, of Mrs. Foale. But of course in bringing Cornelia to the house he had thought himself safe with those two elderly portraits in the hall. He had never envisioned the possibility of a quietly prowling Hilary, nor of Margaret’s being there.

  Margaret found herself staring at her book without having comprehended a line. One of the library windows faced on the porch, and a slice of black glass showed; equally, a slice of lighted room, untenanted except for herself, showed to whoever might care to look. She got out of her chair, carefully unhurried, and twitched the heavy beige curtains to a complete close.

  “Missa Foale give Julio money.” To wind the clock? Hardly, unless that were a sacred duty imposed on her by Elizabeth Honeyman. It seemed much more likely that he had been paid to keep away, that he hoped, with his mixture of servility and impudence, that Margaret might be interested in keeping him away, too.

  He. She hardly thought of him as a man at all, only as a pair of eyes under a big hat, a sinuous, insinuating presence that might flatten itself like a snake and get into the house after all.

  A chill touched her—but it was an actual, physical chill, a brush of cold air on her legs. One of the tall windows must have slipped its catch and be standing negligently open.

  Don’t get excited. (Wasn’t that what the snakebite kits said so waggishly?) Walk briskly and loudly through the house, an indignant resident but not a terrified one, a woman who would calmly send for the police at the first threat of an intruder. Margaret’s shaking legs, so addressed, took her into the long living room with its islands of light, through it and into the hall beyond, where the draught was stronger.

  Hilary’s room, the door open on blowing darkness. Margaret got the light on, sweeping the wall for the switch with a frantic hand. There across the room was the wide-open window, its unhooked screen swung out from the bottom, summoning in the night—and there in the bed, face screwed up in an injured squint, was Hilary.

  Margaret collected a long, bottom-of-the-lungs breath. In silence she walked across the room, hooked the screen, closed the window to within two inches. Still in silence, she turned and gazed at Hilary. Hilary said in an instant and piteous croak, “My throat hurts.”

  “I don’t wonder,” said Margaret measuredly. “Are you trying to catch pneumonia?”

  “I was hot,” said Hilary, in such a subdued and apologetic voice that Margaret glanced more closely at her. No mere fever could work such a change in Hilary, and there was something effacing in the way she had wriggled herself deep into her covers. The room was now very cold, but still—

  “You don’t let in any more air by opening the screen,” said Margaret, thawing a little. Her reaction to a bad fright was receding and Hilary was, after all, fairly sick. “Besides—”

  “Can I have some ginger ale?” interrupted Hilary.

  So she had opened the screen for some well-thought-out purpose—to dispose of something? Hide something until later, because she knew Margaret would be a frequent visitor in the room during the night and all the next day? Once you got to know her, Margaret reflected wearily, going out to the kitchen for ginger ale, Hilary was really no more difficult to read than Coptic.

  At eleven o’clock, she folded another capsule into jam, administered it, took Hilary’s temperature, 103, gave the sheets a last smoothing, turned the pillow, said goodnight, set her alarm clock for three, and toppled into her own bed.

  The alarm went off after what seemed only a wink of sleep. For a wild few seconds Margaret did not know where she was, or even where the clock was; when she found it by knocking it onto the floor, she was still bewildered by this waspish call in the middle of the night.

  Of course. Hilary, medicine, alcohol.

  She woke Hilary with difficulty, gave her her capsule and, although the child felt cooler to the touch, sponged her with alcohol. She was a further ten minutes wiping up the water which spilled from the bedside glass knocked over by Hilary’s protesting hand, but she was so stupefied with sleep that when she was back in her own bed her mind blurred at once.

  It touched the fact that Cornelia and Philip still had not telephoned, and then it abandoned that, too.

  In the morning, there was blood on the porch.

  What was there about dried blood that you knew it instantly, even if you had only opened the door to see if the milk was there yet? The splattered shape of the stains, perhaps, or the little diminishing trail of drops that led down the uneven stone steps and disappeared into the grass.

