In Cold Pursuit

by Ursula Curtiss

  “But there’s nothing disgraceful about a nervous breakdown,” said Mary involuntarily.

  “Certainly not, but there are times when you’d just as soon not have one made public. If you were running for reelection after a questionable voting record, say, or had a proxy fight on your hands, or were in the middle of a divorce and wanted custody of a child or children . . .” St. Ives shrugged, letting that tail off as though he had scarcely embarked upon a list of possible motives.

  Mary could not have said why there was something unspoken in the air: the suggestion that other and less harmless states of mind could be presented as nervous breakdowns. But even the bizarrely run Casa de Flores wouldn’t harbor a dangerous psychotic.

  (Although if he had arrived looking only like a man badly in need of complete rest and quiet, how would they know?)

  The air darkened suddenly as the morning’s massed clouds moved over the sun, the now-deserted swimming pool grew a gooseflesh frill, a new sharp wind blew Mary’s bathing-cap off the table. Owen St. Ives glanced at the sky. “Going to pour,” he said, and then, casually, as he retrieved her cap and pocketed his cigarettes, “Did you happen to hear anything from that direction during the night?”

  Jenny shook her head at once and said, “Not I.” Mary remembered the half-dreamed sound like an aborted cry, and the peculiar atmosphere in the coffee shop at breakfast as though the staff buzzed with something. But if Jenny had been so inordinately frightened of the chambermaid, how would she react to this? “Neither did I,” said Mary firmly.

  She glanced at her cousin as she spoke, and saw with surprise that she needn’t have worried; Jenny was gazing at St. Ives with only interest and speculation. The close proximity of a man with nervous problems severe enough to warrant the presence of a nurse didn’t seem to bother her at all. So her source of alarm, first showing itself in tension at the sound of the telephone in Santa Fe the night before they left, was, unlikely though it seemed, a woman.

  A slender woman with cropped dark hair, Mary amended, because just for a second the maid must have looked to Jenny like someone else. Encountered where?

  It couldn’t matter; Jenny had recovered at once and seemed to have forgotten the incident. She said as they reached the archway just ahead of the first drops of rain, “Those people in the pool were going to a bullfight.”

  It was clear from her dubious tone that in spite of her extreme squeamishness at the sight of blood she was beginning to wonder if this event was something she would regret having missed, later on. Mary was not anxious to repeat her own single experience. She could not endorse the prim outrage of the woman sitting next to her, who had said with conviction, “They would never allow this in St. Louis,” but neither did she care for the streams of crimson coursing down the massive shoulders where the banderillas had been planted at the outset. No matter what Hemingway said, it seemed an odd way for a bull to express his thorough enjoyment of the sport.

  Still, she said, “Would you like me to see if I can get tickets? They might have them right here.”

  Jenny hesitated. “Is there an awful lot of gore?”

  “Well, the bull doesn’t die of fright,” said Mary reasonably, and Jenny gave a little shudder and shook her head. “Forget I mentioned it.”

  The interchange was so normal, and so unrelated to what had gone before, that Mary’s mind had already dismissed that puzzling moment of real fear. It gave her nothing whatever in the way of warning.

  8

  IT was at lunch that the first invisible move was made.

  Owen St. Ives had been accurate in his weather prediction. A hard gray rain was beating down on the flowers and lawns and bouncing up from the walks, with the result that the dining room was crowded with guests who would otherwise have ventured out elsewhere. With the exception of St. Ives, all the people even vaguely familiar to Mary were there: the Indian woman, in a sari of burnt-orange as slumbrous as a fire just getting under way; the conventioneers, giving complicated drink orders (“No, hold that, I’ll have a margharita instead of a daiquiri, but forget the salt”) to a patient waiter; Daniel Brennan, alone at a table for two, gazing expectantly at the dining room entrance and, occasionally, his watch.

  Jenny, who evidently regarded her breakfast melon as an entering wedge in every respect, wanted only a cup of soup until Mary said with dangerous amiability, “Why don’t you just have a crust of bread and a sip of water instead? Then I’ll really look like a villain.”

