And with that a small silence fell. Eve was not vain enough to suppose that this mission was in any way connected with the agency; on the other hand, an apartment-dweller for most of her adult life, she found it unlikely that any landlord would drop around simply in the hope of hearing complaints about the pipes. She waited, and from the next room, clearly audible, Ambrose crooned silkily “Come, my toad.”
Henry Conlon was polite enough not to look inquiring, but this interjection seemed to have the effect of waking him out of some inner preoccupation. He had been gazing about him in evident appreciation of the shell-like pallor of the walls, the cool gloss of the brick floor, the clean twinkle of the tall windows. It seemed to Eve that his glance had lingered unnecessarily on her typewriter on its table in the corner; it was an oldish Royal, and nothing to excite admiration.
Now he said, “My aunt rented this house and lived in the one next door. The other executors want it put on the market as soon as possible, and as I’m the only relative on the spot I get the job of sorting a lot of personal stuff. So if you see lights over there now and then—”
“I did,” said Eve, thawing a little, “and I did wonder. About vandals, I mean.”
In the next room, Ambrose abandoned his sugary approach and shouted angrily, “Come, toad!” and this time it was too loud and too peculiar to ignore. Eve explained that she had a young cousin visiting her, and Henry Conlon said with a smile, “With a friend, I take it. Do you by any chance have an older sister who went to school out here, the Lockwood School?”
The light eyes, Eve discovered, were a hazel-gray, and alert out of all proportion to such a question. She said no, no sisters at all, and Conlon rose. “I have a favor to ask, if I may. I’m missing a key to the back door of the other house, and I wonder if it got mixed up somehow with the keys here? In the time of the last tenant I remember a brass bowl, kept on top of the left-hand kitchen cupboard, I think—”
Eve could not recall a brass bowl, but she said obediently, “Just a second, I’ll look,” and as she left the room the memory that she had been trying to pin down flashed into place.
The last agency Christmas party. Cox-Ivanhoe was not bothersomely big-happy-family, but the copy staff were expected to make at least a token appearance at this annual affair; indeed, many people lived in hope of a repetition of the time when heartily hated Mr. Tannenbaum (Media) had subsided into a huge bowl of fondue.
Eve, repairing her powder preparatory to leaving, had overheard part of a conversation between two pretty secretaries.
“Oh, him. That’s Mr. Conlon. He’s liaison, whatever that is. Tempting, I grant you, but you’re just putting a lot of mileage on your eyelashes for nothing. He’s got a terrible down on women ever since his wife.”
“Wife. Somebody up there hates me,” said the other secretary moodily, leaning into the mirror to examine her lipstick.
“Oh, she’s dead, it was two or three years ago, but that’s the point. From what I heard—damn, why doesn’t somebody invent an elastic safety-pin?—she was one of those females with a wandering foot. Why she’d want to wander is beyond me, I’d have been home putting new hems on his socks or whatever, but she did, and one night she took off with some lunatic in his private plane, just for a lark, and they were both killed . . .”
So that, thought Eve now, was what gave Henry Conlon his look of poised neutrality. It made an unassailable barrier, whereas bitterness was easily attacked.
There was no brass bowl on the cupboard top. Standing on the little ladder, Eve was struck suddenly by the total silence of the house; it had a quality of held breaths, her own included. Well, Ambrose was probably waiting cunningly for his toad to betray itself. And Henry Conlon?
Very softly, from the direction of the living room, the silence was interrupted. There was a slippery rustle, a papery sound, the rustle again. Eve was deeply and instantly angry. Landlord he might be, but that did not give him the right to send her on fictitious searches—which now seemed obvious—and then invade her privacy. She walked swiftly into the living room, head militantly up. “Mr. Conlon—”
He was standing at a window, busy with a cigarette, every line of him expressive of polite waiting. Could the surreptitious sounds have come from Ambrose? She sent a rapid glance around the room, and felt an unreasonable heat rise to her face at the sight of the newspaper clipping which she had left inattentively on an end table. How she would appear to be brooding over her shattered love life . . .
