“You don’t know her married name, by any chance?”
“No . . . something horsy,” said Mrs. Powers after a distant and cogitating pause, “or maybe I only think that because he came from out West somewhere. . .Before she got so bad, your cousin used to complain about Miss Glidden; she said it was all telephone calls and Hadley this and Hadley that. But that wasn’t his last name. I just can’t think of it, isn’t that always the way?”
The world might not be full of Hadleys with horsy last names, but this was too important to make a mistake about. Margaret relaxed her aching fingers on the receiver and tightened them again. “Would this have been Isabel Glidden?”
“That’s right,” said Mrs. Powers surprisedly. “Izzy Glidden, they called her around the hospital, and did she hate it. There, I’ve gone and taken up all this expensive time and I haven’t been able to help you at all.”
Eleven
MARGARET’S mind, taking cover, informed her that this explained the lack of high-heeled shoes. As a nurse, on her feet a good deal, Isabel Glidden Foale had been accustomed to relaxing in flats. (But then why hadn’t she taken any of them abroad with her? Had she bought a whole new wardrobe of shoes?)
The cover fled. Mrs. Foale—impossible to think of her as Miss Glidden after all this time—had been Wilma Trumbull’s day nurse, had discovered her legatee, had communicated this to Philip. It could only have been of interest to him because he was half-engaged to Margaret at the time—had he sought her out at all because, through Mrs. Foale, he knew of the Trumbull connection and hoped for the best?
In any case, as the capable nurse Mrs. Powers had said she was, Mrs. Foale had probably had a fairly accurate idea of her patient’s life expectancy. Philip had had a safe period of time in which to woo and win Cornelia, to be almost at the altar when the astounding news came.
Very well; where did that bring her? Miss Glidden had become Mrs. Foale. Philip had become Cornelia’s husband. Hadley Foale had died, also predictably to a nurse who had been on night duty in the hospital where he was a patient.
That left—didn’t it?—Cornelia. Odd man out.
Not necessarily, thought Margaret, rubbing her temples to try and smooth panic away: the evidence in the house was anything but that of collusion. Whatever their relationship, Mrs. Foale hadn’t trusted Philip. The concealed snapshot of him, and the letter in the piano, were a wary guard against Philip’s defection. Well, she would know how swayable Philip was where money was concerned, how smoothly he could get himself out from under. She would, as denser people often did not, apply the lesson to her own case.
If anything happened to Cornelia, Philip would inherit, and Mrs. .Foale would certainly want a share. She would have foreseen the probability of Philip’s coolly denying anything to do with her—his contacts with her in Connecticut would undoubtedly have been careful— and against that she had stored her weapons. The snapshot of Philip, the letter, possibly other things.
Margaret, in her scouring of the grounds for material with which to speed the burning of the blood-stained rag, had undoubtedly crumpled up the letter and tossed it into the incinerator.
At what she was thinking she put her hands to her cheeks, flat and hard. Reason as she might, Cornelia was not x or y in a given problem. She was Margaret’s sister, flesh and blood, naive for all her efficiency, and she was away somewhere with Philip. When Margaret’s mind glossed over the phrase “if anything happened to Cornelia” she knew it was because she was afraid to face the meaning of the words: Cornelia’s sudden death.
Call Jerome Kincaid? He was a man who knew what to do about all kinds of things; that was evident in his competent face, his eyes that could go so soft. She had wishfully accepted him as an old school acquaintance, because she liked him; underneath, in this raw moment, she knew that she had never believed it.
He knew something about Mrs. Foale, and just as certainly he was interested in Cornelia’s and Philip’s whereabouts. But on whose behalf was he acting?
There was—and shockingly she had forgotten him— Julio Gartfia, dead by such painful degrees. Even if it were a private vendetta, nothing to do with his having been in this curiously sinister house in the past, there was still her own part in it.
Margaret could never remember having spoken aloud to herself, in whatever extremity; when she had heard people do it on the stage, it smacked of self-consciousness. Now, hands still tight against her face, she said to the neat blue and white pantry, “Oh God, what shall I do?”
She did nothing, until the next morning. She wished the day away with meaningless and unnecessary tasks, taught Hilary how to play solitaire; thought, each time she passed the silent telephone, They’ll call tonight. I’ll tell them they’ve got to come back, and before I leave here I’ll warn them both. I’ll tell Cornelia to make a different kind of will, I’ll tell Philip that I know about Mrs. Foale and her being Miss Trumbull’s nurse. He wouldn’t dare, then—
But they did not call.
The morning was by turns dark and windily gold, with thunderstorms forecast on the eight o’clock news. While Margaret stood at the kitchen window, trying to get coffee down a sore and aching throat, the sun disappeared and hailstones rattled down through the bare budding branches of the pear tree. She had slept patchily, perhaps because of her throat, and she must have dreamed, because each time she woke it was with the same feeling of panic.
It was the kind of morning on which catastrophe seems built-in, a smell of smoke hovers just
