Hours to Kill

by Ursula Curtiss

  What to do, apart from scrambling eggs for Hilary? Keep her head, obviously; remember that in spite of the peculiar slyness of the snapshot of Philip which Hilary had found tucked away among the books in the library and the letter concealed in a lipstick case, the whole rather ugly situation might be only that.

  But, looked at in this new light, how odd Philip’s switch of affections had been from the first. Margaret and Cornelia were so unlike each other that attraction to one would almost preclude attraction to the other. Margaret was rather untidy by nature; Cornelia was as neat as a card index. Margaret had flashes of temper and moods of savage depression; Cornelia was equable, with the long cool memory that goes with it. Margaret had had to be dragged into stores by Philip; Cornelia was a tireless shopper. And so on. It seemed impossible that a man could have been even briefly in love with one and then the other.

  And there was the matter of no doctor for Cornelia. Philip had an imperious streak, and it was difficult to imagine him submitting meekly to a diagnosis by telephone, epidemic or not. For that matter, it was hard to believe that not a doctor in the town had been able to make a house call.

  Margaret brought Hilary her scrambled eggs, bread and butter because she couldn’t manage toast yet, and a glass of milk that Hilary turned down in favor of ginger ale. Coming back, she said chattily although she knew the answer, “Did Cornelia have a sore throat, too?”

  “No, she just had awful pains in her stomach and she threw up all the time. I didn’t see her much, though. I irritated her,” said Hilary primly.

  Margaret let that go by. She said presently, “Well, whatever medicine she had fixed her up, and it will you, too.”

  “But she had to change hers.”

  “She did?”

  Hilary nodded, dropping a large cluster of egg on her bedspread and brushing it tidily off onto the floor. “She said it made her sicker, so Philip called the doctor and took it back to the drugstore and got something else.” Careful, careful. “Unfortunately, you can’t take medicine back,” said Margaret lightly. “You’re stuck with it.”

  “Well, Philip took it back. I wanted the bottle to keep paste in and he said he had to give it to the druggist. Will you play a game of checkers?”

  “Yes,” said Margaret, and she did. Red and black, an occupation for her fingers that didn’t touch her mind. Antibiotics often had side effects, but why had Philip taken the bottle away with him—and why, if the capsules made her so sick, had Cornelia kept one?

  “You can’t jump your own man,” said Hilary loudly. “Oh, I guess I can’t. Where was I—here?”

  Other people’s problems were always simple to solve; the wonder was that they made such a to-do about them. If it were not Cornelia and Philip involved, if this were a tale told to her by a worried friend of two faceless other people, she would say . . . what would she say?

  “If he married the sister because he knew she was going to inherit money, he must have been in the old lady’s confidence. And if he was that close to her the lawyer would know about him, wouldn’t he?”

  Yes, he would. Margaret remembered his name, too, because it was the kind that turned up on droll lists of names-and-professions: Eugene Sharp, Torrington, Connecticut.

  She allowed her sole remaining man to be hunted down by Hilary’s fleet of kings; then, closing a number of doors in between, she used the telephone in the pantry to call long distance. She consoled herself, through the series of clicks and mapping of signals across the country, with the thought that if Mr. Sharp had never heard of Philip Byrne no damage was done. If he had, she could still cover her tracks by inquiring for an apocryphal relative.

  There was no need to cover her tracks. As far as Mr. Sharp knew, Miss Trumbull had been unacquainted with a Mr. Philip Byrne. He added, with a deprecation that made Margaret want to spring at him through the mouthpiece, that perhaps he was hardly in a position to make a positive statement about this because his uncle, the senior Eugene Sharp, had always handled Miss Trumbull’s affairs. Unfortunately, his uncle had passed on a month ago.

  So that was that. Mr. Sharp said surprisingly in his faraway legal voice, “If it’s important, as I presume it is, I imagine the nurses would know. Your cousin required two for several months before her death, and I believe I have their names (thank you, Miss Pigeon) right here. Norma Powers and Genevieve DeMaestri.”