  It was the first time she had brought the issue so squarely into the open—and, from her startled and then narrowed gaze, the first time Jenny had contemplated herself in this light. She obviously didn’t mind and perhaps even enjoyed the glances drawn by her pipe-cleaner construction; to be thought of as being punished was a different matter. With dignity, she ordered a chicken sandwich.

  That didn’t mean she would do more than taste it, Mary warned herself, but it seemed to her that the starvation pattern was beginning to break down under the pressure of a strange place and a new face. When the sandwich arrived, accompanied by her own shrimp salad, Jenny opened it briskly, scraped off all the butter, added salt and pepper, and took a purposeful bite. She was thoroughly aware of what was going on; she said ironically to Mary, “Eat it, dear, it’s broccoli . . . actually, it’s not bad.”

  From its very force—the dining room windows were now tall wavering greenish blurs enclosed in gold-and-brown print—the rain couldn’t last much longer. Jenny said yes to Mary’s question as to whether she would like to visit the market later (kept talking, she might absentmindedly consume a few of the tostados thrust invitingly into her guacamole salad) but her attention was clearly elsewhere. She smiled suddenly, lifted a hand in greeting, said across the table, “That’s a girl I met in my mad dash for the paper this morning. She seems quite nice as well as gorgeous, which I don’t think is fair.”

  But gorgeous was an overblown adjective for the girl whom Mary glanced at presently, and beautiful or striking didn’t apply either. She was overwhelmingly, enchantingly pretty, with an air of being on the edge of some delightful adventure even while sitting still: there was a suggestion of breath caught, lips about to curve and part. It wasn’t only a matter of coloring, which was shades of honey; it was millimeters off the norm—a very faint tilt to her nose, a very faint almonding of her eyes, which placed her in a special category. Like a rose in exactly the right stage of bloom, she was a pleasure to behold.

  She had been seated at a table for four. She lifted her face to a waiter and indicated that there would be other people coming, and in spite of all that heavy artillery she looked shy and apologetic. The waiter departed as a man off to the crusades and returned almost at once with a daiquiri, although a couple at the neighboring table were still stranded with only silver, napkins, and ice water.

  “She looks almost edible,” said Mary with sincerity. “From California, I’ll bet. They seem to have a monopoly.”

  Jenny shook her head. “She has a Southern accent.” There wasn’t a trace of envy in her voice, only pride at being on even a nodding acquaintance with such a ravishing creature, and Mary gazed at her with sudden affection. She could be maddening at times, but mixed in with the perversity and stubbornness there was a very sound and sturdy streak.

  The rain stopped with faucet abruptness, the last drops falling through sunlight. There was an instant stir throughout the dining room as people who had been lingering over coffee began to shift in their chairs, gather handbags, crane in search of waiters. Mary’s roving glance noted that Daniel Brennan’s business colleague had never turned up and he was now lunching alone. Reminded of their brief exchange that morning, she went to the desk when the check had been settled, waited through a flurry of people checking out, informed the clerk about her nonfunctioning bedside lamp.

  It was the difficult one, but today he made no pretense of not being able to understand Mary; indeed, as though to add to her stock of Spanish should she care to return to it, he said, “Ah
, lampara.” Patronizingly, he became all teeth. “I will see that the maid bring a new bulb.”

  “But it isn’t the bulb,” said Mary, spurred to give him a steady smile back. “I’ve already tried that. It’s the lamp itself.”

  This “Ah!” had the alertness of a surgeon’s, finding a malignancy, and the clerk made a note, with flourishes. It seemed somehow too easy. “And did you receive your libros? Your books?”

  If not war, this was certainly a skirmish. “Yes, thank you,” said Mary. “It was well worth being waked up for.” She turned away and saw Jenny, who had drifted to the postcard display at the end of the counter, in conversation with the remarkable girl from the dining room.

