Hilary looked up just then. She said with an uncanny sombreness, “Maybe Mrs. Foale isn’t in Europe at all. Maybe she’s shut up somewhere.”
For a horrifying second, the tall locked dark wood doors in the house flashed into Margaret’s mind. She realized then that Hilary meant a sanitarium of sorts, but reaction turned her voice brusque and angry. “If you don’t stop this nonsense, you’ll have us both shut up somewhere. Eat your lunch.”
“I am,” said Hilary with justice, and lapsed into an offended silence. Punishingly, she refused dessert. She had always been coaxed before; Margaret could tell from the stony but waiting look of her down-bent face. “Very wise,” she said, putting on her coat. “You’re not awfully far from being fat.”
Hilary’s very hair quivered with rage, but she stalked without argument after Margaret between the tables. They were nearly at the door when she said with satisfaction, “There’s your friend.”
Margaret’s head turned automatically, and at a table to her left, although Hilary’s words could hardly have carried that far, so did Jerome Kincaid’s. He said something to the tanned, pale-haired woman who sat across from him and rose rapidly, with the evident intention of crossing the floor between the tables. A tray-laden waitress intervened; he gave Margaret a ruefully smiling salute and she smiled back and ushered herself and Hilary out.
A stranger in town, had he said, or at least implied? Well, she could ask Cornelia about him on the phone tonight.
But although she waited up until midnight, amid the uneasy safety of locked doors and tightly fastened windows, Cornelia and Philip did not call.
Five
NO news is good news, thought Margaret dogmatically to herself, and bad news travels fast. Still, she could not help feeling abused. For all Cornelia and Philip knew the furnace might have exploded, or she might have throttled Hilary, or Mrs. Foale might have flown home from Europe and, having heard rumors of a child on the premises, be knocking angrily at the door.
She was further disquieted, in an indefinable way, by the cache of bottles which she looked at for herself after Hilary was safely in bed. She did not even attempt to excuse herself. In the light from the furnace room, because there was no bulb in the ceiling socket of the frigid storage room, she lifted the lid of a large cardboard carton and pulled folds of blanket aside.
There must have been well over a case of empty bottles, not whiskey but rum, piled in winking layers and angles, a neck thrust up here, a whole curved side exposed there. Something about the label suggested that it was very cheap rum. Margaret gazed at the carton in bafflement, pulled the blanket back, tucked it neatly in, and folded the lid down again.
How cold it was in here, and how helter-skelter for such an oppressively formal house. Of course, someone going abroad, coping with all the last-minute details of closing a house, would tumble things in behind whatever door would hold them. But as for the bottles, why not throw them out one by one, as they were emptied?
Rubbish disposal in this part of the Southwest was, Margaret had discovered, a complicated affair to a New York apartment dweller. Paper and all other burnable matter had to be incinerated; garbage had its own domain; cans, bottles, and other non-burnable, non-garbage objects fell into a third category and were put out weekly for collection. The contents would sum up the user fairly accurately, if anyone were interested.
The conclusion seemed inescapable: Mrs. Foale did not want to be known to drink. But why? It was only such a barrage of bottles that might give rise to comment in even the most noticing of rubbish-collection men.
Mrs. Foale did not want to be known to drink at all. Mrs. Foale had presented a certain surface to the town, and drinking did not go with it.
Margaret found it odd, tried to find it pathetic, and was sharply disturbed instead. She wished that Hilary had not prowled into the storage room, nor discovered the size of Mrs. Foale’s feet, nor found the snapshot of Philip, but it was too late now. Mrs. Foale had come to make a shadowy third in the house, and there was no escaping her; the very locks and fastenings that shut out the dark shut her in more securely.
Hilary refused her breakfast in the morning. Margaret at first suspected a carried-over grievance about the allusion to her weight, but Hilary did not have the enjoy-ably martyred air she would have worn in that case, and her eyelids were heavy. Her hands and forehead felt warm, but not alarmingly so. Margaret gave her an aspirin, settled her at the dining-room table with a jigsaw puzzle, and went in search of a thermometer.
There wasn’t one in the otherwise well-stocked medicine cabinet in her bath. Margaret found it in the bedside table drawer, along with a left-over blue and yellow capsule and, in Cornelia’s scrawl on an envelope, a telephone number which was probably the doctor’s.
Hilary’s temperature was 100, not much in a child, but enough to bear watching. What a fool Margaret had been to send her to the movies—but the flu epidemic was theoretically over and this was probably some routine twenty-four-hour thing. At least she had the Revertons’ number in Mexico City, and the doctor’s, in case she needed either. Meanwhile, she would have to put Hilary to bed.
Hilary balked, foreseeably; she was beginning to relish the idea of Margaret run off her feet, fetching and carrying and worrying, but she could not resist an argument. Margaret was firm but crafty. “When Lena comes I can go out and get you some new magazines and you can work on your scrapbook.”
As though Hilary cared any