  Margaret stared downward for possibly a minute before she did what, later, she was a little aghast at. She went rapidly to the drawer in the kitchen where rags were kept for cleaning, soaked one in cold water, went, almost running now, back to the porch. The stains came up easily enough, turning the wet cloth a color that she averted her gaze from while, because there mightn’t be time to rinse it and wring it out, she kept turning it in on itself to find a fresh surface.

  Birds twittered in the new morning, the washed-gold light with its sift of slender branch shadows moved gently ‘over the wet flagstones, turned them damp, turned them dry. Margaret went into the house, locked the door behind her, and walked without pausing into the kitchen. Her hand held the blood-stained cloth without feeling, as though she had detached herself from it; she put off, just for the moment, any thought of the harshest soap she could find, the hottest water she could stand.

  The kitchen wastebasket was fairly full, and in the little back entry were three emptied milk cartons. Not enough. Margaret took up a pile of folded newspapers and carried everything out to the incinerator behind the garage. It was a new and very good incinerator, reducing everything it burned to fine ash. The wet cloth wouldn’t be destroyed at once, but it would dry a good deal, perhaps even char a little, in an initial fire.

  At no time did she question what she was doing, or why. Instinct made her move as quickly and surely as though she had rehearsed this a hundred times, and it was not until she had scrubbed her hands under water that made her wince, and caught a glimpse of her set white face in the mirror, that any realization of what she had done began to seep through.

  Even then she thrust it away, going to the kitchen to put water on to boil. She would feel less stiff, less cold, after a cup of burning coffee. While she waited, she stood at the sink and drank a glass of tomato juice. The morning was windless, and from behind the garage rose a plume of smoke . . . and it was time for Hilary’s medicine.

  Even at a glance, and although she was still quite hot, Hilary was markedly better; her air of prim reproach was back in place. In answer to Margaret’s inquiry she swallowed wincingly—her throat was dry because she had had no water to drink, and she had a terrible headache from sleeping with the window shut. She always had her window open.

  “Except maybe when you’ve just had the doctor,” returned Margaret mildly. She had seldom been so glad to see anyone; Hilary was, loosely speaking, another human being, a voice and a full set of complaints to keep her occupied. “Would you like some applesauce—that goes down easily—and milk? And I’ll bring my coffee in, shall I?”

  Hilary gaped, understandably; her experience of adults, especially of Margaret, was that they tended to be savage if disturbed over their coffee. Margaret went back to the kitchen without waiting for an answer and put orange juice, applesauce, milk, and her own cup of coffee on a tray. (A cat or a dog, her mind offered desperately, hit by a car, running up on the porch to lick its wounds—)

  In Hilary’s room, she sat in the little green-painted rocker and drank her coffee, waiting bracedly for the conversation to open on Mrs. Foale. Instead, Hilary worked her way broodingly through her breakfast, only pausing now and then to regard Margaret with an unnerving lynx-like stare. Had she recognized Philip in the snapshot, after all? Had Philip and Cornelia been so unguarded as to mention, in her hearing,
anything of Margaret and the past?

  Margaret bore it while she smoked a cigarette; then, standing with her empty cup, she said brightly, “What’s the matter, Hilary? Something on your mind?”

  “No,” said Hilary, dropping her lashes. “Who came last night?”

  Margaret’s heart gave a thump. “Nobody.”

  “Somebody kept ringing the doorbell.”

  “Oh, that. That was someone looking for another address on this street.”

  “But you kept telling them to go away.”

  “I was very busy,” said Margaret, and bent her face concealingly over the tray on Hilary’s lap. “Finished?”

  The rag she had used to wash the flagstones was an unrecognizable twist of black when she went out to look; nevertheless, the same driving urgency that had propelled her then made her scour the yard for all the leaves and wind-driven scraps of paper she could find and light a second fire. The rag sank into fragility, then into ash. No one could ever tell, now, that she had scrubbed a man’s blood off the porch, deliberately destroying evidence of—

  No. That was only in her own mind. The Southwest was not the tame and civilized East; you had only to read the newspapers to know that quarrels were still settled quite frequently with knives or guns. That was open battle, not the dark and secret process that murder suggested. In any case, the man on the porch had probably only been wounded.

