She wrenched at the doorknob, and it protested—or did she sob?—and the door swung wide so suddenly that she swayed.
Nineteen
AN ENORMOUS PINK POLICEMAN, so like a policeman that he might have sprung from Elizabeth’s own wild brain, stood or the step, holding his visor against the buffeting of the wind.
He said politely, “Mrs. March? We’re just checking around— your husband called the station and asked us to. Has this man any business here?”
Elizabeth had her attention so riveted on his own rosy reassurance that it was an effort even to look away at the man anchored firmly beside and a little behind him. A stranger, neither young nor old, overcoated, felt-hatted, one of the thousands of people you passed and never saw. Completely anonymous—or was he?
The policeman gave his catch on ungentle urge forward, and light from the hall reached ruddily out for the shadowed face. It caught the bold curving planes of flesh, and shimmered in the heavy glass lenses protecting his eyes. She had seen that face before, she had talked to it, had said, “I’m looking for Mr. or Mrs. Ambrose Miller,” at a two-story house in Arlington.
She found her voice. She said shakily over the wind, “Officer, there’s been a kidnapping here. This man and—”
Jagoe—his name came back to her in the instant before he spoke—had been staring coolly at her, as though daring recognition. Now he glanced over her shoulder, at Lucy. He said in the high soft voice Elizabeth remembered, “You damned stupid fool. You—”
The policeman stopped him, after a blink of astonishment. He said to Elizabeth’s wet face, “Just a minute, ma’am, what’s that you said about a kidnaping?” and hoisted his captive briskly inside.
Elizabeth told him.
The words came out in a harsh tumble, further shaken by her glance at the gilt clock, and Lucy’s voice, interrupting, was damning. “I don’t know what to think. Officer, I’m utterly bewildered. Mrs. March has been ill, of course, and has been employing a nursemaid much too young for the job, who’s simply taken off on some lark of her own and brought the children with her. As for this man—” Her eyes roved with a remote and scornful air over Jagoe’s face, the white socks just visible over his shoes, the stained pigskin gloves. “Is it necessary to say I’ve never seen him before?”
“Oh, you’ve never seen me before, Mrs. Lucy Brent.” Jagoe’s rage came out in a high, slow trickle. “Then I suppose you’ve never—”
Elizabeth was sickened by what came after that; the policeman listened until a shocked and incredulous scarlet overtook him and he said peremptorily, “Here, now! I’ll call the station and report the children, Mrs. March, and then we’d better all go down and get the rights of this.”
Elizabeth’s ears still rang with Jagoe’s detailed obscenity. She wanted, out of a mixture of rage and wonder and revolt, never to look at Lucy again; Lucy who had gone to the Hotel Savoia with this man, who—why had she never realized this before?—had deliberately registered them under the name of March, in Elizabeth’s handwriting. That would be the evidence that had been shown to Oliver. . . .
But Lucy didn’t matter now, except that she or Jagoe must be made to tell where the children were, because she couldn’t stand much longer the peculiar torment that had begun inside her own head. It was a telescoping of all the years since Maire’s birth, and a blending of her voice with Jeep’s into a thin, lost-sounding cry. It was a condensation of panic and blind trust, calling, “Mama,” when she was unable to find or answer it.
The policeman started purposefully for the telephone. Elizabeth put her bowed head into her hands, pressing the heels of her palms in so that they hurt, and heard the front door open.
Oliver walked in.
His face was chalky, and grimmer than she had ever seen it, with a curious admixture of tenderness for Maire whom he carried still crying in his arms. He said over his shoulder to the policeman, “It’s okay, skip it,” but his eyes caught Elizabeth’s and didn’t leave them. Behind Oliver, Noreen Delaney was clutching Jeep. His cheeks were runneled with tears, his fast-closed eyelids the only clean portions of his sleeping face.
Noreen moved gently with him. Her own eyes were wide and hollowed as she came across the room to where Elizabeth was standing and crying without any sound at all. She contrived the transfer of Jeep very deftly, so that he barely stirred when Elizabeth’s arms came about him.
