The room listened and watched as the envelope changed hands. “Thanks, it might be,” said Harry, and dropped the envelope carelessly into a pocket and consulted his watch. “Where was it you had to be at three o’clock, Kate? . . .”
Sarah went up to her room, avoiding Bess’s expectant eye; once she had agreed to sell the farm, any pretext for lingering would be over. Her mind followed Harry Brendan, driving somewhere with Kate beside him; tranquil, quiet equal-to-anything Kate with her disarmingly ragged and shiny dark hair, her white throat, her gray eyes that were big enough to float in.
Sarah stood in front of the mirror and assessed herself in a blank but careful way, thinking that if that was what Harry wanted, she couldn’t compete. She didn’t look tranquil at all; she looked pale and driven and uneven-tempered, someone whom Harry might have felt so sorry for that he had put his arms around her out of compassion.
Below her, the house was quiet. Moving quietly and carefully, unbothered by conscience, she shot the little bolt on her side of the guest room door and turned the knob and let herself in.
One of the twin beds was still pushed against the closet door, as it had been when Hunter confronted her with her raincoat over his arm, and a slipper chair had been placed on top of the bed. Wallpaper stirred around her feet as she crossed the floor, lifted the chair down, listened for any sound that might filter up through the iron-lace hot-air register, and began to move the bed.
It wasn’t heavy, and it needed only pivoting. The closet held a collection of wire hangers, two plastic bags of summer clothing, and on an upper shelf a number of what appeared to be account books.
They were. Sarah glanced at random entries: “$350 for garden tractor. Hurricane damage to chicken house, $75. Quail eggs shipped, May to July, 100 doz.”
Tucked in among the pages of another one were carbon copies of arrangements for land to be plowed, hay fields to be re-seeded, and one strip of land, going northerly some four thousand feet, bounded by etc., etc., to be sold to the addressee.
There was no date, no heading beyond Dear Sir, and of course no signature. It took Sarah some time to realize that the Gideon property, long land-bound, was or had been in process of being unlocked.
What value would that add to the property, with the new highway into the South Shore? Beyond eye range, the farm comprised at least fifteen or twenty acres, and what were building lots worth per acre? Was this what she hadn’t been allowed to go near, was this why Bess had sent Hunter so urgently up to this closet to get Sarah’s forgotten raincoat?
There was another book of some kind, frosted with dust. Sarah reached for it, fingertips identifying the smooth calf even before she lifted it down. It was a pretty little dark-blue volume, its pages gilt-edged. Protruding from the miniature lock was a duplicate of the tiny key in Sarah’s handbag.
“Gale winds last night, edge of hurricane,” Nina Trafton had written in a rapid curling hand. “Called tree warden to see if split old cherry can be saved. Two bird feeders smashed, must replace . . .”
And on another page, “First frost. Pretty to look at when the sun came up but a death sentence for our poor asters. Orchards will be deserted now as their tenants go south . . .” Orchards? What orchards?
Sarah went on leafing through the pages. There were more references to the weather and nature in general, and a lengthy description of bird calls at dawn. “What bird is it that sings under my window like two knives being sharpened against each other?”
My window.
The only name that occurred, and that at infrequent intervals, was Edward Trafton’s. Even then he had a dragged-in-by-the-heels sound: “Edward says it will soon be time to mulch the strawberries. Ours are the Cranford variety, very small, but making up in color and delicacy of flavor what they lack in size.”
“Edward saw a ruby-throated hummingbird this morning.”
The feeling grew on Sarah that this had not been so much written as copied out of a country-correspondence column in a newspaper, with Edward’s name thrown in for verisimilitude. Even granted a devouring interest in nature, would any woman as ripely attractive as Nina Trafton have been as selfless as this in a diary meant only for her eyes? Would any woman at all—particularly a woman living in a house with her husband’s relatives—have made no personal references anywhere in the diary? It seemed a contradiction in terms.
On the other hand, if she had been observed in the keeping of a diary, and someone were curious enough to take a look at it, he would reap only comments about mulch and humming-birds and wind velocity for his pains.
And there was the matter of the extra key. A spare, in case one got lost? Possibly, but Charles would hardly have kept it in that case. He would certainly have kept it, knowing what he did about Nina, if he had found it in a suggestive place after her death and arrived at the obvious answer: two keys, two diaries. The other one the exact mate of this in everything but content, so that Nina could confide in it openly, even amusedly.
It wouldn’t bum easily or unobtrusively, not with the lock and the triangles of brass that cornered the blue calf binding, but it mustn’t turn up to undo the innocent look of Nina Trafton’s life and death. . . .
Sarah paced her room until she remembered that every footstep could be heard by anyone in the dining room below, and sat chainedly down on her bed. She had to
