Suppose—but what unpleasant work it was—some escapade of theirs had precipitated Nina’s illness? Charles had not had a nature for involvements, much less forbidden ones; his conscience would have punished him tooth and nail.
Sarah found herself staring with a trance-like blankness at the floor. How convenient if Charles had kept a journal of some sort, but he hadn’t, only a small red leather book that contained the addresses and telephone numbers of friends and nothing more. It had no lock, although at some time or other she had seen exactly the kind of key that would fit a diary. She had held the key in her hand, wondering idly at the smallness of it. She had been sitting on a bed, as she was now . . . Sarah put out her hand, palm up, and bent her head, using her body to trick her mind.
And it worked, the other background was suddenly there. It was the day after Charles’s death, and her blood had been pounding savagely at the base of her skull in the type of headache that aspirin couldn’t touch. Irrationally, she had been unable to stand the sight of Charles’s suits hanging there so tidily in the bedroom closet, and although someone had suggested tactfully that she ought to empty the pockets first she had swept the suits from their hangers and folded them frantically into two big suitcases.
She had repented of that later. Suppose, after the bags were locked away in the basement, that the lawyer should want something, or Charles’s office? When Bess had told her firmly that she must lie down, she had walked docilely into the bedroom, closed the door behind her, and gone through the pockets of the suits. There was no reason why the housewifely action should have seemed so frightful to her, but it did; she felt as surreptitious as a thief, and she didn’t even want to look closely at the little pile that accumulated on the bedspread.
The tiny key caught her eye, the only one, she realized now, that was loose. There were some neatly folded papers and a few cards too, and at length she found a blank envelope and slid everything into that and put it—
Memory balked there. In a bureau drawer? No, because her search for the snapshot of Charles hadn’t turned up the envelope. In one of her own suitcases?
Her idly determined search, all this time later, found it in her small dark blue suitcase. Sarah emptied the envelope onto the bed. The diminutive key was there but it was a hollow victory, like having been right about the population of Tulsa in some given year; all it proved was an accurate memory. The business cards held unfamiliar names, the folded letters were a receipted bill, a note from somebody about stock shares, and a doubled-over envelope containing the cancelled part of Pullman tickets to Chicago and back on December first and second.
Both were early morning trains—and somewhere there had been a tremendous mistake. According to Dr. Vollmer, Charles had kept an appointment with him on the late afternoon of December first. According to the scribbled pasteboard in her hand, Charles had been in Chicago at the time, exactly as he had told her.
It had to be a clerical error in Vollmer’s office, because otherwise Charles had never been to a psychiatrist at all, and it was some other man who had given his name and his background and said that Charles Trafton went in mortal fear of his wife.
xi
BELOW SARAH, like shock made audible, the telephone rang. It rang twice more before a man’s stride crossed the dining room and Hunter’s voice said in the abruptly challenging tone with which he always answered, “Hello?”
There was a pause while he listened and Sarah listened, too, with a queer and automatic detachment. “No,” said Hunter. “No, we haven’t. . . Let’s see, I think it was Thursday night. . . Yes, we certainly will.”
Mrs. Peck, thought Sarah in that curiously removed way, beginning to worry about her vagabond spouse, wondering at the length of this particular spree. Coming for answers to—of all people—the Gideons.
Her mind went chasing fugitively after Peck’s wife, like a guilty child trying to change the subject; it refused, just for the moment, to admit the enormity of what it had discovered. Because if someone had run the risk of posing as Charles at the psychiatrist’s not once but three times, it could only have been to establish a record of mental imbalance. And that in turn would have to mean—
Make sure of it first, whatever her own frightful certainty. Sarah moved at last, transferring the tiny key and train checks to the zippered compartment of her purse, returning the envelope to a pocket of her suitcase. Why had she never noticed before that the suitcase was only a little bigger than Bess’s travelling case, navy calf instead of dark green alligator, but easily confused in an uncertain light?
But everything looked different to her now, even her own drained and sharpened face. It was like having read the end of a book in advance, so that every minor incident was colored, every character—now that you knew—invested with his own destiny.
Mechanically, Sarah went into the guest bath and washed her face in very cold water, chiefly because something had to be done to it before she went downstairs. Lipstick helped, and a faint touch of the rouge she almost never used. She was combing her hair before the dim mirror in her own room when doors began to open and close, voices lifted, someone below her—Bess?—said, “I don’t know. I’ll ask her,” and began to walk toward the back stair.
Sarah was out of her room in a twinkling, although she could not have explained her unwillingness to be approached there. Bess met her in the dining room doorway. “Oh, Sarah. Harry and Kate are driving