“If there was a brass bowl, it’s not here now,” she said levelly, “and the only keys I have are the ones to this house. Sorry.”
His gaze flickered briefly—amusement at her warlike tone? “Thank you anyway. I think your cousin has found his toad.”
“Oh? Well, it’s not like the woman with the drachma, I’m not going to call in a single soul to rejoice,” said Eve, giving him back his own detached smile. She moved purposefully toward the door.
“I gather you’re busy,” murmured Henry Conlon.
“Yes, I am, rather. Thank you for coming by.”
“May I say that you’re very much missed at work?”
“That’s very nice to hear,” said Eve, as glib as he, and closed the door behind him.
The first thing she did after that was crumple the clipping and toss it into the fireplace. The second thing was to find a shoebox for the horned toad, which Ambrose had indeed found swelling malevolently in a corner.
Eve had no love for horned toads, but even in her present preoccupation she felt a small and justifiable pride. Ambrose had come out here alarmed at houseflies; in her motherly zeal the usually sensible Celia had given him lectures on germs. He had screamed at his first encounter with a grasshopper, and stood paralyzed when an elegant little lizard flashed over his bare toes in the garden. And here he was with a horned toad, harmless but certainly not attractive by any standards.
Eve said firmly, “You can’t keep it, Ambrose, it will die,” but she helped him collect grass for the shoebox, and reclaimed the lid of a peanut-butter jar as a water dish. Ambrose enveloped himself in the straw hat and carried the shoebox out under the apricot tree, where he lay propped on one elbow and gazed fondly through the fringe at his hideous captive.
Eve returned to the living room and tried to examine it through Henry Conlon’s eyes. She had purposely kept the furnishings to a cool bare minimum—the little desk that held all her personal papers was in her bedroom—and the only object here of a remotely personal nature was her typewriter. And yes, his roaming glance had paused there.
As a shield against both the dust and Ambrose, Eve kept the typewriter covered; the cover, when she lifted it off, made exactly the slippery rustle she had heard from the kitchen. The sheet of paper in the machine was only the beginning of a letter to Celia, but in order to look at it Henry Conlon had concocted that nonsense about the key— had, Eve now began to suspect, come to to the house at all.
And what was the random, out-of-context question he had asked her, dropping it in with that alert expression?
Ambrose, who steadfastly refused to take an afternoon nap and had once proved his case for wakefulness by reducing Eve’s alarm clock to a jumble of tiny wheels and screws, occasionally betrayed himself by falling asleep. He had done it now, stretched out peacefully on the grass beside the shoebox. The hat had twisted wildly askew when he turned on his back, giving him somewhat the look of a diminutive drunk in a park.
Eve, obscurely troubled at being the object of unexplained curiosity, went to the telephone and called Nina Earl.
6
“NOW I wonder,” said Ned Saxon softly and for perhaps the tenth time, “who Mr. Arthur Pulliam didn’t want us to meet?”
There was an edge of malice in the full and formal address, and Iris Saxon’s eyebrows drew together. She had no particular liking for Arthur Pulliam, who struck her as pompous, but he was Molly’s bereaved husband and as such, she felt, deserving of courtesy. There was no one to overhear them in the old car
on this windy gray morning, en route to the Morley house for the first time since Molly’s funeral, but she was uneasy at the lively speculation in which Ned had engaged ever since leaving Arthur Pulliam the afternoon before.
She said with unusual shortness, “I can’t see why you’re making so much of a simple package delivery.”
“He was as jumpy as a witch before that.”
“It would be odd if he weren’t upset,” reported Iris sharply. “Can you imagine how the phone’s been ringing in that house for the past few days?”
She regretted that immediately, because Arthur Pulliam’s nervousness at the sound of the telephone had been almost a palpable thing, not the irritation or weariness that might have been expected. She snatched a quick side glance at her husband, but, intent on his driving or perhaps his own thoughts, he did not seem to have heard her. If Iris had been a woman given to flights of fancy, which she was not, she might have considered that he wore the gratified but deeply puzzled look of a magician who has pulled a live rabbit out of a perfectly normal hat.
