At nine o’clock, with Hilary occupied over her breakfast and the house eerily dark with coming thunder, she called the telephone number she had found in Cornelia’s bedside table drawer.
It answered crisply and at once. “Breslin Laboratories . . . Hello? Breslin Laboratories.”
“Do you—I have a capsule that I’d like analyzed, do you do that?”
The voice told her kindly and a little patronizingly that they did not; they served the hospitals in the area. Undoubtedly her own doctor could arrange . . .
Was this the answer Cornelia had gotten, or had she ever called at all? “Cornelia had to change her medicine . . . she said it made her sicker.” And: “She threw up all the time and she had awful pains in her stomach.” Intestinal flu might do that, but at one point Cornelia hadn’t thought so. She had gone as far as looking up the number of the laboratory, and saving one of the capsules, and then something had happened that changed her mind. Perhaps Philip had pretended to call Dr. Muhin her hearing, perhaps he had seemed so frantically worried that whatever had sown the original seed of fear was wiped out and forgotten. Because Cornelia must have had something else to go on; no happily-married wife would suspect her husband of poisoning her simply because medicine didn’t agree with her.
Something had certainly changed Philip’s mind. Hilary’s arrival, the presence of a third and inquisitive person in the house?
In any case, Cornelia had dismissed her own suspicions as the effects of illness or delirium; otherwise she would never have gone away with Philip, and she would not have left the capsule so carelessly and openly in a drawer.
Margaret clung to that, and to the suddenly remembered fact that Philip’s job was with a chemical firm; he might well have had business with a laboratory and the capsule might easily be a sample.
On the cover of the telephone book she was staring at, Cornelia had written “Lena,” and then a number. After a second’s hesitation, Margaret dialled it.
Lena remembered the envelope and the capsule. On being told that Margaret was to occupy the double bedroom after the Byrnes left she had prepared it thoroughly, washing and ironing the dimity curtains, turning the mattresses. Between the mattress and box-spring of Cornelia’s bed she had found an envelope; about to throw it away, she had noticed that it held some kind of pill and had put it in the bedside table drawer. Was that all right?
Yes, Margaret told her nervelessly, that was fine. She had only wondered if it were something Mrs. Byrne had forgotten to take with her. In answer to Lena’s shy query as to whether she felt all right she said yes again, and thanks, and hung up.
But she did not feel all right, she felt far from all right. Her head was heavy and hot, the tonsil that had blossomed into quinsy twice, years ago, ached suspiciously. But she could not get sick now; it was bad enough having Hilary sick.
Lightning flared through the purple house, followed at no alarming speed by a crash of thunder. Even so Margaret waited, and smoked a calming cigarette that she had to light twice, before she used the telephone again to call Jerome Kincaid.
He wasn’t in his room at the motel, but instead of returning her call he arrived at the house an hour later. Margaret knew from his air of controlled intensity, his carefully unhurried inquiry about Hilary and about her, that he thought she was going to tell him she had heard from Cornelia and Philip. It came as a surprising stab that he was here so promptly only because she was a link to them, and indirectly to Mrs. Foale; it undid all her circuitous plans.
She said, “You never knew Cornelia or me, did you? You wanted to get into the house because of Mrs. Foale.”
His eyebrows crooked at her and then went up. “What’s all this?”
Margaret gazed implacably back. “I saw you trying the door that day.”
. . You did. Then you’re remarkably trusting,” said Kincaid with a trace of mockery. “For all you knew I might have been planning all this time to make off with the piano. I could give you a number of good and virtuous lies about why I was trying the door, but no, I never knew you before—I’d have remembered—and I’ve never set eyes on your sister Cornelia. But I had found out what I could about her and so I knew a little about you, too. And I am interested in Mrs. Foale.”
There were a number of dignified replies to this. Margaret said, “Why?”
He seemed to turn something over in his mind before he said, “For someone else, who wonders why she went abroad so suddenly, without telling anybody.”
“She did tell someone. A woman named Grace, in Philadelphia.”
“By wire.” There was a pause, in which Margaret realized that as long as a verifiable telephone number was used it was possible to send a telegram in any name.
Kincaid was looking at her almost dreamily. “What would you do if you were going abroad—I mean, what personal preparations would you make?”
A wave of irritation, probably fever, swept Margaret from head to toe. “I haven’t the smallest idea.”
“Yes, you have,” said Kincaid soothingly. “You’d buy some new clothes, women always do. You might have your hair done.” He gave her a sharp glance from which all dreaminess was
