They hadn’t had time to think, at the funeral; they had been busy about telegrams and flowers and all the other merciful preoccupations that obscure, a little, what has actually happened. But they had had time by now. It would be only human for them to have said to each other, “It’s certainly very odd. Married six weeks and then— You can’t tell me it wasn’t something to do with her.”
Or had they known, had even one of them known, that in marrying Charles she was picking up a loaded gun?
And where had that idea come from, and why was she walking around the room so rapidly and distractedly? Because they wanted to give her a check and cut her completely away? That was reasonable enough, she had no great or abiding affection for them either.
But to be set adrift with the monstrous hypothesis of Charles driven to kill himself before she could kill him was something else again. She might have to live with that, but not if she could help it. Certainly not without trying to track down the two names nobody seemed to know anything about.
Reeves, Elliot. If it were the kind of involvement she imagined, Bess wouldn’t tell her and neither would Kate Clemence. She wasn’t sure about Hunter; he was an unknown quantity. But Milo’s malice, and Evelyn’s wagging tongue. . . She had trained herself not to think about Harry Brendan, and she didn’t now.
After her dinner, much more calmly, she read the letter again. Then she went to the telephone and called Bess Gideon in Preston.
“Sarah!” It took Bess a moment to collect her wits and any kind of warmth. “How nice to hear from you. We’ve all been wondering about you, and I’ve thought of calling several times, but it seemed so sort of checking-up.”
Sarah tucked that away for future inspection and said it had been thoughtful of Bess to write. She hadn’t really had time to think about the farm, what with one thing and another, but now that she had a chance to get out of New York for a few days, would they have room for her if she came up?
Bess sounded instantly pleased and cordial, which meant nothing at all; she came of a generation which would administer ground glass if necessary but could never be merely rude. “When had you thought of coming? The sooner the better. Let’s see, this is Tuesday . . .”
They settled on Thursday. Sarah said she could take the Clipper and then a cab from Route 128, but Bess said nonsense, Hunter would meet her. Milo’s crow cawed suddenly in the background, and brought the long-distance strangeness surprisingly close.
The telephone at the farm was in the dining room. The walls were painted a soft clear yellow above the white dado, the huge fireplace was gray stone, black-and-white toile hung at the windows. The furniture was a deliberate minimum: mahogany table and chairs, radio-phonograph in a cabinet, telephone table and chair in one corner. There were never flowers there, even in the summer, only lemon leaves or ashy sprays of eucalyptus in a silver pitcher. The effect was of standing in a cube of cool uncluttered light.
Bess, at the telephone, would be signalling at the others with her thin expressive face: at Milo in a doorway with his eyebrows owlishly up, or Evelyn, who would have stopped doing the dinner dishes to see what this latest development was. Hunter Gideon . . . Sarah’s mind tried to grasp at him, and couldn’t. As though a tube had blown somewhere, the whole picture vanished and there was only Bess’s voice saying something about the alligator case.
“Yes, I’ll bring that. And the watch,” said Sarah precisely. “Oh, and perhaps we’ll have a chance to talk about something else while I’m there.”
“Oh?” The wire seemed to hum with increased tautness, but Sarah probably imagined that. “Something about. . . ?”
The crow unloosed a barrage of croaks and clucks, providing a welcome cover. “Thursday, then,” said Sarah, and was about to add goodbyes when Bess said brightly, “You just missed Harry Brendan and Kate. They dropped in for a few minutes on their way somewhere. They’ll be so pleased when they hear . . .”
Will they indeed, thought Sarah, staring blankly at the rug—but it was not, on second thought, the vacant remark it seemed. Bess wasn’t given to vacant conversation. This was notice that the ranks were being closed.
She hadn’t realized how difficult it would be to invite herself on these people. Her fingers still felt stiff from their grip on the receiver, the muscles around her mouth must have been producing a smile to go with her voice all that time.
Thursday . . .
Sarah went through Charles’s appointment book again, without finding anything more to wonder about. The H or K of the unkept lunch date—or had it been kept, later?— remained an open question. She half expected Miss Ehrhardt to call and say that she had dug Reeves and Elliot out of the files and they were free-lance photographers, or locksmiths, or friendly newspaper contacts, but Miss Ehrhardt did not.
She wondered whether Lieutenant Welk was still puzzling over her walk on the night of Charles’s death, but as he neither came nor called there was no way of knowing.
While she packed, she looked for and failed to find the framed snapshot of Charles, a fact which made her coolly and impersonally angry. Surely there was a point where helpfulness stopped and license set in.
She talked to the superintendent and assured him that she would arrange some disposition of her husband’s suitcases when she returned. She did her nails and had her hair cut shiningly short, but it did not occur to her
