She realized for the first time, with a sense of shock, how very close she had come to leaving the house unguarded for a dangerously long period of time.
It was night there, too, and the wind would be shaking the windows, driving the lilacs against the glass, meeting itself angrily around the house comer. And both Oliver and she were out of the way, for any purpose that might produce itself on a black and noisy night like this . . . the very eve of escape.
How could she have become so blinded by resentment at Oliver as to forget that?
The wind fought the small car, and twice Elizabeth had to swerve sharply in order to avoid toppled branches in the road. It was ten minutes after six when she went through the center of the little town. Constance, barely arrived, would hardly have had time to change her clothes; she could go back to her hostessing. Elizabeth drew to a stop in front of the house as inwardly breathless as though she had finished a race.
She ran up the lawn under the toss and swish of maples. She pushed the front door shut on a shudder of wind, and called, “Constance? I’m back, so why don’t you—”
But it was Lucy Brent on the stairs; it was Lucy, crisp unfaltering Lucy who took that oddly fumbling step toward her, and spoke her name in a voice Elizabeth wouldn’t have known.
“What’s the matter?” Elizabeth said, staring. “Lucy, what’s . . . Are the children all right?”
How white and strange Lucy looked. How quiet the house was, as though two small and rebellious children hadn’t been put to bed twenty minutes ago, as though they were only Lucy and herself here.
As though —
Lucy found a thin echo of her normal command. “Elizabeth, take it easy. Don’t—”
But Elizabeth was already on the stairs and running.
Eighteen
NOT NIGHTMARE, but fact—the waiting crib, the empty bed, the plush pig smiling foolishly at the dreadful silence.
Elizabeth went downstairs again, holding herself as quiet and calm as if she had discovered the children on a cliff-edge, where a sudden sound, an incautious gesture, would send them over.
Think, now. Before you pick up the telephone to call the police, think about what could have happened to Constance, to delay her. If one of the children had gotten hurt in any way, she would have had to take both to the doctor. Just because your children weren’t in their beds at six-thirty on a black wild February evening didn’t mean they’d been kidnaped.
And even if they’d been kidnaped it didn’t mean you’d never see them alive, or button them into their pajamas, or spank or catch them close to you again.
On the other hand, if they had been kidnaped, it might be dangerous, even fatal, to call the police.
At that instant, Lucy said sharply, “Elizabeth!” and then, more gently, “Here, for heaven’s sake, have a drink of your own bourbon, and don’t look like that. There’s been some mistake, the messages got mixed up. . . .”
“Messages?” said Elizabeth, and with the words she swam up to reality, and knew that she hadn’t been there before but only existing in a merciful sub-layer. “Lucy, if you know anything at all about this—”
“There was a message for Constance,” repeated Lucy, pausing in her nervous circling of the room, “at that damned bazaar. I got stuck as a sponsor, God knows why, and I was sitting beside Constance when one of the caterer’s men came up to tell her she was wanted on the phone. It was somebody calling from the Touraine, she said, to say that you —” was Lucy’s glance faintly inquiring? “—didn’t feel well enough to drive home alone and would Constance please take a taxi into Boston and meet you as soon as possible. Like fools, we didn’t check it in any way. We both thought—”
“I see.” And, incredibly detached, Elizabeth did see: her behavior of the last few weeks had seemed like the logical prelude to a crack-up. She said steadily, “The message wasn’t from me, of course.” Oh God, the moments going by. “So Constance left, arranging with Noreen—?”
“No. Constance was in such a fluster that I said I’d come over and stay until you both got back, so she called Noreen and told her that. I got here at the dot of six, and I’ve been waiting ever since. They’ll probably walk in now,” said Lucy, forcedly brisk, “having been on some perfectly logical errand, and here we’ll be, ten years older.”
Neither of them believed it. Lucy’s set face and wide worried eyes were a flat contradiction, and the faint repeated thundering of the wind said what Elizabeth could not bring herself to say: that no errand would keep Noreen out with two small children, one of them just over a bad cold, on a night like this.
