Sarah did. She repeated invitingly, “When she even what?” but Evelyn had lost her last night’s eagerness to talk. “Rallied,” she said shortly.
It was obviously a fill-in word, but then this was a conversation Evelyn could hardly be expected to enjoy, not when her husband was painting the subject of it. And yet she seemed more—muzzled than resentful. Sarah watched her drop noodles into boiling water and butter a large casserole. “Was Charles here at the time?”
“Oh, yes. He was in the Boston office then and he used to come out for weekends. Toward the end he came on the train every night. He worshipped Nina, and I think he knew that she wasn’t going to get better.”
Worship was an odd word between contemporaries; surely the woman in the portrait couldn’t have been more than five or six years older than Charles. Not with that long vivid hair . . . Sarah stood in silence for so long that the noodles began to froth over. People still died of pneumonia, in spite of all the new drugs, and pulmonary weakness often hid behind that glowing, look of health. Besides, Sarah thought, faintly horrified at the direction her mind was taking, there couldn’t have been any hocus-pocus, not in such a small town. The fact that the woman who had nursed Nina Trafton was also dead, but by violence, was just an unfortunate juxtaposition of events.
She realized that in between watching the noodles and draining the tuna fish Evelyn was giving her a number of furtive, tempted glances, much as a woman on a strict diet might keep eyeing a box of chocolates. Evelyn had something interesting to say, but had been told not to say it. Could her reluctant self-control be weakened?
Sarah said, “Had she and Charles’s father been married long when he died?” and drew a complete blank. Evelyn said without interest, “About three years.”
“This is rather a damp climate, isn’t it, for someone with chest problems? But I suppose Nina was used to it if she grew up here.”
Evelyn’s sandy lashes dropped. She was not reaching out for the chocolates; the chocolates were coming to her. “Actually she was from somewhere in the West. Charles’s father met her when she was visiting relatives here . . . she was Nina Clemence then.”
Behind Sarah, so suddenly that he must have been standing there for some time, Milo said, “Learning to cook, Sarah? Or may we hope that you’re teaching Evelyn?”
Did he never say anything without a sting in it? Evelyn smiled obediently, and Sarah moved a deliberate step away from the face that seemed too intimately close. “Just gossiping,” she said sweetly. “As women do.”
Milo gave her a sharp sparkling look. “I trust you brought some fresh gossip with you? It’s hard to get in the country.”
“You can’t have been reading many best-sellers lately,” said Sarah. “The city isn’t in it with the country. Can I help, Evelyn, or would you rather I got out of your way?”
Why had Charles never told her that the stepmother he had been so fond of had been a relative of Kate’s?
There was no sign of Bess. Sarah got her coat, put cigarettes in her pocket, and went outside. The day was still locked in a gray-and-crystal cold. She visited the beautiful, bad-tempered Reeves, trailing their magnificent tails, and the ruddy, white-breasted Elliots who seemed scarcely more amenable. Like all the pens, theirs were equipped with litter, a metal trough filled with turkey pellets, a water-holder.
What name in his appointment book had been scratched out between Reeves and Elliot? Japanese Copper, Silver, Lady Amherst? It could only have been scratched out because it did not measure up to some requirement, or answer some possibility in Charles’s mind, on the day his reason broke.
It couldn’t have anything to do with selling or breeding these pheasants, because he had never had a hand or even an interest in that; it was Bess’s domain. Bess had spoken of wheels going around, and it was much more evident in the winter than in the summer. Sarah knew that the property was a working farm, for tax purposes, and that it was Milo’s job to see that whatever requirements that meant were met.
The annual pheasant hatch alone was surprisingly profitable, the combined chicks averaging about eighty. The hay in the huge back fields was cut and sold every year, and regular shipments of tiny speckled eggs from the Japanese king quail went out to devotees in Newport, Miami, Bar Harbor. Bess kept a constant supply in the refrigerator for their own consumption, pickled in beet juice and vinegar, and served them on toothpicks with cocktails. They weren’t much bigger than robin’s eggs, but as much more delicate than a hen’s egg as a hen’s is than a duck’s.
. . . She had reached the hickory tree where she and Charles had paused for a cigarette that day in their flight from Evelyn’s friend. Her ears were cold; she dug automatically into her pocket but there wasn’t a scarf, only cigarettes. The scarf, that other time, and the bluff . . . eerily, as though memory had summoned it up, a stir of wind sent the iced hickory branches crashing lightly together over Sarah’s head.
She could see the bluff now, through the winter-stripped barrier of birch and aspen and hickory. Before it had been hidden in the leafage of summer. Anyone could have observed them without being seen himself, could have watched that bizarre trick of the wind with the silk square, could have said to Charles later, “Maybe it was her idea of a joke, but she threw it all right. . . .”
Her mind had gone in a useless circle last night, but it stopped now on a point of clarity. Charles’s nightmare had been born here before she ever met him. Why else would he have written down, completely out of context and in a
