“Mary?” Jenny had the mouthpiece of the receiver against her palm, and her eyes looked beseeching. “He wants to know if we’ll have dinner with him.”
“We’re already committed,” said Mary, not pointing out that it was Jenny who had done the committing, “and I do think that under the circumstances—”
“Mr. Brennan doesn’t want me, ” said Jenny, explaining it kindly. “He was only being polite.”
It was true that his invitation to Jenny had lacked enthusiasm; evidently he hadn’t appreciated that underwater tussle. “Whichever you want, then, it’s up to you,” said Mary.
She half-regretted the words as soon as they were out, even though it would scarcely be possible to forbid Jenny to do anything. Couldn’t it be considered a trifle odd that the day after their arrival here they were dining separately with people who were in effect strangers? Or was that simply a carry-over, a false echo of the feeling of imminence that had driven her out of St. Ives’s car? Yes, because it was only the briefly shared responsibility at the pool which had prompted Daniel Brennan’s invitation. The receiver went down with a little click, cutting off what had been for Mary an undeciphered pattern of words. “He’s going to meet me downstairs at seven-fifteen,” said Jenny. “You don’t really mind, do you?”
“Not at all, but,” said Mary, entirely reasonable, “I think you ought to make it a fairly early evening after that bang on the head.”
Jenny gave her a glance which might have contained amusement, moved to the mirror, stared, bent closer. Any amusement departed. “Good God, what am I going to do about this? It looks like the mark of Cain.”
The graze on her forehead had indeed darkened and acquired a kind of tight burnish. Mary said, “Well, makeup . . .”
“An inch of it?”
There was a gift shop in the lobby which might conceivably harbor something other than souvenirs at exorbitant prices. Mary offered to try to locate a Band-aid, as she was going down for a newspaper anyway, and Jenny muttered, “Oh, I’d look great in a Band-aid, with maybe some grass-stains and a skinned elbow to go with it.”
Mary left her still peering into the mirror. She had no intention of buying a newspaper, but in view of the tacit truce achieved after that scene in the market it did not seem wise to mention the actual and elementary mission which had occurred to her.
The sky to the south was eggplant-colored and a precursory little wind had sprung up. It was going to rain again, and soon. At this hour the forecourt was more than crowded with cars; two foreign compacts were sealed in by the careless length of a Lincoln with Texas plates. Mary counted seven blue ones, none of them resembling the one which had stayed so long in her rear-view mirror.
The auxiliary area where she had had to park that afternoon contained three blue cars, all unfamiliar. It didn’t prove anything. If the vehicle in question did have some connection with Jenny, if in a tit-for-tat gesture Brian Beardsley had hired someone to trail her, it might be parked somewhere on a side street. Still, if Mary had listened to this tale from someone else, she would have said incredulously, “You mean she suspected this car and she didn’t even look to see if it was right there at the motel? She can’t be very bright.”
The air darkened subtly, and a discarded paper cup and a corkscrewed cigarette package spun erratically across the asphalt in what might almost have been the wind of Brian Beardsley’s passing. Because Mary, standing there in the parking area, was suddenly and paradoxically sure to her bones that he was here in Juarez and that Jenny had seen him that afternoon.
She told herself that she ought to feel reassured. The enemy had been encountered, certainly without prearrangement, and right now, upstairs, Jenny was solely absorbed in how to disguise the injury brought about by her own frightening recklessness. She was skilled at evasion, but there could be no doubt about her eagerness to dine with Owen St. Ives. Before the arising of that circumstance, she had seemed anxious to leave Juarez; now, she might be hoping that Beardsley would see them together.
On the other hand, he hadn’t come all this way for nothing. The very lack of any overt move could be interpreted as purposeful—spiders did not build noisy webs—and Mary’s dislike of the Casa de Flores, and even this deserted area in which she stood, changed to something much sharper.
She went back the way she had come, running a little now and then; to get out of the wind, she assured herself. Jenny, opening to her knock, said selfconsciously, “No paper? Mr. Brennan phoned a minute ago, he’s going to call back.”
“Oh.” Mary hoped she had not stared, as at an apparition. “You’ve, er, cut your hair, I see. It looks nice.”
It wasn’t quite the proper description. Using Mary’s manicure scissors, Jenny had sawed her hair into bangs to cover the offending graze. The slightly uneven black fringe, too short, robbed her long narrow face of its individuality, like the before-and-after cosmetic ads which undertook to bring all features within the limits of an arbitrary norm. Mary was reminded of a tall spindly comedienne doing a little-girl impression; only a huge bow and Mary Janes were missing.
“I look horrible, I know,” said Jenny, desperately nonchalant, and Mary, recognizing that this was not the moment to observe that at least she had gotten rid of a lot of split ends, assured her that on the contrary the effect was quite—she hunted for a word which might beguile—dashing.
Under other circumstances she would have taken the inadequate scissors in hand and softened the T-square angles at her cousin’s temples. Now, she sat down on her bed with the directory and announced her intention of finding another motel for the night: “The longer I stay in this place, the less
