Dinner, coffee, the dishes afterward over Evelyn’s automatic protest. For the first time Sarah was acutely aware of the total blackness of the country night at the windows, unbroken by light or any sound other than an occasional mournful brush of wind around the chimneys. All the birds —Midnight, the pheasants who would break the dawn with their high metallic shrieks, the bantam rooster who would answer with an eagle-sized crowing—were asleep in their feathers, fed and watered and protected through another day.
Presumably even Long John slept, hoarding his grievances until morning—but how very black it was going to be in the stable, how startling the ray of the flashlight that hung from the wall of the passageway to the barn. I won’t think about it now, thought Sarah, and instantly her mind began to embroider the stable floor with rats, clawing secretly about for corn or turkey pellets or even an unwary pheasant. Long John had killed a rat once, drilling a savage hole in the ugly gray head. . . .
“Do you feel all right?” asked Evelyn curiously, and Sarah said yes, putting away the dish she had been wiping in blank circles. She wanted to know, nonchalantly, if Bess ever had any trouble with rats, and Evelyn gave a little shudder. “Peck kept them down with poison, because of course wherever there’s feed . . . He found a rat-hole in one of the stable pens once, but he stopped that up. Anyway they wouldn’t come in the daytime,” said Evelyn, turning to give Sarah a reassuring glance. “Only at night.”
However casual she had seemed, Bess had obviously marked this as an occasion to celebrate. Before Sarah had a chance to follow Evelyn out of the kitchen, while the red rubber gloves were still subsiding after being blown into, Hunter appeared in the doorway with a tray holding Bess’s treasured liqueur glasses, stemless little bubbles of pale clear yellow, their etched leaves studded with tiny painted flowers. “Benedictine? Brandy? Or a mixture?”
He had Bess’s ability to look as natural with the delicate glasses as he did with a hayfork. “Brandy, please.”
Hunter switched on the light above the liquor cabinet in the wall opposite the crow’s cage. The crow said, “Awk, hi, Milo,” in an irritable mutter and went back to sleep. Hunter added bottles to the tray; he said without looking at Sarah, “You’re satisfied about Charles, then.”
It was still somehow a shock that this brusque remoteness had looked so sharply and exactly into her mind. “Satisfied doesn’t seem to be quite the word,” Sarah said with care. “I’ve learned about Nina, if that’s what you mean.”
“He wasn’t to blame. Neither of them was,” said Hunter astonishingly. “It was on the cards from the beginning. Charles was impressionable, Nina . . .” He shrugged. “This isn’t the Victorian age. Nobody but Charles would have made such a mountain of it.”
Did he really believe what he was saying, Sarah wondered amazedly, or did he only intend her to think that he did? Charles was impressionable, he had said—and what about Hunter? He hadn’t gotten those knowledgeable eyes, nor the subtle lines of experience at their corners, from nowhere. And a startling softness, even an idealism, often lay under just this kind of no-nonsense coating. Hunter turned suddenly and caught her inspecting gaze, and for a moment he did not seem remote at all.
In the living room Sarah sipped her brandy, listened idly while the others talked, responded when Bess asked her tactfully about her plans. She said that she might go away for a while, she had always wanted to see the Southwest, but that she would probably end up at an advertising agency again. It was the only job she knew, and she would have to work at something; she couldn’t simply settle down and do nothing all day. It seemed at once real and unreal as she said it, like a needed operation for which the date had not yet been set.
Predictably, Milo began to hum the “Serenade to a Wealthy Widow.” Bess stopped him with a glance. Time seemed to have stalled, as though everybody knew exactly what was in Sarah’s mind, until Evelyn said with a patient air, “Can I take these glasses out now? I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m asleep on my feet.”
“Not your feet, precisely,” said Milo, peering across at her, but all at once sleep was in the air. The wind seemed louder and colder, the night blacker, beds inviting, the very lamplight exhausted. Bess told Sarah to have a good sleep. Milo touched his jaw reflectively and said he would take some aspirin up with him. Hunter stayed in the dining room, hand on the light switch, until Sarah had mounted the stairs to the attic room.
The house settled into darkness. Water gushed through the pipes and died into silence, footsteps ceased, doors closed with finality. Sarah turned her own bedside lamp off and smoked four cigarettes, carefully spaced, before she put on her flat and soundless slippers, eased her door open, and tiptoed down into blackness.
xvi
EVEN AT THE DOORWAY into the barn, the flashlight beam sharp as a shout in the darkness, Sarah was not fully committed.
She knew it, she had known it in a carefully buried way ever since the plan to find the hidden diary had first entered her head. That was why her brain had supplied her with the thought of rats, the possibility that the flashlight might not be there or its batteries dead, the much likelier possibility that the Clemences would still be up, and notice and act upon a light moving about in the stable.
The flashlight hung from its accustomed hook; there was no sound of rats; the Clemence house was dark. Hunter had put the car in and closed the heavy sliding barn door; from the distance
