Somehow Mary thought not, and a very peculiar idea had entered her head. The motel pool was lit, throwing up a muted flare of green-gold, and although the night was cool Jenny got into her still-damp bathing-suit. “I love swimming at night, and I have to work off that beer,” she said with friendly mockery. “Are you coming?”
“Maybe just to watch you—I think I’ll go into the matter of our books first,” said Mary, sitting down on the bed near the telephone. “Incidentally, should you be swimming so soon after dinner?”
“That’s an old wives’ tale,” said Jenny, and departed.
Mary did not pick up the receiver and ask if Alfredo had returned to his station. She didn’t remember ever having been introduced to Daniel Brennan, and his was a decisive-featured face. The La Fonda was a safe choice as background, because most large functions in Santa Fe were held at the old hotel, and Willie Wilkinson as agent even safer: tirelessly social and insatiably curious, he seemed to have mastered the trick of being everywhere at once.
But if this story were false, how had Daniel Brennan known her name, with that slight and convincing inaccuracy?
Jenny’s parents had met Brian Beardsley, and could tell Mary his approximate height and his general appearance even if, say, a mustache had been removed or hair color altered. While she waited through the expected complications of putting a call in to New York from Mexico, Mary examined the possible reasons that would make Beardsley pursue Jenny at all.
Genuine love, when he had lied to her in essential areas? A determination to reinvolve her with him as revenge against the Actons for having had him investigated? Or, very simply, money? Gerald Acton would not qualify for a wealthiest-men list, but Henrietta had money of her own and their son-in-law could look forward to a well-upholstered future. For all their thunder and lightning, they would never disinherit their only child.
Of all these motives, Mary liked the second least, because, on the record, Brian Beardsley was not a man to provoke. And it had to be considered that persuading Jenny back into an affair or even marriage was not the only or the worst way he could hurt the Actons.
And what about Jenny, deliberately calling Mary’s attention to the fact of a watcher in the restaurant: was she capable of such guile? Yes. Mary didn’t even have to weigh the question. She had the fierce, single-minded commitment of her age to what she looked upon as inviolable rights, Beardsley’s as well as her own, and it would undoubtedly give her a good deal of satisfaction to outwit the system. She was, at least now, of a peculiarly unyielding nature; she did not have that brooding look for nothing.
. . . Mary realized that the Actons’ telephone was finally ringing—and ringing, and not answering.
She sat for a few moments with her hand on the cradled receiver, staring reflectively at it, and then she left the room, locked the door, turned to see a waiter emerging from the small service elevator with a laden cart. Dinner for two in the room at the end of the frigid corridor. What could it be like in winter?
Although the courtyard was now a packed glisten of cars, the only people Mary encountered on her way to the pool were the Indian woman, tonight resplendent in a sari of deep blue bordered with silver, and a gray-haired delegation wearing oblong plastic name tags and expressions of daring gaiety, as if, safely away from home, they might engage in a hat dance later in the evening. The women with their short curls and ruddy skins and pant-suits looked curiously like the men, or perhaps it was the other way around.
At first glance, the brilliant, still-shaking pool was empty. Then Mary, eyes adjusting to darkness made blacker by contrast, saw the hand holding onto the deck at the deep end; saw, too, a figure crouched there, an arm going out and down as she watched.
She called sharply, “Jenny?” as she walked closer, and the arm withdrew, what was now identifiably a man came to his feet and moved away without hurry, Jenny’s white-capped head appeared as she lifted herself on her elbows. The dazzle behind her made it impossible to read her expression, but Mary had a feeling that it was annoyed.
That couldn’t be helped—and she was, after all, the cause of these uneasy speculations. Mary said, bending toward the lifted face, “Jenny, when your parents talked to you on Tuesday night did they say anything about going away in the next few days? I just tried to reach them, to let them know where we are, and I don’t want to keep trying if there’s no point.”
“My mother said they might go to the Cape if the weather was decent.” Jenny shifted the position of her hands, braced her feet against the side of the pool, pulled her body into a bow. “You don’t need to worry about them calling till next week, anyway. You should see my father when the telephone bill comes in.”
My mother. My father. Had she always placed them at that cool biological remove? The crouching man hadn’t taken himself very far away after all; an edge of Mary’s vision saw him drop down onto a chair at the table where Jenny had sat that afternoon. In the brief wink of a struck match, there was even what looked like a bottle of Carta Blanca there again, and a glass.
Jenny was now pulling herself forward and back in the water, clearly impatient for Mary to depart so that she could get on with her swim. Or just for Mary to depart?
The feeling, once again, of coming along like a wardress to spoil things for her cousin gave Mary a faint crispness. “Look, Jenny, it was my idea to come down here and I really think your parents should know, just in case. Your