  She was small—Jenny seemed to tower over her— and Mary guessed her to be about twenty-two. A fashion magazine would have wanted her to lose at least five pounds, but that would have been like wanting a slender apricot or a hollow-cheeked peach. Up close, her warmly tanned skin was silky, her eyes a melting gray-green. In accordance with the habit of the day, Jenny introduced her as Astrid and asked Mary if they could give her a lift into town; through a misunderstanding, the aunt and uncle she was with had gone off without her.

  “I’m a tiny bit nervous about taking a taxi here,” said Astrid abashedly, “but if it’s a bother—”

  If she had been less disarming, Mary could have imagined whole processions of women arranging to leave her behind. As it was, she seemed to present no more of a threat than baby powder, although there was nothing in the least babyish about her. Here, something twitched at the edge of Mary’s mind and as abruptly let go. “No bother at all,” she said, smiling at the girl. “We were going to the market anyway, so whenever you’re ready . .

  This proved to be at once, not surprisingly; Astrid had obviously cut her lunch short, when she realized her predicament, in the hope of a ride with someone she had at least met. In the car, she asked to be dropped off at any place convenient for Mary near the optician’s on the main street where her aunt and uncle were having eyeglass prescriptions filled; she would meet them there after she did some souvenir-shopping.

  Astrid lived in North Carolina (this in answer to a question from Jenny) and this was her first visit to the Southwest. No, she had never been to New York, but had heard that it was expensive. After a time, Mary stopped listening to compared notes and gave her whole attention to the traffic. Driving habits in Juarez had improved in the last few years, and taxis no longer looked like discarded frozen-food containers, but it was still necessary to be on the alert for boys darting fearlessly between cars with cartons of duty-free cigarettes for sale, or wobbling alongside on bicycles and offering themselves as guides.

  Astrid got out at the appointed corner, expressing thanks and the hope that if her aunt and uncle didn’t decide to start the return journey to Albuquerque that afternoon she would see them later. Mary was struck by the frequency with which, in less than twenty-four hours, she had heard these words from people encountered for the first time. She glanced back automatically as she completed her turn into the parking area for the market, but Astrid had vanished.

  . . . For a moment, standing close to Mary Vaughan—fair hair looking lamplit, hazel eyes clear and unmarked in a face not dark with a rain of blood but only touched lightly by the sun—he had nearly seized her throat then and there and to hell with the consequences. His heart had raced with the raging impulse, his brain ached with it.

  He had smiled at her instead, although it was increasingly difficult, now that she was within actual, physical reach, to remind himself that she had to know why she was dying. There would be no point in dispatching her with almost the speed of a sniper—but he promised himself that she would pay him back for every second of this charade, which was forcing him to take more tranquilizers than his prescription called for.

  She had glanced at him peculiarly once or twice, as if searching for another identity behind his features, but she couldn’t be really suspicious because she was still here with the stick-figure girl, Jenny. If he had had any hatred to spare he would have applied it in that direction, because she had to be detached long enough for a fatal accident to befall Mary Vaughan—if not in the pool, on the almost glassy stairs—and she stuck like a burr.

  The Casa de Flores must have a discreet doctor to summon in emergencies, and he felt sure that accident, in the case of a U.S. citizen staying at a tourist-oriented Mexican motel, would be a verdict welcome in all quarters.

  Meanwhile, there was an essential call to make, and instinct took him back over the border to El Paso and the first telephone booth he could find. He was in luck; it was his sister who answered the direct-dialling and asked, after her first anxious inquiry, “Where are you?”

  Unhesitatingly, he named a town fifty miles to the north of Santa Fe, where he and his wife had had a primitive cabin for vacations and an occasional long weekend of fishing, hiking, brief dips in an icy stream. Where, if she had not done so much internal bleeding after she was turned away from Mary Vaughan’s door, his wife would have been able to heal all her wounds. In his mind he struck down again, furiously, the doctor’s assertion that the mortal damage had already been done by that time. Those were the tales they told children.

  “. . . the cabin?” Eunice Howe was asking incredulously, and he scratched the edge of a coin gently over the mouthpiece and said, “ . . . friends. I can’t hear you very well, can you hear me? How is everything there?”