Bothered by his expression, unable to put her own disquietude into words, she said crossly, “It seems to me that for twenty-five dollars the garage might have taken a few more rattles out of this car. I keep expecting it to fall to pieces any minute, and how I’ll get to work then I don’t know.”
This time Ned did hear her, and glanced at her with astonished concern. “Iris, what’s wrong?”
The twenty-five dollars irretrievably spent two weeks ago, although Ned usually doctored the old engine himself. The cold fact, shocking to think about, yes, but still a fact, of having lost the small weekly income from the Pulliams. The knowledge that Ned would not allow her to seek any further such employment; the inevitable curtailment of the occasional drive-in movies that were their only recreation, the small weekend steak that constituted their one departure from a diet which could only be described as filling . . .
Habit was strong, and Iris managed a smile. “Sorry—you know how this miserable wind gets me down. I’ll be fine as soon as I’m busy.”
She was not looking at him then, she was automatically checking the contents of the capacious knitting-bag that went everywhere with her. Included in its depths was her own spartan lunch of an apple and some saltines spread with peanut butter; not even at Molly’s had she ever accepted food, no matter how deviously offered.
The car halted in the Morleys’ circular drive. Ned heaved himself out, rounded the hood, opened the passenger door and assisted Iris out as though she were the thinnest of glass bubbles. Together, like fond elderly children, they proceeded to the front door.
After a year of working weekly at the Morley house, Iris Saxon would have stood patiently in a blizzard rather than open a door that was not her own, even though Jennifer had said repeatedly, “I wish you’d come right on in—some morning I might not hear you.” Equally, neither would Iris arrive at any but the front door: this was a fact understood by all parties.
Footsteps sounded within the house. Ned cleared his throat and said, “I thought I might go from here to Center Cab. I understand they need drivers.”
He would go, and he would fall into a political argument with the manager or tell him kindly but firmly how he was mishandling the whole operation . . . Irs smiled with steady cheerfulness. “Well, good luck, hon.”
Ned gave her a little salute of acknowledgment and an earnest blue glance. “Now you be sure, if Jennifer goes out, to lock all the doors,” he said.
The footsteps were Richard Morley’s, because twenty minutes earlier Jennifer had finished her breakfast coffee, looked at the clock, and stood up. “If Iris comes while I’m getting dressed, would you let her in?”
Normally, on Mrs. Saxon’s day there, Jennifer indulged in a leisurely routine quite at variance with this businesslike air. A week ago Richard would have asked in surprise, “Where are you off to so early?” Now he only glanced at her with cautious inquiry, unaware that his face had tightened.
“I’m going over to Arthur’s,” Jennifer said abruptly, “and get that over with. I should be finished by this afternoon.”
Molly’s jewelry had already gone to the safe-deposit box, but there were still her clothes and the small intimate personal possessions, some of them dating back to her childhood, which could be neither discarded nor put into the hands of total strangers en masse. Appalled that they could be speaking to each other in these level and detached tones, Richard said, “Should you be over there alone?”
“Oh, I’ll be perfectly all right. It’s something that has to be done, and the sooner the better. I’ll see you tonight.”
It was crisp, arm’s-length, dismissing as Jennifer herself disappeared and the shower began to run. And to Richard Morley there was something enormously wrong with it, even allowing for shock and grief and resentment at his delay in going to the Pulliam house on the night of Molly’s death.
It was connected somehow with the mail.
On Saturday the mail had come late, around noon, and Richard had brought it in. Notes of condolence were still arriving for Jennifer, but there came a point in the envelope-opening when she turned so still that it was possible to think she had stopped breathing; it was the kind of stillness that had the effect of shattering sound.
