Celia had not thrust old Mr. Tomlinson over the balcony all those years ago, nor had she force-fed Mary Ellen Vestry an overdose of sleeping pills. But the pattern that allowed destruction was there, as distinct in her nature as her blood type. It enabled her to face with calm the fact that in the course of the next few fours she would have to flush out, and permanently dispose of, her patient enemy.
First things first. Celia’s hand had drawn back from the telephone a few minutes earlier; now she picked up the receiver and gave the operator The Priory number. Her emerald-cut diamond, badge of everything she had worked and schemed and waited for, glistened coldly up at her.
“Hi, darling,” she said in a relaxed and sleepy voice when Jules answered. “I just called to say that the altitude is catching up with me or something, and if I don’t want to be a haggard bride I think I’d better soak a while and then have a sandwich sent up and crawl into bed. I might even take a seconal.”
“Good idea,” said Jules over five miles of wintry New Mexico darkness. “It is only that? You don’t feel ill?”
“Not a bit—just that I could use a little extra sleep,” said Celia through a daintily audible yawn. “We did get in quite a lot of sightseeing today, you know.”
And they had, driving in the rented car to a pueblo south of Santa Fe, walking about the trading post there— on top of that, traipsing through the museum in the Palace of the Governors, where Celia had had to exclaim over a number of dreadful old bowls.
“I know what you mean, I’m feeling it a bit myself and I think I’ll have a tray here too,” said Jules, and they exchanged fond but brisk good nights. And that was that: Celia was assured of no calls from The Priory to an unanswering telephone here. She crossed the room to her suitcase, tipped up the lid, and rummaged in a side pocket for the weapon, if it could be called that, which she had packed at the last minute only because Jules had bought it for her and he might inquire.
Six weeks earlier, in a house on Theodore Street only three removed from Celia’s, the housekeeper in charge while the owners were vacationing in the Bahamas had been attacked by a young hoodlum whose apparent motive was violence: he had beaten her senseless, smashed some furniture, and left without touching any of the inviting silver in evidence. When apprehended, he was under the influence of drugs.
Jules was not only alarmed on Celia’s behalf but outraged at this departure from the rules; like most sensible and well-insured men, his credo was to turn over any valuables without demur rather than risk being knifed or shot. But there were obviously cases where this did not apply, particularly among women living alone, and he had insisted on providing Celia with a plastic tear-gas gun which, shot at close range, would immobilize an intruder for the time necessary to an escape.
Open air would lessen the effect of the gas but there would still be seconds, at least, when the advantage was Celia’s.
It was thanks to her unusual fringe attention, developed over the years, that she had remembered without a small item in the local newspaper, read on the day after her arrival in Santa Fe. The body of an elderly man had been fished out of the shallow, iced-over alameda which emerged from its underground course in this part of the city. The autopsy report indicated that he had been stunned by either a fall or a blow—there was alcohol involved and the evidence wasn’t conclusive—and had died of exposure in the bitter temperature.
Death by exposure was a natural process, Celia now reasoned to herself, and overtook the young and healthy as well as the old; lost hikers were prone to it, for example, and mountain climbers. It wasn’t really murder, it was the extension of an accident. And how would the police make a connection between an accident victim, carefully anonymous behind an unsigned note deposited at a hotel desk, and Mrs Jules Wain, abroad on her honeymoon?
For that matter, identification alone would take time in the case of a visitor to the city if there were no handbag, or no wallet.
Celia dropped the gas gun into her own handbag, consulted the menu on the desk, called room service and ordered a meal which she had no intention of eating beyond a few hunger-allaying bites. From her suitcase she took the navy ski-suit she had bought because, like all sports clothes, it became her—and, tonight, would melt easily into darkness. She carried the suit and a sweater into the bedroom, along with a pair of soft warm boots and a scarf which was red on one side and emerald on the other, and returned to the bedroom for the most concentrated thought of her life. The room-service waiter to whom she presently called “Come in” found her sitting relaxedly in the room’s one armchair, apparently engrossed in a thick paperback edition of War and Peace bought in Jules’s company in the lobby. (“I haven’t read this in ages.”)
She said idly as she tipped the waiter, “I imagine it’s getting quite cold out?” and gave an appreciative little shiver, the reaction of a woman settled comfortably in for the night, when he answered politely that the temperature was expected to drop to twelve.
Her face was already made
