What had she thought she could find out here? Evelyn had sat down beside her and was confiding the domestic problems of a friend who had recently moved to Jefferson City—small wonder, thought Sarah unkindly—but they corresponded and the friend had been so upset to hear about Charles.
Charles. Surprisingly unreal himself now, but leaving behind a very real burden. How could he have . . . ? Anger and hurt, or perhaps the cocktails after the train trip and the drive here, caught up on Sarah without warning. She said into the smooth flow of Evelyn’s voice, “Yes, that must be awfully hard for them. Is it—” she could not help putting her palms against her cheeks “—very hot in here? I feel. . .”
Evelyn’s gaze expanded alertly; she was, thought Sarah a little wildly, the only person she had ever seen who could flex her eyeballs. And an idea was dawning on Evelyn, visibly. “Are you— You don’t think you could be—?”
Sarah stared at her in perplexity until the whisper and the woman-to-woman air sank in. “Pregnant?” she said. “Oh dear, no. That would be awkward, wouldn’t it?”
It fell resoundingly into an attentive silence. Hunter turned his head hastily away, apparently to ward off a sneeze. Milo slid his glasses to the end of his nose and peered roundly at Sarah over them. Bess said with aplomb, “It is hot in here—look at the thermostat, will you, Hunter? And Evelyn, I think the roast must be done.”
The roast was not only done but thoroughly grayed. Evelyn, who took care of the meals as Bess took care of the pheasants, was an elaborately bad cook of the fruit-salad school. Nothing was allowed to stand by itself. Peas had to have milk added to them, potatoes were tortured out of and back into their shells with a garnishing of something peculiar. Any oven-cooked meat was either plastered with or surrounded by some foreign element, usually fruit.
Sarah moved her fork delicately and questingly, and came upon what might have been an apricot. She sat beside Milo, who handed her peas with a murmured, “Let’s see, you’re eating for one, aren’t you?” She bore that in silence, because she had brought it on herself in that unstrung moment, but when Bess moved shakers about and said, “These are all pepper, I think,” Sarah pushed her chair back and said rapidly, “Let me.”
She had been at the house often enough to know where the table things were kept, and even an instant alone was surcease. In the kitchen she took down a shaker, sprinkled salt experimentally into her palm, turned to go back and saw the man at the window.
He must have been standing quite close to the glass, in fact pressing against the pane, because otherwise his normal expression would have been distorted beyond belief. Sarah glanced fleetingly at dark hair dipping over a low forehead, splayed nose, mouth stretched in the kind of grin children usually accomplished by the use of two fingers, and was out of the kitchen before the tap could sound at the door.
Bess frowned, Hunter said, “I’ll go,” and did. The door in the kitchen opened and a low interchange began. Evelyn turned her head listeningly and then devoted herself to her dinner; the man in the kitchen was obviously someone of no interest. Bess said, “Tell me, Sarah, have you seen that new Italian movie there’s such a furor about?” and presently Hunter came back and resumed his dinner without a word.
Someone wanting to buy a pheasant, explained Sarah to herself, or wanting to trade, as pheasant fanciers always seemed to be doing. Or perhaps someone paying for quail eggs; she thought she had heard the clink of coins. He had only frightened her because she was nervous anyway and, a city dweller, not used to faces framed against the dark.
They had coffee in the living room, and when Evelyn rose to take out the cups Sarah went with her. She said lightly to Bess’s protest that she had been sitting too long on the train, but it wasn’t that, nor even the faint compassion for anyone whose nightly ritual, taken for granted, was the doing of all the dishes and pots and pans.
Evelyn washed and Sarah dried, at the other woman’s insistence. Over a rush of water, Sarah said casually, “Who was the man who came during dinner?”
Evelyn’s allergic rubber-gloved hands deposited a vegetable dish in the rack. “He helps Bess with the pheasants, and I suppose he forgot his pay. Or else Bess didn’t have the cash when he left last time. She’d just paid for a pair of blue-eared Manchurians.”
Something about the cool air of censure not quite withheld surprised Sarah. She dried the vegetable dish and put it away, thinking back to the sunburned college boy she had seen the last time she was here. “He’s new, isn’t he?”
“Well, new here,” said Evelyn. “Isn’t it awful the way some cups get dark at the bottom? When you think of the prices they charge. Actually, he’s been around here a long time, in fact—” she turned from the sink, stripping off her gloves “—he used to work at the mink farm down the road. Peck, his name is.”
Something in Sarah’s mind jumped unpleasantly. “Peck . . . ?”
“I see you know about him,” said Evelyn. She sounded almost pleased. “He’s the man they arrested for that murder on the mink farm. You know, the nurse. Miss Braceway.
vii
SARAH HADN’T needed reminding. Two echoes came back: of Kate Clemence saying over tea in New York, “They’ve caught the man who killed the nurse. He used to work on the mink farm . . .” and Charles, later, “My God. Poor Peck. . . .”
And he had slept soundly that night and the next.
Evelyn was still watching her with that curiously pleasurable air. “The police held him for a while, but then it turned out that he’d been somewhere else when it
