The Iron Cobweb

by Ursula Curtiss

  “Yes. Sorry,” said Oliver, his tone matching her own. “It isn’t serious, he doesn’t know what a birthday’s all about anyway. But —there’s this. Nobody knows where the stuff came from, nobody saw them eat it. Do you, for instance, know what they’re doing even half the time—does anybody?”

  “If you mean, is somebody at their side every waking instant, no, certainly not,” said Elizabeth, stung. “It might be done with one child, if you didn’t mind turning out a little marionette, but it can’t be done with two.”

  “I thought that was what Noreen was here for.”

  “Noreen’s very good and very capable, and when the children aren’t with her they’re with me. Neither of us is a police matron, however, and there are things to be done in the house. She was hanging up the laundry, I gather, when—”

  “Of course, that’s right—you were busy with Steven Brent.”

  A small shocked silence fell. Somewhere beyond it Constance closed the oven door with a bang, and Noreen tiptoed in the upper hall. Elizabeth and Oliver stood staring at each other, heads flung back, anger like a tightwire strung between them. A moment passed that way before Elizabeth said slowly, “Oliver,” and stopped and then started again. “Sooner or later, we’ve got to—”

  Noreen came down the stairs and paused in the doorway. About to speak, she glanced uncertainly at Elizabeth and then at Oliver, and turned and went silently into the kitchen. Constance appeared in the dining-room, brisk and aproned. “What a pity about the children—but they’ll have their cake tomorrow.”

  Nobody answered her. Sleet touched the windows. Oliver opened his newspaper, rattling it, and observed savagely into the folds, “What a rotten night.”

  “Vile,” said Elizabeth stonily.

  How long had it been since she went to bed and to sleep, as simply as that? The process was very involved now; it meant the uncomfortable aloneness with Oliver, the polite query as to whether the other intended to read, the attempt at oblivion. After that, the cigarette, the staring thoughts, the sleeping pill which had lately grown into two.

  Elizabeth lay in the dark and listened to Oliver sleeping. The vague dread that she had first become aware of a month ago was taking a more definite shape. It was now a pair of hands. Tearing the roses, as though they hadn’t been able to resist the beauty and the perfection, or the gesture they represented. Patiently practicing with a pen—how many sheets of paper, in what quiet room, had been covered with “Sarah E. Bennett” and “Elizabeth March”? Opening over a child’s toy chest, to spill out a shining jumble of rich forbidden candies.

  Hands she had looked at countless times, and hadn’t really seen because they were the hands of someone she trusted.

  The trouble with Seconal was that somewhere between the second one and morning, she could shrink and dwindle while the hands swelled and grew and played with her life at their own vicious leisure.

  But the checks, thought Elizabeth, grasping at tangibles, unable to live too long with the hands; something will turn up about the checks, or Mrs. Bennett’s stolen identification. . . .

  Something did.

  Six

  IT WAS A LOGICAL THING, a small but necessary link in the misty, twisted chain. It had its own prologue, and Elizabeth half recognized that at the time.

  She had gone up to the studio at a few minutes before noon, because lately she didn’t like being alone in the house. The children had been picked up for a pre-Christmas party, and Constance had asked for the car. Noreen, whose day off extended from twelve to twelve the following day, had hurried off to catch her bus.

  The studio was bitterly cold. Elizabeth turned on both electric heaters, put a fresh sheet of copy paper in her typewriter, lighted a cigarette and sat staring ahead of her.

  The morning hadn’t been peaceful. That wasn’t due as much to Jeep’s biting Maire in a transport of rage, or Maire tearing the leg off his battered rubber baby by way of revenge, as it was to Lucy Brent’s late-coffee visit.

  Lucy had been at her most Lucyish: nervous, irritatingly brisk, critical. “Haven’t you lost weight, Elizabeth?”

  “A little, maybe.” Which was a lie; it was seven pounds in four weeks.

  “Are you feeling as well as you should by now—or oughtn’t I to ask?”

  Nice points, both of them: how well should you feel when an unseen, uncontrollable presence, the presence of evil, had slipped quietly into the heart of your home? And should Lucy— Lucy ask? Elizabeth hadn’t had to answer that, because upstairs, dimly, there was a fresh burst of tears, and she was able to murmur, “Poor Noreen. She must be holding her breath until she goes off at noon.”