  Intolerable to think anything else. That he had swayed this time because he was dying, that some bewildered instinct had led him to seek help in a house where he had been used to receiving money, that Margaret had driven him back into the night to die by himself.

  Another, colder thought touched her. Suppose that at this minute, while she stood here in warm light under a sky that seemed tangibly blue, he lay somewhere quite near her, unaware any more of light or sky?

  Stepping as carefully as though she had heard a whir of rattles in the grass, Margaret began to search the grounds. The garage, first, piled with sealed cartons belonging to Cornelia and Philip, boxes and roped trunks of Mrs. Foale’s. Then around the house, under pear and apple trees to where the walled front lawn ran lengthwise to taller trees at either end. She had no eye for the neglected gardens, the jonquils budding hopefully in the midst of drifted leaves and twigs and last year’s brown stalks. She looked for worn dungarees, a big-brimmed hat, a slender olive hand—and they weren’t here.

  At least . . . there was one more place to search, or rather, two: the twin concrete-lined pits, perhaps four feet deep, that flanked the gate on the inside of the adobe wall. Margaret had no idea of their function, but either one would be a certain trap for feet weaving off into the dark.

  The first held only dead leaves, twigs, and two ancient newspapers still in their tight cylindrical fold. She caught her breath at the second, but the piece of blue cloth was a wind-whipped fragment, faded and rotting.

  It would be dreadful if he came back, after that parting gesture of fury. It would be worse if he did not. When the doorbell rang at ten o’clock Margaret’s nervous fingers dropped a glass shatteringly into the sink, but the shadow cast on the door curtain was a woman’s.

  It was Elizabeth Honeyman with news of Mrs. Foale.

  Nine

  MRS. Foale had settled down abroad, at least for the time being, and wanted any accumulated mail and her address book forwarded as soon as possible.

  Perhaps because Margaret had invoked her so often, any actual utterance by Mrs. Foale seemed as unreal as speech from a statue, or a flutter of wings from the beaded peacocks on the mantel. She said after a surprised little pause, “I don’t think there’s any mail except a postcard . . . here it is. I imagine you’d know where she keeps her address book.”

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t. In her bedroom, I should assume,” said Elizabeth Honeyman, sounding annoyed. The color in her thin carven face was high and uneven. Anger because Isabel Foale had left her “trust,” irritation at doing errands, or something else? At Margaret’s glance she turned sharply away, appearing to inspect the crystal seagulls on the desk for dust or cracks. “Perhaps she’s going to write people at last . . . if you wouldn’t mind taking just a quick look? It’s green leather, and” she gestured “about this big.”

  From the things left in the closet, Mrs. Foale had apparently used the room that Hilary now occupied. Margaret went down the hall, opened the door, closed it behind her, put a warning finger to her lips as Hilary opened her mouth, and began to pull open drawers.

  “What are you looking for?” demanded Hilary in a penetrating whisper.

  “Sshh. Mrs. Foale’s green address book.” Too late, she realized the folly of that.

  “What does she want it for?”

  “Addresses,” said Margaret tersely. “Sshh.”

  “If she’s all the way over there, why does she want addresses of people all the way over here?”

  “Because she does. Hilary, are you absolutely sure you haven’t seen it?”

  Hilary’s look of wistful chagrin was answer enough in itself. The book was nowhere in the room, and after a second’s rebellion Margaret crossed the hall into her own bedroom. She was not going to turn the house inside out for either Mrs. Foale or Miss Honeyman, but if Lena had found the address book lying about, chances were she would have put it in the top bureau drawer.

  She had. Cornelia, meticulous as usual, had segregated it on one side of the drawer at the back. Margaret lifted the book out, jiggled the drawer to make it run smoothly back in, and stood absolutely still, gazing down. The jerking of the drawer had toppled Cornelia’s neat stack of wedding photographs, glossy eight-by-tens from which the framed picture on the bureau top had been chosen. The one Margaret was staring at showed Cornelia and Philip just inside the door of the church, against a background of faces in the aisle.

