On the other hand, Celia would be just as pleased if no rumor of her activities as hostess got back to Mrs. Cannons ears. She had an uneasy feeling that a lawyer might be able to make something unpleasant out of that. The danger seemed diminished by the fact that although the evening paper had carried a small paragraph about the inquest, a narcotics raid in Newark and a local bank robbery had driven it onto an inside page. It would have to be read in its entirety, moreover; Celia had always said merely, “my uncle.” It was unlikely that any one of that handful of people would pursue the obsequies of Robert E. Tomlinson, aged 83.
Willis Lambert was safely in Milwaukee, his cousin and wife had returned to Arkansas. Somewhere, presumably, there remained Betty Schirm, but Celia would cross that bridge when she came to it.
She turned out the lights and went to bed in her own small room, hugging the thought that she could just as easily have slept in the guest room, where she had changed the linen herself after the Cannons’ last visit. It was perhaps a comprehensive summing-up that no vision of an old hand wrapped frantically around a railing bar entered her dreams at all.
Advised by her lawyer, who talked to Dr. Fowler and sent out a few discreet feelers among Mr. Tomlinson’s friends, Mrs. Cannon did not contest the will, but the cost to her temper was high. It showed on an afternoon in late September when, by prearrangement, she came to 4 Stedman Circle to collect her uncle’s personal effects.
Although the will had stipulated that Celia be allowed immediate occupancy, she had not stayed at the house after the first few days. When the novelty of this domain had worn off, she felt exposed—to exactly what, she could not have said. She had none of the resources of a person solitary by nature, and yet, going out, she did not care for being an object of mild interest. She had also begun to receive eager letters from Willis, announcing that he would be home in December and ‘Will this call for a celebration!!!”
Even in his absence Willis was as annoying to Celia as a partially dangling hem. It seemed expedient to be thoroughly gone from the scene by the time he returned, although in a thoughtful way that would have gratified him she kept his letters, and she consulted Dr. Fowler, who was a coexecutor, about closing up the house until the time of probate. “It doesn’t feel—right, somehow, my living there.”
In his way Dr. Fowler was almost as old-fashioned as Mr. Tomlinson, and this humble sentiment appealed to him. He suggested that she air the house now and then and advise the police that it would be vacant. Celia agreed to both, packed her bags, and removed herself to a rather shabby but respectable New York hotel to consider her future. The drain on her savings worried her, idle as she was for the first time in her adult life, but she had an almost superstitious conviction that whatever she did next would be of immense importance for good or ill.
She had still not come to a decision on the afternoon when there was a crisp clicking sound at the front door— no one had had the temerity to ask Mrs. Cannon for her key—and, moments later, Mrs. Cannon’s black head poked inquiringly around the living room doorway. At the sight of Celia rising without hurry, open magazine in hand, she said “Oh, quite at home!” in a tone an uninitiate might have thought congratulatory. She indicated the suitcase in one gloved hand. “Perhaps you’d like to come up with me to see what I take?”
The nature of the invitation was lost on the usually acute Celia. She said deprecatingly, “Oh, I know that isn’t necessary,” and the earnestness stung Mrs. Cannon far more thoroughly than any amount of mockery. She proceeded upstairs at a pace which miraculously did not leave little round holes in the carpeting.
Celia returned to her magazine. She had a fairly accurate idea of what Mrs. Cannon would want in the way of personal effects: a surprising amount of men’s jewelry in a leather case, photograph frames which Mr. Tomlinson had once told her were platinum, a valuable camera with which, until his sight had begun to deteriorate, he had photographed birds in his garden. Even in her acquisitiveness she would hardly claim the wealth of old-fashioned suits and coats. Besides, there wasn’t room in the suitcase.
Celia was up and strolling about when her visitor descended and turned toward the study, saying edgedly over her emerald wool shoulder “. . . Well. You’ve certainly come up in the world, haven’t you, Celia?”
“Yes, I have, Mrs. Cannon,” replied Celia with dangerous humility.
“I don’t imagine”—Mrs. Cannon was now almost absent-mindedly stowing into the suitcase a presentation gold-and-onyx penholder, an antique letter-opener, a paperweight of some curious, glinting stone— “that you’ll be looking for any more situations now, will you?”
Celia had the kind of smooth heavy skin that almost never betrayed the color of rage, and it did not now. She said, “I don’t know yet what my plans are,” and then, although nature had left her without a sense of humor in the same random way it had presented her with an impressive bone structure, she walked to the typewriter table. Deftly, she stuffed a great mass of annotated typescript into an outsize brown envelope, twirled the cord to close it, thrust it at Mrs. Cannon. “I know Mr. Tomlinson would have wanted you to have this,” she said seriously. “It’s his book.”
The suddenness of the gesture caught Mrs. Cannon