  “Noreen’s quite good, isn’t she?”

  “Extremely.” Elizabeth felt peculiarly defensive this morning under Lucy’s sharp roving gaze. When the other woman busied herself noncommitally with a cigarette, she took a moment for appraisal, a long detached look she wouldn’t have dreamed of two months before.

  Lucy was—thirty-four, thirty-five? Not tall, with a quick-moving, beautifully economical body that just avoided angularity. Small dark head, small clever face with haughty cheekbones and restless eyes. Like a greyhound turned out by Bonwit’s, Elizabeth had thought when they first met; she knew now that Lucy refurbished her own slender wardrobe patiently and expertly.

  And what did she know of Lucy, beyond her darting gaiety, her passion for bridge, her deftness with a scarf or a medallion or a twist of silk? Nothing. . . . The impromptu realization brought her up short. Lucy was looking at her and saying with faint amusement, “She doesn’t Like me, you know. I don’t think she approves. Noreen, I mean.”

  “Nonsense,” said Elizabeth surprisedly, and when Lucy smiled and shrugged her wonder took on an edge of annoyance. “What a peculiar thing to think. For that matter, you’ve never liked her, have you, Lucy?”

  Lucy’s eyebrows went up. She said mildly, “Like her? My dear, I hardly know her. As far as I’m concerned she’s an appendage of the children, and them I adore. . . .Put it down,” said Lucy vaguely, “as a funny impression.” She smiled her sudden warm banishing smile. “As you may have gathered, I’m not fit to talk to today. I have a horrible thing to ask you, so I will now take a running jump and get it over with. . . . Can you lend me fifty dollars until January?”

  “Of course,” said Elizabeth. It seemed imperative to be as brisk as Lucy, and not to offer more than fifty. “Will a check do?”

  “A check will do wonders,” Lucy said with frank relief, and thanked Elizabeth and folded it into her wallet. Five minutes later she was moving toward the door, and that was when the children came down the stairs, ready for the party, shepherded by Noreen. That was when Lucy turned, and greeted Maire and Jeep, and lifted her eyes and said brightly, “Hello, Noreen, how are you?” Noreen bent and adjusted Jeep’s suspender straps before she straightened and answered politely, “Hello, Mrs. Brent.”

  Elizabeth watched with a small shock the glance that went between them: Lucy cool and poised and a little challenging, still holding her mechanical smile; Noreen facing her in her rigidly neat uniform of white blouse and dark blue jumper, her gaze level, her composure matching Lucy’s.

  For a quick instant it echoed almost audibly on the air that they were not nursemaid and visitor or even oblivious strangers, but hostile, well-aware equals.

  She had a plot and a typewriter, peace and pencils; at the end of an hour Elizabeth found that she might as well have been supplied with a shoemaker’s awl.

  The bon-bons—where had she seen those brilliant foils before? If she could pin that down, she would know who it was . . . . . . who hated her.

  Because that, all at once, was the only possible answer. The simplicity of it was appalling: the loathing that must have bred and spread behind a friendly face, the violence that was forcing the venom out drop by drop, that must sooner or later come with a gush. . . .

  Elizabeth felt shaken and a little sick; she got up and walked restlessly around the studio, stopping at t
he front window to stare down at the house. It was graceful, even under the leafless trees: stormy gray shingle, shuttered in white. The window trim needed painting, so did the rose trellises.

  Her gaze halted. She stayed sharply still, fingers tightening in her palms. Because there was an answering-back stare from the quiet, supposedly empty house.

  Like war at long range . . . why did she think of that? It was a face, pressed whitely against one of the upper windows, tilted a little in its blind stare up at the studio. It moved a trifle; a white hand lifted lazily. It watched, it waited for a shocking and boundless moment, and then a sudden turn of shoulder took it away out of sight.

  It was the window of Noreen’s room.

  It was not Noreen’s face.

