She had. Cornelia, meticulous as usual, had segregated it on one side of the drawer at the back. Margaret lifted the book out, jiggled the drawer to make it run smoothly back in, and stood absolutely still, gazing down. The jerking of the drawer had toppled Cornelia’s neat stack of wedding photographs, glossy eight-by-tens from which the framed picture on the bureau top had been chosen. The one Margaret was staring at showed Cornelia and Philip just inside the door of the church, against a background of faces in the aisle.
One of the faces was Mrs. Foale’s. She was looking at the camera with an expression that turned Margaret cold, although she couldn’t define it.
And this was why, when she had seen the snapshot of the dark-haired woman Hilary had said was Isabel Foale, she had been haunted by a faint familiarity. She must have remembered this wedding photograph. She had noticed it more than the others because Cornelia and Philip had fought about it, laughing, over a drink at her apartment shortly before they left for New Mexico. Philip was all for tearing it up; he looked like a department store dummy, he said, and it wasn’t good of Cornelia. “But I like it,” Cornelia had insisted. “You’re so wonderfully wooden, and I’m the cat that ate the canary. Don’t you lay a finger on it. I suppose it won’t do to have framed, but it’s really my favorite.”
Was it the sight of Mrs. Foale that had made Philip go so rigidly expressionless?
Elizabeth Honeyman gazed critically at the address book when it was handed to her, thanked Margaret, and began moving toward the door. Nothing escaped her eye; she was open about it, moving the piano scarf a fraction straighter, sending a sharp glance at the peacocks. She said to Margaret with her little twitch of a smile, “Did your woman ever call again?”
Margaret had been half-prepared. “Mrs. Withers. Yes, and she seemed quite disappointed.”
“Oh? I still think she’s mistaken,” said Miss Honeyman very levelly, “in thinking Isabel had a cousin so like her.” She paused at the door curtain, drawing her head back a little to peer at the white folds. “You don’t allow your cleaning woman to do this up, do you?”
Margaret would not have dreamed of burdening Lena with it. “No, why?”
“Hadley’s mother did the lacework at the sides,” said Miss Honeyman, putting out an infinitely delicate finger and thumb to what Margaret would otherwise have thought was general wear and tear. She was quite serious, and very fretful. “I told Isabel that these ought to be taken down and put away and something else used instead. Perhaps . . .”
Her bothered glance was too proud to be inquiring; it seemed to lay a directive on Margaret. Take the curtains down, have them exquisitely laundered, fold them tenderly away in tissue . . .
“Wait, you’re forgetting your cookbook,” said Margaret.
It crossed her mind, when the other woman had left, that as she was only visiting here perhaps she ought to have seen some sort of written authorization before she turned over Mrs. Foale’s belongings so docilely. But Miss Honeyman would hardly risk such a lie (would she?) and in any case an address book was merely that, and a postcard was open for all the world to see. Why, then, this sharp feeling of worry, as though she had forgotten something important, or made some drastic error? Nerves.
Jerome Kincaid seemed to think as much when he arrived, at shortly before noon, with ice cream and a Mexican puppet for Hilary and daffodils for Margaret. He cut through her thanks with an examining, “Sure you’re not coming down with this thing yourself?” and, at her headshake, “Well, it’s doing something to you.”
Sympathy would undermine her completely, so would the childish conviction that if she told Jerome Kincaid about the blood on the porch he could somehow make everything all right; that if she told him about Philip and Mrs. Foale he could dissolve that nightmare, too. She didn’t dare, but fatigue and tension constricted her throat so that she had to turn away and pick up a cigarette before she could say, “I’m tired, I guess—I was up in the night with Hilary.”
He was still looking at her clinically. “Have you a drink in the house?”
“Yes . . . in the pantry,” said Margaret, and retired to the library to collect herself. This would never do. She might involve herself with the police so that she would be detained here; she might destroy Cornelia’s and Philip’s marriage at a stroke. Fiercely, she picked up the newspaper, brought in off the lawn by either Miss Honeyman or Kincaid; she would distract herself briefly with that.
But she didn’t. The word “Fatalities” at the bottom of the front page caught her eye. It was the toll of weekend victims in New Mexico, and she followed it tensely to page three. Antonia Sanchez, of Alamosa, dead when her car collided with another on Highway 66. Andrew Begay, of Nambe Pueblo, dead when his pick-up truck overturned near Pojoaque. Julio Garcia, this city, killed by a hit-and-run driver on San Rafael Road. A bullet had been recovered from Garcia’s shoulder; police were investigating.
This was San Rafael Road, but she couldn’t be sure that Julio Garcia was—had been—the snake-like man in the big-brimmed hat. The man who had referred to himself as Julio. Yes, she could. The blood on the porch, from a bullet wound, and the sound she had thought so comforting after he had left, the hum of a car. San Rafael wasn’t long; it was a quiet residential area between another road from which it branched off at the bottom and a highway it joined at the top. Hit-and-run victims must be very scarce on San Rafael, especially hit-and-run victims with the same first name.
How badly you must want a man dead to try first with a gun, then lie in wait with a car to finish the job. And how
