talking with Renee, he called the police. “I’ll wait here until you come up,” he said. “Please come as quickly as you can.”
Katherine was standing in the bathroom doorway. She walked over to Robert, and he took her in his arms. He held her firmly, and she began to cry. Then she left his arms and sat on the bed. He went to the open window. Down in the street he could see a truck with COMFORT CARPET COMPANY painted on its roof. There were some tennis courts in the next block, and people were playing tennis. There was a hedge of privet around the tennis courts, and an old woman was cutting some privet with a knife. She wore a round hat and a heavy winter coat that reached to her ankles. He realized that she was stealing the privet. She worked quickly and furtively, and she kept looking over her shoulder to make sure that no one saw her. When she had cut a good bunch of the green branches, she stuffed them into a bag and hurried down the street.
The doorbell rang. A police sergeant and a plainclothesman were there. They took off their hats. “This kind of thing is hard on the ladies,” the sergeant said. “Now, if you’d give me the facts again, Mr. Tennyson. We already have men looking for her. You say she went down in the elevator herself. That was about an hour ago.” He checked all the facts with Robert. “Now, I don’t want to alarm either of you,” he said, “but would anyone have any reason to kidnap the child? We have to consider every possibility.”
“Yes,” Katherine said suddenly and in a strong voice. She got up and began to walk back and forth in the room. “It may be unreasonable, but it’s at least worth considering. She may have been kidnapped. I’ve seen that woman in the neighborhood twice this week and I had a feeling that she was following me. I didn’t think anything about it then. And she did write me that letter. I’m not making myself clear. You see, before we had Mrs. Harley to take care of Deborah, we had a woman named Mrs. Emerson. I quarreled with her about Deborah, and she told me, while we were quarreling?I never told you any of this, darling, because I didn’t want to worry you and I didn’t think any of it was important?but when we quarreled, she said the child would be taken away from me. I tried to forget about it, because I thought she was eccentric. The city is full of strange women like that. Then I saw her on the street twice this week, and I had a sense that she was following me. She lives at the Hotel Princess. It’s on the West Side. At least, she used to live there.”
“I’ll go over,” Robert said. “I’ll get the car.”
“I’ll drive you over, Mr. Tennyson,” the sergeant said.
“Do you want to come?” Robert asked Katherine.
“No, darling,” Katherine said. “I’ll be all right.”
Robert put on his hat, and he and the sergeant left. The elevator man spoke to Robert. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Tennyson,” he said. “We all loved her in this house. I telephoned my wife and she went right over to St. John’s and lit a vigil light for the little girl.”
There was a police car in front of the house, and Robert and the sergeant got into it and drove west. Robert kept turning his head from side to side, and he did this to avert his eyes from the image of the child’s death. He imagined the accident in the cliches of “Drive Safely” posters, badly drawn and in crude colors. He saw a stranger carrying the limp body away from the fenders of a taxi; he saw the look of surprise and horror on a lovely face that had never known any horror; he heard the noise of horns, the shrieking of brakes; he saw a car coming over the rise of a hill. He made a physical effort to force his eyes to look beyond these images into the bright street.
The day had got hot. A few low, swift clouds touched the city with shadow, and he could see the fast darkness traveling from block to block. The streets were crowded. He saw the city only in terms of mortal danger. Each manhole cover, excavation, and flight of stairs dominated the brilliance of the day like the reverse emphasis of a film negative, and he thought the crowds and the green trees in Central Park looked profane. The Hotel Princess was on a dingy street in the West Seventies. The air in the lobby was fetid. The desk clerk became uneasy when he saw the policeman. He looked for Mrs. Emerson’s key and said that she was in. There was no telephone in her room. They could go up.
They went up in an elevator cage of gilded iron, driven by an old man. They knocked on the door, and Mrs. Emerson told them to come in. Robert had never known the woman. He had only seen her when she stood in the doorway of the nursery and sent Deborah in to say good night. She was English, he remembered. Her voice had always sounded troubled and refined. “Oh, Mr. Tennyson,” she said when she recognized him. The sergeant asked her suddenly where she had been that morning.
“It’s all right, Mrs. Emerson,” Robert said. He was afraid she would become hysterical and tell them nothing. “Deborah ran away this morning. We thought you might know something about it. Mrs. Tennyson said you wrote her a letter.”
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry to hear about Deborah,” she said. It was the fine, small voice of someone who knew her place as a lady. “Yes, yes. Of course I wrote that letter to Mrs. Tennyson. It came to me in a dream that you would lose the little girl unless you were very careful. I have a profession, you know. I interpret dreams. I told Mrs. Tennyson when I left her that she should take very good care of the little girl. She was born, after all, under that dreadful new planet, Pluto. I was on the Riviera when they discovered it, in 1938. We knew something dreadful was going to happen then.
“I loved the little girl dearly and I regretted my disagreement with Mrs. Tennyson,” she went on. “The little girl was one of the fire people?banked fire. I gave her palm a good deal of study. We were left alone a great deal, of course. She had a long life line and a good sense of balance and a good head. There were signs of imprudence there, but a great deal of that would depend upon you… I saw deep water there and some great danger, some great hazard. That’s why I wrote the letter to Mrs. Tennyson. I never charged Mrs. Tennyson for any of my professional services.”
“What did you and Mrs. Tennyson fight about?” the sergeant asked.
“We’re wasting time,” Robert said. “We’re wasting so much time. Let’s go back.” He got up and
