horizon. Impressive, all in all, but I couldn’t enjoy it. Directly below the parapet, the cliff wall fell away to an extension of the carriage road and then, steeply, to the Great Highway; looking down there made me think of the promontory at Moss Beach-it made me think of death.
It was quiet here, almost too quiet; the noisy activity around Cliff House and the stream of Saturday afternoon afternoon traffic on the Great Highway seemed muted. I could feel the odd pervasiveness of the place, even on a day like this, and I would have broken the silence myself if Mrs. Summerhayes hadn’t done it first.
She said without preamble, and still without looking at me, “My husband has been having an affair with Alicia Purcell. For at least a year now.”
I couldn’t think of a response.
“He came home one night with scratches on his neck, after he’d been to see her. He said he was seeing Kenneth but I knew Kenneth was away that night. He was very clever about not letting me see the scratches; I saw them anyway.” She paused to watch a gull that came winging up over the cypress beyond me. Then she said, with a kind of dull bitter loathing, “I hate women who mark men, the ones with claws like cats.”
“Have you confronted her?”
“I wanted to, several times. But I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“You haven’t confronted your husband either?”
“No. Eldon is not a man you can confront. He blusters, he denies, he lies, he makes you feel as if you are the one who has done wrong. He would never admit the truth.”
“How serious is it between them?”
“Not serious. Very, very casual. Lust is what binds them together, nothing more.”
“Did Kenneth also know about the affair?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Possibly.”
“Would it have bothered him if he had? Would he have had words with your husband about it?”
She shook her head. “He knew the kind of woman Alicia is. He condoned her lust because he understood it. He was filled with lust himself.”
“Forgive me for asking this, Mrs. Summerhayes, but did he ever make a pass at you?”
“Yes. Once. I slapped his face.”
“When was that?”
“A long time ago. Three years.”
“How did you get along with him after that?”
“I had as little to do with him as possible. My husband handled all our business dealings.”
“How did he and Kenneth get along?”
“They had no trouble. They are two of a kind, after all.” Another pause. “If you’re thinking Eldon might have murdered Kenneth, you’re mistaken. He had no reason. He doesn’t want Alicia; he only wants her body.”
“There’s Kenneth’s money,” I said mildly.
“Yes. But I have more than Alicia inherited, you see-much more. My father was a very rich man in Oslo.”
Again I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Eldon told you the truth that we were together when Kenneth died,” she said. “Not alone together; with some of the other guests. If someone pushed him, it wasn’t Eldon. Nor I. I had contempt for Kenneth but I didn’t hate him. I couldn’t have killed him if I had. I couldn’t kill anyone.” She seemed to think about something for a time. “Not even Alicia,” she said.
I had nothing to say to that, either. Silence rebuilt between us; she still wasn’t looking at me-hadn’t looked at me the entire time we’d been talking. It was an eerie sort of conversation, as if there were a great distance between us and we were each talking to ourselves. It matched the surroundings, made me even more aware of them.
She had more to say; I sensed it, and I sensed, too, that prodding was not the way to get it out of her. When she was ready to talk she would, not before.
A good three minutes passed, with her looking out to sea and me looking here and there, everywhere but at her. Birds made a racket in the cypress nearby. A dog came bounding up onto the terrace, took a look at us, sniffed around, peed on one of the empty benches, and went away again.
“I examined the gallery records last night, after you left,” she said. The words came so abruptly that her voice startled me a little, even though I had been waiting for her to speak. “My husband paid Alicia fifty thousand dollars four months ago, from his private checking account.”
“A down payment on Kenneth’s collection?”
“I don’t know. It was for an unspecified reason. But on the same day he also deposited seventy-five thousand dollars.”
“Where did he get it?”
“From one of our better customers.”
“For something he’d sold, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Who was the customer?”
“Margaret Prine.”
“Uh-huh, I see. Do you have any idea what it was he sold her?”
“It was nothing from our inventory at the time,” she said. “I made a careful examination of those records, too.”
“Would Mrs. Prine pay that much money for something in Kenneth’s collection?”
“She was not impressed with his collection. His best pieces are ones she already owns or was not interested in. All except one.”
“The Hainelin snuff box?”
“Yes.”
“Would Mrs. Prine have paid seventy-five thousand for that?”
“I think so. Yes, she would have.”
The implications were obvious. If the Hainelin box was what Mrs. Prine had bought from Summerhayes, then it followed that the fifty thousand he’d paid Alicia Purcell on the same day was for purchase of the box. But why would she lie about having had it all along? Why the deception? It was legally hers anyway, as part of her husband’s collection.
There was only one reason I could think of: Everyone knew Kenneth had been carrying the box on his person that night. If she admitted having it after his death, suspicion might fall on her-suspicion that she’d got it from him out on the cliffs, before she pushed him off-
No, hell, that didn’t wash. She was alibied for the time of Kenneth’s fall; she couldn’t have pushed him. So why worry about being suspected, when everybody including the authorities was perfectly willing to call her husband’s death an accident? All she’d have to do in any case was to say he’d given her the Hainelin before he stalked out of the house.
And that brought me right back to the original question: Why hadn’t she admitted she had the box?
I put the question to Mrs. Summerhayes. She said, “I don’t know. I don’t understand women like Alicia, why they do things.”
“Your husband might know.”
“Yes, but he won’t tell you if he does. He won’t tell me.”
“Why do you suppose he kept the two transactions secret? Because of his affair with Mrs. Purcell?”
“Yes. And because of the money. He likes to gamble in the stock market and he knows I won’t give him money for that any more. He has lost too much in the past.”
I wanted to ask her why she put up with a bastard like him, why she stayed married to him. But I already knew the answer. She loved him, and it didn’t really matter to her what he was or what he did: she loved him.
She was still sitting in rigid profile, and this time I sensed that she had said all she’d come to say. It had not been easy for her to talk to me as she had; it had been an act of small vengeance, born of bitterness and pain, and I thought that she might regret it later on. But it wouldn’t be because of anything I did.
I said, “What you’ve told me here is in confidence, Mrs. Summerhayes. I won’t repeat it to anyone under any