  Careful. This wasn’t the time to slip on a stone, or plunge head-on into a thrusting branch. Elizabeth, running precipitately down the hill toward the house, closed her mind to what she would find there. She would know, and that was enough—and the only way to do it was pell-mell, like this, with action outdistancing thought and fear.

  She reached the house and went in through the kitchen, because that was quicker. Warmth met her, and the secretive knowing silence of a just-emptied house. The oil burner started up with a throb, a board creaked somewhere, the refrigerator gave a mechanical mutter and settled back to work. Elizabeth, catching her breath with difficulty, called uncertainly, “Hello?”

  And, at the foot of the stairs, “Constance . . . ?”

  But she was alone in the house.

  The quality of the silence suggested it; the front door, swinging inward a lazy inch while she waited at the foot of the stairs with lifted face, confirmed it. Someone had flashed down these stairs not much over a minute ago, and had not taken time to close the door securely.

  Either that or, out of fear and a nearly-sleepless night, she had shaped an innocent reflection into a face, and the door had been left that way earlier.

  Upstairs, she found her answer. The door of Noreen’s room was ajar, and Elizabeth went in. It was a small room, slant-ceilinged, wallpapered in a pattern of ivy and curly pink flowers. There v/as a single bed and night table, a bureau, an armchair, a hooked rug full of clear pastels.

  Throughout the air hung a heavy sweet perfume, alien to Elizabeth, clearly wrong in that room.

  There were two glass bottles on the bureau. Elizabeth uncapped them, sniffed at innocuous flower fragrances and replaced them carefully. Outside Constance’s door she hesitated a moment and then went in.

  Her cousin’s usually immaculate room was untidy today; to see the tweed suit Constance had worn that morning flung carelessly on the bed and a rejected stocking draped rakishly over a chair was almost like catching Constance herself with no clothes on. Elizabeth had no real attention for the room. She went to the dressing-table, tested a tall bottle of cologne and found it to be gardenia, and paused. Her heartbeats refused to quiet, the palms of her hands felt damp. What was this sense of urgent hurry, almost of personal danger?

  She pulled her thoughts back. Whoever had worn that drench of perfume hadn’t applied it here, unless—At the back of the dressing-table, near the mirror, was a small something in pink and white striped wrapping. It had been opened and loosely re-wrapped. Before Elizabeth’s scruples could catch up with her fingers the striped paper had fallen away.

  It was perfume—imported, costly—in a chaste, unopened white box. There was a card, and on it was written simply, “I hope you will accept this from H.W.”

  Elizabeth came aware suddenly of Constance’s bedside clock. How long since she had come into the house—five minutes, six? She closed the door of her cousin’s bedroom behind her and went down the stairs to the telephone. She heard her own voice, expressionless, giving the Brents’ number, and then she waited and listened to the patient, empty drawl. She was about to hang up when the receiver at the other end was lifted with a jostling sound and Lucy’s voice, breathless, said, “Hello? Yes, hello, who is it?”

  Breathless.

  “Elizabeth. I wondered if by any chance you still had . . .”

  Moments later, after pretending to write down an address she didn’t want, Elizabeth put the receiver back. The silent house, the witnessing walls and watchful mirrors that could have told her everything she wanted to know, were full of suggestions.

  She didn’t listen. She made herself a sandwich and tea, turned on a lamp against the threatening light, and settled down grimly with a book. Before she did any of those things she did a thing she had never done before: nonchalantly, trying not to notice herself doing it, she locked every door in the house.

  The thing that turned up so neatly and logically, its purpose spent, was Mrs. Bennett’s pocketbook.

  Noreen brought it to Elizabeth the next afternoon. “Excuse me, Mrs. March, but would you have any idea whose this is?”

  Elizabeth took the bag and looked at it carefully. It was old and worn, its top clasp tarnished, its black fabric folds dusty. Mrs. Bennett’s cheerful voice seemed to emanate from it: “Oh, don’t trouble your head about it, Mrs. March, it’ll turn up, and small loss if it doesn’t. It was an old thing anyway—nothing in it but a handkerchief and a few old bills, and Lord knows there’s more where they came from . . .”

