Out of nowhere, chillingly, flashed a fact so taken for granted after a week’s familiarity that it hadn’t reminded her of its existence at once in this context. At least twice a day, possibly three times, Jenny took some kind of capsule.
What?
Briefly, Mary’s skin seemed to blaze over the inner cold. There were medications so incompatible with alcohol—tranquilizers, usually, although why would marionette Jenny of all people be taking tranquilizers?—that the people who combined the two sometimes never woke up.
By this time she was at the other bed, shaking the sharp-angled shoulder, pushing back the disordered black hair. “Jenny. Jenny. Wake up. Can you hear me? Wake up!”
It was useless. Jenny’s eyelids would lift a little at the insistent pressure of Mary’s hands and then close again with no trace of any comprehension beyond her own need for oblivion, although once, patently to get rid of this interference, she mumbled “Okay,” and burrowed her face deeper into the pillow.
There was no point in getting furious at her, and no point either in the self-recrimination at the other end of the pendulum. (You should have known she might do something like this. You knew she was besotted with Owen St. Ives, and you thought yourself that she looked like someone doing a little-girl impression.)
Above all, it would not help to give way to tears of worry and frustration in spite of a brand-new speculation which had slipped in on the heels of the other like an animal, not a domestic one, taking advantage of an opened door.
People who made an intensive study of the subject contended that a significant number of automobile fatalities could be considered to be suicides. Jenny had been courting danger at the pool. It was true that she had appeared to snap back to normal, but what if, in a short period of time, she had seen Brian Beardsley with Astrid in downtown Juarez and on top of that made the discovery that St. Ives liked her as an eighteen-year-old but nothing more?
You don’t know that, Mary informed herself steadily. Jenny is not run-of-the-mill.
She went to the telephone and presently, watching the unmoving, unhearing girl in the bed, got the Casa de Flores and asked for Owen St. Ives. He would certainly be able to tell her something— Jenny’s mood, how much she had had to drink, whether she had taken one of her capsules. Almost from the first the ringing had a futile sound, but she let it go on long enough to penetrate the running of a shower before she hung up and stood for an indecisive moment with her hand on the receiver.
If she did call back with a message to phone this number, how likely was it that Owen St. Ives, returning, would stop at the desk and inquire? Or that the clerk would keep ringing his room faithfully?
For the first time, Mary was strengtheningly angry as well as alarmed. It was difficult to deflect Jenny from a chosen course, God knew, but by the very nature of things St. Ives would have more weight with her than anyone else. In view of her age and her current condition, he might have lingered here, at least briefly. Failing that, it should have been no insurmountable task to write a fast note: “Don’t worry, Jenny’s just had a drink too many.”
Unless he hadn’t realized—but of course he had. He would have seen Jenny up the difficult stairs and inside the room, and he would have known that she was only minutes away from passing out.
Mary left the telephone, studied her cousin again, hung up the pink dress as if it mattered to be tidy. Jenny’s raincoat wasn’t in the closet, it was on the bathroom floor with an air of having been aimed haphazardly at the door hook. Mary bent for it and felt in the pockets for a piece of paper thrust in bemusedly, but found only a leopard-printed chiffon scarf, a pair of gloves, and eleven cents.
The straw handbag was on the floor too. Mary zipped it open and combed rapidly through the contents for the small silver pillbox with a turquoise set in the lid which Jenny had bought in Santa Fe the day after her arrival (“Might as well be fancy about it”). It was empty, which told her nothing because she didn’t know when it had last been filled from the mother lode in Jenny’s suitcase.
Mary did not put the pocketbook down at once. Feeling that something important hinged on this, she made a thorough search for that other and actual note. It wasn’t in the wastebasket, and Jenny could hardly have chewed it up and swallowed it, like a spy. And it was not an infringement of rights. In Santa Fe, she had heard a siren and assured herself that someone was in charge out there—but now she was in charge.
She found what she was looking for wedged into the thin folder of traveller’s checks—for sentimental reasons, incredible though that seemed, or so that Jenny could remind herself that a man capable of this casual cruelty wasn’t worth disrupting her life and alienating her parents for? It was a single line in a tight and punishing little hand: “How do you like my girl? Pretty, no?”
There was no signature, mockingly, but Jenny would know his writing. In view of her emaciation, it was like a kick at the head of someone who had stumbled and fallen, and all the more wounding because it was reasonable to believe that Astrid had shared in the fun. Mary thought back to her cousin’s simple admiration of the other girl, felt like tearing the note into savage little pieces, put it scrupulously back instead.
. . . And how many moments lost here? Jenny was still deep in the sleep that might be natural
