If not war, this was certainly a skirmish. “Yes, thank you,” said Mary. “It was well worth being waked up for.” She turned away and saw Jenny, who had drifted to the postcard display at the end of the counter, in conversation with the remarkable girl from the dining room.
She was small—Jenny seemed to tower over her— and Mary guessed her to be about twenty-two. A fashion magazine would have wanted her to lose at least five pounds, but that would have been like wanting a slender apricot or a hollow-cheeked peach. Up close, her warmly tanned skin was silky, her eyes a melting gray-green. In accordance with the habit of the day, Jenny introduced her as Astrid and asked Mary if they could give her a lift into town; through a misunderstanding, the aunt and uncle she was with had gone off without her.
“I’m a tiny bit nervous about taking a taxi here,” said Astrid abashedly, “but if it’s a bother—”
If she had been less disarming, Mary could have imagined whole processions of women arranging to leave her behind. As it was, she seemed to present no more of a threat than baby powder, although there was nothing in the least babyish about her. Here, something twitched at the edge of Mary’s mind and as abruptly let go. “No bother at all,” she said, smiling at the girl. “We were going to the market anyway, so whenever you’re ready . .
This proved to be at once, not surprisingly; Astrid had obviously cut her lunch short, when she realized her predicament, in the hope of a ride with someone she had at least met. In the car, she asked to be dropped off at any place convenient for Mary near the optician’s on the main street where her aunt and uncle were having eyeglass prescriptions filled; she would meet them there after she did some souvenir-shopping.
Astrid lived in North Carolina (this in answer to a question from Jenny) and this was her first visit to the Southwest. No, she had never been to New York, but had heard that it was expensive. After a time, Mary stopped listening to compared notes and gave her whole attention to the traffic. Driving habits in Juarez had improved in the last few years, and taxis no longer looked like discarded frozen-food containers, but it was still necessary to be on the alert for boys darting fearlessly between cars with cartons of duty-free cigarettes for sale, or wobbling alongside on bicycles and offering themselves as guides.
Astrid got out at the appointed corner, expressing thanks and the hope that if her aunt and uncle didn’t decide to start the return journey to Albuquerque that afternoon she would see them later. Mary was struck by the frequency with which, in less than twenty-four hours, she had heard these words from people encountered for the first time. She glanced back automatically as she completed her turn into the parking area for the market, but Astrid had vanished.
. . . For a moment, standing close to Mary Vaughan—fair hair looking lamplit, hazel eyes clear and unmarked in a face not dark with a rain of blood but only touched lightly by the sun—he had nearly seized her throat then and there and to hell with the consequences. His heart had raced with the raging impulse, his brain ached with it.
He had smiled at her instead, although it was increasingly difficult, now that she was within actual, physical reach, to remind himself that she had to know why she was dying. There would be no point in dispatching her with almost the speed of a sniper—but he promised himself that she would pay him back for every second of this charade, which was forcing him to take more tranquilizers than his prescription called for.
She had glanced at him peculiarly once or twice, as if searching for another identity behind his features, but she couldn’t be really suspicious because she was still here with the stick-figure girl, Jenny. If he had had any hatred to spare he would have applied it in that direction, because she had to be detached long enough for a fatal accident to befall Mary Vaughan—if not in the pool, on the almost glassy stairs—and she stuck like a burr.
The Casa de Flores must have a discreet doctor to summon in emergencies, and he felt sure that accident, in the case of a U.S. citizen staying at a tourist-oriented Mexican motel, would be a verdict welcome in all quarters.
Meanwhile, there was an essential call to make, and instinct took him back over the border to El Paso and the first telephone booth he could find. He was in luck; it was his sister who answered the direct-dialling and asked, after her first anxious inquiry, “Where are you?”
Unhesitatingly, he named a town fifty miles to the north of Santa Fe, where he and his wife had had a primitive cabin for vacations and an occasional long weekend of fishing, hiking, brief dips in an icy stream. Where, if she had not done so much internal bleeding after she was turned away from Mary Vaughan’s door, his wife would have been able to heal all her wounds. In his mind he struck down again, furiously, the doctor’s assertion that the mortal damage had already been done by that time. Those were the tales they told children.
“. . . the cabin?” Eunice Howe was asking incredulously, and he scratched the edge of a coin gently over the mouthpiece and said, “ . . . friends. I can’t hear you very well, can you hear me? How is everything there?”
Everything being the funeral arrangements, about which he cared nothing at all, and the investigation in progress, in which his interest was vital. People taken to emergency rooms passed through a number of hands. Was it possible that the police had somehow learned of Mary Vaughan’s involvement, tried to question her, discovered her hasty departure, linked
