Noreen must feel it too, then—the gentle, intentional warping in the house. She wasn’t a fool, and she had seen the roses, the bon-bons, Mrs. Bennett’s purse—most important of all, she was an outsider, looking in. And knowing, or suspecting, so that she grew daily more shadowy-eyed and apprehensive.
Talk to her, thought Elizabeth, suddenly alert; pin down, if possible, small facts of timing and opportunity that might have escaped her in her own fog of dread. . . .
Downstairs, Oliver was turning out all but the living-room lights, to be left on for Constance. He glanced at her briefly. “Early to bed, whether you like it or not—you’re shot, in case you didn’t know.”
Elizabeth said nothing; she picked up her book and cigarettes and went silently upstairs. She was in bed when Oliver sauntered out of the bathroom, toothbrush suspended, and said, “What was all the shouting about—bad dream?”
“I suppose so.”
Oliver disappeared again; after an interval of splashing next-to-drowning sounds he was back again. “You know, some day,” he said without inflection, “you’re going to shoot up the stairs like that and trip and break your neck while Maire goes peacefully back to sleep.”
Trip. And break her neck. While Maire . . . Elizabeth said tightly, “I can’t help running when I—when anything, anything might happen in this house,” and to her intense horror burst into tears.
Oliver was there instantly, much as she had been there for Maire, with close-holding arms and the safe steady shelter that everyone, child or adult, sought at times to grow quiet against. It took Elizabeth some time to grow quiet, because the accumulated terrors of six weeks came spilling and hiccuping out into Oliver’s chest. Even then, remembering the short hostile exchange over Constance, she held back the forged checks, as though the unadmitted fear in her own mind put them in a place apart. She told Oliver, frantically, between sobs, about the roses: “I didn’t, no matter what you think,” about the bon-bons: “Can’t you see how horribly deliberate that was?”, about the face at Noreen’s window: “I don’t know who—and then the empty house. I’m so afraid,” said Elizabeth unsteadily, lifting her head and staring blindly across the room. “I’m so terribly afraid.”
Oliver’s arms loosened. He was shaking his head, gently, as though he were afraid to trust himself with any more violent gesture. When she stopped speaking he tilted her face and said, “Elizabeth . . .” and groaned and gave his head a quick clearing shake and started again, gazing intently down at her, “You mean you’ve been living with this—this business ever since that mess over the roses? When you said yourself that—”
Elizabeth was queerly, instantly conscious of the importance of this. “When I said what?”
But Oliver shook his head, listening. Footsteps went discreetly down the hall, a light switch clicked, a door closed.
Constance.
“Oh, God,” Elizabeth said bleakly. ‘That does it up nicely.”
“That,” said Oliver, grim, “is what I meant. Here, let’s have a cigarette and go at this a little at a time. . . .”
Elizabeth stopped listening after the first few quiet words, realizing what seemed just then the ultimate horror. She had told it all to Oliver, gasping and crying and shaking like a child—and Oliver was treating her like a child, to whom he might explain kindly that the shadow under her bed was her slipper.
No way out there, no one to help her after all. . . .
She pulled stiffly away from Oliver as he concluded, “—ten to one I’m right. And things always look different in the morning —worse, maybe, but different. What you need at the moment is about twelve hours’ sleep.”
Elizabeth lifted her bent head and caught an astonishing glimpse of herself in her dressing-table mirror. Wild eyes, wet cheeks, recklessly ruffled hair . . . no wonder Oliver thought she was hysterical.
Or did he merely pretend to think so?
Oliver was in the mirror, too, his gaze thoughtful and faraway. As though her eyes on his reflection had burned him he stood up and crossed to the bureau. “Think you could swallow a pill?”
“All of them.”
“Come now,” said Oliver, his back to her, “I wouldn’t—” His voice stopped, and Elizabeth glanced up at the sharp-edged silence. “Aren’t they there?”
“Got them,” said Oliver, and brought her the capsule and a glass of water.
Elizabeth settled herself under die covers and caught Oliver at the edge of his bed. “Do you suppose Constance locked the front door?”
“Probably.”
“I wish you’d look.”
As soon as he had left the room resignedly, Elizabeth slid out of bed and crossed to the bureau. When Oliver came back she was in bed again, composed, still, with nothing to show the violent pounding at her temples.
Two capsules left in the little gray pasteboard box that, last night, had held nine. Oliver knew it, because he had got the capsule the night before.
Six missing.
You’ll trip and break your neck, said the shocked hammering of her blood.
And: What are we going to do about Elizabeth?
Eight
IT COULD HAVE BEEN two o’clock or four when Elizabeth found herself awake, nudged out of sleep by a change in the texture of the icy, deep-night silence.
A bar of moonlight hung like a knife across the front of the bureau; she could almost have screamed at that. When the orientation of pulse and brain and senses was complete, she knew it was nothing in the room that had waked her.
The curtains hung straight and still, the moonlight might have been a painted thing, across from her Oliver slept undisturbed, a long scissoring shape under blankets. She had dropped her head uneasily to the pillow again when she heard the soft, the indescribably secret sound.
She knew later that a louder sound must have preceded it, jarring her out of the depths of exhaustion. Because this would never have waked
