“No. Did you lose something, Katy?”
Cassie’s voice had softened and quickened and become subtly coaxing. Katy’s fingers tightened on the receiver. Did Cassie think she was the one groping around outside the house in the cold and snowy dark, the one who had attacked Francesca in order not to be recognized?
“Did you, Katy?” There was an edge to Cassie’s soft persistence, and Katy said absently, “My bag. It doesn’t really matter. I just wondered if it had turned up.”
“Your bag? It isn’t here. If the police found it, they didn’t say.”
Katy said, “Someone was in Ilse Petersen’s house the other afternoon. Maybe there’s a tramp around, or a stray thief.”
Cassie said maybe, vaguely, with a flat lack of interest which made it clear that neither of them believed it for an instant. Katy said again that she hoped both Francesca and Cassie would soon be better and added, feeling compelled to and foolish at the same time, “Jeremy’s taking me to dinner tonight. It’ll be lovely not to face this dining room again.”
“I know,” Cassie said, putting an edge on politeness. “It was nice of you to call, Katy. We’re neither of us mortally wounded in the least, though, so please don’t worry.”
Dismissal. Katy grimaced at the mouthpiece and went back to the dining room. When their lunch arrived, she told Lieutenant Hooper that the police had already been at the Pooles’, although they hadn’t been notified of the prowler the night before.
“Odd,” said Lieutenant Hooper, fastidiously removing onions from calves’ liver. “Two women alone in a house, fairly isolated, late at night… they must have rather remarkable nerves. Either that or Mrs. Poole knows who struck her and doesn’t want to tell—or doesn’t dare.”
They separated in front of the post office. Katy pointed out the police station, a neat little building in the shadow of the gloomy red-brick town hall. Cash a check at the bank, first, then call on Mr. Harrow; she said goodbye to Lieutenant Hooper and crossed the street to the bank.
It was hard to believe, that day, that a howling blizzard had swept down on the town forty-eight hours earlier. Snow was still piled in the streets, but the sidewalks were wet and shining and little pools of melted snow brimmed with tender blue sky. Bare branches were slender and dripping, patches of sodden brown grass had begun to emerge on the library lawn, a fresh watery wind came pouring out of the west. It might have been, instead of that strange and menacing December, March in any serene New England town.
Except for the buzz of speculation. Katy grew gradually aware of it in slyly curious glances in the bank, in a hush and turning of heads as she went by, in little pairs and trios and groups of people gathered on street corners, knotted in store entrances. She couldn’t hear voices, but she knew what they were saying: “That’s the Meredith girl, she’s one of the ones that was out to Mrs. Poole’s for dinner the night that Petersen woman got run over. Smack in front of the house, they say…” Or possibly they were going back to Miss Whiddy’s abrupt and unexpected death. “Who’d have thought poor Alice Whiddy… she looked like burying us all. Didn’t do the Inn much good, either, I s’pose…”
It was, for Fenwick, a surfeit of talking-material. First one of the oldest inhabitants and most reliable gossips, then the aloof and inscrutable sculptress who, the natives said disapprovingly, had “taken Mrs. Poole’s husband away.” And they wouldn’t suspect, any of them, that there had been two quiet and cunning murders in their midst.
But the police suspected that second fatal accident. They must, or why would they have combed the Poole house so carefully, even—chillingly—the cellar?
The tiny glittering tree in the window of Francesca’s shop looked forlorn and a little gaudy. Silver dripped liquid and flashing from its miniature boughs; a truck went by on Main Street and the bulbs trembled and danced, red and fiery green and stained-glass blue. Katy, glancing fleetingly at it as she passed, knew that it was her own uncertain mood that made it look so jarringly out of place. Tinsel and fear, shining bulbs and cold dark cunning—they didn’t go together. A young girl with blonde silky hair was dusting the rows of brightly jacketed books; luckily, Francesca’s assistant was back to take care of the shop. Katy went on past, along the street, and turned in at the glass door that said “Farrow Florists.”
Mr. Farrow was relieved to see her. He hoped the wreath had been satisfactory; he hadn’t had very much time to prepare it and he had, he said insinuatingly, had to drop everything else in order to get it to the cemetery that morning. Katy added another bill to the ones already in her hand and thanked him. Yes, the wreath had been lovely.
