A boy bicycled past them on the sidewalk, a woman went by with a baby carriage and two small children who besought her for pennies: “We won’t buy gum-balls, honest, Ma.” Sarah didn’t answer Milo directly, but then he didn’t expect her to. “Why did you paint her that way?”
“Whimsy,” said Milo after a second. It struck her that he was horribly like his crow—or had the crow picked up from its master the tipped head, the round and mocking stare, the air of secret malice? “I’m as whimsical as all get-out,” said Milo. “But it makes you think, doesn’t it?”
“Drink it,” said Harry Brendan authoritatively, “or I will, and the last state of this man will be worse than the first. Sarah”
Time seemed to have rolled back, Sarah thought, lifting her glass obediently; this was Harry as he had been in the frightful interval after Charles’s funeral, bending her to his mood, knowing instinctively what she needed, cutting off the dangerous withdrawal.
Charles’s death had been shocking and inexplicable then; it was at once simpler and more shocking now that it was murder. There was no other logical conclusion to arrive at: no one would bother to set the stage for suicide, no one would have to. Nor, in setting the stage, plant the victim’s wife as a cause of actual fear, a bone to be thrown to some assiduous detective who might question the suicide of a man in Charles’s position. An ace in the hole.
What Sarah kept seeing was almost invisible—the hair of blue fibre from the dining alcove curtain caught under Charles’s fingernail. Not in the last-second change of heart the policeman had suggested, but in a struggle for his life. Because he had been pushed from the window, thrust out, beaten away from the sill.
Impossible not to think about what must have led up to that. A telephone call, probably, to make sure that Charles was alone. Charles opening the apartment door to someone he trusted, making drinks; betraying, to this sympathetic and deadly face, something he mustn’t be allowed to repeat. The window in the dining alcove being raised, Charles—because there were no indications of a struggle—being summoned there on some casual pretext. (“Isn’t that Sarah now, at the corner?”)
How had it felt to be toppling from a killing height, to reach out in a last frantic effort for an anchor and feel only the graze of cloth? Almost everybody knew how it felt in nightmare; Charles must have had a second, or seconds, to know how real it was.
That was what had turned Sarah’s stomach upside down. She forced herself to go back to the drugstore and buy what had to be bought, and when Harry Brendan came back to the car she was sitting in it very quietly, not crying but swallowing steadily and convulsively.
If he was surprised, he hadn’t showed it. He had sensibly opened both front windows of the car and, not so sensibly, put his arm around her and held her firmly. He had said a lot of disconnected things, alternately brisk and soothing, ending up with, “Well, you can’t go back to the house like this. Oddly enough, neither can I. Let’s have several drinks, shall we?”
He was very quiet about it, but Sarah felt suddenly ashamed because he had known Charles much better and longer than she had, over a matter of years. Now, when she had put her glass down, he said, “Are you going to tell Bess about all this?”
Bess. Hunter Gideon might have gone to Dr. Vollmer, or Rob Clemence, or even Milo. Psychiatrists did not, from Sarah’s hearsay acquaintance with them, demand birth certificates nor any other document; a medical history might be taken but you were who you said you were. (Even, for the time being, Napoleon.)
“No,” said Sarah, “not yet.” Harry did not appear to have noticed the small package she had carried from the car. “Did you have a lunch date with Charles that day?”
He didn’t ask what day. “No. I got the night train down when Bess called me.”
Out of her own shock and bewilderment, Sarah had not telephoned Bess until midnight; she could still remember the long empty drawl on the line while she waited for the ringing to wake someone. That had allowed time for whoever had killed Charles to get back to Boston by plane, and from there to Preston by car.
The check came. Sarah opened her purse to put her cigarettes away, and the tiny key, nestled with the cancelled train checks inside the zippered compartment, seemed to clank at her. She said, “Did Nina Trafton keep a diary?” Harry’s gaze shot up from his drink. “Indeed she did. Edward Trafton was a bird-watcher and an amateur botanist and a do-it-yourself weatherman all rolled into one, and Nina kept his field journal. The barometer went down so many points, crocuses came up ahead of schedule, cedar waxwings were observed at the bird feeder. Heady stuff. I imagine it’s still in the house somewhere. All set? Don’t forget your package.”
The diary wasn’t significant, then. On the other hand, why keep a key to a nature log? But it mightn’t be the key of a diary at all, it might have fitted a jewel box or some special drawer; it might even, thought Sarah, suddenly flat, have something to do with Charles’s office, although it would be odd if someone hadn’t come looking for it before this.
She said briefly, picking up the package, “It’s a camera.”
“. . . Oh. Yes, I see. From what you’ve seen of this Vollmer, do you think,” said Harry in a neutral way, “that he’s going to admit he was taken for
