He shrugged and started the motor. Sarah said, aware and not caring that she must seem to him like the drip of water on stone, “All right. That takes care of Miss Braceway. Who hunted up a psychiatrist in our neighborhood—one who was going abroad shortly—and went to him and pretended to be Charles? Who killed Charles?”
The rail fence and the sign that said “Pheasant Pharm”— that would be Milo’s work—came into view around a curve. Harry Brendan said very soberly, “Are you absolutely sure anybody did, Sarah?”
It took a moment for her unbelieving ears to sort that out. “But the train checks—I showed you—and it was the same date, the nurse . . .”
Something stopped her, and her voice trailed off. Harry’d swung the car into the driveway and braked it before the barn. He said almost lightly, not looking at her, “How did you manage to get Charles onto a train?”
And this was it, this was at the bottom of the oddness in him, the parrying. Charles had hated trains with a hearty, almost a holy hatred. There was nothing mysterious or neurotic about it; he hated the dirt, the noise, the food, the service, the inevitable delays. Fortunately his job required almost no travelling, and when it did he flew. So that when Harry Brendan had seen the train checks he had thought—what?
It was impossible to be angry when her own mind had to grope for the answer. Sarah said concentratingly, “It was —wait, it was right after that terrible crash on take-off in Chicago. I had a touch of flu and I was very unreasonable about everything, especially Charles’s flying at just that point, so in the end he agreed to go by train.”
And said, smiling at her in one of the unguarded moments that had become so rare between them, “I hope you know that I wouldn’t do this for anybody else.” For some reason the memory was knifing. When Sarah lifted her head from an unseeing study of her hands, Harry said slowly, “He would have. Yes, I see.”
His voice was calm, but his face had changed indefinably. The reluctance had gone out of it, and the careful reserve. The glance with which he swept the length of the house was as brilliant and measuring as though there were a face at each window. “In that case,” he said, “I’d better have the train checks. Not now, later, and as publicly as possible.”
The house seemed different to Sarah when they went in; her new certainty of Charles’s murder, and Nina’s, chilled and darkened it.
Evelyn reflected the changed atmosphere, greeting them at the door with a hushed and important gravity. Hunter rose, loomed briefly, and said, “Get you a drink,” but again that hardly scratched the surface of the silence. Even before he opened the door to the dining room, showing a slice of pale yellow wall and window and Bess at the telephone with her back turned, Sarah realized that all of them—Milo, Kate, Rob—had the self-consciously preoccupied air of people overhearing something.
There wasn’t much to overhear. It was a conversation so one-sided that even Bess’s single syllables were cut off. She said, “Yes, of cou—” and, “I know how you must fee—” and, “If there’s anyth—” and a peculiar tension built up in the living room.
After a wordless eyebrows-up glance around the room, Harry Brendan had joined the ranks and was studying a framed pen-and-ink as though it had just been hung. Milo, stretched on his spine, peered at a Chinese puzzle that glittered in his short soft hands; the faint repeated clicking of metal brought him oath-like glances from Rob Clemence, tight jaw set, on the couch opposite. Kate sat at a window and gazed at the lawn with a rapt unconscious air that was undone by her strained and rigid throat muscles.
Sarah lit a cigarette she didn’t want and listened to the infectiously quickened pace of her own pulse and drew in the glass ashtray with the burned match. It was a habit of suspended thought, but this time it didn’t produce the usual random designs. Secretly, horrifyingly, the match in her fingers formed a “P” and then an “E” and a “C”—
The receiver went down and Bess came in, face shocked, short gray curls wilder than usual because she was pushing blankly at them with a leather-gloved hand. She said unbelievingly, “That was Mrs. Peck. The police just called and told her he’s—Peck’s dead.”
Nobody moved. In that lightning interval Sarah had erased the letters in her ashtray, so that only a small shining square remained, but it was too late to help Peck.
“He’d been drinking all day, it seems, and he must have stumbled on his way home and hit his head on a rock in that brook near their house,” said Bess more strongly. “It was so cold last night, and the brook was deeper than usual after all the snow we’ve had. They think he died of exposure.”
And you could hardly, thought Sarah, tensely not looking at Harry Brendan, put it more clearly than that.
xiii
LUNCH WAS a kind of rite for Peck’s memory, in which not everybody joined. Food was deferred by common consent in favor of another drink; even Evelyn, who sipped at sherry only on state occasions, seemed grateful for hers. It was Rob Clemence, freckles showing more than usual on the tight graven face under the crisp curling hair, who said with mordant amusement, “I’m a little confused here; can somebody fill me in? This morning Peck was an absentee nuisance, a known drunk, and, if everybody present will pardon me, a surly son-of-a-bitch. Why are we all wagging our chins like this? Is he changed?”
“Considerably,” said Harry Brendan dryly.
“Oh, biologically, yes. Don’t,” said Rob, turning almost clairvoyantly upon Evelyn, “quote De mortuis at me. Anybody who has to be
