But Margaret hadn’t let Julio Garcia in, had held the lock against him.
She didn’t know that she had put her hands to her face until Kincaid’s voice, sounding as though it came from some distance away, said gently, “What goes on here?”
He had secrets of his own where Mrs. Foale was concerned, and no intention of divulging them; remember that. Margaret took the drink he handed her, and even the iciness of the glass was steadying. “It’s this house, I think.” She managed a very minor smile. “It’s not the most cheerful place in the world at best, and now with Hilary sick too . . .”
Kincaid nodded, glancing around him and then back at her face. “Your sister and her husband still haven’t called?”
Margaret shook her head.
“It isn’t my business, I suppose,” said Kincaid, bending a look of severity on his own drink, “but feeling the way you look as though you feel, couldn’t you get in touch with them and have them come back?”
How sharply inquiring his lifted glance was. Could this be pure solicitude? Margaret said, finding the source of her own haunting worry as exactly as if she had touched a bad bruise, “I can’t. I haven’t the faintest idea where they are.”
He received that with a short incredulous silence. “You mean they just—drove away in the other direction?”
“That was the point,” said Margaret, defensive in spite of herself. “They didn’t want to be bound by a lot of schedules and reservations, and they did have one of those marked tour books with them, and it isn’t the tourist season yet so they wouldn’t have any trouble finding places to stay.”
“I see,” said Kincaid. He sounded curious. “And what were you going to do if you fell and broke your hip?”
“I was going to be very careful not to, I suppose.”
“Man proposes,” Kincaid said sententiously, and got up and walked to the windows, where he stood contemplating the greening lawn. “They must have had some general idea of where they wanted to go, or did they?”
“Roughly toward the Coast, I think. Cornelia wanted some swimming.”
“Well, that narrows it down,” said Kincaid pleasantly. “It’s only—what? A thousand, fifteen hundred miles?” He turned to her, smiling, aware of the precise second in which Margaret had begun to resent being catechised. “You’re very polite not to tell me to mind my own business. It’s only that you look as though you couldn’t take much more. Anything I can do for you before I go? Look at the furnace?”
Margaret gasped; in her single-minded fear, the night before, she hadn’t even thought about the furnace. “Yes, if you wouldn’t mind. It probably needs water.”
It did; she could hear the rush in the pipes moments later. And then silence. How fortuitous, but still how odd, that it should have entered his head to look at the furnace. She couldn’t recall ever having mentioned that particular problem . . . Into her own mind, never quite forgotten, flashed the first glimpse she had had of him: hand going out cautiously to try the front door, head tipped listeningly.
Walking crisply, she went to the cellar door, pushed it wider, called down, “Is it all right?”
“Seems to be, but it belongs in the Smithsonian.” His voice sounded very distant, but seconds later he appeared at the bottom of the stairs and came up toward her. Something gave her the impression that he had had to hurry. She said involuntarily, “There’s a cobweb—” and at her glance he slapped a hand over his dark head.
He had stared at her without seeing her at first, but that might have been the brilliance of the kitchen after the dim stairs. “I’m at the Paraguero. Call me, will you, if anything comes up, or there’s something I can do?” Margaret said she would, and at his insistence wrote the motel name on the front of the telephone book. When he had gone she locked the front door behind him and then realized emptily that there was no need to do that any more, certainly not in the daytime. Julio Garcia was dead. She had not fired the gun at him, nor aimed the car that had killed him, but she was responsible just the same.
And why didn’t Cornelia and Philip telephone? Contrary to what she had told Kincaid, she didn’t feel understanding at all, she felt growingly angry at both of them. They knew she was unable to get in touch with them, no matter what the emergency, and yet they went blithely on their way. Perhaps they were superstitiously afraid of bad news and a summons to cut their vacation short; it was still an unforgivable thing to do.
Part of her rush of feeling was fear masquerading as anger: suppose something had happened to them? Nonsense, she would have heard. It was much more likely that Philip had emerged from a phone booth in a gas station or restaurant, smiling at Cornelia, saying, “I just called Margaret—thought I might as well while I was there. Everything’s fine.”
It was the kind of thing Philip would do: airy, highhanded, putting Philip first, and for which he would have an engaging explanation later. Margaret realized with shock, how completely, almost without her knowing it, her feeling for Philip had changed. The stubborn remnants of love had become detachment, then cool criticism, now—not suspicion, exactly, or was it?
Certainly his affections were easily bestowed. Mrs. Foale, Margaret and Cornelia, in that order, and in how short a time? Odd, now that she thought about it, that a man so charmingly selfish should allow himself to be swayed so readily. Selfish people generally hewed to a line, made for a single goal.
Margaret discovered her fingers curled so tightly into her palms that the nails bit. She unclenched them, wondering shakenly at herself, and went in to check up on Hilary.
Hilary was playing with the