  He gave her addresses, expressed his hope that he had been of help, and was gone in a dissolving click. Margaret stood with her hand on the receiver, embattled. Understandably, Mr. Sharp had not known which was the day and which the night nurse, and it made all the difference. And how were all these Torrington calls going to look on Philip’s phone bill? But she could hardly call collect, and she certainly couldn’t leave Hilary to seek a public booth.

  The mental coin she tossed came down Norma Powers, and she was in luck. Mrs. Powers was not only at home at 131 Elkhart Road; she had been the day nurse, and she was brisk and articulate. After a confusion over a Mr. Bums, who owned a grocery store in Torrington, she said positively that Miss Trumbull had not known a Mr. Philip Byrne, nor had he come or telephoned while she was there. Of course, in the last weeks before her death, Miss Trumbull had been able to see only an occasional old friend, and then for a few minutes at a time. That was one of the reasons Mrs. Powers had gotten the job in the first place; Miss Trumbull couldn’t stand the telephone-ringings and doorbell-buzzings that had accompanied the previous nurse.

  “Oh, a gay one, she was,” said Mrs. Powers half-admiringly, “and the old goat she had on the string, somebody she met on night duty at the hospital, bothered your cousin half to death before he was through. Ring, ring, ring. Not that Miss Glidden wasn’t a good nurse—she knew her job, all right—but she had her mind on the men. I don’t usually like taking over from another nurse, it’s all in the family, you know, but Miss Glidden didn’t care because she was getting married anyway.”

  “You don’t know her married name, by any chance?”

  “No . . . something horsy,” said Mrs. Powers after a distant and cogitating pause, “or maybe I only think that because he came from out West somewhere. . .Before she got so bad, your cousin used to complain about Miss Glidden; she said it was all telephone calls and Hadley this and Hadley that. But that wasn’t his last name. I just can’t think of it, isn’t that always the way?”

  The world might not be full of Hadleys with horsy last names, but this was too important to make a mistake about. Margaret relaxed her aching fingers on the receiver and tightened them again. “Would this have been Isabel Glidden?”

  “That’s right,” said Mrs. Powers surprisedly. “Izzy Glidden, they called her around the hospital, and did she hate it. There, I’ve gone and taken up all this expensive time and I haven’t been able to help you at all.”

  Eleven

  MARGARET’S mind, taking cover, informed her that this explained the lack of high-heeled shoes. As a nurse, on her feet a good deal, Isabel Glidden Foale had been accustomed to relaxing in flats. (But then why hadn’t she taken any of them abroad with her? Had she bought a whole new wardrobe of shoes?)

  The cover fled. Mrs. Foale—impossible to think of her as Miss Glidden after all this time—had been Wilma Trumbull’s day nurse, had discovered her legatee, had communicated this to Philip. It could only have been of interest to him because he was half-engaged to Margaret at the time—had he sought her out at all because, through Mrs. Foale, he knew of the Trumbull connection and hoped for the best?

  In any case, as the capable nurse Mrs. Powers had said she was, Mrs. Foale had probably had a fairly accurate idea of her patient’s life expectancy. Philip had had a safe period of time in which to woo and win Cornelia, to be almost at the altar when the astounding news came.

  Very well; where did that bring her? Miss Glidden had become Mrs. Foale. Philip had become Cornelia’s husband. Hadley Foale had died, also predictably to a nurse who had been on night duty in the hospital where he was a patient.

&
nbsp; That left—didn’t it?—Cornelia. Odd man out.

  Not necessarily, thought Margaret, rubbing her temples to try and smooth panic away: the evidence in the house was anything but that of collusion. Whatever their relationship, Mrs. Foale hadn’t trusted Philip. The concealed snapshot of him, and the letter in the piano, were a wary guard against Philip’s defection. Well, she would know how swayable Philip was where money was concerned, how smoothly he could get himself out from under. She would, as denser people often did not, apply the lesson to her own case.

  If anything happened to Cornelia, Philip would inherit, and Mrs. .Foale would certainly want a share. She would have foreseen the probability of Philip’s coolly denying anything to do with her—his contacts with her in Connecticut would undoubtedly have been careful— and against that she had stored her weapons. The snapshot of Philip, the letter, possibly other things.

  Margaret, in her scouring of the grounds for material with which to speed the burning of the blood-stained rag, had undoubtedly crumpled up the letter and tossed it into the incinerator.

