Having gone that far, she was lost. Slipping into other people’s bedrooms was hardly the best guest behavior, but then that was a rule not strictly observed in this house. Sarah went rapidly through the house and up the stairs to the door of Milo’s room, as nerved to this as though it represented the blackest kind of danger instead of the embarrassment of being caught.
And there was Nina seated on the backless white stool, brilliant head poised eternally over the basin that had killed her. She wore a puff-sleeved nightgown of pale blue, and there was no towel about her throat. Milo had evidently had second thoughts about his portrait since the morning, because at the right edge of the canvas, close to the top, something in the blue background had been painted out in a sharp, noticeable patch of green.
Sarah reached for the wall-switch with a lightning hand. Her overstrained ears manufactured a sound of returning voices, and for one queerly terrified second she was afraid that she would reach the top of the stairs and find a man’s face waiting furiously for her at the bottom. Milo’s, stripped of spite and secrets, or Hunter’s, the eyes gone like ice, or Rob Clemence’s, his temper let off its leash and bounding up to meet her.
But there was no one there at all; there was no one in the house until safe moments later, and by that time Sarah had the rolls in and was closing the oven door. Evelyn, coming in ahead of the others, thanked her volubly, tasted the chowder and began dropping things into it. Sarah was speechless, even when Evelyn said chattily, “What would you say to a few cloves?”
Whatever had been painted out of Milo’s portrait, or painted in and then obliterated, had occupied a space behind and a little above Nina Trafton’s head.
x
PECK DID NOT COME the next morning, although the chicken house and pheasant pens awaited their regular Saturday cleaning. Sarah suspected that Bess was glad, in spite of the extra work it meant; it gave her a chance to demonstrate that farm life was not all a matter of open fires and pristine snow and beautiful idle birds.
She said crossly, “How that man does drink, and always the night before you need him most. I don’t wonder that Hopkins fired him,” but the grumble was unconvincing. She made a great play of getting into her outdoor clothes, bundling up, Sarah thought interestedly, as though she were setting out for Little America instead of twenty yards beyond the barn. The heavy boots and gauntleted gloves and woolen scarf were all intended to say, “This is what you’d have to do all winter if you lived here, and how would you like that?”
Milo had assessed the situation early and disappeared. To the dentist, he said; he was unruffled by Hunter’s dry compliment on his bravery in having stood such a painful tooth all the day before. Sarah said after breakfast, “Isn’t there something I can help with? Can I carry in the pheasants’ water jugs, or bring out feed?”
Bess cast a significant glance at her lilac tweed suit. “Now, Sarah. Hardly.”
“I have an old coat here,” said Sarah suddenly, remembering it for the first time. “A raincoat I used to leave for weekends. If someone has a pair of boots I could borrow—”
Her feet were instantly assessed, with unflatteringly doubtful glances. Hunter said without a trace of a smile, “If you really want to go out, and you wear some heavy socks under them, I have a pair that might stay on you.”
“Coat?” said Bess blankly. “Where, Sarah?”
“Upstairs in the guest room closet. Don’t bother, I’ll get it; I have to go up anyway.”
“But there’s all that furniture in the way. Hunter—”
He had already gone. Bess said briskly, “Better have some more coffee while it’s hot, Sarah,” and Sarah said with equal briskness, “I’d love some when I come down,” and walked rapidly through the dining room and up the little back stair. Quick as she was, Hunter had been quicker. When she shot back the bolt on her side of the guest room door and opened it as though she would save him the trouble of looking for the coat, he was standing at the closed closet door with it over his arm.
It was a very old raincoat, badly in need of cleaning, and the sight of it gave her an unexpected pang; she had worn it last on that final weekend here with Charles. A petal of green silk scarf escaped from one pocket, and he had said that the color of it made her eyes as green as leaves.
Her face must have altered, because Hunter, toweringly tall and restless in this enclosed place, took an abrupt step toward her. “Sarah—?”
Bess’s voice reached crisply up the stairs. “Hunter? Did you find Sarah’s coat?”
Hunter looked goaded and annoyed at his mother for the first time since Sarah had met him. He called back that he had and she waited, but if there had been a moment when he was going to tell her something it was gone.
For some reason, perhaps because he had always kept so brusquely to himself, Sarah had never thought of Hunter as a source of information. It had come as a shock to her that he knew, from that unexpected question in the car, exactly what she was about here. Charles had never said much about him, but she had put that down to the fact that men took each other more for granted than women did, or perhaps there just wasn’t much to say. Now she wondered.
Bess was at the far side of the barn, collecting quail eggs like a croupier from the tiered cages that were built shallow so that the quail, who flew straight up at the slightest alarm, could not gain enough momentum to knock themselves senseless. She said over her shoulder that