Maire stopped wailing at the sight of Elizabeth and the familiar room. She struggled higher in Oliver’s arms, peering over his shoulder at the assembled faces—Lucy’s in carven white ice, the policeman’s, confusedly gaping. It was at Jagoe that she directed the unnerving, single-track stare of childhood before she said simply, “Oun, Daddy.”
“He won’t hurt you, baby. Believe me, he won’t,” said Oliver softly between his teeth. He didn’t even glance at Jagoe; there was no one in the room for him but Elizabeth. He said almost lightly, “Speaking of which, did either of these—?”
“No,” said Elizabeth. “No, I’m all right.”
She slid Jeep to her hip and reached for Maire’s hand. She walked past Jagoe, she walked past Lucy, who flattened herself with a curiously feral movement. She heard the policeman say with desperate patience, “Mr. March, this man here—” and then she went on up the stairs to put the children to bed.
“But where were they?” said Elizabeth shakily, afterward. Her hands were still unreliable; she kept them tightly together in her lap, waiting for the reaction to go away. “I was half mad. I thought—”
“I took the children, Mrs. March.” On the couch, Noreen Delaney lifted haggard eyes. “I never dreamed you’d be back in time to miss them, but when Miss Ives called and told me Mrs. Brent was coming over to stay with the children, I got—frightened. It seemed so funny, things working out like that when you and Mr. March were both in Boston. I didn’t know what she might do if she got alone with the children, so I called a friend of mine, Rosemary Teale, and she came right over and drove us back to her place. We all stayed there until— “
Constance could stand it no longer; she interrupted in bewilderment, staring from face to face. “But I don’t understand. What made Noreen suspect—? Do you mean to say that she and Lucy Brent knew each other before?”
Lucy, a statuette, not glancing at any of them while she repeated her cool denials, had been allowed to go her own way. The policeman had left with Jagoe firmly in tow; Constance had arrived from Boston, frantically worried because she had received no answer to her indignant telephone call from the Touraine.
She was waiting for a different answer now; they all were. Noreen Delaney glanced up from her hands, flushing. “I wasn’t sure at first.” The hands gripped each other, mutely defensive. “It was six years ago, in Boston. She wore her hair differently then and she wasn’t so thin. Everyone called her Ceil—Ceil Poynter. It never occurred to me until I heard her called Lucy, here, that Ceil could be the other part of Lucille.”
She braced herself visibly, gazing at Elizabeth. “I’m twenty-five, not twenty-two. My name isn’t Delaney. I took that because—”
“I think I know,” said Elizabeth gently, and Noreen glanced quickly away. “I was nineteen then, and working as a maid for some people named—but you don’t care about that. They had a lot of money, and their son had just gotten engaged to Mrs.—Miss Poynter. We all knew his parents didn’t like it, but they gave in. There were a lot of parties . . .”
Between the halting words, Ceil Poynter grew out of the lamplight, hungry, shrewd, fiercely determined under the air of sureness and casual poise. Her charm had carried her through the screen set up by cautious and elderly parents, and the conclusion was foregone: the sheltered young man, surrounded since college by suitable daughters of suitable families, was instantly dazzled. They had met at Christmas, they were to be married in July. But Ceil made the classic mistake of wanting the best of two conflicting worlds, and at a week-end houseparty two months before the wedding, the worlds collided.
“I co
uldn’t help it,” said Noreen, flushing, “and I wasn’t spying. I’d had the job of straightening out the living-room after they all went upstairs, and I woke up hours later wondering if there was something I’d forgotten to do. It worried me so that I went down to look, and—Ceil Poynter was there with a man.”
She had screamed at the sudden startled sound in the dark room, and the house awoke. The man with Ceil, whom she had introduced as a cousin, turned out to be a well-known figure in gambling circles—the heady world Ceil Poynter couldn’t quite bring herself to leave entirely, whose stimulation she craved.
The affair was glossed over, the explanations of both parties accepted—and the engagement dissolved. For Ceil Poynter, the money and the servants, the summer house at Bar Harbor and the golden security of the inner circle, fled before a housemaid’s scream.
