Why was Evelyn liking this? Was it a taste for tragedy, or merely the unfamiliar sensation of being listened to with sharp interest? Sarah said slowly, “If it wasn’t Peck—” and Evelyn blew into her rubber gloves. The limp red fingers became frighteningly lively, a meddlesome pair of hands capable of anything, and died again. “I don’t suppose they’ll ever find out now,” said Evelyn in an abstracted way. “They were so sure it was Peck that they weren’t looking for anyone else, and he’s had plenty of time to disappear.”
The mink farm, Sarah was thinking with sudden attention. Although it wasn’t visible from here and there was apparently no interchange between the two houses, it was a thread that appeared with surprising constancy in the pattern of these people’s lives. Miss Braceway had died there. One of the minks had killed a black-throated Golden cock. And here tonight was Peck, ex-employee . . .
She said with a lift of excitement, “Who owns the mink farm?”
“People named Hopkins,” said Evelyn, quashing this possibility, but Sarah had met her gaze first and the letdown —Hopkins, not Reeves or Elliot—was lost in shock.
What a vast mistake it had been to be sorry for Evelyn, or even to dismiss her as a long-playing bore. Somewhere, thought Sarah, seeing the shrewd cold eyes for the first time, Evelyn was keeping a list of just such people, and it seemed entirely possible for a second that she would pay them all back.
But then Evelyn said in one of her random rushes, “This friend I was telling you about has the most awful trouble with her hands, too. She tried everything, and do you know what the doctor finally told her? He said . . .” and Sarah thought that she must have been mistaken after all.
She went early to bed, up the twisting back stair that led out of the dining room.
Bess had known where to stop, aesthetically and financially, when it came to this region of the house, a long narrow steeply peaked room that overran the dining room and kitchen. It had been whitewashed, and the one end window curtained in blue, but there was no attempt to hide the chimney that thrust up in the middle of it, nor the cob-webbed chests and trunks piled at the far end near the arching door that opened onto the barn loft.
The habitable end, on the near side of the chimney, held a bed, night table and lamp, braided rug, and a pine bureau, beautifully waxed under a shadowy mirror. Sarah’s bags stood at the foot of the bed, along with the portable heater Hunter had plugged in when he brought them up.
Sarah turned the heater off, got into nightgown and robe, and went cautiously through the connecting door into the guest room. As Bess had said, the furniture was piled and wallpaper lay about in great curls on the floor. The bath that went with it was intact and she brushed her teeth, washed her pale unfamiliar face and went to bed.
Charles’s bed. But then, as she knew, a great deal of juggling went on at the farm in the way of sleeping quarters —the living room couch opened up, so did the one in the study beyond—and it was possible that Miss Braceway had slept here during her tenure. Must have, because what was now the guest room had once been occupied by Charles’s stepmother.
And what had her maiden name been?
Sarah’s mind started in its grim circle again, but the blankets were warm, the sheets had a dried-in-the-wind fragrance. The sleet had stopped, and so had the house sounds below her. Imperceptibly, she went to sleep.
In what seemed a wink she was awake again, heart hammering; for one ghastly instant she expected to hear Charles cry out in the clenching grip of nightmare. But what her groping senses strained out of the darkness was quite different: a curious ripping sound, a soft plop, the creak of a board. All in the room with her, quite near, and all, she realized, long moments ago; it had taken awareness that interval to break through the barrier of sleep.
“Yes?” she said with the boldness of fright, and then, “Who is it?” and sat up with a deliberate thrashing of sheets before she reached for the light switch. It took courage to press it because who knew, in this room where Charles had slept, what sly shadow might be cast upon the wall by someone just out of sight, someone just around the corner of understanding?
But there was no other presence, and no shadow except her own when she made herself get out of bed and look behind the chimney. Nor was there any sound other than the contact of her bare feet with the floor planks. The very stillness had a difficult quality, as though whoever had been here was now standing somewhere else, breath held, listening as she listened.
Sarah broke out of her own rigidity. Nothing could have made her walk the length of the room to the loft door, swallowed in darkness; it was probably unlocked but she was going to get out of here right away. She put on robe and slippers and turned to see what it was that had waked her.
The plop had been her handbag, on the bureau when she switched off her lamp, now on the floor. A mouse might conceivably have done that, but a mouse could not have opened Bess’s alligator travelling case and investigated the watermelon silk lining with such violence that the shirring was torn in one place. Sarah stood staring blankly down at it, and it was a measure of her own shock that she only wondered how she was going to explain the damage to Bess.
Tiptoeing, she went down the
