She was instantly out of the chair, holding up a silencing hand as the bathroom door opened and Jenny’s startled face emerged. Concentrating, she could hear a man’s voice, controlled but urgent. “Come away from there.”
Mumble, also male.
“Come away!”
After a few seconds there was the quiet but distinct closing of a door, not on the corridor. Mary realized for the first time why there was so relatively little coming and going on the stairs: those invisible occupants had taken the adjoining room as well, although until now there hadn’t been so much as a whisper from it. There was a bumper sticker which read “Help! The paranoids are after me,” but this seemed to be a case of the real thing.
Jenny was still staring, her unconcern pierced at last. “All this place needs is little bunches of garlic over the doors and windows to keep vampires out.”
“I think you’re right,” said Mary with feeling. She tried to be entertained at the notion of Dracula in sombrero and serape, but remembered instead the nonchalance with which the employees here attempted to use passkeys. She looked at the decorative little chain on the door: a determined child could get past it. For purposes of security, they might as well be living in a paper bag.
Had someone, moments ago, thought to hurl himself into this room? Would he try from the corridor? “It will be a horrible nuisance to pack everything up,” said Mary, “but I’m going to see if they can put us elsewhere.”
The door-chains were undoubtedly standard throughout the motel, but at least she and Jenny would be removed from the now unnerving presence which was so much closer than she had thought. She started for the telephone, and Jenny said tentatively, “Or we could go back tonight.”
Mary shook her head firmly at that. She found night driving taxing even with a companion to ward off drowsiness, and the prospect of long hours of it, with stretches of divided highway turning suddenly into two-way traffic and Jenny almost certainly fast asleep, was unthinkable. In any case, the problem that had brought them down here wasn’t resolved. She lifted the receiver, and put her request.
Expectably, the clerk did not ask what was wrong with the present room, so that it might be corrected, nor did he inquire about the state of the lamp. He simply assured Mary that there was no other accommodation in the motel, and sounded amazed that she could think there might be. He was not her familiar adversary, for whom she was developing a certain admiration, or he would have added a bland, “Lo siento.”
Because even this token regret was lacking, and to test his reaction, Mary said that surely the room next to theirs was unoccupied?
There wasn’t so much as a flicker of hesitation, let alone a pause to consult a chart, although the Casa de Flores must have contained at least fifty rooms. Two-thirty-eight, said the clerk at once, formed part of a suite and was most certainly occupied.
Mary replaced the receiver and sat down on her bed with the Juarez directory. As with any half-formed decision, her resolution had hardened in the face of an obstacle, and her distaste for this room, and in fact for this whole place, had grown proportionately—or, she supposed, disproportionately. But there it was: she hadn’t liked the Casa de Flores from the moment she set foot in it, and this new circumstance was a violent underscoring.
Had the same man caused that half-cry in the night? And from whom? It needn’t have been during the small hours. Fatigue distorted the time sense, so that bar service might still have been available and a waiter have encountered—what?
Someone all bandages, like the Invisible Man? In the throes of drug withdrawal the hard way? With two heads? Mary put her nerves severely back into place and found the number of one of the American chain motels. The telephone rang as she stretched out her hand to it.
She expected the clerk, prepared to move them after some upper-echelon consultation because this was clearly a touchy area in the motel. Instead, Owen St. Ives said, “Mary?” It was the first time he had used her name. “Someone told me there was an incident at the pool, and from the description it can only have been Jenny. Is she all right?”
Mary felt an odd but recognizable sensation, twin to the one she had experienced in the early days when Spence, after they had quarrelled on their way to a party, had attached himself to a girl with waist-length copper hair until he learned that she not only owned but fully intended later on to play the harp standing ominously in a corner. She said, mentally arming herself against any more surprises in this vein, “Yes, luckily,” and then, as Jenny emerged from the bathroom, “Hold on a second, here she is.”
Jenny’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “Owen St. Ives,” murmured Mary, and handed over the receiver which, she realized belatedly, had come alive again with his voice in the tiny interval of transition. Ostentatiously busy and unlistening, she measured herself a drink to take the place of the one untasted beside the pool.
She had already learned not to think seriously about ice here. She added water to her Bacardi, and there at her feet was Jenny’s straw bag, abandoned in her curiosity at the ringing of the hitherto silent room telephone. It was unzipped as before—a technicality—and approximately thirty seconds ago Mary would have bent for it instantly. Now, because of some brand-new and complicated reaction, she had to force herself to remember those moments of terror while she stared at the water, and the very real fact that with a little more impetus in that downward plunge Jenny might have broken her neck. .
But the note that had to be the cause of it all, purportedly from Astrid, wasn’t there, at least in a fast search. Put that beside Jenny’s proposal
