In Cold Pursuit

by Ursula Curtiss

  It was too late by then—they had already ordered boquilla black bass—but Mary wondered suddenly if there hadn’t been altogether too much pussyfooting with this half-child, half-woman. She said directly, “Jenny, if you’ve met someone at the motel why didn’t you say so, for heaven’s sake, and we could have stayed there for dinner? I thought we ought to leave on principle, but my principles are easily bent in a good cause.”

  For the first time, Jenny looked so flustered that her eyelashes seemed in danger of getting tangled. “Oh, no. I hate that too, drumming up business for the bar,” she said, and then, selecting a tostado, “What do I do with this?”

  Change of subject. Mary indicated a small bowl of chili. “You dip it in that,” she said,“but cautiously. I have a friend who mistook it for vegetable soup two years ago, and people still ask him why he’s crying.” Jenny did as advised and winced only a little, perhaps because her mind was on something else. She lifted her gaze to Mary in open curiosity. “Speaking of meeting people, how come—I mean, you’re so attractive—you aren’t engaged or anything? Oh,” she said to herself in rebuke, “that is rude.”

  Mary was entertained at the “or anything.”

  “No, it isn’t. I’m twenty-six, and I was engaged, about a year ago. We decided to call it off by mutual consent.” Jenny, having introduced a subject which might be regarded as somewhat personal, appeared to have lost interest; her glance was absorbed in something else.

  “He thought he ought to have his ring back,” continued Mary in exactly the same tone, “but I fooled him by swallowing it. Heated words were exchanged, I’m sorry to say.”

  Jenny heard none of this. “Well, you have an admirer now,” she said. “Behind and to your left, sitting by himself under that mirror with all the decorations. He hasn’t taken his eyes off you since he came in.” Their dinner arrived as she was speaking, wheeled up on a cart, the bass boned and served with the flourishes usually associated with crepes suzette. Mary turned her head to thank the waiter and ask for two Carta Blancas, and in the same motion let her gaze rove a casual few degrees.

  And removed it at once from the man seated alone at a table against the wall, because holding his regard, very light in a tanned face, was like holding on to one end of a rubber band stretched to snapping point. Mary said distractedly to Jenny, “There’s tartar sauce, but try the bass with just lime first,” and realized too late that there were a lot of calories in tartar sauce.

  “Who is he?” asked Jenny, contriving a hiss as she picked up a wedge of lime. “Someone you know, or a visiting wolf?”

  “I have no idea. You can eat the salad in places like this, the lettuce comes from El Paso,” said Mary earnestly—why was it that all natural conversation fell dead at moments like this?—while she went on feeling that steady contemplation on the back of her head.

  Or . . . ? For the first time she became aware of a length of mirror half-dividing the dining room into two sections and holding her own small but clear reflection: slightly peaked brows, a touch of sunburn on her cheekbones, hair almost as gold, in this light, as the heishi earrings sewing an occasional sparkling stitch on the air. In the rear distance, the perfectly stilled sleeve and shoulder of a dark coat.

  Mary did not glance at the mirror again, because if the man behind her shifted his chair slightly she would find him in it too. She talked determinedly to Jenny, asking about distant and half-forgotten relatives and realizing resentfully that she was scarcely even enjoying the black bass, which was sweet and delicate, or experiencing any triumph over the fact that Jenny liked and drank the Mexican beer—for which she proceeded to compensate by ignoring her baked potato and refusing dessert.

  True to his calling, the waiter who had asked twice if everything was satisfactory presented the check and vanished, apparently forever. Rather than remain in her spotlit position, Mary put down bills that left him far too big a tip. Their progress toward the door took them necessarily past the table for two against the wall, and the man there came to his feet as they approached.

  “My name is Daniel Brennan,” he said, offering his hand to Mary, “and if you caught me staring it’s because I’m always surprised to see another Santa Fe face down here.” He seemed to be visited briefly by doubt. “You are Mary Vane, aren’t you? Someone introduced us at an affair at the La Fonda—Willie Wilkinson, I think.”

