What had begun as an excuse to Daniel Brennan was suddenly true. Jenny certainly hadn’t looked like waking for some time, but her physical reactions were unpredictable. She could have received only the blurriest of impressions of the room to which Owen St. Ives had delivered her, so that she would open her eyes to what in effect were strange surroundings. She might even try the door before she discovered that propped-up piece of paper to be a note—it wasn’t likely that she would regain consciousness with a mind as clear as a bell—and find herself locked in.
Mary, who was mildly claustrophobic and would hate such a circumstance, quickened her steps on the wooden stairs. It crossed her mind that this audibly hurrying pace would have drawn a sharper vigilance than ever from those odd inhabitants at the Casa de Flores.
The stingy light at the top of the stairs receded as she passed the three intervening rooms to the corner one, key in her hand. She whirled and nearly dropped it as the black shadows against the wall broke and a man said her name.
14
FOR a shaken second, Mary thought that Owen St. Ives was going to pull her into his arms, key and all. Then he said simply, “Thank God. I called back a little while after I talked to you, and when there was no answer—May I come in for a minute?”
“Of course. I was only downstairs,” said Mary, having a little unaccountable trouble with the key. She got the door open and went instantly to examine Jenny, who had shifted position and was lying on her other side, her hair a fresh tangle of black. Her breathing seemed even and unchanged.
“You can see why I was so worried until I talked to you,” said Mary, turning to St. Ives. He must have waited outside for quite a while, she thought as he closed the door; two fingers on his right hand were almost white with cold. He nodded at her, pushing both hands into his pockets as though self-conscious about this frailty—Mary’s own ungloved hands had felt chilly, but not to that extent—and joined her at the bedside, gazing down with an abstracted frown.
“I was feeling badly about Jenny,” he said in a troubled voice, “and I started analyzing it and wondering if it was the drinks that knocked her out? She stretched her cocktail to last through two of mine, and she did at least eat part of her dinner. And then when I called back, and there was no one here, I was afraid it might have been something else, that she might have gotten worse. I couldn’t find your car anywhere, and I thought you might have gone for a doctor, or—God knows what I thought.”
“My car wouldn’t start, it’s still at the motel.” Mary was finding his apprehension about Jenny’s condition difficult to follow. Food poisoning wasn’t unheard of in Mexico, but it did not send one into a profound sleep, to put it mildly. “What do you mean by something else?”
St. Ives didn’t answer that. Instead, he asked abruptly, “Do you know a David Brand in Santa Fe?”
It didn’t ring the faintest of bells, and Mary shook her head. Her legs felt tired or unreliable or in some way unwilling to keep on holding her up. She dropped down on one of the inhospitable chairs, inviting St. Ives wordlessly to take the other, but he stood there beside Jenny, a core of restlessness even though he was still. He said, “I asked Jenny, tonight, who you’d gone out with, and she said someone named Daniel Brennan, who had apparently remembered you from Santa Fe.”
A quiet fist seemed to close over Mary’s breathing because of his tone. She said, astonishing herself, “Yes, he thought he had, but it turned out to be someone else he had in mind.”
“I saw him last night in the lobby,” said St. Ives steadily, “and I recognized him from a village meeting in Albuquerque about two months ago. Very few people came out for it because there was a storm, and I couldn’t have been mistaken. I started across to him to say hello, and he saw me coming and walked out the door.”
A child would have grasped the implication. David Brand, Daniel Brennan—either initialled luggage or the psychological factor. “Daniel Brennan lives in Santa Fe,” said Mary, equally steady. “He owns part of a shop there.”
Owen St. Ives commented on that only with his eyebrows. “Did you get an El Paso newspaper tonight by any chance?”
“No.”
“David Brand’s wife was attacked and killed in Santa Fe the night before last,” said St. Ives, and now he did change his mind and sit down in the other hard and armless chair.
Echoes, Mary had thought before—but this seemed more like a gradual and dangerous quickening of drums. “No worse, you must admit, than those women’s shops where . . .”
“You know about those.”
“Yes.” Single syllable, shutting off any further light discussion. She remembered those comical little whiffs of cologne, and felt sick. She said, as one who knew, “The world is full of people who resemble other people, and a man whose wife had just been killed in Santa Fe wouldn’t be here in Juarez.”
“Yes, I know, I thought the same thing.” The dark blue gaze was puzzled. “But I’m certain he’s Brand, and people react differently to shock.” St. Ives turned his head and studied the bed with its oblivious occupant. “Jenny told me that he had dived in after her at the pool this afternoon, and that in fact he’d been there for some time.”
“Yes, he’d been working at the motel with a buyer . . .” But would a man who had just lost his wife by violence have
