The man from the pool, concerned about Jenny. Mary let herself into her room just as he was starting to turn.
She had travelled light to Juarez as always, two dresses for daytime and two for night, so it was a matter of the mint-leafed white which she had worn in the car on the way down. Fortunately, it was of a fabric which started to shed wrinkles the moment it was placed on a hanger. Mary washed her coffee-stained clothes rapidly and, key in hand, stood at the door for a puzzled moment, as if there were something else she should be doing before she left the room.
It couldn’t, said the age-old and totally false reassurance in such instances, be very important.
On the half-landing between the slippery flights of stairs, she encountered the man from the pool, who had been openly waiting for her. He wasn’t the astonishment of the night before, but she still felt a small jolt along her nerves—because so often she had exited from after-theater ladies’ rooms to where Spence waited, or come home to find him pacing her living room when she had been delayed at work?
He was friendly and casual, and said by way of explanation that he had realized only after leaving her last night that he hadn’t introduced himself— Owen St. Ives. He knew Mary’s name, from Jenny. He added that he had been trying to find out from the maid, without success, the identity of the invisible occupants at the end of the corridor. “None of my business, but I’m torn between a case of plague and somebody who’s been getting white roses from the Mafia. Unfortunately, the maid doesn’t speak English.”
He glanced inquiringly at Mary as he spoke, as though she might have succeeded where he had failed. His eyes weren’t brown, as they had looked in the orange glow from the wall sconces the night before, but very dark blue. “I know,” began Mary, and stopped, because it would be ridiculous to confide to a man she didn’t even know the woman’s strange and silent invasion of her room.
They had reached the doorway of the coffee shop, and Owen St. Ives lifted a hand in greeting to Jenny, still at the table. He said to Mary, “You’re staying at least through tonight, aren’t you? Then I’ll see you both later, I hope.”
Mary rejoined her cousin, and saw that her impression from a distance had been correct: Jenny wore the faint remains of a blush. Clearly she had a penchant for men considerably older than herself, and just as clearly Brian Beardsley had been supplanted.
Good, said Mary to herself with force, because this meant that the problem had largely evaporated. Still, it was something of a surprise to realize that her senses might have betrayed her again, there on the stairs; that St. Ives, who could have registered only a blur of motion as she entered her room, might very well have been waiting not for her, but for Jenny.
Out into the blaze of light to the car which, presently, Mary surrendered to the watchful eye of a brown-uniformed policeman. Even without a parking meter to be fed by him, this was standard procedure. Where no such official existed, bands of small boys took over.
In various shops—the main market could wait until afternoon—she and Jenny looked at tooled leather handbags, flower-decorated straw bags, onyx chess sets and pottery owls, sheaves of brilliant paper flowers, hand-embroidered cotton blouses and dresses, mirrors set in sunbursts of tin or mosaics of rainbow glass. Under this assault of color and variety Jenny began to acquire a glazed and indecisive expression, but finally bought a mantilla for her mother and a pair of silver filigree earrings which were not, Mary considered, going to do a thing for Gerald Acton.
Having completed the last purchase, Jenny roamed off to another counter, came back, said, “This is so old hat to you that you must be tired of it, Mary. Why don’t you wait for me a few minutes in the car?”
Mary thought she knew the reason for this suggestion. She said, “Jenny, if you were thinking of buying anything for me—” and was interrupted by one of the rare, teasing smiles and, “Don’t I have any rights around here?”
She started obediently off for the car, a figure at once cool and vivid in the simple leaf-patterned dress, and was stopped almost at once by a hailing “Mary Vaughan” from Daniel Brennan. It was a peculiar form of address, much more recognizing than the use of just her first name, which Southwesterners employed instantly, or a formal greeting. He walked to her car with her, so unalarming that she was amazed at her own suspicions the evening before, and explained that he was in search of a decent light bulb for his reading lamp; the one in place was so dim that moths flew away from it.
“Mine doesn’t work at all, thank you for reminding me,” said Mary, and, after a further comment on the boil of black-tinged clouds which she hadn’t noticed until then beginning to build up in the west, was handed into her car. She got out again almost at once, tipped the policeman to whom this courtesy belonged, was sealed gallantly in once more, wound down the window for a stir of air, idly picked up the newspaper which Jenny had carried away from the breakfast table.
Or not quite idly, because without conscious thought she looked at the index for the weather, turned to the proper page, saw that there would be no point in any further long-distance telephone calls. Both New York and Boston were sunny, with temperatures in the seventies, so the Actons were undoubtedly in Wellfleet.
Although that seemed academic now.
At the