  Mary corrected her last name politely and introduced Jenny. If only he had come over to their table and said that earlier, she thought.

  “I think they’ve gone out to search for a boat to catch my shrimp,” said Brennan. “Won’t you—” he cast a glance around for another chair “—sit down and have a cordial?”

  Up close, his gaze wasn’t formidable at all but merely an extremely light gray. “Thank you, but we have to be getting back,” said Mary, and was asked inevitably where they were staying. Told the Casa de Flores, Brennan said, “I’m meeting a friend there tomorrow, a business colleague really, so perhaps I’ll see you again?”

  It seemed an actual question rather than the usual automatic courtesy, and Mary said yes, perhaps, and added a goodnight. Outside in the half-dark—this part of the city contained a kind of exhaled light at all hours, as if the pale shop-fronts around the huge plaza had stored up some of the fierce white sun—it struck her as odd that after his introduction to her Daniel Brennan hadn’t so much as glanced at Jenny again. Delicacy, because in her sleeveless teal-blue dress she looked more than ever like an X ray of herself?

  Somehow Mary thought not, and a very peculiar idea had entered her head. The motel pool was lit, throwing up a muted flare of green-gold, and although the night was cool Jenny got into her still-damp bathing-suit. “I love swimming at night, and I have to work off that beer,” she said with friendly mockery. “Are you coming?”

  “Maybe just to watch you—I think I’ll go into the matter of our books first,” said Mary, sitting down on the bed near the telephone. “Incidentally, should you be swimming so soon after dinner?”

  “That’s an old wives’ tale,” said Jenny, and departed.

  Mary did not pick up the receiver and ask if Alfredo had returned to his station. She didn’t remember ever having been introduced to Daniel Brennan, and his was a decisive-featured face. The La Fonda was a safe choice as background, because most large functions in Santa Fe were held at the old hotel, and Willie Wilkinson as agent even safer: tirelessly social and insatiably curious, he seemed to have mastered the trick of being everywhere at once.

  But if this story were false, how had Daniel Brennan known her name, with that slight and convincing inaccuracy?

  Jenny’s parents had met Brian Beardsley, and could tell Mary his approximate height and his general appearance even if, say, a mustache had been removed or hair color altered. While she waited through the expected complications of putting a call in to New York from Mexico, Mary examined the possible reasons that would make Beardsley pursue Jenny at all.

  Genuine love, when he had lied to her in essential areas? A determination to reinvolve her with him as revenge against the Actons for having had him investigated? Or, very simply, money? Gerald Acton would not qualify for a wealthiest-men list, but Henrietta had money of her own and their son-in-law could look forward to a well-upholstered future. For all their thunder and lightning, they would never disinherit their only child.

  Of all these motives, Mary liked the second least, because, on the record, Brian Beardsley was not a man to provoke. And it had to be considered that persuading Jenny back into an affair or even marriage was not the only or the worst way he could hurt the Actons.

  And what about Jenny, deliberately calling Mary’s attention to the fact of a watcher in the restaurant: was she capable of such guile? Yes. Mary didn’t even have to weigh the question. She had the fierce, single-minded commitment of her age to what she looked upon as inviolable rights, Beardsley’s as well as her own, and it would undoubtedly give her a good deal of satisfaction to outwit the system. She was, at le
ast now, of a peculiarly unyielding nature; she did not have that brooding look for nothing.

  . . . Mary realized that the Actons’ telephone was finally ringing—and ringing, and not answering.

  She sat for a few moments with her hand on the cradled receiver, staring reflectively at it, and then she left the room, locked the door, turned to see a waiter emerging from the small service elevator with a laden cart. Dinner for two in the room at the end of the frigid corridor. What could it be like in winter?

  Although the courtyard was now a packed glisten of cars, the only people Mary encountered on her way to the pool were the Indian woman, tonight resplendent in a sari of deep blue bordered with silver, and a gray-haired delegation wearing oblong plastic name tags and expressions of daring gaiety, as if, safely away from home, they might engage in a hat dance later in the evening. The women with their short curls and ruddy skins and pant-suits looked curiously like the men, or perhaps it was the other way around.