  A receipted bill, from a public utility, perhaps . . . would that do for identification at a bank? Elizabeth didn’t know. She said, “Yes, it belonged to Mrs. Bennett, who used to take care of the children. She lost it here and we combed the house . . . where did you find it, Noreen?” and knew the answer to that even before the girl spoke.

  “In the closet in my room, way up on the shelf at the back. I did some Christmas shopping this morning and when I put the presents away I felt it there . . . I hope Mrs. Bennett remembers just what was in it,” said Noreen, her color high, “because I never touched it at all, Mrs. March, except to bring it straight down to you.”

  She gave her head a quick perplexed shake and gazed troubledly down at the bag. This, thought Elizabeth, must be the perpetual nightmare of people working in other people’s houses. She said quickly, “Of course not,” and then, “Thanks, Noreen. I’ll take care of it.”

  So the errand of the intruder in Noreen’s room yesterday was explained. The pocketbook had not been in the closet when Noreen moved her things in; Mrs. Bennett had given the room a thorough turning-out and Elizabeth herself had inspected it. The placing of it there could only be a safeguard, an ace in the hole if the matter of the forged checks should ever come under open discussion. How logically the suggestion of searching Noreen’s room could be presented . . .

  And it might have worked if Elizabeth hadn’t seen the face in the window, the face that was not Noreen’s. It was a purely negative identification but none the less certain for that: if you saw something jarringly wrong, and were only allowed a fleeting instant, you couldn’t assign it to its proper background. You could only know that it was out of context.

  What had it been in the case of the face in the window—height, contour, quality of movement?

  Elizabeth took the pocketbook to her room and examined it. Mrs. Bennett had been accurate; there was a handkerchief, a horn hairpin, a two-cent stamp, a plumber’s bill. It told her nothing except the manner of its arrival in the house.

  Sitting there on the edge of her bed, Elizabeth knew with a feeling that was half dread and half relief that the time had come to tell Oliver about the forged checks.

  When you knew about the checks, Jeep’s spoiled birthday and the destruction of the roses fell into a different focus. It might have been argued, before, that the checks themselves were a simple, non-uncommon case of theft—but then there would have been no stranger in Noreen’s room, and Mrs. Bennett’s bag would have been disposed of.

  It was nearly five o’clock. Elizabeth put the black purse in a drawer of her bureau and went downstairs.

  Constance met her in the lower hall. “Oh, here you are. I was just coming up. There’s cold chicken in the icebox and I’ve fixed a
salad and made some strawberry shortcake. I thought I’d tell you because,” said Constance, flushing like an elderly schoolgirl, “I won’t be in to dinner tonight.”

  Elizabeth swallowed her surprise. Of course—H. W., who must be following up his gift of perfume. She smiled involuntarily at her cousin’s retreating back and went out to look at the kitchen clock. With her decision to tell Oliver about the checks, the time until he came home seemed suddenly endless and empty.

  Noreen was heating consomme and cutting croutons; she turned to smile at Elizabeth and then at Maire. “Tell Mama what you saw this afternoon.”

  “A buffalo,” said Maire, radiant.

  “Maire!”

  Maire turned her face away from Noreen’s reproachful gaze and addressed herself importantly to Elizabeth. The buffalo dwindled and then disappeared as she lost interest; they had, it turned out, seen ducks instead, and Jeep had cried all the way home.

  Elizabeth said seriously, “He’s little, he gets tired,” and, “Come to think of it, where is Jeep?”

  Jeep was in the small back L of the kitchen, peacefully oiling his tricycle with mustard, from which he was separated with great difficulty. Noreen set the table for their supper and pointed out the possibilities of the croutons. Elizabeth left them in an absorbed silence and went into the living-room to wait for Oliver.

  He would believe her now, because he had to; the watchful impersonal look would go out of his eyes. If there were someone else who understood, someone else to watch the narrow line between normality and disaster, then she could stand it. She could stand anything as long as Oliver was with her, as he would be, as he couldn’t help being. . . .

  It was five-thirty and then a quarter of six, and Elizabeth dropped all pretense of reading and walked nervously up and down the length of the room, cupping her hands against her eyes to stare out into the dark. The children finished their supper and followed Noreen upstairs for their bath, and Oliver still had not come. . . . Elizabeth went on pacing.