Margaret closed the door with a sense of quiet horror, put her hands briefly and coolingly against her feverish face, and went into her own room.
How was it that the very air testified to recent tenancy? Was there an actual if tiny stir left, or simply an imprint of curiosity, of alien feet on the rugs, an alien stare bringing subtle life to silent beds, bureaus, curtains?
Margaret did not at the moment care. She was possessed by two immediacies: to make sure that Hilary, listening on the extension, had not looked around for envelopes to inspect and perhaps pocket; after that to put her sick aching body to bed and plunge the memory of Cornelia’s voice, clear, deliberate, into forgetting sleep.
She moved toward the bed lamp, and stopped in her tracks. That was not the familiar shadow of the stand-lamp in the far comer. It was a figure, a woman, still as the paint on the walls, waiting to see what she would do. There was only a bulk of skirt, shabby even in outline, and some sort of head-scarf. A very faint crisp scent, not noticeable except to newly, sharply edged nerves, was on the air.
Margaret had only checked herself for a brief second that sounded in her own head like a clash of cymbals. Plummet into the bathroom and lock the door? No, there was Hilary. Rub her eyes as though she were blind and inattentive with sleep, saunter toward the other bed— no one could know which bed she slept in—and the telephone extension on the table there. Start unbuttoning her sweater obliviously as she went, and then snatch up the receiver, because danger hung far heavier on the air than scent.
Above all, seem not to know who stood there, shorn of her wasp-like slenderness and delicacy, become suddenly a blunt instrument. Forgetting the scent that was as habitual as her tweeds and her pride.
Margaret moved, one foot after another. She hadn’t stared at the comer; she had known in an immeasurably small flicker of time. She undid the bottom button of her sweater and then the next, and all the time, idly, chest burstingly tight, she was getting closer to the telephone. Almost beside it, she bent and turned back the bedspread. Her hand flashed out, and the shadow in the corner said softly and sharply, “Don’t touch that!”
Margaret dropped her hand at once. Better women might have seized handset and all and dropped down behind the shelter of the bed, or sprung across the room in a diving tackle. Her own reaction was an instant and paralyzed obedience, because this woman’s driving purpose was not to be trifled with.
“There’s an envelope,” said the carefully masqueraded voice. “Give it to me, please.”
How meticulous she was, even in this extremity—and if Margaret turned over the capsule Cornelia had hidden under her mattress, there went Cornelia’s plea of self-defense. There went Cornelia. Fever gave Margaret a clarity she could not have achieved under other circumstances. She said, “I don’t know who you are or what you want, and the only envelope I’ve seen is in—” she nodded in half-darkness “—the top drawer of that bureau beside you. I can only warn you that there’s no money here.”
If she would turn her back, for just an instant, but she did not. Her voice said out of shadows, “You get it for me, and I’ll tell you if it’s what I want. Be very quiet, because we don’t want to wake the child.”
She knew—of course she had known, from the jigsaw puzzle and countless other small evidences which Margaret, accustomed to living with Hilary, had not noticed.
Carefully, Margaret moved around the bed and across to the bureau. In the darkness she hadn’t seen a gun or any other weapon, but she was as conscious of one as she had been of a presence in the room when she first entered it. She said as she pulled open the top drawer of the bureau, “I can’t see very well, you know,” and a flashlight beam—Hilary’s, that she had dropped?—came on instantly. The piled and slipping wedding photographs turned to sheets of blind gold as she toppled them, pretending to grope beneath. What now, what further delay—
She whirled, saying frantically, “It was there, I put it there,” and the suddenness of her movement shot the flashlight beam up and a little back.
Furious gold-carved face inside a loose and shielding scarf, pale eyes icy under bleached but still perfectly arched brows—not Miss Honeyman at all. The flashlight snapped off, and Margaret could almost have cried out with a childish horror of being left in the half-dark with Mrs. Foale.
“Give it to me,” said Mrs. Foale. Without a pretence at Elizabeth Honeyman’s deep arrogant voice, her own was hard and flat and rather high. “The medicine. Philip told me he thought she had hidden some.”
Margaret couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. The transition from Mrs. Foale dead in the storage room, another of Philip’s victims, to this woman who gave an impression of springing at her, although she stood statue-still, had left her hollow and cold with shock.
Although she would have had to keep out of Elizabeth Honeyman’s way, because hatred had a sure recognition of its own, this woman would have been safe anywhere else. She had lost weight, altering the contours of her face, and the dark bangs had become brushed-across blonde hair. Her skin had looked very white in the snapshot; tan make-up made a surprising difference. Add very high heels, and a small plumpish brunette woman who was supposed to be abroad could register at one of the motels in the town and even move about without worry.
“I said give it to me,” said Mrs. Foale sharply. Because of her total stillness and her air of
