Hunter Gideon met her as arranged at Route 128.
The train got in half an hour late, which put Sarah at a disadvantage; added to that was a thin icy rain that froze as it fell and must have made the fifteen-mile trip from Preston that much more of a nuisance. She began to apologize while Hunter was still crossing the tracks toward her, tall and spare in oilskins, the sheen of the rain seeming to sharpen his brusque high-cheekboned face.
“No trouble at all,” he said, collecting her bags. “How’ve you been? You look like the very devil.” He paused to peer at the ranked cars. “Now, damn it, where are we?”
After that little spate of talk, which Hunter himself seemed surprised and chagrined at, they retired into a mutual silence. Sarah was caught in the half-hypnotized fatigue with which long train trips always afflicted her, and Hunter had to concentrate on the icy road and freezing windshield.
Ask him right now if he had had an appointment with Charles that day? No, thought Sarah, and justified her instinctive refusal, here in the confinement of the car, by the darkness which would conceal any reaction. But he had seen the half-turn of her head toward him and turned his own inquiringly.
“How—are the pheasants?” Too late, she realized that the question might sound proprietary, but Hunter seemed relieved at the introduction of a topic that would keep them going for a while. They had had one casualty, he said; a black-throated Golden cock, one of his mother’s favorites, had been killed by a mink. There had also been an incident of another kind: the Silver cock had scratched and bitten a neighborhood child who had teased and then loosed him.
Even with the sudden oppression of the mink farm upon her again, Sarah was amazed. “You mean a pheasant will actually attack a child?”
“Not most breeds. Silvers are belligerent by nature— they’ve been known to pursue people who’ve teased or harmed them into houses when they’re really aroused. They’re big birds, and they’ve got a tremendous wing span and spurs like knives. And unfortunately Long John, the one that went after the boy, had lost his bit and could use his beak into the bargain.”
Sarah remembered the bits some of the pheasants had worn, tiny metal rings inserted through the beaks to prevent pecking and defeathering, particularly when a pair were crated for shipping. Charles had explained that to her on one of those limpidly gold afternoons. The memory struck her into a silence that lasted most of the way home, except for an occasional, “Slippery there,” and, “Yes, wasn’t it?” If Sarah had known the man beside her either less or better, she might have asked a number of questions. As it was, convention, and the peculiar relationship in which they stood to each other, assumed that they were a good deal more at ease than they were.
They had reached the house, long and yellow-lit in the dark, its ice-coated rail fence glittering briefly in the headlights as Hunter turned in at the gate. He drove into the barn, braked expertly just before the stacked fire-wood, and said without turning his head, “Have you found out yet why Charles killed himself?”
It was not so much the question itself as the tone of it —the tenseness, the sudden ripping away of politeness—that brought Sarah’s gaze shockedly around. In the carving of light from the dashboard he didn’t look unlike a rather bold pheasant himself; there was the profile spare to sharpness, the poised and total stillness, testing the very air.
Not a man to share secrets with. “Well, unsound mind . . .” said Sarah, deliberately bewildered, and wondered, when he switched off the lights, whether the darkness hid a look of contempt.
Bess Gideon kissed her cheek lightly, Evelyn was effusive, Milo said whimsically, “Meanwhile, back on the pharm . . .” Somehow he managed to make the spelling clear and to invest it, like most of his utterances, with a secret amusement. Sarah shook his warm plump hand and barely avoided wiping her own on her coat.
Hunter made drinks during the little flurry of arrival. Bess said with apology that they were having the guest room re-papered and it was a mess; would Sarah mind using Charles’s old room instead, just for this visit?
Sarah said, “Not at all. Anywhere,” and wondered whether this was a test of sentiment or a challenge or nothing but what it seemed. Bess was smiling at her so measuringly.
The older woman had undergone what Sarah knew was her daily metamorphosis. A man came once a week to clean the pheasant pens and chicken house and make any needed repairs, but apart from that Bess took care of the birds herself. She dressed in slacks that suited her lean figure but usually had a tear or a patch or a streak of paint somewhere, and someone’s discarded plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. With work gloves on, a pail in each hand and her short gray hair blown about or rained upon, she had always looked to Sarah like a character actress working hard on a role.
At six o’clock she seemed to change her skin as well as her clothes. She was invariably in slender unadorned black —with no distraction, the eye went to and stayed upon her haggard and faintly satirical face—and Evelyn, who had looked overdressed all day, now looked underdressed.
By tacit agreement, nothing of what they were so separately bent upon was mentioned. Hunter made drinks again, and the freezing rain changed to sleet and bounced microscopically off the windows—how black windows were in the country. Milo, with a poker-faced pedantry, told a story that Sarah was amazed Bess would tolerate; she reminded herself, not even pretending to smile, that he was a man with whom insult passed for wit and