Soon after that Noreen had left her position as a maid in the house. She left her aunt and uncle’s home too, because she was going to have a baby.
She was not accepting the way out that Elizabeth had offered her. Her color came up but her eyes didn’t lower. “I hated being a maid, and he said he’d marry me. He didn’t, of course. I’d saved some money, so I went to New York and got a part-time job and had the baby there.”
The baby was a girl, and frail. Noreen might have managed somehow to support a normally healthy child; she felt defeated before a long future of medicines, climes, special care. She had made a few contacts at the dress shop where she worked, and one of them led to a home for the little girl. Then, torn between loss and relief, she had returned to Arlington to live with her aunt and uncle. (And, thought Elizabeth—remembering the gay girl in the photograph, looking now at the pale face and downcast eyes —the self-imposed sackcloth-and-ashes.)
The next time Noreen saw the woman she had known as Ceil Poynter was in Elizabeth’s living-room.
She said again, “I wasn’t sure. It was such a long time ago, and she didn’t seem to recognize me at all. But there was something about the way she came in the day after Jeep’s birthday. . . . I began to think who it was she reminded me of.”
Of course, thought Elizabeth, her mind flashing back. Lucy in the doorway, Noreen at the foot of the stairs, looking at each other with that hostile awareness. And, later that day, Lucy’s alien face staring out of Noreen’s window, and the drench of heavy obvious perfume she would never have connected with Lucy, and the discovery of Mrs. Bennett’s pocketbook on Noreen’s closet shelf . . . would any of it ever have happened, would Lucy’s bitter envy have overflowed the bounds of reason if she had not found the perfect scapegoat?
“She came to the house in Arlington,” Noreen said, twisting her hands. “She knew I’d changed my name, and she guessed why—I suppose she’d watched me with Maire. That’s where she met that—Jagoe. She pretended to be nice, she said she’d rather I didn’t mention that other affair because it might get back to her husband, and he was so jealous. She asked about my baby, and said she wouldn’t dream of telling you because that would be the end of my job. And then a few nights later, when you people were out, Mr. Jagoe came here to the house.
She shivered a little. “I’d always been afraid of him, and that night he told me that if I was careful and kept my mouth shut the way Mrs. Brent said, nothing would happen to Maire or Jeep. It frightened me, because he’d been outside the window long before I knew it—Maire saw him first.”
Maire, and her oun. The very real touch of danger, pinpointed in those thick curved lenses that watched among the cedars. Elizabeth stirred in her chair. Noreen said in a low voice, “Something else happened, later on. On Christmas day I got a telegram from the people who adopted my little girl. They’d promised to let me know if they decided to have the operation the doctors said she needed—but this was an emergency one. I couldn’t think of anything else, I just left. When I came back I found that Jagoe had the name, and the address in New York. I must have left the telegram in the hall. I was so terrified at the idea of Mrs. Brent getting hold of it. . . .”
For the first time she began to show reaction, hands going to her cheeks in remembered dread. She said falteringly, “I didn’t know what to do. I thought that maybe if I stayed and did as they told me, I’d be able to catch Mrs. Brent at something—because I could see by then that she was so jealous of you,” her eyes went to Elizabeth, “that she hated you even more than she hated me.”
“If you’d only come to us in the beginning—” That was Oliver, keeping his voice in check.
“Would you have believed me,” Noreen made a small hopeless gesture, “If I’d made accusations with no proof at all about a very close friend of yours? When you’d never seen me before a few weeks ago—and had a child you didn’t know about and was using an assumed name?”
She said it quietly, forcing them to consider it. Oliver stared at the fire in silence; Constance, on the couch, shifted uneasily. Elizabeth remembered her rush of certainty earlier that evening when she had found the photograph of the child in Noreen’s suitcase, and said slowly, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. . . .”
“I wonder—what about her child?” asked Constance awkwardly in the silence that followed the soft closing of Noreen’s door upstairs.