While Constance, drawn away and disposed of by a false telephone message, sped in all innocence to Boston.
What to do?
To Elizabeth it seemed like a crisis she had tried to rehearse for at intervals ever since Maire had lain roaring in her bassinet. She would go to bed tired, furious, rebellious—and wake to think. What if I got up, now, and went into her room and the bassinet was empty? What would I ever do?
It had happened at last, and she knew she had never had an answer.
Oliver would know, but Oliver wouldn’t be home for hours, and she had no idea of where to reach him, unless—
Five desperate minutes went by at the telephone, with Lucy roaming nervously past her, before she found she could no longer stand the operator’s leisurely connections, the paging at the hotels she called, the polite, faraway negatives.
Elizabeth looked at the clock, the cradled phone, the black windows. She thought clearly, This is what you’re here for, this is the ultimate responsibility. She said, “I’ll look upstairs and see if anything’s—gone. Then I’ll call the police.”
“I’ll try Steven again, he wasn’t home when I called before. He might—”
Elizabeth lost the rest of that, she was running again up the stairs which she had descended, in some impossible measure of time, not quite fifteen minutes ago. She flung open the door of Noreen’s room and switched on the lamp.
She hadn’t quite liked sniffling at the girl’s cologne on the day an alien face had stared up at her out of this window; probing the small amount of privacy left to a household employee wasn’t pleasant. She was ruthless now, throwing the closet door open, staring hard at the few dim shapes on hangers, gaze going instantly to a small suitcase on the floor at the back.
Had the suitcase been emptied?
It hadn’t.
Downstairs, Lucy’s voice said tensely, “—gone, both of them . . . What? Well, what else could it be? Get over here as fast as you can, will you?”
And Elizabeth stood staring at the open suitcase on the bed.
There was a beige cardigan and what looked like a nightgown, stockings rolled in a ball, a pair of black stilt-heeled pumps, very worn. Carefully folded away, a small cotton dress, flowered in peach and blue, still in the basting process.
A dress for a child of four, or five.
Elizabeth picked it up, half-numbed, and the child herself smiled up from the cheap blue rayon lining of the suitcase. Not pretty; a thin little face inside straight dark hair, with frightened eyes cancelling out the obedient curve of the mouth. Noreen Delaney, in miniature.
Not much older than Maire. . . .
But so very thin, so fragile. . . .
Elizabeth said softly, “Oh, God,” and slid a shaking hand once more into the cuff of rayon that lined the suitcase. Another photograph met her fingers, and she stared at it for a long moment before she knew that it was a photograph of Noreen.
Cool, deliberately flirtatious, a little bold; the eyes laughing, the vivid lips parted. A scrawl of ink in one comer said, “To Stony, from his N.”
There were still the things she couldn’t change: the shape of the face, the setting of the eyes. . . .
“I caught Steven in his shower, but he’s coming right over,” Lucy said. She looked exhausted. “He says—what’s that?”
“She had a child,” said Elizabeth, and said it again, carefully, while she look
ed for her coat. “She—had a child. Noreen.”
“Noreen?”
Elizabeth found her coat and put it on; she glanced distractedly about for her pocketbook and saw it in the chair where she’d flung it, contents spilling out. She said to Lucy’s staring face, “It’ll save time if I bring her picture down to the police station—where are my keys. . . .”
Her lipstick had rolled, her cigarettes were tilting out across the striped cushion; there were all the familiar trappings of nightmare. Lucy cut through them with impatience. “I’ll drive you, my car’s here. But oughtn’t we—”
“I’ll leave a note, Constance might be back before we are, or Steven . . . there was a pencil here this morning . . . oh, God, I’d better bring pictures of the children too . . .”
“I have a pencil,” said Lucy. “Go get the pictures, I’ll write a note . . .”
Noreen.
So quiet, so very solicitous, with those small deft hands. That air of almost pitiful innocence, the shadowed eyes that, Elizabeth realized now, could come from an excess of gaiety, a reckless spending of the emotions that must have damned and choked in this house. If you had a child of your own whom you couldn’t acknowledge, and had to take care of other children, bathe their small satiny bodies, see the wealth of love and belonging they’d been born to . . . Lucy—shrewd, noticing Lucy—had sensed something false from the beginning. If only—but there wasn’t time for that now.
