Her fingers shook over the fastening of the door, but that would be put down to the awkward grip of flashlight and stick, and not the fact that she had to turn her back briefly on that black and soundless corner.
But all at once the spell broke. Wood creaked in a slow, drawn-out secrecy; cold air came drenching over Sarah’s feverish face. Someone said her name in a whisper, and said it again aloud. For Sarah it was like a stone thrown at glass, a match held to tinder: it destroyed her in a twinkling. She ran without control, stumbling up the wooden ramp into the barn, crying without knowing it, the flashlight beaconing crazily about her.
If she hadn’t tripped, and gripped at the car fender to keep from sprawling, Harry Brendan would not have caught her there.
xvii
“SARAH! OH GOD, are you all right? Sarah!”
Sarah, still locked in a peculiar horror, flinched at the sound of her name rolling and echoing around the barn, just as her muscles had gone frantically rigid under the grip of Harry’s hand. The rocketing flashlight beam had showed him coatless and tieless, his face wearing the jarred look of someone just waked.
Later, she could analyze her tongue-tied dread as the instinctive care people showed in the presence of a deadly snake. At the moment, all she could do was nod dumbly at Harry, push her tumbled hair back from her face, try to control her trembling and her heaving breath.
Harry took the flashlight from her and looked at her in its beam. “You’re not all right,” he said violently. “Who did that? Who’s out there?”
He lifted his head at the growing sound of voices in the passageway. Sarah became simultaneously aware of two things: a distant barking of dogs, and a draught of cold air from the stable. How long had that been going on?
The barn was flooded suddenly with light. The blue door opened and Bess Gideon, at the head of what seemed to be a small procession, blinked at them and said with the poise she carried even in the small hours of the morning, “Sarah— Harry. What is all this?”
Harry had encountered a protruding nail somewhere, he was rubbing absently at a long scratch on the inside of one wrist. He said pleasantly, “Bess, when I find out I will certainly let you know,” and Sarah realized that with his first anxiety gone he was bitterly angry at her for not having confided in him, for attempting this on her own.
Faces turned toward Sarah and then away as just outside the stable door Rob Clemence’s voice said irritably, “Nonsense, there’s no smoke,” and a moment later he and Kate came up the ramp and into the barn. His sardonic gaze examined the assembly; he said dryly, “I see. It’s a come-as-you-are party, and Sarah and Harry have cheated.”
. . . By their robes you shall know them, Sarah thought in a savingly unreal way. She could have identified each on its hanger: Bess’s brusquely sashed navy blue, Hunter’s austere Black Watch plaid, Milo’s glittering foulard, Evelyn’s quilted, ruffle-swamped peignoir. Kate wore beautifully tailored rose-red wool, Rob seemed to be poking fun at himself in regulation blue and gray and white stripes.
All present and accounted for. Which of them had had to make a run for it? Which pair of slippers wore, even after a rapid trip over cleansing grass, traces of the litter that clung to Sarah’s? There hadn’t been time to change slippers. One of them, even now, must be disciplining his lungs in order not to pant.
Milo said, “The secretary will now read the minutes of the last meeting,” and the incongruity of the setting came sharply home—the barn floor puddled with sallow light, the vast shadowy loft above, the push of the wind, with occasional slicing success, at the cobwebby windows and the big door. Bess’s poise surmounted even this. Hair wilder than usual, breath coming out in little gray puffs on the icy air, she said concernedly to Sarah, “You’ve hurt your face. What is all this, what’s happened?”
I was awake, and I thought I heard a noise in the barn, said Sarah soundlessly inside her head, and I thought maybe a mink was after the pheasants and I could frighten him away. But I dropped the flashlight and it went out, and like a fool I went crashing around after it and fell against the woodpile.
She could say that, and dispel the feeling of naked danger that hung about her like a brilliant spotlight. She had proved to herself that Charles’s death had been a contrived thing, not involving her, and she could take that comfort with her to the train. Harry Brendan would know she was lying, and one other person, but Harry knew his way to her apartment if he cared to find it and she would never see any of the rest of them again.
And Nina Trafton’s diary—not in a deep bathrobe pocket, that would be too risky, nor even in the stable—could be retrieved and destroyed at leisure. Charles would not be avenged, but she had never undertaken that. She had only . . .
Rob Clemence had said it, and Harry; she had even said it to herself. She had only wanted to get out from under.
“I came to look for Nina’s diary but I was too late,” said Sarah, and although all their voices were altered in this big vaulted place, her own sounded unnecessarily loud and shocking. “The diary she really kept, the one whoever killed her took away and hid.”
What followed had a dream-like quality, although it might have been the pounding of her blood in her ears that removed the scene a little for Sarah. But it was usually in dreams that people stood about robed and pajamaed in a great dim barn, oblivious of the cold, and discussed the dreamer as though she weren’t there.
After the first blank wheeling of faces, and
