Something did.
Six
IT WAS A LOGICAL THING, a small but necessary link in the misty, twisted chain. It had its own prologue, and Elizabeth half recognized that at the time.
She had gone up to the studio at a few minutes before noon, because lately she didn’t like being alone in the house. The children had been picked up for a pre-Christmas party, and Constance had asked for the car. Noreen, whose day off extended from twelve to twelve the following day, had hurried off to catch her bus.
The studio was bitterly cold. Elizabeth turned on both electric heaters, put a fresh sheet of copy paper in her typewriter, lighted a cigarette and sat staring ahead of her.
The morning hadn’t been peaceful. That wasn’t due as much to Jeep’s biting Maire in a transport of rage, or Maire tearing the leg off his battered rubber baby by way of revenge, as it was to Lucy Brent’s late-coffee visit.
Lucy had been at her most Lucyish: nervous, irritatingly brisk, critical. “Haven’t you lost weight, Elizabeth?”
“A little, maybe.” Which was a lie; it was seven pounds in four weeks.
“Are you feeling as well as you should by now—or oughtn’t I to ask?”
Nice points, both of them: how well should you feel when an unseen, uncontrollable presence, the presence of evil, had slipped quietly into the heart of your home? And should Lucy— Lucy ask? Elizabeth hadn’t had to answer that, because upstairs, dimly, there was a fresh burst of tears, and she was able to murmur, “Poor Noreen. She must be holding her breath until she goes off at noon.”
“Noreen’s quite good, isn’t she?”
“Extremely.” Elizabeth felt peculiarly defensive this morning under Lucy’s sharp roving gaze. When the other woman busied herself noncommitally with a cigarette, she took a moment for appraisal, a long detached look she wouldn’t have dreamed of two months before.
Lucy was—thirty-four, thirty-five? Not tall, with a quick-moving, beautifully economical body that just avoided angularity. Small dark head, small clever face with haughty cheekbones and restless eyes. Like a greyhound turned out by Bonwit’s, Elizabeth had thought when they first met; she knew now that Lucy refurbished her own slender wardrobe patiently and expertly.
And what did she know of Lucy, beyond her darting gaiety, her passion for bridge, her deftness with a scarf or a medallion or a twist of silk? Nothing. . . . The impromptu realization brought her up short. Lucy was looking at her and saying with faint amusement, “She doesn’t Like me, you know. I don’t think she approves. Noreen, I mean.”
“Nonsense,” said Elizabeth surprisedly, and when Lucy smiled and shrugged her wonder took on an edge of annoyance. “What a peculiar thing to think. For that matter, you’ve never liked her, have you, Lucy?”
Lucy’s eyebrows went up. She said mildly, “Like her? My dear, I hardly know her. As far as I’m concerned she’s an appendage of the children, and them I adore. . . .Put it down,” said Lucy vaguely, “as a funny impression.” She smiled her sudden warm banishing smile. “As you may have gathered, I’m not fit to talk to today. I have a horrible thing to ask you, so I will now take a running jump and get it over with. . . . Can you lend me fifty dollars until January?”
“Of course,” said Elizabeth. It seemed imperative to be as brisk as Lucy, and not to offer more than fifty. “Will a check do?”
“A check will do wonders,” Lucy said with frank relief, and thanked Elizabeth and folded it into her wallet. Five minutes later she was moving toward the door, and that was when the children came down the stairs, ready for the party, shepherded by Noreen. That was when Lucy turned, and greeted Maire and Jeep, and lifted her eyes and said brightly, “Hello, Noreen, how are you?” Noreen bent and adjusted Jeep’s suspender straps before she straightened and answered politely, “Hello, Mrs. Brent.”
Elizabeth watched with a small shock the glance that went between them: Lucy cool and poised and a little challenging, still holding her mechanical smile; Noreen facing her in her rigidly neat uniform of white blouse and dark blue jumper, her gaze level, her composure matching Lucy’s.
For a quick instant it echoed almost audibly on the air that they were not nursemaid and visitor or even oblivious strangers, but hostile, well-aware equals.
She had a plot and a typewriter, peace and pencils; at the end of an hour Elizabeth found that she might as well have been supplied with a shoemaker’s awl.
The bon-bons—where had she seen those brilliant foils before? If she could pin that down, she would know who it was . . . . . . who hated her.
Because that, all at once, was the only possible answer. The simplicity of it was appalling: the loathing that must have bred and spread behind a friendly face, the violence that was forcing the venom out drop by drop, that must sooner or later come with a gush. . . .
Elizabeth felt shaken and a little sick; she got up and walked restlessly around the studio, stopping at the front window to stare down at the house. It was graceful, even under the leafless trees: stormy gray shingle, shuttered in white. The window trim needed painting, so did the rose trellises.
Her gaze halted. She stayed sharply still, fingers tightening in her palms. Because there was an answering-back stare from the quiet, supposedly empty house.
Like war at long range . . . why did she think of that? It was a face, pressed whitely against one of the upper windows, tilted a little in its blind stare up at the studio. It moved a trifle; a white hand lifted lazily. It watched, it waited for a shocking and boundless moment, and then a sudden turn of shoulder took it away out of sight.
It was the window of Noreen’s room.
It was not Noreen’s face.
Careful. This wasn’t