Elizabeth managed to find one of the pictures they had taken under the tree at Christmas, with Maire looking seraphic for the camera and Jeep caressing his flyswatter.
The flyswatter. The pig . . . If she started to cry now it would be the undoing of everything, it would break through Lucy’s layer of strength and she herself would go crashing.
Lucy said briefly, writing at the telephone table, “Ready?”
“Yes. Let’s leave the front door open, in case Steven, or Constance . . .”
She stood on the bottom step of the stairs, watching Lucy’s fat little backhand that said with the haste of a telegram: “Constance —Children gone, out looking for them with Lucy. If you know anything call me at police station. Back soon.”
Elizabeth watched with a kind of dreadful fascination while her own signature flowed out from under Lucy’s pencil, sharply different from the script above. Forward-sloping, casually looped, as airy and expert as though Elizabeth herself had written it.
Lucy looked, too, and the pencil stopped on the tail of the “h” and dug sharply into the paper. There was a tiny explosion of breaking lead, and then their eyes, meeting slowly, locking.
Out of a kaleidoscope world, Elizabeth managed to say carefully, “Let’s go, Lucy.”
“Oh, no,” said Lucy slowly. “Let’s not.” Her hand reached out; without taking her eyes from Elizabeth’s face she crumpled the sheet of notepaper into her palm. She said almost casually, “We weren’t going anyway, you know—no farther than my car.”
The house shook under the wind, the gilt clock ticked. Elizabeth knew suddenly why Lucy’s eves had kept finding her face with such intensity ever since she had walked into the house. It hadn’t been shock, or pity; it had been a devouring fascination.
She said, “Where are my children, Lucy?” and must have stepped off the stairs, because Lucy said sharply, “Stay where you are!”
The whip hand. The voice like a whip, too, flicking out, biting in. Before Elizabeth could move, it came curling at her again. “You’re losing your husband,” said Lucy stingingly. “If you don’t want to lose your children too, you’ll do as you’re told.”
She was shockingly the same, except for her tone and her bright unwinking eyes. Elizabeth knew dimly that she was all the more dangerous for that. She said as quietly as she could, holding back desperation, “What do you want, Lucy? Tell me and I’ll—”
“Mrs. March,” said Lucy, smooth and ugly, “will reach for her ever-present checkbook. Oh, I’ve watched you, Elizabeth, how I’ve watched you. Quite the lady of the manor, weren’t you, when we’d go in to Bonwit’s? You could write a check—and I could sit up for nights in a row, sewing at some dreary little copy. Clever Lucy, however do you do it?”
It might have been fantasy but for Maire and Jeep, and the wood of the newel post pressed against her shoulder. Elizabeth thought back in bewilderment to the other woman coaxing her on shopping trips, urging a blouse, a dinner skirt, a nightgown—and realized what a fierce enjoyment she must have derived from every purchase. Something else to feed into the fund of hate. . . .
She said wonderingly, “You tore the roses, didn’t you, Lucy? And all the rest of it. I think you must be mad.”
“Oh, do you,” said Lucy mincingly. “I’m not, though. It’s just that you had everything—and I had nothing. I thought I’d like to see how you looked wearing your world around your ears, that’s all. It’s hardly becoming,” Lucy cocked her head with indescribable malice, “but it’s certainly—interesting.”
The children, Elizabeth thought doggedly. Mustn’t allow herself to forget the only thing that mattered. If Lucy wanted money, why didn’t she—
But Lucy was staring at her, and saying curiously, “You never thought you’d want something you couldn’t buy, did you, Elizabeth? Because you’ve always had everything. The clothes you wanted, the home you wanted, a husband so deaf and dumb and blind to anyone else that he only spoke to other women to consult them about you when you got home from the hospital. ‘What shall we do about Elizabeth?’ Never mind that you were all right, and the children were all right—just poor, dear Elizabeth. You lost a child, yes—but you had two others safe at home. Do you realize,” said Lucy, suddenly shaking with rage, “that I was to come to the rescue—I, who’ll never have a child at all?”
