“The Elwells and their children left for California on Thursday,” said Bess distinctly, “and I changed the litter in the Silvers’ pen this morning—yesterday morning.”
Milo wouldn’t have known; he had been at the dentist’s. Or had someone else used that as a double bluff? Sarah’s head ached with tension and the effort of trying to remember some small and very significant thing.
The wind blew through crevices in the barn, the quail bounded, and nobody stirred, nobody said, “Let’s go in.”
“Someone,” Bess was saying in that ominously clamped-down voice, “nearly broke Long John’s leg. The spur is broken as it is; it won’t heal normally.” At Milo’s surreptitious, “Is that bad?” she wheeled; she said in a cutting voice Sarah had never heard from her before, “Milo, you’re a little old for clowning. Sarah, didn’t you get a glimpse of anyone in the stable?”
Had she ever said there was someone in the stable with her? Sarah said, “No,” and knew that the brief pause had been dangerous in the extreme. She had shone the flashlight at random when she first entered the stable. How was X to be sure that it had not touched the tips of a pair of motionless slippers, a fold of foulard or plaid or stripes or quilting, or a flicker of rose-red?
But not Kate, surely, who had loved Charles, who had been engaged to him and then, after Nina Trafton’s appearance on the scene, unengaged. She might have hated Nina for that, but she would never have placed Charles in jeopardy, nor killed him.
Foulard or plaid, stripes or quilting or rose-red—the barrier in Sarah’s mind came tumbling down. Why had she never seen this before, the one thing that ran consistently through it all? The tale told to the psychiatrist, the tiny thread of fabric under Charles’s fingernail after his death, the rifling of Bess’s travelling case on the night of Sarah’s arrival, the smear of paint on Milo’s portrait of Nina.
Was it possible that no one else knew? But it was so elemental that it might be passed by as a personal vagary, of no importance. Sarah could take Bess aside and ask her, but could she even trust Bess, whose whole existence lay in the farm, who bore the Silver pheasant’s mark between thumb and forefinger?
Harry Brendan’s hand drifted to Sarah’s, touched it secretly, held it tightly. Sarah’s head swam a little at the private contact; it seemed, at this moment, much more piercing than a kiss. She couldn’t find a safe pair of eyes, so she gazed beyond the others into the stable, still lighted, as she said, “I didn’t see anybody in the stable, but I know where it all started. As far as I’m concerned, I mean. The psychiatrist said Charles had nightmares about me, about a walk we took together here just before we were married.”
The narrowing of attention was almost an atmospheric thing, like a sharp drop in the barometer, a promise of thunder. Sarah had to transfer her gaze to the woodpile, because Bess—deliberately?—had not fastened the door of the Silvers’ pen. It hung open a good four inches, and the Silver cock, whose furious grunting had become a part of the background, was just about to find it out.
xviii
“CHARLES AND I went through the woods and up to the bluff,” Sarah said. (If only someone would stop the quail’s soft, senseless, ceaseless battering off in the ragged shadows.) She looked at Evelyn, and the full blue gaze met hers and swelled with interest. “A woman had come, with her children . . .”
“Jane Folsom,” said Evelyn promptly. Her lashes were busy. “She stayed forever, and the children were ghastly. I didn’t blame you and Charles for sneaking off.”
“I had a scarf in my pocket, and I started to put it on when it got windy. It blew into Charles’s face just as he reached the edge of the bluff. It was only a little bit of silk,” said Sarah steadily, “but it might have made him go over the edge, I suppose.”
A plank creaked hollowly as someone’s weight shifted. The very corner of Sarah’s eye saw the Silver cock, crimson face thrusting, test the door of his pen, find it open, come jumping out. He stood erect in a position of triumph and menace, great wings beating, and although the wind around the barn covered the rapid clicking sound, Sarah suspected that none of them would have heard it anyway. The tight attention of one had spread to them all.
“What someone told the psychiatrist in New York was that Charles believed I wanted him to fall, and that it got to be an obsession with him, to the point where he was terrified of me.”
Kate Clemence’s face had the closed unyielding look of statuary; Bess was rigidly intent; Evelyn’s skin was patched with red. Milo had taken off his glasses and was polishing them on a fold of his robe, as though fearful of missing a single detail; Rob Clemence, hands thrust tensely into his pockets, waited with an expression of incredulity.
The Silver cock came stalking up the ramp.
Hunter’s shadowed face moved forward into the light, so bent upon Sarah that they might have been alone in the barn. “Then somebody was obviously out of his mind. As I remember it, the two of you came back holding hands, which isn’t the usual manifestation of terror.”
Don’t look at the Silver, head furiously down and forward, rose-pink feet, one blood-darkened, quickening as he came closer to the attacker with the slashing stick. “That might have been another day,” said Sarah carefully. “I think I came back first, as a matter of fact.”
“No, you were together. Charles
