Someone was trying the front door.
But Oliver had gone down and made very sure of the lock. Hadn’t he?
The back door, the cellar door with its other entrance into the kitchen; the porch door—open to a seeking hand at this unconscious hour? Her shoulders and throat ached from the steady stubborn lift of her head as she listened. Elizabeth realized all at once that the sound had stopped and wouldn’t come again.
The floor was cold under her bare feet as she stepped off the rugs in her progress to the window. It was a stageset lawn: bare arching trees, lawn drifted with shadows, stone path glimmering faintly with frost. Only the hedge moved at the inner edges of its opening, as though it had been disturbed a bare second ago—or had she imagined that?
“Can’t you sleep?” said Oliver’s voice, shooting unexpectedly out of the dark.
How long had he been awake, how long had he watched her? Elizabeth answered at random and went back to bed, still listening acutely. She was almost asleep when she heard the small, infinitely careful closing of Noreen Delaney’s door.
Morning. Maire running a slight fever. Constance preoccupied over her generous, post-Oliver breakfast, going away behind her pale folded eyelids so that Elizabeth, fidgeting nervously with her coffee, felt as though she were excusing herself needlessly when she rose and went out to the kitchen.
Maire was making a bubbling hum in her orange juice. Jeep wore a cereal beard. Elizabeth smiled at them both and said, “Noreen, if you have a minute I’d like to talk to you.”
Noreen had just poured the children’s milk into cups in the pantry. Elizabeth watched with mild astonishment the narrow shoulders, the small deft hands, go rigid. After a second the hands went down automatically to the apron, twisting there, and the girl turned. She said on a caught breath, “Mrs. March, that’s what I’ve been wanting to ask you. If there’s something I should be doing that I’m not doing . . . it’s hard to know in a new place, and I’ve been wondering—I know you had someone so satisfactory before me—”
“It’s not that at all,” Elizabeth interrupted hastily. “We’re more than satisfied, Noreen, it’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
How pale the girl was, how braced . . . was it apprehension over her job, or a deeper fear? Elizabeth met the grave green-brown eyes, shadowed in mauve down to the ridge of cheekbone. The shadows were new; Noreen hadn’t had those when she first came, nor the faltering look to the young, down-curving mouth.
She knew something—or she was afraid of something. Elizabeth was startled into changing her tack; she said gently, “Are you quite sure you like it here, Noreen? Don’t be embarrassed to say so if you don’t—children this age are quite an undertaking.”
“Oh, please, Mrs. March, I love the children!” It was soft; it had an underlying violence, and Elizabeth was startled again. Noreen gave her a small anxious smile, and Maire said curiously, “Who loves the children?” and that, temporarily, was the end of it.
In the middle of Friday morning Elizabeth dressed with foolish, superstitious haste. Her plum-blue suit, the fitted stiff-skirted rosy tweed coat that wasn’t really warm enough for a bitter day like this but might deceive Hathaway’s bright and nonchalant eye. She felt like a mad reversal of Lot’s wife, as though the danger lay in looking forward to the ring of the telephone and Oliver’s voice saying regretfully that he couldn’t meet her for lunch.
She had been braced all through breakfast, but all Oliver said was, “Call me from the office there when you’re through, and I’ll give you a head start and meet you in the bar at Dinty Moore’s.”
“Where you will take a head start.” She had felt gay with relief because Oliver was breaking his soft, hurried telephone appointment in order to meet her. There had been an obscure choice to make, and he had made it in her favor. Why look anxiously at the clock, then, why want so urgently to be out of the house and on her way to Boston before anything could happen . . . ?
The telephone rang at nine-thirty and it was Brenda McCollum to ask them to an egg-nog party on Christmas Eve; Elizabeth said they would love to but were busy. It rang again at five minutes of ten.
Oliver said, “Damn it, of all days. Moulton’s called an eleven-thirty conference. I’d like to sneak out the back way, but—”
“You can’t, of course not,” Elizabeth said, carefully bright. “Oh well, the skies won’t fall. Have a nice meeting.”
“Isn’t that too bad,” said Constance abstractedly, glancing up from the desk in the living-room. “Oliver’s tied up, is he?”
“So it seems. I’ll see you later, or rather sooner,” Elizabeth said, and closed the front door behind her and walked down the lawn to her car.
Oliver had calculated the time to a nicety, he hadn’t pricked the bubble an instant too soon. It was a pity he had told her only a few days ago about Moulton’s extended West coast trip. Otherwise it might have sounded like the truth.
Hathaway saw her early and said with emphasis that she looked frightful; what was she trying to do to herself? Elizabeth sat in a fever of impatience while he asked questions, stared at her brightly, and at length wrote notes and a prescription. The taxi she called came instantly, and it was just ten minutes of twelve when they pulled in at the curb opposite Oliver’s office building.
She leaned forward. “Driver, I’m meeting someone here and we’re going on. It shouldn’t be more than a few minutes.”
Noon, Oliver had said to the unknown voice
