His voice had been gradually slowing; it stopped in a trailing way, as if he had forgotten that he was speaking and even that Sarah was there at all. The glass she hadn’t lifted was cold and wet inside her hand, and she was holding it much too tightly. She said with a peculiar feeling of trespass, “Did she die of pneumonia?” and Harry Brendan’s gaze swung up and struck her like a slap.
“No,” he said.
Sarah stood up and walked unseeingly to the sink, and after a few seconds of thunderous silence Harry’s even voice began again.
Nina Trafton had been understandably vain about her beautiful hair; she had been painted a number of times with it hanging rich and loose. After three weeks of illness and fever—she had refused to be removed to a hospital—she was as illogical as a child about insisting that it be washed. She had actually gotten out of bed once, and crashed lightheadedly into a doorway, cutting her forehead.
On an afternoon in February, with the house briefly emptied of everyone except the nurse, she had succeeded. Weakened by fever and drugs, warned by the doctor of the seriousness of a relapse, she had nevertheless gone into the bathroom, clad only in her nightgown, and moved a high stool into position before the basin. She had pinned a towel about her throat and stood a bottle of shampoo on the glass shelf and filled the basin. She had bent her head with its long tangle of fever-dulled gold, and struck the faucet so sharply that her head went into the water and stayed there.
Sarah hadn’t turned from the sink; she felt incapable of moving. Milo had painted Nina ready to wash her hair— and how frightful that was, it gave him a new and ugly dimension. No wonder Bess had caught that knife-like breath when his bedroom door creaked open to show the easel. Sarah said into the stretched-out silence, “Where was the nurse all this time?”
“Asleep,” said Harry Brendan shortly. “She said later that her tea had been drugged, but the laundryman who stopped at the house that day saw her moving around upstairs.”
Sarah did turn at that, incredulously. With this frightening affair so recently behind them, all these people had shaken their heads blankly over Miss Braceway’s murder and wandered what could have been bothering Charles. She felt as though she had landed in a gathering of well-behaved maniacs, who persisted in thinking that the cobra in their midst was a garter snake, until Harry went on.
Someone had had the presence of mind to preserve Miss Braceway’s teacup—the tea set to steep for her punctually at one o’clock every day and left on the stove—and the dregs were tea and nothing else. As her relief had not arrived the night before, she had been on duty an unbroken twenty-four hours. What more natural than to take a look at her patient, who pretended to be asleep, and lie down herself for a few minutes of badly needed rest? The times involved didn’t agree with the laundryman’s account, but the curtains in two of the upstairs rooms were straight-hanging white net, and the draughts that old houses were full of might have set one of them stirring so that it looked, to a casual glance from the lawn, like a moving uniform.
After the first shock, no one blamed the nurse. Her record was impeccable, she had exhausted herself in caring for her patient, and although she was familiar with the irrationality of fever and female vanity, she hadn’t bargained on Nina Trafton’s obsession. As a professional woman whose reputation was her living, it wasn’t surprising that she clung to her story of having been drugged; as far as that went, Nina was easily capable of it.
“I’m afraid I’ve drunk your drink up,” said Harry, light with an effort. “Say that six times fast.”
“Milo painted Nina that way, getting ready to wash her hair.”
“Milo—?” Harry’s forehead wrinkled and then cleared. “I know she’d sat for him a couple of times before she got sick —she liked being painted with her hair loose and Milo fancies himself as an artist. I suppose he couldn’t resist a dramatic touch later, or maybe he wanted to imply an attachment. Although for that matter I think every man who ever met Nina was a little in love with her at one time or another.”
Of course; no wonder even talking about this had made him white. Sarah went to the stove and gazed blindly at the chowder, which rewarded her with a scalding burst of steam. She said before she could stop herself, “That must have made it nice for her husband.”
The stillness behind her was absolute. Not quite daring to turn her head, not trusting either Harry or herself, she said, “Tell Evelyn, will you, that Ym putting in the rolls?” and after a long moment the kitchen door closed with furious calm and she was alone in the house.
So the subject Charles had kept locked up so tightly was still not to be examined, no matter what her own necessity. Never mind that Miss Braceway was dead, and Charles. Where Nina Trafton was concerned, you might look but you mustn’t touch.
Sarah set the oven to heat for the rolls, thinking remotely that Evelyn, left to herself, would have inserted currant jelly and sour cream or some other unlikely mess. Whatever else Harry Brendan had done in that disturbing interlude, he had exorcised Peck. When she looked at the steamy window-panes she saw Nina instead as Milo had painted her, stiff and out of drawing but with the surprising life that a child can sometimes produce with crayons.
Towel at her throat, Harry had said, but Sarah didn’t remember a towel. Maybe Milo had left it out for aesthetic reasons, or