Richard had said instinctively, forgetting his guard of the past few days, ‘‘What’s the matter?” and after a moment in which she stared at him as though he had addressed her in another tongue Jennifer had shaken her head. “Answering all these people . . . it’s going to take forever.” She had appeared to drop all her letters onto the table beside him then, as she always did, but nothing among them could have caused that instant of—dazedness? Disbelief? And late that evening, when she had thought him asleep, she had telephoned a man, although he had heard only the “Mr.” before her voice lowered to inaudibility.
The letter sender?
A less proud and fiercely jealous man might have questioned his wife point-blank even at the risk of a quarrel, or made some effort to find the communication which had stricken her into that silence. Richard Morley did neither. He saw the unprecedented gulf between them widen, was powerless because of his own nature to attempt to close it, and, on this windy morning, greeted Mrs. Saxon briefly and departed for his office.
For all her appointment-keeping air, Jennifer did not leave the house at once. Noticeably thinner in a French-cuffed white silk blouse and charcoal skirt, even her lightest lipstick startling in a face grown angular, she made Iris Saxon a ritual cup of coffee and kept determinedly to brisk neutral topics. There was a small rip in the vent of Richard’s dark blue suit coat, if Iris could get around to it, and might it be a good day to do the bedroom curtains? “Hung out really wet in this wind they mightn’t even need ironing . . .”
Although that was a waste of breath, because everything fell to Mrs. Saxon’s iron, including washcloths unless they were spirited away first. She was not a luxury, however, as Jennifer had often pointed out to Richard; if anything, she saved them money by laundering things which would otherwise have gone to the cleaner’s—even raincoats emerged from her hands looking new—and effecting repairs which would have carried a tailor’s bill. In addition, the finicky Richard’s shirts now looked starched without being so, and retained all their buttons whole and intact.
“I’ll be over at Arthur’s if you need me for anything,” said Jennifer, “and if anyone calls I ought to be back by three or so. Oh, and Iris, I’m sure they asked you this at the time, but Molly didn’t have any unusual phone calls that day, did she?”
She was poking about in her purse with an air of abstractedness as she spoke, but she lifted her gaze quickly to the look of compassion in the older woman’s face. “Not that she mentioned,” said Iris, gently but definitely. “She was—was just as usual.” Her voice threatened to tremble and she turned rapidly away. “I’d better get busy, as you don’t ask me over just for the pleasure of my company . . .”
So that compartment could
be sealed off—couldn’t it?
In the last few days Jennifer had taken refuge from thought by observing her own actions as though she were a critical stranger. Now, she watched herself get into her car and drive along the winding roads, spotted here and there with fallen yellow leaves, and slow presently for the turn into the Pulliam driveway. For a single undetached second she looked with revulsion at the old lilac, somehow smug with secrets even after its official investigation, and then she recaptured the protective mood, drove up to the door, used her key.
Get the easiest things over with first. True to his promise, Arthur had provided huge cardboard cartons, and in the bedroom, which seemed a special core of stillness in the silent house, Jennifer folded Molly’s suits and dresses and coats; by arrangement, a charity thrift shop would collect them. The more formal robes would go there too, along with some layered-chiffon gift nightgowns, still in their tissue—and like some horrifying klaxon the telephone was ringing.
Arthur, of course; he had known she would be coming today or tomorrow; still, it took a few seconds for the unthinking fright to die away from between her shoulder blades. And it wasn’t Arthur, but a woman who said to Jennifer’s answer, “Hello? Is—hello?”
There was nothing wrong with the line. “Hello,” repeated Jennifer, and after a tiny pause the faintly accented voice said, “I’m sorry, I must have the wrong number,” and there was a click and a hum.
. . . Lingerie, some cellophaned nylons. Costume jewelry: Iris Saxon would probably like some, out of sentiment, and Jennifer bundled it all into the carved wooden jewel box now emptied of Molly’s good pearls and guard rings and the hideously ornate ruby earrings which had belonged to Arthur’s mother. (And it was only eleven o’clock, observed a treacherous portion of her mind; how easy, once you put your mind to it, to pack and tidy someone completely out of existence.)
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