This was it. Far away—and how long ago?—Lucy’s remembered voice said about a Christmas puppy, “We’re to have the patter of four little feet instead of two, and something to tie Lucy down.”
This was the seed of Lucy’s hatred. Left alone, it mightn’t have grown to the monstrous thing it was, but there was Oliver, whom Lucy must have wanted, and there was the symbol of the checkbook. Not the money itself, but the gesture; even now, standing in a controlled terror, Elizabeth knew that. No matter how classic the circumstances, Lucy could not be bought, could never have been bought. What she wanted of Elizabeth, what she had wanted all along with such terrible eagerness, was not her money but her destruction, complete, in a wiping out of love and sanity and safety.
And Elizabeth knew now what she had to do.
She moved, breaking the rigidity that seemed to have been a matter of hours rather than minutes. She couldn’t see the telephone, but it was there, behind Lucy’s thin braced body. She said, “I’m going to call the police,” and took a step forward.
Lucy moved too, but it was only the hand that had stayed behind her back while the other crumpled the note with the betraying forgery. She had been holding something that, while Elizabeth froze, took a slow silver bite at the air.
Lucy had the kitchen scissors.
Shining, complicated things: you could cut spinach with them, or uncap bottles, or unscrew stubborn jar tops. You could sever a telephone wire with them very easily, or open a vein. Lucy must have gone for them as soon as she finished her call—
Her telephone call. Elizabeth made herself stop staring at the scissor points and looked at Lucy instead. “You’re waiting for someone, aren’t you, Lucy?”
“So are you.”
“Who?”
Lucy laughed, a sharp startling sound. “Who do you think?”
The back of Elizabeth’s neck was wet. She said the name as she thought it, slowly, incredulously; “Steven?” and Lucy laughed again and said shortly, “You’re more of a fool than I took you for.”
The telephone rang. Elizabeth felt her heart catch and pause, and saw Lucy stiffen. It rang again, and it was all she could do to stay still, to go on watching and realize with a sudden quickening that if she had a chance at
all, if the trap were not to close completely, it was this.
Because Lucy, in spite of her immobility, didn’t like the loud imperative summons either, or the things it had to mean—a hand holding a receiver somewhere, a voice waiting impatiently to speak, a wonderment growing in even the most casual mind, because houses containing two small children were rarely vacant at this hour of the night.
The telephone rang again, and Elizabeth steeled herself. If she could reach it before it stopped . . . Lucy’s first peak of triumph was past; she was edgy now with the waiting and the delicate, dangerous balance between them. It showed in a flicker of pulse at one temple, a rigid stilling of her fingers so that the scissors pointed awkwardly in. She had been breathing fast and audibly before; she seemed now not to be breathing at all.
Gather your muscles, so very quietly, aim for that thin strong unmoving wrist. The whole maneuver had to be a single uncoiling action, or Lucy would be warned and the scissors might find her face.
The phone sounded once more—for the last time? Elizabeth took a final lightning look at that other face—and felt every impulse in her body come to an astonished halt.
Lucy Brent seemed to have forgotten her existence. Her eyes, dark in the pallid high-boned face, had the huge silent swelling stare of a cat’s. And she wasn’t only watching. She was listening, filtering sounds out of the windy night. Elizabeth, who had heard only the roaring and oblivious silence of desperate concentration, listened too, gaze trained warily on the woman with the scissors.
That long trembling scrape was the lilacs bowing against the windowpanes. The thump was a shutter, flung loose in the wind—
But the brief ringing peal, so close to Elizabeth that she jumped, was the doorbell.
The doorbell.
She knew later that one of the most difficult things she had ever done in her life was turn her back on Lucy and that dangerous stillness. That—waiting. As though, when she reached the front door after five or six running, interminable steps, she might let in another and horrifyingly familiar enemy—the person for whom Lucy waited.
The Iron Cobweb Page 15
