Open on the coffee table, face down, as though Cornelia had just been consulting it when Margaret and Philip arrived from the airport. She remembered saying something like, “Everything all mapped out?” and Cornelia shaking her head while she turned the book face up. “Not really—we’re going to travel like a couple of vagrants. I want to know where the pools are, though. It’s going to be warmer as we get down into Arizona.”
There had been a few neat little x’s in the margins, and a photograph at the bottom of a—Margaret shut her eyes—left-hand page. Something with palms, because she had remarked that they always looked like false trees to her, to be folded up and carted away when a tropical movie scene had been shot.
Cornelia couldn’t come to any harm in a pool; she wasn’t much of a diver but she swam like a fish. But there was the car, thought Margaret in a gathering rush of panic, there was the very food Cornelia ate.
The front door opened and closed and Kincaid came in with the tour book. Margaret looked up at him. “What happened to the—his first two wives?”
Kincaid glanced away. “Maybe nothing,” he said. “That’s the trouble. Maybe he just gravitates to women who have money of their own and something wrong with them. The first was a diabetic and died of insulin shock. The second had a heart attack—she’d had rheumatic fever as a child and wasn’t very strong.”
Cornelia had fifty thousand dollars and nothing wrong with her—except that she was just over a severe bout of what had been diagnosed, by telephone, as flu. The recurrent type; the newspapers had warned about that.
“Here’s Arizona,” said Kincaid, deliberately brusque after a glance at her. “Now, let’s see . . .”
It wasn’t quite the hopeless task it had seemed at first. Margaret found the photograph of a motel under palms in the Arizona section, and thought she remembered that two of the x’s on that page had been near the top, one close to the bottom. She was right; those three had swimming pools and restaurants with cocktail lounges. One was in Prescott, two in Phoenix.
Kincaid bracketed them with a pencil and produced a road map. “They started south, so chances are they wouldn’t retrace their steps north. They’d probably keep going southwest or west. Your sister wants a rest, and that would mean not more than two hundred and fifty or three hundred miles a day, maybe a little more or less —that’s if they kept moving and didn’t settle down somewhere. That would bring them roughly—” Something about Margaret’s still and total silence made him glance up. He slapped the tour book shut and stood. “You ought to be in bed, and I ought to be shot. I’ll do the telephoning from my place, and call you as soon as I find out anything. I’ll call you anyway. You’d be surprised at how often people fall into conversation on trips, and mention their plans.”
“Not people with plans like Philip’s,” said Margaret. “For all we know, he may have gone in exactly the other direction, he may have already—”
“You’d know,” said Kincaid.
For a moment, in the hot confusion of her mind, Margaret thought he meant it in some occult sense. Then she understood, and said in the same dead steady voice, “Out in all that desert? I doubt it.”
Kincaid started to speak and checked himself. Then he said, “The doctor will be here before twelve. In the meantime, is there someone you could get to come in and help out for a while?”
“No . . . Yes, I think so. If you aren’t a policeman,” said Margaret over the distant and querulous rise of Hilary’s voice, “how do you know all this?”
Kincaid’s hand tightened on the doorknob and relaxed again, but the brief movement had released the catch and let in a thin flash of spring-colored light that seemed to cut the faded old Oriental rugs. “Byrne’s second wife, Ellen Morrow, was my first cousin. I grew up with her.”
The glance he lifted to Margaret from an apparent absorption with the stripe of light was very clear and absolutely empty. “I’ve had my eye on Byrne for quite a while.”
What was it that he hadn’t said?
Even if she had just entered the house for the first time Margaret could have found Hilary simply by following the thin curls of colored wax, some ground into the floor, out of the living room and down the hall. At some point, then, Hilary had been out of her room and listening, but when Margaret opened her door she lay in her bed like something carved on a tomb. She was, plainly, rising above the blizzard of bright waxy scrolls that covered her bedspread, the visible part of her sheets, the floor.
Laboriously, Margaret’s mind informed her that when she had closed the door earlier Hilary had been complaining that her crayons were all blunted. She had found a pencil sharpener, and this was the result.
Hilary opened her mouth. Margaret said wearily, “I know. You didn’t want to bother me. Would you like some ginger ale now?”
It was, she knew, going back to the kitchen, very bad for Hilary or for any child; the vanishing of all known landmarks of adult reaction was bound to be upsetting. But she could not have cared just now if Hilary had laid a wall-to-wall carpet of crayon shavings; thinking about Hilary at all was a defense her mind had flung up. If she thought enough about Hilary, so irritably that every square inch of her body felt sore to the touch, she would not be able to think about Cornelia, alone with Philip on some unwitnessing stretch of desert road—
And that was what Kincaid hadn’t said, hadn’t thought she could stand. Cornelia was perfectly safe while she was
