Hilary saw the glance coming. “Does your friend Mr. Kincaid know Mrs. Foale?”
Does he indeed? “No. What happened to the jam?”
“It broke.”
“I thought it just might have,” said Margaret pleasantly, with a vision of herself squeezing out a sponge implanted with jagged slivers, “and I think I remember telling you that it certainly would if you went anywhere near it.”
Effortlessly, Hilary’s face took on a downtrodden expression. “I thought it might be good for my throat, like honey only you never buy any honey, and I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Oh. Well, thank you, Hilary,” said Margaret containedly. “That was very thoughtful.”
There was no more jam, only marmalade. Hilary took her aspirin in that, shuddering prolongedly, while Margaret picked the biggest pieces of glass out of the heaped strawberries, cut herself in spite of her care, and finally resorted to wet paper towels. When she had finished and stood up rather tiredly—at least this was jam, not blood, her mind said—Hilary was subdued. “I asked about Mr. Kincaid because doesn’t this look kind of like Mrs. Foale?”
The puppet danced jerkily on the bedspread. It was a woman in a bright cotton fiesta dress, the crude wooden face adorned with black-rimmed eyes, curved and expressionless black eyebrows, a red puppet smile that didn’t know what was going on above. Hilary moved a finger, possibly by accident, and the black-painted head dropped senselessly down on the blue and orange breast.
“I think it does,” said Hilary fondly, and Margaret said with an effort, “Well, maybe.”
She had only needed a jiggling wooden little Mrs. Foale, capable of sudden grinning leaps and fallings, to make her day perfect. No, she hadn’t needed it. The memory of Julio Garcia’s shadowed and foolish smile, his nightmare ringing of the door, her own iron refusal, were quite enough.
Police are investigating. She was obstructing justice, probably, by not reporting the time and the exact spot on San Rafael Road at which he had appeared, leaving blood from a bullet wound. Was she an accessory after the fact, simply through having washed the blood off the flagstones?
Margaret went into her own room, stretched out on her bed, and stared at the ceiling for some time. The ceiling was white and uninformative, and solved no problems at all. She sat up presently, pulled open the drawer of the bedside table, and used the telephone extension to dial the number Cornelia had left on the envelope there.
It drawled blankly back at her as it had Saturday noon when she had tried to get a doctor for Hilary. People away for the weekend, then, although Cornelia had said they didn’t know anyone in the town, or an office of some kind.
The blue and yellow capsule was still there. It said a good deal for Cornelia’s distracted state of mind; she was religious about keeping all medicines safely contained in their properly identified bottles in a cabinet for the purpose.
Margaret’s fingers went out independently, dropped the capsule into the envelope, folded the envelope securely, thrust it back into the drawer. Asked for a reason, she could only have produced a sequence of phrases that might bear no relation to each other: Philip had stayed in this house secretly with Mrs. Foale; Mrs. Foale had given Julio Garcia money; Julio Garcia was dead and Mrs. Foale was abroad; Philip and Cornelia were gone, too, and had not kept their promise to telephone; Cornelia who, so ill that Margaret was here on her account, had been doctored by telephone.
What had Muir said, in explanation? That the flu had been in many instances severe, that when he wasn’t in his office he had been at the hospital.
Like a spider flashing into sight in an otherwise well-kept drawer came the thought that if Cornelia had died, Philip would be quite well off.
Ten
IT was a relief to have the spider out, if only to dispose of it. Cornelia had not inherited her cousin’s money until just before her marriage, and if it had been such a thunderbolt to both her and Margaret, Philip, a total stranger to Miss Trumbull, could not possibly have known about it in advance. And any other predication was unthinkable.
He had lived in Connecticut at one time, of course, but the chances of his having known one elderly woman there so intimately that he was familiar with the contents of her will were so remote as to be impossible.
Besides, fifty thousand dollars really wasn’t that much money, not with present living costs and to a man of Philip’s tastes. Cornelia had some stock, of course, as had Margaret; it had been left to them by their parents. But even so . . .
Hilary’s remembered voice said like a knell, “Mrs. Foale heralded money.” And oh, God, what was she doing here, not disposing of the spidery thought at all but encouraging it, watching it flee secretly here and there? Even if Philip could have coaxed Mrs. Foale’s inheritance out of her, the very fact that she was abroad was proof that he hadn’t. A young woman of wealth would hardly have married a man of Hadley Foale’s age, and people didn’t go to Europe on a shoestring. Nor did they stand contentedly by while the man who had bled them married someone younger and prettier.
Mrs. Foale’s face, at the wedding.
Margaret jumped violently off her bed, looked curiously at her own face in the mirror, washed it with bitingly cold water. She felt caught in a dangerous spiral from which only activity, any kind at all, could release her.
She
