Anyone watching them might have been reminded of a pair of children, about to take possession of a tree house— of hand-crafted mahogany, furnished by Sloan. Celia gave Jules a glowing look. “Let’s not tell anybody,” she said.
But of course it was not quite as simple at that. Adelaide Wain and a few of Jules’s close friends had to be told, and party-givers like the Friths, who had counted upon being included in a pleasant round of other prewedding parties, advised vaguely that the principals had not yet set a firm date.
For Christmas, Celia gave Jules gold cufflinks, and received a slender, supple rivulet of diamonds and emeralds for her wrist. Adelaide Wain’s present proved to be the thinnest of white cashmere shawls, for which Celia could imagine no use whatever; she tendered Jules’s sister-in-law another figurine to add to the Dresden collection which would shortly have to be moved to new quarters, and was rewarded with a smile of enormous frost. “How thoughtful of you, dear. I’ve always been afraid that something would happen to the milkmaid—even the best of hotel maids can be careless—and it’s so nice to have two.”
On the day after New Year’s they were in Santa Fe. During the mandatory three-day wait after the license, Jules stayed at The Priory, a dauntingly exclusive lodge north of the city, as did Adelaide Wain, who had seemed genuinely horrified that the wedding could be contemplated without a family representative. Celia was chastely installed at an elegant old hotel only a block or two from Santa Fe’s plaza. She was vaguely frightened of the blanketed Indians with their wares, and although she said, “Yes, aren’t they?” when it was pointed out to her with great frequency that the Sangre de Cristo mountains were magnificent, she found them a monumental bore.
But the time passed pleasantly enough. Most of the people looked either sleek and expensive or wildly disheveled and artistic, and the Celia whose years-ago ambition it had been to have heads turn as she passed, and voices murmur, “That’s Celia Brett,” was delighted that she attracted no more than the automatic glances accorded tall blonde young women everywhere.
She was relatively unworried about what might happen after she became Mrs. Jules Wain. It was true that Jules had divorced one wife, but that was for a socially acceptable reason. His pride would never allow him to appear to have been tricked, particularly if Celia returned from Europe pregnant, as she was coldly determined to do. The six months abroad would provide that much indemnity, and she did not look beyond.
In the meantime, she was blessedly anonymous and safe from nagging little worries like the insurance-company convention she had seen announced in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel just before they left, and the abruptly remembered existence of Mary Ellen Vestry’s older brother. (Surely a big rangy woman like Mrs. Vestry had recovered from her collapse?)
Here in Santa Fe, no one knew of the old Celia . . .
Or so she had thought until tonight.
Eighteen
A FAINT smell of smoke, the essence of all danger signals, still hung in the hotel room from the burning of the note. It was not quite six thirty, but how much time was she to be allowed? Enough, obviously, to encompass her own destruction. If her facial muscles had not been so rigid with purpose, Celia could almost have smiled at that.
There was no point now in trying to sift faces on the plane or at the airport; she need not have been followed at all. Although Jules had agreed indulgently to keep the place and time of their wedding as secret as was practicable, the simplest of ruses could have obtained it from his secretary; it wasn’t a matter of industrial security. While Celia had strolled unworriedly about the shops that bordered the plaza, or waited for Jules in the hotel lobby, she had very probably been under observation by the enemy, already established in Santa Fe and delaying the attack until the last minute so as to give it maximum effectiveness.
Established where? At The Priory, almost certainly. It was implicit in the note that the writer would know whether or not the wedding had been canceled, and where else but at the proposed scene could the knowledge be had so quickly? Even a brief acquaintance with the inner life of hotels had taught Celia that nothing sped as rapidly among the staff, or caused such giggling speculation, as the eleventh-hour calling off of a wedding. The signs would be there for an eye trained for them—and if they were not, there would be the threatened personal approach to Jules, although that meant giving up the extra twist of the knife.
Celia had of course considered and discarded the two obvious possibilities. She could telephone Jules at once— it was a blessing that he was a traditionalist and had taken it for granted that he would not be seeing her the evening before the wedding—and say that she had just had an anonymous and frightening telephone call, and could they be married right away, tonight, by a justice of the peace?
But Jules Wain was not an impetuous, infatuated boy. He would be concerned and outraged, and want the police informed, and interrogate the switchboard operators and learn that no call had been put through to Room 218 within the last several hours .Long before any of this transpired, Adelaide Wain would have remarked triumphantly that there was something very peculiar here, to say the least, and how much did Jules actually know about his fiancee?
Or Celia could feign illness—even, if necessary, do herself a minor injury and insist that Jules and Adelaide return to San Francisco without her. But that would only postpone disaster; “this wedding” did not mean simply “this ceremony.” Celia was sure to her
