Sarah thanked her, and went transparently on. “There seem to be so many people to write, and a lot of details . . . have you an address for Mr. Reeves, or Mr. Elliot?”
“. . . No,” said Miss Ehrhardt’s hesitating voice, with a frown in it. “I’ve been asked about that, but I really don’t know. We published a Mr. Vernon Chase Elliot years ago, but he’s with another house now and living in Santa Monica. In any case he was before Mr. Trafton’s time, and there hasn’t been any correspondence. I have no record at all of a Mr. Reeves.”
But it was there in her voice, as it had been in Sarah’s mind: the tiny bothered pause before certainty. Sarah said, “Well, thanks very much,” and her disappointment must have been clear because Miss Ehrhardt, thawing rapidly, said, “I’m sorry I can’t help, Mrs. Trafton. If there’s anything else I can do . . .”
Sarah had not realized until she hung up how much she had been building on the identification of the two names in the appointment book. With a mind trained to the embroidering of fact, she had even evolved a situation that would have gnawed at Charles years after it happened: a fatal fall, the result of a joke or a dare, by a member of a party that had included Charles and Reeves and Elliot. Or any set of circumstances ending in a tragedy which he might have averted if he had not turned his back on it.
H, she thought, going back to the lunch date; H, or K. In the face of all her sensible arguments it was still Hunter or Harry or Kate Clemence. On closer inspection, she could see why Kate might have kept quiet about that. If she had been in New York again, and phoned Charles at his office instead of the apartment, it might have seemed a little awkward.
Hunter needn’t have had any such scruples, nor Harry Brendan. But could Harry have spent that peculiarly indelible time with Sarah without mentioning the fact that he had seen Charles, or at any rate arranged to meet him, earlier that day? Yes, thought Sarah surprisedly, he could. He was a man who kept his own counsel; there was nothing sunny or open about him at all. It was, in fact, hard to conceive the authority to which Harry Brendan would feel obliged to explain anything.
Again, she had forgotten to thaw the lamb chops. Sarah looked hopelessly at them at five o’clock and, mindful of last night’s frightful meal, went out to the delicatessen on Lexington with a small shopping list. On her way in she opened her mailbox. There was an anxious note from her sister in California, asking her to visit them, three advertisements which she dropped unopened into the wastebasket, and the letter from Bess Gideon which, if she had received it a day earlier or a day later, might have had quite a different effect.
vi
THE LETTER was typed, a detail which made Sarah instantly and unfairly suspicious. She typed most of her own letters—she had grown so used to thinking on a typewriter that the only things a pen would write readily for her were a check or a grocery list—but every other communication she had had from Bess Gideon had been in a round backhand.
As crisply and practically as though Sarah had never written to say that she did not want to sell the farm, Bess offered thirty thousand. True, Charles’s father had paid only twenty-three when he bought it, but in view of all the improvements and the rising real-estate values on the South Shore, she thought thirty was fair. If Sarah would care to speak to her lawyer so that the necessary arrangements could be put in train . . .
That took care of the first paragraph. In the second, Charles’s gold pocket watch had belonged to four generations of Traftons or Gideons. Of course, if Sarah had a particular attachment, they would all understand.
New paragraph. Perhaps Sarah remembered that Bess had given Charles her small overnight case some time ago, to have the lock repaired at the shop where Charles had bought it. Bess didn’t know when she might be in New York, but if Sarah would leave the case with the superintendent she could have someone pick it up without troubling Sarah.
The letter ended with the somehow preposterous suggestion that whenever Sarah happened to be up that way—on one of my periodic trips to Boston to buy a hat, perhaps? wondered Sarah—they would all be so glad to see her.
It was like a letter to a caretaker, polite but brisk, full of commissions and reminders. Or at least Sarah’s tight nerves saw it that way.
Her first reaction was to stalk into the bedroom and get the gold watch from the bureau drawer where Charles had kept it, as though Bess Gideon were actually waiting there with her palm outstretched. And here was the overnight case, alligator and very handsome. What tremendous nuisances people could suggest in that offhand way. If Sarah left it with the superintendent and something happened to it—a scratch from one of their Siamese cats, for instance— or if the would-be burglar succeeded on his second try, Bess would hold her responsible until doomsday.
Her next impulse was to go straight to the telephone— but not now, while she was still in this militant frame of mind. Wait, think it over, remember that Bess, all of them for that matter were in a rather awkward position, living in a house that now belonged to a semi-stranger; naturally they would want to have something
