Jenny tried to stare them into a tighter group, standing on the deck and spinning her cap on her forefinger. Mary, more determined if less militant, slid over the side and managed to preempt a lane at the very edge. Her head came up in mid-stroke at the sound of a sharp scream when she was halfway down the pool, but it was only a woman who had had a toe playfully bitten by one of the men.
Screaming in the water broke a basic rule of conduct, but apart from Jenny’s severe gaze it provoked no reaction at all; a waiter passing by with a tray of drinks didn’t even glance over his shoulder. Frolicking here was evidently done in full cry. Mary wondered what would happen to a swimmer in real trouble, figured out the answer without much difficulty, and saw presently that Jenny had sat down and was no longer glowering. She was looking up at Owen St. Ives, who said something to her and then pulled out a chair and joined her.
Mary had been going to abandon the pool until it was less crowded, but she did six more laps in the clear, crisp-feeling water so that Jenny should not see her in the role of chaperone again. She wondered about her cousin and Owen St. Ives as she swam. There were men who found youth a challenge for its own sake, but he did not look like one of them. Was he simply being—awkward word, it sounded somehow connected with warts—avuncular? Was he here on vacation, and tiring of his own company?
The ball in play hit her on the head with a surprising thump, and a man cried jovially, “Hey, sorry about that!” Just don’t bite my toe, thought Mary, and swam cautiously past him and climbed out. Owen St. Ives got to his feet as she approached the table, but with no intention of leaving. He looked mildly pleased with himself. “I was just telling Jenny—”
A waiter arrived with a tray holding iced tea and two golden Bacardis on the rocks. There was even a glass of water for Mary, who diluted her drinks somewhat. This sure choice shook her until she realized that he would have asked Jenny what to order.
The waiter went away. “I’ve unravelled part of the mystery upstairs,” said St. Ives, “but we’re all sworn to secrecy so the room-service waiter I talked to won’t lose his job. What we have there is an American with a nervous breakdown and a male nurse. He must be readily recognizable, because he’s paying heavily not to be seen.”
“But there’s nothing disgraceful about a nervous breakdown,” said Mary involuntarily.
“Certainly not, but there are times when you’d just as soon not have one made public. If you were running for reelection after a questionable voting record, say, or had a proxy fight on your hands, or were in the middle of a divorce and wanted custody of a child or children . . .” St. Ives shrugged, letting that tail off as though he had scarcely embarked upon a list of possible motives.
Mary could not have said why there was something unspoken in the air: the suggestion that other and less harmless states of mind could be presented as nervous breakdowns. But even the bizarrely run Casa de Flores wouldn’t harbor a dangerous psychotic.
(Although if he had arrived looking only like a man badly in need of complete rest and quiet, how would they know?)
The air darkened suddenly as the morning’s massed clouds moved over the sun, the now-deserted swimming pool grew a gooseflesh frill, a new sharp wind blew Mary’s bathing-cap off the table. Owen St. Ives glanced at the sky. “Going to pour,” he said, and then, casually, as he retrieved her cap and pocketed his cigarettes, “Did you happen to hear anything from that direction during the night?”
Jenny shook her head at once and said, “Not I.” Mary remembered the half-dreamed sound like an aborted cry, and the peculiar atmosphere in the coffee shop at breakfast as though the staff buzzed with something. But if Jenny had been so inordinately frightened of the chambermaid, how would she react to this? “Neither did I,” said Mary firmly.
She glanced at her cousin as she spoke, and saw with surprise that she needn’t have worried; Jenny was gazing at St. Ives with only interest and speculation. The close proximity of a man with nervous problems severe enough to warrant the presence of a nurse didn’t seem to bother her at all. So her source of alarm, first showing itself in tension at the sound of the telephone in Santa Fe the night before they left, was, unlikely though it seemed, a woman.
A slender woman with cropped dark hair, Mary amended, because just for a second the maid must have looked to Jenny like someone else. Encountered where?
It couldn’t matter; Jenny had recovered at once and seemed to have forgotten the incident. She said as they reached the archway just ahead of the first drops of rain, “Those people in the pool were going to a bullfight.”
It was clear from her dubious tone that in spite of her extreme squeamishness at the sight of blood she was beginning to wonder if this event was something she would regret having missed, later on. Mary was not anxious to repeat her own single experience. She could not endorse the prim outrage of the woman sitting next to her, who had said with conviction, “They would never allow this in St. Louis,” but neither did she care for the streams of crimson coursing down the massive shoulders where the