  At what she was thinking she put her hands to her cheeks, flat and hard. Reason as she might, Cornelia was not x or y in a given problem. She was Margaret’s sister, flesh and blood, naive for all her efficiency, and she was away somewhere with Philip. When Margaret’s mind glossed over the phrase “if anything happened to Cornelia” she knew it was because she was afraid to face the meaning of the words: Cornelia’s sudden death.

  Call Jerome Kincaid? He was a man who knew what to do about all kinds of things; that was evident in his competent face, his eyes that could go so soft. She had wishfully accepted him as an old school acquaintance, because she liked him; underneath, in this raw moment, she knew that she had never believed it.

  He knew something about Mrs. Foale, and just as certainly he was interested in Cornelia’s and Philip’s whereabouts. But on whose behalf was he acting?

  There was—and shockingly she had forgotten him— Julio Gartfia, dead by such painful degrees. Even if it were a private vendetta, nothing to do with his having been in this curiously sinister house in the past, there was still her own part in it.

  Margaret could never remember having spoken aloud to herself, in whatever extremity; when she had heard people do it on the stage, it smacked of self-consciousness. Now, hands still tight against her face, she said to the neat blue and white pantry, “Oh God, what shall I do?”

  She did nothing, until the next morning. She wished the day away with meaningless and unnecessary tasks, taught Hilary how to play solitaire; thought, each time she passed the silent telephone, They’ll call tonight. I’ll tell them they’ve got to come back, and before I leave here I’ll warn them both. I’ll tell Cornelia to make a different kind of will, I’ll tell Philip that I know about Mrs. Foale and her being Miss Trumbull’s nurse. He wouldn’t dare, then—

  But they did not call.

  The morning was by turns dark and windily gold, with thunderstorms forecast on the eight o’clock news. While Margaret stood at the kitchen window, trying to get coffee down a sore and aching throat, the sun disappeared and hailstones rattled down through the bare budding branches of the pear tree. She had slept patchily, perhaps because of her throat, and she must have dreamed, because each time she woke it was with the same feeling of panic.

  It was the kind of morning on which catastrophe seems built-in, a smell of smoke hovers just around the corner, cups and glasses topple of themselves. Margaret had begun it by opening a fresh jar of instant coffee and, in her distraction, forgetting what happened when vacuum seals were punctured at high altitude. A geyser of brown powder shot up and then settled slowly down over her hair, her dress, her hands. It was somehow, at just this point, the most natural thing in the world, and after the merest washing of her hands she wore the powder as grimly as a hair shirt while she waited for water to boil.

  At nine o’clock, with Hilary occupied over her breakfast and the house eerily dark with coming thunder, she called the telephone number she had found in Cornelia’s bedside table drawer.

  It answered crisply and at once. “Breslin Laboratories . . . Hello? Breslin Laboratories.”

  “Do you—I have a capsule that I’d like analyzed, do you do that?”

  The voice told her kindly and a little patronizingly that they did not; they served the hospitals in the area. Undoubtedly her own doctor could arrange . . .

  Was this the answer Cornelia had gotten, or had she ever called at all? “Cornelia had to change her medicine . . . she said it made her sicker.” And: “She threw up all the time and she had awful pains in her stomach.” Intestinal flu might do that, but at one point Cornelia hadn’t thought so. She had gone as far as looking up the number of the laboratory, and saving one of the capsules, and then something had happened that changed her mind. Perhaps Philip had pretended to call Dr. Muhin her hearing, perhaps he had seemed so frantically worried that whatever had sown the original seed of fear was wiped out and forgotten. Because Cornelia must have had something else to go on; no happily-married wife would suspect her husband of poisoning her simply because medicine didn’t agree with her.

  Something had certainly changed Philip’s mind. Hilary’s arrival, the presence of a third and inquisitive person in the house?

  In any case, Cornelia had dismissed her own suspicions as the effects of illness or delirium; otherwise she would never have gone away with Philip, and she would not have left the capsule so carelessly and openly in a drawer.

  Margaret clung to that, and to the suddenly remembered fact that Philip’s job was with a chemical firm; he might well have had business with a laboratory and the capsule might easily be a sample.

