“Watch these rocks, they’re slippery. Oh, God,” said David in an odd abrupt voice, and put out a steadying arm, turned her around and kissed her.
Celia closed her eyes, not from rapture but in order to taste her victory more fully. How many weeks since she had first seen him in the apartment living room, bearing that elusive trace of Hugh Stevenson, all the more attractive because he was a symbol of what she had once been forbidden to touch? How many times had she thought, I know he notices me, and pretends he doesn’t, and finds me attractive?
His arms dropped. He said in a shaken voice, “We’d better go back,” and Celia replied composedly, “Yes, we’d better. In fact”—she had turned, and her faint breathlessness was due neither to his kiss nor the wind—“there’s Mary Ellen.”
Mary Ellen, a small figure in the distance, was not wearing her glasses, and it was impossible to tell from her manner whether she had seen two blurred shapes merge into one. Or perhaps that was the way people like the Vestrys did things, thought Celia, contemptuous but still a little uneasy; she was somewhat afraid of Mrs. Vestry, in spite of the easy deception with the Christmas candle, and did not want any confrontation here.
There wasn’t one. If Mary Ellen was gayer and more talkative than usual at the country club that evening, it was attributable to the holiday season. No one could have said with certainty that she was like someone desperately fanning a spark which threatened to die, or even that she noticed the mutual avoidance of glances that linked Celia and David like a bridge. Susan’s clear-eyed assessment was a threat, but Susan seemed absorbed in her Navy lieutenant. At the core of her own tranquillity, Celia’s mind nibbled interestedly away at a random question posed by Paul Vestry in the pursuit of one of his hobbies: “You wouldn’t be one of the Baltimore Bretts, by any chance? The English branch of the family?”
That was a concept which might be worth looking into, later. At close to 2 A.M., Celia was about to get into bed, sure that all danger had passed, when a light tap at her door turned out to be Susan, ostensibly in search of a match although she must have been aware that Celia didn’t smoke.
“Oh, well, have to go downstairs, I guess,” Susan said lightly. “Tonight was fun, wasn’t it? Mary Ellen was on top of the world—but then she would be, the year’s nearly up, and it’s so much nicer to be able to announce an engagement than keep it under wraps, don’t you think? Or didn’t you know—about David’s first wife?”
Celia could only gaze, and shake her head.
“She died of meningitis last January—in fact, David and Mary Ellen first met at the hospital, and I suppose the fact that they were both so suddenly—bereaved . . .” Susan turned the unfit cigarette in her fingers. “The Macintoshes are real Scottish sticklers, and David didn’t want to upset them by having an engagement made public before what they consider the proper period of mourning is up, even though the marriage wasn’t all that good. I suppose there’s something to be said for that point of view, even when two people are so much in love with each other. Although I do think,” said Susan, her gray gaze lifting and holding Celia’s directly, “that it’s almost tempting Fate when a girl like Mary Ellen depends so much on a man that her whole existence hangs on it.” The cigarette broke with a soft snap. “Which it does, but of course living with Mary Ellen you’d know that.”
“I’m sure everything will work out,” said Celia politely.
And, for her and for the moment, it did. She and Mary Ellen left the next day to return to New York, and Mrs. Vestry said of the Christmas candle as fondly as her roughened voice would permit, “You must come and claim it, Celia, as soon as you can give it, as you said, a happy home.”
But long before any such eventuality could come to pass, a Susan stone-faced with grief had seized the candlestick, smashed the silvery heads of the trumpet-blowing angels against a comer of the house, and flung the ruined stump into the trash.
Eleven
ONE of them was out here now in Santa Fe, over that spread of years and miles, to destroy her. Might even be here in the hotel, which she would leave tomorrow for the wedding toward which her whole life had been aimed.
No one was going to stop that.
Still standing, as rigid as she had been while she watched the ashes flush away forever, Celia sent her mind back on a cold and ranging hunt. It found only three faces that mattered: Mrs. Cannon’s, Susan Vestry’s, Willis Lambert’s.
One of them had seen her, obviously, and followed her, to know that she was registered in this hotel. But wouldn’t she have recognized—? No. Quite apart from the natural alterations of time, wigs were commonplace among women, and in a skiing community both sexes, whether they ever went near the slopes or not, were apt to wear outsize dark glasses which made an effective disguise in themselves.
The terrifying thing was the anonymity with which her destruction could be accomplished. All it would take was a telephone call: “Did you know that your bride-to-be is the daughter of immigrants, with a family still living in a tenement? At least shell manage her servants well, she was one herself for years. . .
Celia had no illusions as to the result of such a call. She clenched her hands, drawing a leap of light from the big emerald-cut diamond, and the savage contact of nails against palms half-stirred a memory of having done exactly that on some occasion years ago. She straightened her fingers mechanically, started to reach for the phone, thought better of it.
But there was a