  Everything being the funeral arrangements, about which he cared nothing at all, and the investigation in progress, in which his interest was vital. People taken to emergency rooms passed through a number of hands. Was it possible that the police had somehow learned of Mary Vaughan’s involvement, tried to question her, discovered her hasty departure, linked it with his own if they knew about that?

  He gripped the receiver, staring at the pebbled wall of the phone booth, and heard his sister say that the police had arrested a boy with a previous record but were still searching for the weapon. “ . . . And I hope you’ll approve of what we’ve arranged with Homan’s, the—well, you know. When will you be back?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said, setting a seal on Mary Vaughan. “I don’t know what time, but tomorrow.”

  “What does pobrecita mean?” asked Jenny.

  Poor little thing. Mary replying falsely that she didn’t know, had also heard it murmured behind them more than once in their jostled progress through the narrow aisles of the market, all converging on the central area with its heaped bins of vivid, outsize fruits and vegetables.

  The diminutive would have seemed odd to apply to tall Jenny if simple alarm at this teeming place with its lively vendors and overspill of brooms, straw hats, puppets, salad bowls, bull horns, handbags—just in one short distance—hadn’t given her the appearance of a defensive child. She pretended not to hear the incessant coaxings to look, to buy, so that the stall-keepers pursued her the more assiduously. When Mary said, “No, gracias,” they desisted at once, and that was when the “pobrecita” followed, as though she were in the habit of denying the poor little thing decent sustenance as well.

  Gradually, at the sight of other tourists bargaining over carved wooden masks and painted pottery jars as they stepped casually around spilled liquid or trodden lettuce leaves on the uneven concrete floor, Jenny recovered her composure and even a trace of adventure. How much, she inquired of Mary, would one of those curly black iron candlesticks be?

  “About two dollars, or two-fifty. Why don’t you ask?”

  Jenny did. She had evidently been keeping an ear cocked, because at the two-fifty price she shook her head and said with a firm and practiced air, “Too much.”

  “Too much!” Mary recognized this zestful man from the year before, and it was mutual; he dropped an eyelid at her in the midst of dealing with Jenny. From nowhere, like lightning, he produced a candle and thrust it into one of the two holders. “How beautiful, yes? You are never without light. Too much? You are rich Yankee, and I—”
he allowed his curly dark head to loll dramatically toward his chest”—am poor man. Big family. Sixteen kids.”

  The wrought iron was graceful, like all Mexican work, and Jenny was no match for this seasoned mixture of drollery and reproach. She bought the candlestick, the candle having been whisked thriftily out of it, and watched it wrapped in the ubiquitous newspaper by a fleet little boy who had also appeared where he wasn’t before. She muttered deflatedly as the man went to another stall for change, “I suppose that’s the oldest of the sixteen.”

  It wasn’t an observation which required an answer —and, Mary realized a second too late, Jenny wouldn’t have heard one in any case. She had turned her head, seeking the source of a sudden gay burst of mariachi music, and all at once she was as stiff and deaf and dumb as a statue.

  Mary followed her gaze, saw only tourists, the back of one of the musicians, the sunny street outside the market entrance. The two men they had passed on their way in still sat at a sidewalk table, lingering over cans of beer and squeezed limes. With a small acceleration of her heartbeat, because they were at the edge of a confrontation, she said directly, “Who was that, Jenny?”

  If it were possible for stone eyes to liquefy and achieve color, they would have bent exactly Jenny’s glance. “Who was what?”

  And unspokenly, as a week’s cautious cameraderie was wiped out in a matter of seconds, What business is it of yours? It mightn’t be unusual at eighteen to consider that you had passed the point of having to answer to anyone—but Mary thought of the Actons’ very real worry and her own sense of responsibility, and felt a flash of anger at being put in the position of a prying stranger. A passerby bumped into her and apologized, but her eyes held Jenny’s without flickering. “You seem to have seen someone who startled you,” she said levelly.