  At first glance, the brilliant, still-shaking pool was empty. Then Mary, eyes adjusting to darkness made blacker by contrast, saw the hand holding onto the deck at the deep end; saw, too, a figure crouched there, an arm going out and down as she watched.

  She called sharply, “Jenny?” as she walked closer, and the arm withdrew, what was now identifiably a man came to his feet and moved away without hurry, Jenny’s white-capped head appeared as she lifted herself on her elbows. The dazzle behind her made it impossible to read her expression, but Mary had a feeling that it was annoyed.

  That couldn’t be helped—and she was, after all, the cause of these uneasy speculations. Mary said, bending toward the lifted face, “Jenny, when your parents talked to you on Tuesday night did they say anything about going away in the next few days? I just tried to reach them, to let them know where we are, and I don’t want to keep trying if there’s no point.”

  “My mother said they might go to the Cape if the weather was decent.” Jenny shifted the position of her hands, braced her feet against the side of the pool, pulled her body into a bow. “You don’t need to worry about them calling till next week, anyway. You should see my father when the telephone bill comes in.”

  My mother. My father. Had she always placed them at that cool biological remove? The crouching man hadn’t taken himself very far away after all; an edge of Mary’s vision saw him drop down onto a chair at the table where Jenny had sat that afternoon. In the brief wink of a struck match, there was even what looked like a bottle of Carta Blanca there again, and a glass.

  Jenny was now pulling herself forward and back in the water, clearly impatient for Mary to depart so that she could get on with her swim. Or just for Mary to depart?

  The feeling, once again, of coming along like a wardress to spoil things for her cousin gave Mary a faint crispness. “Look, Jenny, it was my idea to come down here and I really think your parents should know, just in case. Your mother must have said where on the Cape they might be going.”

  “Well, their best friends, the Mitchells, have a summer place there—you must have met them, nobody in the family can get married or buried without them. He’s a sailing nut, I think he sleeps in his blazer, and . . .”

  Was Jenny being purposely maddening? As though aware of a certain irritation above her, she went on hastily, “They open up their house in Wellfleet around now, but they never get around to having the telephone connected until everything else is done because otherwise people descend on them in droves, so if I were you,” she was either matter-of-fact or slightly amused, “I’d just stop worrying about it.”

  So much for obtaining a description of Brian Beardsley, who, although it couldn’t be true, summoned up a vision of brown hair, old tweeds, a calm way with a pipe. Mary left the pool area, marvelling that neither she nor Henrietta had thought of this in the course of that alarmed and alarming telephone call. But the weather-permitting Cape visit had been projected before her aunt learned of the new turn of events; would they still have gone ahead with it? Very probably. With the feeling of a problem solved and danger averted, people tended to heave a sigh of relief and proceed as planned.

  There was a different clerk at the desk. He was not much of an improvement on the old. He said disbelievingly, “Books?” as if there could be no possible use for such objects at the charming, diverting Casa de Flores, and after that he implied that the motel could scarcely be responsible for Mary’s carelessness, but he wrote something on a memo pad. “I will send Alfredo to you,” he promised.

  Like that first consignment of ice, Mary thought disenchantedly.

  The Casa de Flores came to life in the evening; from two cavelike, lantern-lit bars issued muted sounds of revelry and mariachi music, chopped into almost-silence by the closing of the heavy glass doors of the lobby. The lawns and flowers, floodlit, looked vivid and unreal, something to be rolled up and stored for the night when everybody had gone to bed. Mary walked to the proper arch and mounted the steps, hearing an echo in the encroaching cold.

  It wasn’t an echo, it was someone behind her, and this was no time to think about the recessed alcoves spaced along the corridor, holding huge urns of sand and their own darkness. She turned casually as she took her room key from her bag, and—something about the way he moved? The shape of his face in that quick flare of match-light?—knew that this was the man from the pool.

  His features were not obscured now, and she half-caught her breath and almost spoke.