  One of the faces was Mrs. Foale’s. She was looking at the camera with an expression that turned Margaret cold, although she couldn’t define it.

  And this was why, when she had seen the snapshot of the dark-haired woman Hilary had said was Isabel Foale, she had been haunted by a faint familiarity. She must have remembered this wedding photograph. She had noticed it more than the others because Cornelia and Philip had fought about it, laughing, over a drink at her apartment shortly before they left for New Mexico. Philip was all for tearing it up; he looked like a department store dummy, he said, and it wasn’t good of Cornelia. “But I like it,” Cornelia had insisted. “You’re so wonderfully wooden, and I’m the cat that ate the canary. Don’t you lay a finger on it. I suppose it won’t do to have framed, but it’s really my favorite.”

  Was it the sight of Mrs. Foale that had made Philip go so rigidly expressionless?

  Elizabeth Honeyman gazed critically at the address book when it was handed to her, thanked Margaret, and began moving toward the door. Nothing escaped her eye; she was open about it, moving the piano scarf a fraction straighter, sending a sharp glance at the peacocks. She said to Margaret with her little twitch of a smile, “Did your woman ever call again?”

  Margaret had been half-prepared. “Mrs. Withers. Yes, and she seemed quite disappointed.”

  “Oh? I still think she’s mistaken,” said Miss Honeyman very levelly, “in thinking Isabel had a cousin so like her.” She paused at the door curtain, drawing her head back a little to peer at the white folds. “You don’t allow your cleaning woman to do this up, do you?”

  Margaret would not have dreamed of burdening Lena with it. “No, why?”

  “Hadley’s mother did the lacework at the sides,” said Miss Honeyman, putting out an infinitely delicate finger and thumb to what Margaret would otherwise have thought was general wear and tear. She was quite serious, and very fretful. “I told Isabel that these ought to be taken down and put away and something else used instead. Perhaps . . .”

  Her bothered glance was too proud to be inquiring; it seemed to lay a directive on Margaret. Take the curtains down, have them exquisitely laundered, fold them tenderly away
in tissue . . .

  “Wait, you’re forgetting your cookbook,” said Margaret.

  It crossed her mind, when the other woman had left, that as she was only visiting here perhaps she ought to have seen some sort of written authorization before she turned over Mrs. Foale’s belongings so docilely. But Miss Honeyman would hardly risk such a lie (would she?) and in any case an address book was merely that, and a postcard was open for all the world to see. Why, then, this sharp feeling of worry, as though she had forgotten something important, or made some drastic error? Nerves.

  Jerome Kincaid seemed to think as much when he arrived, at shortly before noon, with ice cream and a Mexican puppet for Hilary and daffodils for Margaret. He cut through her thanks with an examining, “Sure you’re not coming down with this thing yourself?” and, at her headshake, “Well, it’s doing something to you.”

  Sympathy would undermine her completely, so would the childish conviction that if she told Jerome Kincaid about the blood on the porch he could somehow make everything all right; that if she told him about Philip and Mrs. Foale he could dissolve that nightmare, too. She didn’t dare, but fatigue and tension constricted her throat so that she had to turn away and pick up a cigarette before she could say, “I’m tired, I guess—I was up in the night with Hilary.”

  He was still looking at her clinically. “Have you a drink in the house?”

  “Yes . . . in the pantry,” said Margaret, and retired to the library to collect herself. This would never do. She might involve herself with the police so that she would be detained here; she might destroy Cornelia’s and Philip’s marriage at a stroke. Fiercely, she picked up the newspaper, brought in off the lawn by either Miss Honeyman or Kincaid; she would distract herself briefly with that.

  But she didn’t. The word “Fatalities” at the bottom of the front page caught her eye. It was the toll of weekend victims in New Mexico, and she followed it tensely to page three. Antonia Sanchez, of Alamosa, dead when her car collided with another on Highway 66. Andrew Begay, of Nambe Pueblo, dead when his pick-up truck overturned near Pojoaque. Julio Garcia, this city, killed by a hit-and-run driver on San Rafael Road. A bullet had been recovered from Garcia’s shoulder; police were investigating.