Carefully now; examine this. Remember Charles’s strained face on her very first visit here, when Kate Clemence had told him that the dead woman on the mink farm was the nurse, Miss Braceway. Skip to New York, after their marriage, and his deep dreamless relief that her killer had been caught.
He had not been personally attached to Miss Braceway, so that could only mean the wiping out of some secret fear. That someone else had killed the nurse? That there was reason for someone to kill her?
The relaxedness and the absence of nightmare had lasted for two days before the torment resumed. And if one message from the farm had brought about that calm, it stood to reason that another message from the same source had destroyed it. And twice in that strange blurred week, she had thought she saw faces from Preston—Hunter’s, once, and Harry Brendan’s, and she had looked endlessly at Milo’s round horn-rimmed glasses. It had seemed like a trick of her nerves then. It didn’t now.
Suppose—although supposition was dangerous and wilfully constructed on air—suppose that someone had come to Charles (H? K?) and told him that the police had released Peck because he had an ironclad alibi for the time of the murder. That would leave the whole thing wide open again, an area of horror for Charles because the people who were closest to him could be concerned in it.
None of it explained what he had told the psychiatrist, except a theory that seemed to Sarah untenable: that he was in fact frightened of someone and knew he needed help if he were to preserve his marriage, but that at the last .moment, in Vollmer’s office, he had put up Sarah as a smoke screen against something worse.
What could be worse than a conviction that your wife was planning to push you from a height?
Sarah walked rapidly back to the house, face aching from the cold. It was hardly conceivable that a fear of such magnitude had been totally unsuspected by Charles’s family and close friends. In that case their silence on the subject of his motive for suicide had not been tact but secrecy, and a willingness to let her bear the full responsibility.
Perhaps she had not understood the mortal danger in which Charles stood from himself, but the burden belonged right here.
If Bess Gideon was worried, there was no sign of it at lunch. She told Sarah that Kate had phoned; Harry Brendan was coming out for the weekend and Kate wanted them all for cocktails. Harry became, in Bess’s telling, a belonging of Kate’s which she was willing to share for an hour or two.
Even so, thought Sarah with a faint unreasonable pang which might well have come from Evelyn’s inspiredly bad casserole, Harry would tell her the truth if he knew it. She was comfortably sure of it until she saw him that evening.
ix
“YOU KNOW ROB,” Kate Clemence had said half-wryly, and Bess: “Even Rob can wait five minutes . . Sarah saw the reason for both tones when she met Kate’s brother at a little after six o’clock.
She caught only a fast glimpse of a bathrobed figure in the commotion of their entrance into the Clemences’ living room. There were reminiscent shivers, the usual, “Isn’t it cold?” and “The weather report said snow,” and “Let me take your coat.” Sarah caught Harry Brendan’s glance with all the shock of the first time, and then she was being introduced to Rob Clemence.
She had gathered earlier that he was either an invalid or a convalescent, and the bathrobe and a faint tired limp that showed itself later bore that out. He was older than Kate, and startlingly fairer; his sandy hair curled crisply back from a high freckled forehead. Temper or pain had cut deep lines down his cheeks, disconcertingly like scars; and although he was obviously pleased to see the Gideons, Sarah would not have been surprised if the angular jaw had tensed suddenly, and something more than temper flashed out. He was the tightest, tautest man she had ever met.
He gave Sarah a rapid-head-to-toe glance that came back to settle on her face. “Well, well,” he said with a lift of sandy-tufted brows. “What can Charles have been thinking of?”
The crudity of it made Sarah catch her breath. He was no taller than she, so she was able to keep her gaze level while she said coolly, “When, Mr. Clemence?” and someone—Milo?—gave a small titter. A hand touched her wrist and Harry Brendan, his face unfamiliarly dark, said lightly, “Where I come from we ask a girl what she’d like to drink.”
Rob Clemence bowed slightly. “Then I beg your pardon, too. Kate tells me my manners are abominable, Mrs. Trafton, and there might just be a grain of truth in it. What’ll it be?”
He expected her to say, “Nothing, thank you,” and be put in the position of a sulky, party-spoiling child. “Rye, please, if you have it,” said Sarah, and moved away with every appearance of calm.
Kate produced crackers and cubes of cheddar cheese; Hunter, his face thunderous, went out to help Rob Clemence with drinks. Talk built gradually up around the raised town taxes, an actress with a summer home here who had taken her third overdose of sleeping pills, and then, with a jump, the missile program. Under it all, Sarah held her anger as carefully as a match that might go out in the wind.
Bess had known she would walk into this; so, from his instant reaction, had Milo. And what was it, exactly? A verdict against her in the matter of Charles’s death, or merely the resentment and license of speech allowed an invalid?
Rob Clemence himself settled it, or seemed to, when he leaned for a
