“I was in a car crash that killed three people. One of them was the man I was going to marry. He was just back from Vietnam and we were driving to the country club because some people were giving a party for us. To celebrate.” Mary Ellen spoke in a kind of halting rush, as though this had to be said rapidly or not at all. “The other car came straight at us, on the wrong side of a divided highway.”
Perhaps because of the words, and a lull in traffic, the slamming of a car door in the street below had a surprisingly personal and imminent sound. David Macintosh, down from Providence for the weekend? wondered Celia with an edge of her tight attention—although she had already guessed what was coming next.
It was still startling to hear it said in the painfully chosen phrases. Mary Ellen, sole and nearly miraculous survivor of the crash, had had a nervous breakdown after her release from the hospital, contributed to by the withdrawal of the morphine on which she had become dependent. Ex-drug addict, thought Celia, applying the term coolly and experimentally to the image of the short silky hair, the big gray eyes, the imported sandals.
A faint shuddering vibration announced that the elevator had reached the fourth floor, and Mary Ellen caught her breath like someone reprieved. “If that’s David, I’m not fit to be seen. I think he has theater tickets, so would you go with him, Celia? I honestly wish you would. Sleep’s the only thing that’s going to do me much good.”
In the end, she prevailed. Celia prepared her tea and toast, and went to get dressed with an exultation unclouded by the strange little flicker of David’s eyes when he learned of the changed plans. By the law of averages it had had to happen sooner or later—even protected Mary Ellen wasn’t proof against occasional indisposition—but tonight it seemed like a gift laid astonishingly in her lap.
She had never been to the theater, and she was going tonight. In her leopard coat, with Mary Ellen’s man. There was no one to say, “Don’t touch”—and she was sure that, more than once, she had felt his speculative gaze on her although it slipped immediately away.
It did not slip away this evening. Drinks ordered, David Macintosh looked at her across the restaurant table, a steady, measuring, hazel look, and said pleasantly, “At the risk of sounding rude, hadn’t we both better know where we stand? You put up a very good front—in fact, Mary Ellen still hasn’t a suspicion—but I’ve known, almost from the beginning.”
Nine
THE blood stood incredulously still in Celia’s body. It wasn’t possible that the yellow snap of Mrs. Cannon’s eyes could see this far, could hunt her out and destroy her without warning, and yet—
Total shock and disbelief rendered her incapable of answering at all. She simply stared at the man opposite, and her very speechlessness was her salvation. “I might have known Mrs. Vestry wouldn’t give in so easily,” he went on stubbornly but far less certainly. “The whole point of— You are in that apartment, aren’t you, to keep an eye on Mary Ellen?”
Celia thought later that it would have been politic to register outrage that she could have been suspected of any deception at all. At the moment, her feeling of relief was so enormous, like discovering a precipice edge to be only a single grassy step down, that she simply said, “I had never heard of Mary Ellen until I answered her ad, and I’ve never met her mother or anyone else in the family but her sister.”
The drinks came. Celia continued to meet the hazel gaze, her heart still beating heavily with reaction, and watched it change from distrust to an almost ludicrous embarrassment. The thin face—“nice” seemed as accurate a description as any—relaxed. David said, “I beg your pardon. The circumstances looked so very—”
He broke off, obviously aware that this could be a troublesome tack, and changed direction. “Mrs. Vestry is one of those wildly overprotective mothers. Mary Ellen’s her youngest—there’s a married son who took his practice out to the West Coast—and she’s always been cast as the baby. Maybe that’s natural enough up to a point but it can be pretty oppressive too, and after Mary Ellen was badly injured in a car crash Mrs. Vestry got absolutely obsessive. Everybody agreed that Mary Ellen had to get out of her mother’s shadow, and Mrs. Vestry finally gave in about the New York apartment on condition that she share it. And you turned up on the dot, so obviously steady and upright and even with some experience in . . .”
Someone else’s face might have flamed at this description. Celia regarded her companion tranquilly. “In nursing. Mary Ellen told me about her—illness,” she said as easily as though the knowledge were not quite two hours old and then imparted under stress. “I still don’t know what made you think anyone at all was spying.”
And she didn’t know, although the uneasy speculation had crossed her mind that, because of his special relationship with Mary Ellen, this man had somehow plucked her own concentration out of the air and placed an entirely wrong interpretation on it.
“Well, Mary Ellen and I have been out there to dinner twice in the last three weeks, and Mrs. Vestry seems extremely well-informed.”
“Then it must be someone who goes to the bookstore and pumps Mary Ellen,” said Celia firmly and, as it turned out, accurately. “She’s very”— she had to hunt for a word that would not make him bristle—“unsuspecting.”
“She is, isn’t she?” agreed David eagerly, and noticed his drink and lifted it to her, smiling; not a smile connected with Mary Ellen this time, but just for Celia. “No grudge?”
Celia would have liked to respond with something light and witty, but, although