She lingered. She looked at pots of African daisies, at poinsettias with crepe-paper poise and perfection, a sheaf of dark, satiny roses. She had hoped half-consciously that her phone call that morning might have refreshed Mr. Farrow’s memory about a previous voice, the one that had requested funeral flowers for Monica Meredith’s grave. She was standing in front of something wild and frilly and fragrant cream-yellow. Mr. Farrow said uneasily, “Interested in something else, maybe, Miss Meredith? That, now, for instance, that you’re looking at—”
“No,” Katy said slowly, “not right now. I was wondering, Mr. Farrow, if by any chance you’d happened to remember anything more about that other carnation wreath.”
Mr. Farrow’s face closed suspiciously. Katy realized that he regarded the whole untidy incident as a devious plan to do him out of the price of a wreath. She said, “It doesn’t matter,” and left the shop, and walked back to the Inn through gilded sunlight and rhythmically dripping snow.
If Lieutenant Hooper had returned there was no sign of him. Katy went up to her room and did her nails and considered that she could be arrested, very probably, on charges of obstructing justice. She wondered if and when the police would want to see her, and thought with silver-lining logic that it would at least be thoroughly safe and quiet in the Fenwick jail.
If Cassie suspected her of prowling about the Poole house last night in search of incriminating evidence, then Cassie was obviously in the clear and quite uninvolved in that.
But Cassie had said that Ilse Petersen had promised to think over the proposition of leaving Fenwick for a time, whereas Ilse Petersen had said no such thing. She had implied, rather, that she knew something which would result, for her, in a far more profitable plan of action.
It was oddly baffling not to be able to believe anything that any of them told you. It gave you no toehold, no raw material for reason. Undoubtedly some of them were exactly what they seemed, and were telling the truth, and were sincere in their expressions of shock or bewilderment. But who? thought Katy, waving her nails to dry them.
There was Francesca, silent and furious in the doorway of the little closet in the shop. There was
Francesca whitening and flushing when she read the card that had come with the carnations.
There was Pauline Trent, angry and impatient in a red beret and a white woolly coat, scarringly bright in the mourning-hushed cemetery. Who had been, mystifyingly, a friend of Ilse Petersen’s.
And where was her own bag?
Perhaps the police had found it in their search of the Poole house. But didn’t they usually notify the owner? Unless, or rather more particularly when, it contained something incriminating? Katy emptied her bag mentally, went through the usual innocent contents and didn’t get anyplace. But bags, tangible black suede handbags, didn’t vanish up ropes or melt into thin air. She gave it up.
She was dressing for dinner when the message came that New York was calling. New York… Michael? Katy dropped an earring and fled down to the booth in the lobby, and listened instead to Stan Smith’s voice cutting crisply out of another world.
“Katy? Stan. Hubbard’s been at me to call you all day but I thought I’d wait until the place cleared out. I’m still working, incidentally. That blasted spring catalogue… but it’s a long worm that has no turning, and I’m delivering an ultimatum any day. Anyway, the point is that Hubbard is
in a twelve-cylinder tizzy.”
Hubbard was Paige’s copy chief. Katy’s mind went groping back to the names and personalities that had been her nine-to-five life until—incredibly, it was only a week ago. She said carefully, “What’s the matter?”
“They got a free-lance girl to take up the slack,” said Stan, “and Hubbard says she writes like the label on a bitters bottle. He says when—several words deleted here—are you coming back?”
“Next week,” said Katy, and heard her own voice with amazement. By next week, what? Safety and the end of persecution? Or defeat and the shadow of pursuing hatred standing with them in the church when Michael’s wedding ring went over her finger? She said again, “Next week, Stan,” and Stan said, “I’ll tell him. Well, I guess that’s the burden of my song. Having fun?”
“Oh, yes. Delightful,” said Katy, and knew that distance deadened the edge on her tone because Stan said cheerfully, “Lucky dog. See you next week, then,” and Paige’s dissolved in a click and a silence.
Katy went back to her room to finish dressing. Because she was dining at an inn in Easton, she didn’t find out until the next morning that Michael’s apartment in New York had been broken into. On the same day that the former Mrs. Galbraith, remarried now, who was Ilse Petersen’s aunt and who had lived with Ilse for some years in the little house by the pond, received her startling and wholly unexpected visitor from Fenwick.
