The suicide note had been taken away as evidence, but in the confusion of Maude Egan’s hysterics and the arrival of the finally located Susan, someone had let drop the gist of it: that Mary Ellen was sorry, but “she could not go through it again.” Susan, queried by the police as to the meaning of this, had a choice of two betrayals: she could say that fifteen months ago her sister had lost a fiance in a fatal accident and had just now been in the process of losing to another woman the man she hoped to marry, or she could explain the period of morphine addiction and Mary Ellen’s terror of a recurrence.
Out of feminine solidarity she chose the latter, and the almost empty bottle of pills which had anchored the note, and which from its date Mary Ellen had clearly obtained as a result of her visit to a doctor three days earlier, was also borne away as evidence. Susan said to the younger of the departing policemen, “Will they have to—You know what she took and why. Will they still . . . ?”
The policeman understood. “Well, yes. Just routine,” he said kindly, as though this made the fact of an autopsy less painful. “They’ll let you know when you can . . . they’ll let you know.”
And that was when the apartment door closed. Susan picked up Mary Ellen’s huge calf handbag and put it down quickly, looking distraught. Her bewildered glance about her said that when a member of the family had been taken away in an ambulance it was usual to pack at least a few things to bring to the hospital—but Mary Ellen would never need anything again.
Susan had washed her face at some point, in the calmly irrational way in which such things are done in the middle of catastrophe, and her eyes looked dry and glittery and stretched apart. She said slowly to Celia, “You dreadful creature. You killed her, but I suppose you know that.”
Celia chose to misinterpret the charge. “When I left here this morning and she wasn’t up yet, I knocked at her door and she called that she was going in to work a little late. How could I have known that she was going to—”
Susan brushed this aside. “You knew about that ghastly accident, when Tom Anders was killed.” It was the first time anyone had ever told Celia his name. “You knew what that did to Mary Ellen, physically and every other way. You knew that she loved David desperately, because he was the one who put her back together again more than anybody else, and you waded right in and took that to pieces.”
“David is a perfectly free—”
“David is a fool,” said Susan bitterly, “but so is almost any man when a woman flings herself at him as openly as you did. Oh, I watched you at Christmas. He simply didn’t know what had struck him, and Mary Ellen was so damn trusting—” Her voice began to shake and thicken, and her eyes to fill; she dashed at them furiously with the back of her wrist. “Dear God, to think that I once walked down those stairs with you and said I thought you’d be good for her . . .”
She turned her suddenly blinded gaze away, pretending to hunt for her handbag. Celia said with an assumption of dignity, “I realize that you’re very upset and you’re saying things—”
“Upset?” repeated Susan wildly, wheeling on her. “You mean just because my sister is dead and my mother has collapsed? What would make you think a thing like that?”
For a terrible instant she seemed about to lose all control, and then she sent an unrecognizing glance around the room and returned to her almost equally frightening, recitative calm. “There’ll be someone here tomorrow to— take things away, and I hope to God you’re out. The service will be private, and don’t come near it or any of us in any way. I wouldn’t be responsible.”
Whatever Celia’s rage at this echo of dismissal, it did not seem the moment to remind Susan that she paid half the rent here. She packed a bag and. went to the Hotel Alexandra, where she explained casually to Mrs. Pond that her apartment was being repainted. That was always a bore, observed Mrs. Pond, but how nice it was to see her again.
And, although even a few months had tended to diminish the hotel and its social director in her eyes, Celia was glad to be back. For the moment the Alexandra was a talisman place, her previous connection with it unknown to Willis Lambert, his face suffused with hatred on the station concourse, or to vindictive Mrs. Cannon, or to Susan Vestry with her look of naked ferocity.
It was fortunate—more than fortunate under the circumstances—that Celia had made that trip to Bridgeport.
At the time, her vision had contained a resentful Susan, angry on her sister’s behalf, taking the trouble to track down that elementary address and returning, triumphant, to report that Brett was not the name Celia had been born with; that her mother and the rest of them were very much alive in a wretched little basement apartment, although she had not troubled to visit them for years; that she had left them originally to go into service as a maid. Not that there was anything wrong with being a maid, Susan would undoubtedly have pointed out in her high-minded Vestry fashion; what mattered was that Celia had turned her back on her family and lied about herself from start to finish.
All that would have been disastrous enough. But, in the new light of the terrible, inexcusable thing Mary Ellen had done to
