Margaret collected a long, bottom-of-the-lungs breath. In silence she walked across the room, hooked the screen, closed the window to within two inches. Still in silence, she turned and gazed at Hilary. Hilary said in an instant and piteous croak, “My throat hurts.”
“I don’t wonder,” said Margaret measuredly. “Are you trying to catch pneumonia?”
“I was hot,” said Hilary, in such a subdued and apologetic voice that Margaret glanced more closely at her. No mere fever could work such a change in Hilary, and there was something effacing in the way she had wriggled herself deep into her covers. The room was now very cold, but still—
“You don’t let in any more air by opening the screen,” said Margaret, thawing a little. Her reaction to a bad fright was receding and Hilary was, after all, fairly sick. “Besides—”
“Can I have some ginger ale?” interrupted Hilary.
So she had opened the screen for some well-thought-out purpose—to dispose of something? Hide something until later, because she knew Margaret would be a frequent visitor in the room during the night and all the next day? Once you got to know her, Margaret reflected wearily, going out to the kitchen for ginger ale, Hilary was really no more difficult to read than Coptic.
At eleven o’clock, she folded another capsule into jam, administered it, took Hilary’s temperature, 103, gave the sheets a last smoothing, turned the pillow, said goodnight, set her alarm clock for three, and toppled into her own bed.
The alarm went off after what seemed only a wink of sleep. For a wild few seconds Margaret did not know where she was, or even where the clock was; when she found it by knocking it onto the floor, she was still bewildered by this waspish call in the middle of the night.
Of course. Hilary, medicine, alcohol.
She woke Hilary with difficulty, gave her her capsule and, although the child felt cooler to the touch, sponged her with alcohol. She was a further ten minutes wiping up the water which spilled from the bedside glass knocked over by Hilary’s protesting hand, but she was so stupefied with sleep that when she was back in her own bed her mind blurred at once.
It touched the fact that Cornelia and Philip still had not telephoned, and then it abandoned that, too.
In the morning, there was blood on the porch.
What was there about dried blood that you knew it instantly, even if you had only opened the door to see if the milk was there yet? The splattered shape of the stains, perhaps, or the little diminishing trail of drops that led down the uneven stone steps and disappeared into the grass.
Margaret stared downward for possibly a minute before she did what, later, she was a little aghast at. She went rapidly to the drawer in the kitchen where rags were kept for cleaning, soaked one in cold water, went, almost running now, back to the porch. The stains came up easily enough, turning the wet cloth a color that she averted her gaze from while, because there mightn’t be time to rinse it and wring it out, she kept turning it in on itself to find a fresh surface.
Birds twittered in the new morning, the washed-gold light with its sift of slender branch shadows moved gently ‘over the wet flagstones, turned them damp, turned them dry. Margaret went into the house, locked the door behind her, and walked without pausing into the kitchen. Her hand held the blood-stained cloth without feeling, as though she had detached herself from it; she put off, just for the moment, any thought of the harshest soap she could find, the hottest water she could stand.
The kitchen wastebasket was fairly full, and in the little back entry were three emptied milk cartons. Not enough. Margaret took up a pile of folded newspapers and carried everything out to the incinerator behind the garage. It was a new and very good incinerator, reducing everything it burned to fine ash. The wet cloth wouldn’t be destroyed at once, but it would dry a good deal, perhaps even char a little, in an initial fire.
At no time did she question what she was doing, or why. Instinct made her move as quickly and surely as though she had rehearsed this a hundred times, and it was not until she had scrubbed her hands under water that made her wince, and caught a glimpse of her set white face in the mirror, that any realization of what she had done began to seep through.
Even then she thrust it away, going to the kitchen to put water on to boil. She would feel less stiff, less cold, after a cup of burning coffee. While she waited, she stood at the sink and drank a glass of tomato juice. The morning was windless, and from behind the garage rose a plume of smoke . . . and it was time for Hilary’s medicine.
Even at a glance, and although she was still quite hot, Hilary was markedly better; her air of prim reproach was back in place. In answer to Margaret’s inquiry she swallowed wincingly—her throat was dry because she had had no water to drink, and she had a terrible headache from sleeping with the window shut. She always had her window open.
“Except maybe when you’ve just had the doctor,” returned Margaret mildly. She had seldom been so glad to see anyone; Hilary was, loosely speaking, another human being, a voice and a full set of complaints to keep her occupied. “Would you like some applesauce—that goes down easily—and milk? And I’ll bring my coffee in, shall I?”
Hilary gaped, understandably; her experience of adults, especially of Margaret, was that they tended to be savage if disturbed over their coffee. Margaret went back to the kitchen without waiting for an answer and put orange juice, applesauce, milk, and her own cup of coffee on a tray. (A cat or a dog, her