11
Warmth and a red-gold tide of light from a leaping open fire; the White Hart Inn in Easton was pleasantly, but not offensively, antique. Katy and Jeremy Taylor sat in an alcove not far from the hearth and talked lightly and easily through cocktails and soup, roast chicken and salad and cool white wine. It was delightfully un-reminiscent of Fenwick, and Jeremy was using that peculiar flashing charm that you basked in, Katy thought, like a golden moment of sunlight on a black-skied April day. Be careful. It was only a moment.
She had, light-mindedly, put on frosty pink wool, a touch of singing French perfume, a mood of guarded gaiety. The guard slipped, halfway through dinner. The firelight was benevolent and relaxing, Jeremy was, after all, an amusing and attractive dinner companion whom she had known at the intimate age of twelve. Time out from suspicion and fear and dread; it was an interlude to forget in and enjoy.
Coffee came. Jeremy said, “What makes you think Miss Whiddy was pushed, Katy?”
The mood shook, but it held. Danger was far from Katy’s mind. She said, “Her shoes, and the light bulb. And she’d been living at the Inn for almost two years, since her brother died. She’d know that staircase by heart…” and then she was telling him, about the light bulb that had flashed on under her fingers, and the loose heel that Miss Whiddy hadn’t been wearing. Jeremy’s eyes were bright and intent, but that was the shining firelight. Jeremy was rigidly statue-still—and that was the natural reaction of shock and wonder. When Katy said, “—and it would have been so simple to hide there, in that linen closet at the top of the stairs,” her eyes were on the flaming logs.
Jeremy said, “Brandy?” Katy, suddenly aware that warmth and cocktails and wine had taken the warning edge from her mind, shook her head. It was late. They’d idled through dinner and the evening had slipped by. Jeremy looked at Katy’s carefully cool eyes and drained his coffee, eyebrows hailing a waiter. “Funny thing about Francesca. And lucky she wasn’t hurt.”
You wouldn’t hurt her, thought Katy. Neither would Arnold Poole, or Harvey Pickering, or her own daughter, Cassie. Violence hadn’t been the object in the attack on Francesca, it had been concealment, regretfully enforced. How reasonable to think that, with Cassie still suffering the effects of her fall, and the living room blocked from the road by the tiny entrance hall, you could investigate the road and the little lawn without interruption on a snowbound December night. But something, some sound, had startled Francesca, and she hadn’t been allowed to find out who had made it. What was the intruder looking for? What, in Francesca’s grounds, had to be obliterated, returned, or taken away?
The night was windy and cold. The stars were out, the sky seasoned sharply with silver. The snow looked luminous and peaceful. Katy got into the car, shivering. Jeremy glanced at her, turned on the heater and headed silently for Fenwick.
Any of them, Katy was thinking, any one of them could have struck Francesca down. The roads had been clear by last night—clear enough, at any rate, for cars to pass. There was Jeremy’s car, and Harvey Pickering’s, and Arnold Poole’s, and Pauline Trent’s ancient Dodge. You’d park your car around the curve, of course. Go silently forward on foot, using the flashlight that had, in all probability, subsequently been used on Francesca. Proceed with your search after the interruption, perhaps, or flee immediately—or had the object of the visit already been accomplished? “Hell—just a minute,” said Jeremy apologetically, and was out of the car.
They had run into snow-covered ice on a lonely stretch of road. Fields on either side, dimly white in the darkness; blacker blurs that were woods. Not a house, not a light, in sight.
But the car had skidded. That was why Jeremy had gotten out, and was moving silently around toward her side of the car in the dark. Katy’s gloved fingers wove and tightened. Jeremy opened the car door and coldness rushed in at her, no colder than the sudden swooping fear that swept nauseatingly up into her throat. Jeremy said softly, “Katy…”
But this was how Use Petersen had been found, struck down on a snowy road. Katy’s mouth was dry. Jeremy said, again, “Could you come out for just a minute, Katy?”