  On the cover of the telephone book she was staring at, Cornelia had written “Lena,” and then a number. After a second’s hesitation, Margaret dialled it.

  Lena remembered the envelope and the capsule. On being told that Margaret was to occupy the double bedroom after the Byrnes left she had prepared it thoroughly, washing and ironing the dimity curtains, turning the mattresses. Between the mattress and box-spring of Cornelia’s bed she had found an envelope; about to throw it away, she had noticed that it held some kind of pill and had put it in the bedside table drawer. Was that all right?

  Yes, Margaret told her nervelessly, that was fine. She had only wondered if it were something Mrs. Byrne had forgotten to take with her. In answer to Lena’s shy query as to whether she felt all right she said yes again, and thanks, and hung up.

  But she did not feel all right, she felt far from all right. Her head was heavy and hot, the tonsil that had blossomed into quinsy twice, years ago, ached suspiciously. But she could not get sick now; it was bad enough having Hilary sick.

  Lightning flared through the purple house, followed at no alarming speed by a crash of thunder. Even so Margaret waited, and smoked a calming cigarette that she had to light twice, before she used the telephone again to call Jerome Kincaid.

  He wasn’t in his room at the motel, but instead of returning her call he arrived at the house an hour later. Margaret knew from his air of controlled intensity, his carefully unhurried inquiry about Hilary and about her, that he thought she was going to tell him she had heard from Cornelia and Philip. It came as a surprising stab that he was here so promptly only because she was a link to them, and indirectly to Mrs. Foale; it undid all her circuitous plans.

  She said, “You never knew Cornelia or me, did you? You wanted to get into the house because of Mrs. Foale.”

  His eyebrows crooked at her and then went up. “What’s all this?”

  Margaret gazed implacably back. “I saw you trying the door that day.”

  . . You did. Then you’re remarkably trusting,” said Kincaid with a trace of mockery. “For all you knew I might have been planning all this time to make off with the piano. I could give you a number of good and virtuous lies about why I was trying the door, but no, I never knew you before—I’d have remembered—and I’ve never set eyes on your sist
er Cornelia. But I had found out what I could about her and so I knew a little about you, too. And I am interested in Mrs. Foale.”

  There were a number of dignified replies to this. Margaret said, “Why?”

  He seemed to turn something over in his mind before he said, “For someone else, who wonders why she went abroad so suddenly, without telling anybody.”

  “She did tell someone. A woman named Grace, in Philadelphia.”

  “By wire.” There was a pause, in which Margaret realized that as long as a verifiable telephone number was used it was possible to send a telegram in any name.

  Kincaid was looking at her almost dreamily. “What would you do if you were going abroad—I mean, what personal preparations would you make?”

  A wave of irritation, probably fever, swept Margaret from head to toe. “I haven’t the smallest idea.”

  “Yes, you have,” said Kincaid soothingly. “You’d buy some new clothes, women always do. You might have your hair done.” He gave her a sharp glance from which all dreaminess was gone. “You would certainly have the prescribed shots. Mrs. Foale did none of those things here.”

  Margaret didn’t ask how he knew; his voice was too flat and certain for that. “But she came from the East— she might. . .”

  The clothes, possibly, the visit to a beauty salon. But the passport shots, while her husband was dying? And anyway there was a certain time limit on shots. Hilary’s voice came back, saying sombrely, “Maybe she’s shut up somewhere,” and Margaret shook it off with difficulty.

  “She is in Europe, she must be. She sent Elizabeth Honeyman for her mail and address book.”

  “Did she?”

  Although he didn’t move, he gave an impression of having spun argumentatively on her. Margaret said, “All right, then, you don’t believe she’s in Europe. Where do you think she is?”

  He got up and walked to the windows. “I don’t know.”

  (. . . Shut up somewhere.) Margaret forced her mind past that and gazed steadily at Kincaid’s tall uncommunicative back. If he had gone to the trouble of finding out her father’s name, the elementary school she had attended, a single memorable event in Cornelia’s youth, he certainly knew about her past relationship with Philip. The reminder hardened her voice. “But you think Philip may know.”