  6

  BUT the message that had flashed through her senses was wrong. This was not, by one of the wild coincidences the world was full of, the man she had mentioned to Jenny so lightly at dinner, the man she sometimes missed astonishingly. Apart from a certain angularity of cheekbone, and the way his hair grew at his temples, he didn’t resemble Spence at all.

  In spite of this instant realization, Mary was still a little off-balance when he said pleasantly, producing his own key, “Your young friend is a remarkable swimmer. Competition material, if she’d work on her turns.”

  Friend. Not surprisingly, at her age and in her circumstances, Jenny hadn’t wanted to be labelled as in the company of any relative, even a cousin, and in fact Mary, out of some intuition, had merely said to Daniel Brennan, “This is Jenny Acton.” And this man had heard the trace of alarm in her voice as she neared the pool, and was politely explaining himself and his attentions away.

  “She is, isn’t she?” said Mary, polite in turn, and was about to use her key when she became aware that he was studying her face intently, as though making up his mind whether to add something else.

  He did. He said, “I’m afraid this will sound intrusive, but Jenny seems like a very nice girl and I wondered—she told me this afternoon that she lives in the East—if her parents had ever heard of Dr. Bechstein, in Denver? The reason I ask is because I have good friends with a daughter in pretty much her condition, and he’s been able to do a lot for her.”

  Mary, growing instinctively stiff, knew that this approach from a stranger was not really astonishing. A great many people came to New Mexico for the relief of physical ills—arthritis, or asthma or other respiratory problems—and concerned sympathy, particularly from those who had encountered successful treatment, crossed lines usually drawn. Too, in spite of her flashes of irony, Jenny often showed the vulnerability of a child. But although Mary had been disowned to a degree she was still not going to discuss Jenny’s problems with someone encountered sixty seconds ago.

  She said a little aloofly, “I’m sure her parents—” and broke off and turned instinctively, following his sharpened gaze over her shoulder. At the end of the corridor, motion so fast that she had just missed it indicated the withdrawal of a watcher there.

  “They’ve Got a Secret,” observed the man in audible quotes. He weighed his key tentatively, took a step backward, patted his pockets, said, “Left my cigarettes behind,” and smiled at Mary. “Good night.”

  Mary responded mechanically, watched him disappear around the turn for the
stairs, let herself into her room. A peculiar tingly feeling remained from that first shock; she had to remind herself that it was not Spence uttering Jenny’s name so warmly.

  Five minutes later, at a signalling tap, she opened the door to her cousin, who looked flushed and bright-eyed if a bit shivery in her terry robe, and wanted to know if Mary was contemplating a bath right away, because otherwise she was going to wash her hair.

  “Go ahead,” said Mary, now accustomed to this frequent process, and watched with interest while the contents of a zippered makeup case were disinterred. There were three plastic bottles and a tube, all evidently designed to cope with the Great Split End Crisis. She said casually, curious as to the reaction, “I met your pool friend. He thinks that with a mustache you’d be another Mark Spitz.”

  She was instantly appalled at herself; why had she put it that way? Jenny stared briefly, and the stare was not friendly. Mary said rapidly, “That was my own translation. What he actually said was that you’re a marvelous swimmer, you could compete, and he thinks you’re very nice.”

  Although it was exactly what he had said, it acquired a faintly patronizing flavor in the conveying, but Jenny didn’t seem to mind. She collected a lock of her black hair and draped it experimentally over her upper lip. “Come to that, I saw your Mr. Brennan downstairs. Spying out the territory for tomorrow, would you say, or panting for another glimpse of you?”

  We’re needling each other, thought Mary in amazement. I like her, and I think she likes me, but listen to us. She jumped up. “I brought bath powder, if you didn’t. Wait a second and I’ll get it for you.”

  It was a fragrance Jenny had admired. Mary picked up her book when the bathroom door had closed and the ablutions begun, but although it was a very good English mystery novel she did not immediately plunge herself into it again. “Your Mr. Brennan,” Jenny had said—but something in that brief interchange at the restaurant, although she had not realized it until now, had rung slightly false.