Elizabeth shook her head, seeing again the small cotton dress on the girl’s bed. Unfinished. She would ask tomorrow, because by tomorrow she would have room in her mind for something else beyond the indelible picture of Lucy, braced, vicious, holding the kitchen scissors. Had Lucy, waiting for Jagoe to arrive and turn to advantage the inexplicable absence of the children, intended merely to cut the telephone wire if it became necessary?
Or, if Elizabeth had struggled with her, would she have used the scissors in another way?
She would never know that, nor would there ever be a firm base to her own conviction that Lucy, activated solely by her own destroying hatred, had allowed herself to be coaxed into a scheme for profit as well. With the stolen checkbook, the driver’s license, the hair dye, they wouldn’t have had to use the ransom money until—something Jagoe had said in his rage came back to Elizabeth—they were safely away. The plan itself had been hurriedly contrived, forced by her own announcement of a trip to the Cape. Lucy couldn’t allow her victim to leave the source of contamination, because peace and perspective might have undone all her slow and infinitely cunning work. She had gambled everything on tonight; that was why she had looked so white and brittle and unlike herself at Elizabeth’s unexpected return. . . .
How very delicate the timing had been, how slender the margin of safety between Noreen’s departure with the children and Lucy’s arrival at the house. Elizabeth looked up at Oliver, who had reappeared with fresh drinks for all of them, and said, “What made you phone the police when you did?”
“I called here to say that if it was too late when I got rid of the Treadwells I’d stay in town. When I didn’t get any answer—it was about a quarter of six—I waited ten minutes and tried again. I got thinking about the fire in the studio, and,” said Oliver grimly, “I phoned the police here and turned the Treadwells over to poor Bishop and got into my car and drove like hell. It seems that the Teale girl—Noreen’s friend—called my office when Noreen turned up at her apartment with the kids. They told her I was on my way home, so there they all were in the girl’s car, half-frozen, waiting at the bridge.”
The girl’s car, waiting . . . something stirred in Elizabeth’s mind, became the memory of a black car, the faintly familiar figure of a man, sun bouncing from his glasses—and Constance. She sent a quick startled look at her cousin, and Constance was standing, playing nervously with a pin at her throat, clearly wanting to get something uttered and having trouble with it.
It came with a rush. “I suppose we’d better have something to eat—sandwiches, I thought,” said Constance distractedly, and then, “No, let me . . . I did want to tell you both, though it seems such an odd time for it, that—that I’m going to be married to Horace Willett.”
In the middle of thei
r exclamations she escaped to the kitchen, blushing brilliantly, and Elizabeth swallowed an unsteady impulse to laughter. Aunt Kate’s vigilance over the affections of her useful daughter had instilled a habit of secrecy in Constance, and the evasions, the mysterious exhilaration, the experiments with uplifted hair boiled down to nothing more sinister than Mr, Willett. No wonder his distant figure had seemed familiar; he was the rosy, prosperous owner of the market where Elizabeth dealt and where, for the past four months, Constance had shopped so diligently. . . .
But Constance had left the room, and she was suddenly alone with Oliver, and almost afraid to move and find that although Lucy was gone the glass wall was still there.
But if Lucy had built the wall, the hard polished coldness between two people who loved each other, she herself had laid the groundwork. It had begun, she realized bewilderedly, with her own silent retreat in the hospital—and after that, when Lucy had started to make such skillful use of the emotional temperature of the house, she had walked arrogantly away from Oliver, putting more and more distance between them, expecting him to follow blindly and without question. And Oliver, stubborn, baffled, hurt beyond comprehension, had not.
. . . Had Lucy left her mark after all?
Constance moved distantly about in the kitchen, and for Elizabeth, suddenly and enormously shy, it became the precious, seconds-counting absence of a chaperone. She said, “Oliver—” and Oliver said simultaneously, “I’ve been ninety kinds of a fool . . . Exhibit A.”
He came to the hearth to stand beside her, so close that Elizabeth had almost no attention to spare for the thing he held and was staring wryly down at, the thing that should have been surprising and wasn’t. It was a registration card from the Hotel Savoia, dated November the 19th. Looping bluely across it, the casual, confident “Mr. and Mrs. Oliver March,” in Lucy’s expert forgery.
The Iron Cobweb Page 16
