Sarah left the lamp on and stretched herself out on the couch, trying vainly to find a comfortable place for her head. With physical fright gone, and the primitive reaction to having been approached unaware, she began to wonder why whoever had wanted something from her handbag or luggage had waited until that inconvenient hour. After all, there had been all evening—
But there hadn’t. Hunter had started to take her bags upstairs shortly after she was in the house, but Bess had asked him to make cocktails and the bags had stood at the foot of the stairs until just before she went up to bed. After cocktails and dinner she had been in the kitchen with Evelyn, and from the sink you could look directly past the jog that contained Milo’s crow and across the dining room to the stairway door. It would have been an awkward place to get at.
And what had she said to Bess, after the first greetings were over? “I remembered your case, and the watch . . .” But Hunter had carried the case upstairs with her things— not knowing it was his mother’s? Or politely waiting for Sarah to turn it over?
Whoever it was had wanted something of Charles’s, and had thought it might be in the case. Sarah was as sure of that as she was of her own rapidly stiffening neck. Whatever else these people might be they weren’t thieves, after her wallet or whatever jewelry she might own. Unless . . . Peck?
But a man who had just been released after being held on suspicion of murder would hardly risk recapture for theft, particularly on such a dubious quest. It was too bad, because Peck’s villainous face made him such a believable scapegoat.
Sarah removed herself to a chair, tucked her robe around her cold ankles, and composed herself to remember what odds and ends of Charles’s she might have included in her packing. Because something of his was bothering somebody here, and it wasn’t anything that could be asked for openly, like the handed-down watch. . . .
The crowing of the Silkie rooster, a gunshot to city ears, woke her when the living room was turning an icy blue. She switched off the now-diminished lamp and went, stiff with cold and discomfort and sleepiness, back up to the attic room and to bed.
Milo had killed a mink during the night.
It was a matter of great triumph to everybody, and Sarah viewed the stiff caramel corpse with the rest. She had no compassion for the mink, which was only an expensive rodent and would have died by cyanide gas anyway, but she flinched from the exhibition of the short heavy stick Milo had used. There was blood on the end; she supposed that a closer examination, which Bess seemed quite willing to make, would reveal a few short hairs.
From his pride and his countless retelling of the details, Milo might have slain a sabre-toothed tiger, Sarah thought. He had been waked in the night by toothache—here he exhibited a molar to anyone who cared to look—and he had gone downstairs for some brandy to rinse it with. He didn’t know what had made him think about the prowling mink of a few nights before, but as he was wakeful anyway he had thrown on a coat and gone out into the barn, picking up on his way the flashlight that was kept in the passage. He had no thought of going outside, not with his toothache in the bitter cold, but three of the pheasant pens opened off the stable.
And there was the mink. Sarah had not thought of Milo as a gifted teller of tales, but when he waggled his soft plump hands the mink came alive, supple, almost rippling, trying to slip through the wire mesh that protected the pheasants. It had been so intent in its greed, or perhaps so mesmerized by the flashlight beam, that not even the noise of Milo’s approach had diverted it from the appetizing cock-pale gold satin with a black-masked white face—that roosted docilely only a few feet away.
“Whango,” said Milo, hefting the stick, and that was when Sarah turned her head away, saying, “What time was this?”
They all looked at her as attentively as though the mink had spoken. “Twoish,” said Milo, sliding his glasses down his nose and looking at her over them. “Were you awake in your bower, Sarah? I wish I’d known; you could have held the flashlight for me.”
But Sarah had had time to think, and to realize that any mention of what had happened in the night would make her position here completely untenable—and was that, just possibly, the point? She said indifferently, “Not really awake, but I had a notion I’d heard something.”
Which one of them had moved secretly about her room and knew she was lying? Bess had turned away and was feeding lettuce to a sweet-faced brownish hen which, unlike the violently snatching Silvers and the dartingly shy Japanese Coppers, took the morsels gently from her fingers. Evelyn was looking at the dead mink thoughtfully, as though measuring it for a scarf; Milo, seeing that the general interest had flagged a little, gazed around at them all and stood his stick in a corner of the stable. Hunter, hatted and coated for his morning departure for Boston and looking almost military among the rest of them, took a step toward the car, nodded back at the mink, and said in a clipped voice, “You don’t suppose Peck’s letting them
