They had run out of shops quite a while ago, and now out of small, close-packed houses. This was an area of trees on one side, and what looked like the laying out of an industrial complex on the other; there were cordoned-off stretches of cement, some skeletal framework, piled bricks. Beyond, the headlights picked out a crumbling adobe building, its sides studded decoratively with the bottoms of thrust-in-green glass bottles, and St. Ives was pulling the car up in front of it.
Mary gazed expectantly at him, waiting for him to back and turn, said bewilderedly when he made no motion toward doing so, “What are we—? To get to the hospital we have to—”
“We aren’t going to any goddamned hospital,” said St. Ives in a voice like an exposed knife-blade. “We never were.”
For seconds, while the car gave off the tiny sounds that follow a suddenly switched-off ignition, Mary thought that she must have misheard him. She hadn’t. She realized with a hard heavy beating in her throat that this terrible slippage, this abrupt canting of everything in sight which must be experienced by stroke-sufferers, was happening.
She put out a hand instinctively to the door handle, remembered Jenny helpless in the back seat with her dreams of parakeets, withdrew it again. She heard herself say steadily, like someone pretending fearlessness to a dog with its lips drawn back and its hair up, “I don’t understand this, Owen.” Speak to it by name. “Why are we here?”
“Why are we here?” mimicked the man who called himself Owen St. Ives. There was the worst kind of mockery in it, as though Mary had been making flirtatious advances. “So that I can kill you,” he said, “like you killed my wife.”
Even over the pounding of her blood, Mary felt a certain relief, because out of her own indisputable innocence she could argue with him, ultimately convince him. She could account for herself on the night before last, because this had to be what it was all about; give him the names of the two men she had been with at a long dinner, assure him that Jenny could back her up about the quiet evening afterwards.
“If you’re David Brand—” she said out of a pinched throat.
He gave a sharp bark which wasn’t laughter but a release of hoarded-up hatred. It was as horrifying as seeing a cloth snatched away from apparently healthy flesh to reveal an abcess at bursting point. “I liked the initials. Go on, you murdering bitch.”
“I’m sorry about what happened to your wife, but I swear that I never even met her,” said Mary, discovering that it was possible even now to flinch at that invective in that particular voice. (But how would you know if you’d met her, whirled through her brain, when his name isn’t even Brand?) “I’ve never harmed anyone, that I know of, in my life. I’ve certainly never—”
“You thought she was too far gone to describe you after you turned her away from your door, didn’t you?” said the man facing her. “Oh, but she wasn’t. She told me about the wagon-wheel in your gate, where she nearly fell down, and your blonde hair—” mincingly, terrifyingly, the silhouetted fingers flickered about his head, and he could never have thought that up by himself, he was copying a woman’s gesture “—and the light you turned out in her face. Do you know how long she ran, bleeding?”
Mary’s stomach turned over with foreknowledge. The subdued lights in the living room when she got back. Jenny’s shower cap, pale yellow, frilly, looking like hair to a desperate woman outside in the dark. Jenny’s almost pathological squeamishness at the sight of blood, her anxiety to see a newspaper the next morning, her momentary terror when a strange woman had stalked toward her with apparent intention at the Casa de Flores. Like someone washed free of blood, and coming back to make her pay?
But Jenny lay in the back seat, unable to protect herself.
“All right, I was frightened,” said Mary, trying in her horror to follow what must have been sleeping Jenny’s course. “There had been some break-ins in my neighborhood, with violence, and I didn’t dare open the door. And then I heard an ambulance a few minutes later, and I was sure that whoever it was had been rescued. In fact, I heard two sirens, so I—”
Swiftly, without warning, her throat was encircled. It might almost have been a lover’s caress, except for the hovering thumbs. “Beg me,” said the man pleasantly.
Mary’s throat closed on an obedient Please. This was what he wanted, this was to be the aperitif, this was why she had been spared in the corridor on that first evening when the door at the far end had opened and those watchful eyes looked out. And if she had gone with him on that purported shopping errand? She hadn’t been seen leaving with him, so that no one, later, could have said how she had come to be dead, strangled, in an abandoned adobe building.
Except that someone in the restaurant or the bar might have remembered her with Daniel Brennan, and the woman in the rain hat, if she were still here at the time, would come forward. And as a witness— but Mary didn’t see how he could leave her to be a witness—Jenny would be no good at all.
“I told Daniel Brennan you’d taken Jenny out to dinner,” said Mary, finding a level for her voice although the thumbs had come down lightly, testingly, prolongingly—and, oh, God, why hadn’t she? “If anything happens to me, after what happened to her, they’ll look for you.”
And what satisfaction in that, when she was dead and a certain number of people sent flowers and went to her grave, saying soberly among themselves that at least the police had her
