But the circumstances weren’t normal, and hadn’t been since she had answered the telephone in Santa Fe forty-eight hours ago. Logic spelled out a perfectly safe equation—Brian Beardsley with Astrid, Jenny with Owen St. Ives—but Mary tensed with impatience at a red light, an enforced crawl behind a bus, a stalled car creating a knot of traffic. Moreover, although he saw to it that they did not travel in utter silence, Daniel Brennan had gone into a retreat of his own. He was obviously a man to whom any real or imagined rebuff from a woman presented not a challenge but an occasion for civil goodbyes.
A van blocking the entrance to Jaime’s courtyard, its luridly painted tiger-eyes glittering with raindrops, was the last straw. Brennan sounded his horn in accordance with the notice on the wall-corner, but Mary already had a hand on the door release. “Would you mind . . .? It’s getting late, and I’m anxious to see if Jenny is back.”
It wasn’t really late; it only felt that way to newly awakened nerves. And, thought Mary irrelevantly, they hadn’t addressed each other by name all evening.
“Not at all.” Brennan sent a glance across the puddled flagstones to the wooden stairs rising to the railed walk. There were lights, but of such thrifty wattage that there were stretches of dark. “Will you be all right?”
“Yes. Thank you again, and I’m sorry—” Unable to complete that, Mary shook her head, smiled, and walked rapidly to the rear entrance of the hotel, beside the bar. She said good-evening to the tireless Raoul, who was apparently in charge of parking problems in addition to all his other duties, and waited at the desk while the clerk addressed the telephone severely in Spanish; something, it seemed, to do with laundry.
He hung up. Yes, he told Mary, the young lady had picked up the key perhaps ten or fifteen minutes ago.
In her relief, uncalled-for though she knew it to be, Mary did not look beyond his faintly indulgent smile because Jenny aroused that kind of reaction. She went outside again to the courtyard sounds and sights blocked off before by her sense of urgency: occasional laughter over the syncopated thud of music from the bar, water running pink and gold among the flagstones, the black rain-ruffled droop of the willows around the swimming pool. The van that had blocked the entrance was gone, and Daniel Brennan’s car was presumably slotted away somewhere. She mounted the wooden steps, the shaky rail wet and surprisingly cold under her hand, and walked past a Stygian well housing some kind of machinery to the door of the corner room, and tapped.
“Jenny?”
No answer, not even a promising stir. If she had sealed herself into the shower, would she, in view of the time, have left the door unlocked although that was never the best of ideas?
The door opened under Mary’s hand. The overhead light was on. A length of pink dress almost at her feet sent a terrible bounding through her chest, but Jenny wasn’t inside it. She was under the covers in the nearest bed, face down, black hair every which way, oblivious.
She had come in a very short time ago, according to the desk clerk. She was almost crankily neat about hanging up her clothes. She had travelled down here with a calico nightgown that seemed to be her favorite, but only her bra strap showed on one bony bared shoulder. She was still wearing her costly pearls. She had ears like a deer, and she hadn’t heard the opening or the closing of the door. Except for the very slight rise and fall of the blanket, she might have been dead.
“Jenny?” The fear at the pool might have been a rehearsal for this. Mary bent and placed the lightest of fingers on the exposed shoulder, forcing herself to speak calmly although there was something odd and wrong here. “Jenny? . . . Jenny!”
12
IT took a frighteningly long time for the extravagant eyelashes to tremble and lift a little, reluctantly, on a flash of white and then dazed gray-blue before they dropped again. Jenny muttered indistinguishably and resumed her sleep. Mary straightened, astonished but relieved at the strong smell of liquor.
As simple as that, when for an uncountable number of heartbeats the room had seemed full of some unspecified danger. Jenny, acutely self-conscious about her hair and therefore doubly anxious to appear nonchalant and sophisticated to Owen St. Ives, had had drinks she wasn’t used to and—if body weight had much to do with the assimilation of alcohol, couldn’t tolerate. She would almost certainly have required assistance into the lobby for the key, as the clerk would scarcely turn it over to a strange man, and that was the cause of the understanding smile.
Here, Mary became aware that some of her relief was filtering away. Sitting on the other bed, gazing across at what little she could see of the profile between the long masking strands of hair, she thought uneasily that this looked somehow deeper than sleep, even liquor-induced sleep. Moreover, Owen St. Ives would have seen early what was happening to his young companion, and although there were people who found it entertaining to watch unsuspecting drinkers get drunk, and even fed liquor to parakeets or puppies, Mary was sure that he was not among them.
Sure? How? Because of some elusive quality of resemblance, she was going by the standards of another man entirely.