What was it…? ‘Dilly, dilly, come out and be killed.’ What did you do, on an empty, soundless eternity of road? If she could slide over into the driver’s seat, if she could, magically, make the wheels pick up on that slither of ice… the windshield silvered. A car was coming around the curve, chains grinding. Katy didn’t wait. She was sliding under the wheel, had the driver’s door open, was out in the road, shouting. The oncoming car pulled up and Jeremy walked around in front of the headlights to join her. Katy didn’t look at him. She said to an earnest be-spectacled face in the car, “We’re stuck—I wonder if you could give us a push.” She said, very slowly and deliberately, “I’m Katy Meredith. This is Mr. Taylor, Jeremy Taylor. We’re on our way back to Fenwick.”
The man was obliging. He said that the roads were nasty, with ice under all that snow, and turned his car in the road and nudged their bumper gently with his and gave them a push. They started off. Jeremy waved and shouted his thanks, and Katy shrank towards the door and thought, It’s all right. He couldn’t, now. That man has my name, and his.
There was a red light at the bridge going into Fenwick. Jeremy turned his head, deliberately, and looked at Katy. It was dark and warm inside the car. She had relaxed her stiffened muscles. Their shoulders were almost touching. Jeremy’s eyes were clear and green in the light from the dashboard. Katy heard her own heartbeats, swift and deafening; Jeremy stirred abruptly and put an arm out, along the back of the seat. His wrist touched her hair. And there it was again, without warning, that smothering, pounding sensation, that dizzying awareness of a warm shoulder next to hers, the held breath that, expelled, would make them touch.
Magnetism, she thought remotely. Some peculiar, electric fusion that Jeremy could produce at will. Was he like this, she thought ashamedly, with Cassie? And turned her head, so that her hair slid along Jeremy’s wrist, and her mouth was a scant three inches from his. The light changed, and horns sounded impatiently behind them. Jeremy went on looking at her, and an isolated, chilly spot in her mind warned her to move, to turn her head away, to speak. She didn’t. Jeremy was going to kiss her.
He didn’t. His eyes and mouth changed, he gave her a cool, weighing look and took his arm away from the back of the seat. Horns grew more indignant on the bridge. Jeremy laughed and said, “Don’t worry, Katy. I won’t touch you,” and a sweep of heat came up into Katy’s face. She didn’t say anything. She had stood, for a second, on the ragged edge of danger. With Michael’s
ring twisting under her fingers, she was blessedly safe again. A waiting look, a stilling of bone and muscle: it was neat, a conjuror’s trick. In front of the Inn she said lightly, “Dinner was wonderful, Jeremy… don’t get out. And don’t, for heaven’s sake, take me too seriously about Miss Whiddy or anything else—it’s the kind of thing you think up when you’ve time on your hands.”
“Is it?” said Jeremy, and gave her a long look. But the alchemy was gone, Katy thought; he was only a friend, an affianced man, glancing at her in what was undoubtedly meant to be a devastating fashion. Jeremy realized it too, because his mouth looked angry and his “Good night” was curt.
It was after eleven, but she wasn’t tired. She took a bath and brushed her hair stingingly and smoked a cigarette, looking out into darkness, hearing wind shuddering around the Inn. Where was Michael? Asleep—or working late, putting delicate, sure brush-strokes of color on lifeless white paper that would suddenly seem to breathe and move? Bending forward, probably, in a welter of cigarette butts and cold coffee and brush-water, which he usually missed, ending up by dabbling his brush in coffee instead?
Michael was strong and driving, with magic in his fingers and a camel’s-hair brush. Jeremy… Katy undressed and slipped into bed and pulled blankets up under her chin; Jeremy’s charm came out of a faucet, turned on generously when the occasion demanded. Was that why Cassie was so quietly, white-facedly, not happy? Jeremy was attracted to her, Katy—she knew it with blood and senses rather than logic. Was that what it had been, out there on the lonely black road, a fumbling, schoolboy attempt at a tête-a-tête, another version of the out-of-gas routine? The thought made her feel abruptly and unreasonably safer. No man would continue to strike, with hidden, vicious malevolence, at a woman toward whom he was ever so slightly drawn. Would he? Her mind was drowsy.
She forgot, completely, the heat in her own cheeks, the shaking violence of her own heartbeats, the warning consciousness that said this was deliberate magnetism, the other thing that had been willing to be magnetized. The measure of calculated response.
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