She kept a curious eye on Mary Ellen for the next week or two, but the bookshop was taking inventory and it was sometimes nine thirty before her roommate got home, which would account for her pallor and the newly sharp definition of her face. Nor did Celia attach much importance to a small incident which took place the first week in March, when, a modeling appointment having been canceled, she returned to the quiet apartment in midmorning through a dark streaming rain and was just in time to answer the telephone.
“Miss Vestry, please,” said a brusque male voice.
“You can reach her at the Mulberry Bookshop. The num—”
“This is the Mulberry Bookshop,” retorted the telephone, and clicked off.
Mary Ellen would not have been the first person to plead indisposition if it seemed the only way to get a day off, but Celia thought she had better mention the call that evening.
“I know. I went in to work after I got out of the doctors. See, I took your advice after all,” said Mary Ellen with a faint smile. “Do you want to bother with that chicken stuff for dinner or should we just settle for cube steak?”
That was evidently all she wanted to say on the subject, and Celia did not pursue the matter. There was no mystery as to why she had kept the doctor’s appointment from the bookshop; with her own private intelligence service there, Mrs. Vestry would have descended immediately at this threat to her darling’s health. As it was, she telephoned that same night. Celia listened with scorn to Mary Ellen’s side of the exchange.
“Oh, not really sick, Mother, for heaven’s sake—I do wish Miss Egan wouldn’t harass everybody like this. Just a sore throat I thought I’d nurse for a couple of hours, and it’s fine now . . . Yes, it’s raining here too but of course I have an umbrella. I do take vitamins. Yes, I will . . . I will . . . I will.”
Her back was to Celia as she hung up, but a mirror on the opposite wall caught the brief tight gesture of hands pressed against her small reflected face for an instant. Then she turned and said unnecessarily, “There’s an old friend of my mother’s, Maude Egan, who fives around the corner from the shop and has nothing to do but read. She comes in at least once a day—taking me under her wing, I suppose she calls it—and then files her reports. If for any reason I’m not there, like this morning, or I am there and have no fresh news of—”
Color rushed drivenly into her face and she stopped short with an effect of biting her tongue. Then, as though she could dispel the clear unspoken echo of David’s name, she said abruptly, ‘Tm going to take a long hot bath. Let’s just let the dishes go to hell tonight, shall we?” and withdrew.
Almost anyone else in Celia’s position, faced with such unusual behavior, would have inquired whether the doctor had said anything that morning to upset Mary Ellen. Celia merely gazed speculatively after her.
Queried on the subject, she would have given the opinion that no semiofficial engagement could remain in that suspended state for long; that it would either reach the expected conclusion or fall apart completely. Now she realized with faint surprise that Mary Ellen, without tears or recriminations or any other display, had succeeded in maintaining the status quo far beyond the predictable point of dissolution.
Moreover, she would ultimately win. Celia had learned a good deal about David Macintosh’s character and she knew, even if he didn’t at the moment, that although he wanted her now it was Mary Ellen whom he wanted in the long run. At their last meeting he had implored Celia to spend a weekend with him at an inn in Providence, but afterwards he would be quite capable of guilt, self-abasement, and the declaration that they—because Celia would be included in this sweeping judgment—were not fit to kiss the ground which Mary Ellen Vestry walked upon.
Things must certainly not be allowed to reach that stage. And here Celia’s mind informed her of what must have been nearing the surface for some time: if it had been a triumph to take David away from Mary Ellen, how much more triumphant to hand him back—to have him in her own gift, so to speak?
But Celia, sitting on the couch while bath water ran distantly and traffic swished by in the wet street below, had made one of the few serious miscalculations of her new life. Three days later, there was nobody to hand David back to. There was only the diminishing wail of a siren and, in the lobby near the door, a small, narrow, black kid slipper.
Thirteen
MARY ELLEN VESTRY’S death was reduced to a brief inside-page item in the newspapers, choicer space being reserved for the suicides who teetered on ledges or set themselves on fire or slaughtered their whole families prior to the act. There was nothing bizarre or even very unusual about a self-administered overdose of sleeping pills and a suicide note; the contents of the note were not revealed but the account stated, or understated, that the victim had been “despondent.”
The body had been discovered at 4 P.M. by a family friend (the ubiquitous Maude Egan). Celia’s name as roommate did not appear at all.
After her first shock, and a tiny trickle of personal fear, Celia was indignant. Suicide seemed to her scandalous, in somewhat the same category as wandering out from showers with no clothes on; and on top of that she had been accused of murder by a Susan
