Maire turned her head, fearfully, pressing closer to Elizabeth. She was staring over her shoulder, and Elizabeth followed the wide watchful gaze to the paned glass inner door, the small space between that and the front door itself. Nothing there but shadows and a few bright reflections. . . . “See?” said Elizabeth, ashamed of her own relief. “There’s nothing there at all, silly.”
Maire gave her a dubious look. She was quiet again, but still tense. She repeated slowly and wonderingly, “Nothing there. Oun’s all gone,” and took her hands out of Elizabeth’s and walked sidlingly into the living-room. Elizabeth watched her, Constance stared as though mesmerized; Jeep said, wriggling, “What Maire doing. Mama?”
Maire seemed unconscious of all of them. She went the length of the room with that odd, wary, stiff-legged gait, keeping well away from the windows, eyeing the porch door with particular care. Constance turned her head in fascinated silence. Elizabeth stared everywhere Maire did, and thought, her heart beating hard, Something’s been at one of the windows.
Because it was glass, any and every glass surface, that Maire was ready to shy at.
But she was, at not-quite-four, quick and self-possessed and almost dangerously without fear. Over-imaginative, possibly, but well aware of the dividing line between fact and her own sportive fancy. And she knew by name everyone and everything that concerned her in the immediate world of the house.
What was it that could leave an observing and articulate child with nothing but a wild crying syllable to describe it?
“I still think,” said Oliver, peering concentratedly at the hub on Jeep’s tricycle, “that you’re getting wound up over nothing. Everybody takes an illegal day off now and then, and Noreen’s been pretty good about that so far. Of course, the day after Christmas isn’t the most tactful time to . . . The cotter pin’s gone off this.”
Constance rose and went silently out of the room. Elizabeth stared out at the falling snow, at white-iced cedar branches trembling close to the glass. She couldn’t have explained her own feeling of foreboding, her conviction that this was not an ordinary, inconvenient absence—not even, perhaps, a willing one. She said in a muffled voice, “Suppose something’s happened to her?”
“You mean the North Shore white-slave ring?” Oliver appeared to consider this solemnly before he bent to the tricycle again. “Got a tweezers?”
Elizabeth’s irritation escaped. “I wish you’d put that damned thing down and help me think what to do.”
Oliver put the tricycle on its side, dropping his own patience at the same time. “All right—I don’t see, frankly, what there is to do.”
Constance came back again and handed him a bowl full of small miscellaneous objects collected from around the house, said murmuringly, “Would it be in there?” and sat down again. Elizabeth said, “I could call the police.”
“They don’t send bloodhounds out after every missing nursemaid—particularly over the holidays.” Oliver looked at her, and shrugged. “Well, where did she go for Christmas?”
“To an aunt and uncle in Arlington. But it’s a two-family house and the phone isn’t in their name. Besides, she was coming back early to spend a few hours with the girl she used to room with here in town.”
Constance was frowning at her hands. She said unexpectedly, “I quite agree, Elizabeth. If she were sick, or something had come up in the family, she’s the kind of girl who’d get in touch with you. And she’s so very young and—gullible that it does make you feel responsible.”
Oliver looked moody at the joining of forces. “Well then, why don’t you go see the other girl—do you know her name?”
“Rosemary Teale—I think it was Rosemary. In Pinckney Court, which I suppose I could find.” Useless, again, to try and define for either of them her own faint but growing dread, her feeling that Noreen and the children stood together in jeopardy, and for the same reason. People didn’t bother to conceal things from children or, often, from young, inexperienced, rarely seen-or-spoken-to maids.
The difference was that children could not tell. Maire screamed at reflections in glass, and Noreen was missing.
Rosemary Teale, Pinckney Court . . . “I’ll go tomorrow,” said Elizabeth.
But, as it turned out, she didn’t have to.
Twelve
ROSEMARY TEALE, silhouetted in navy blue against the icy blinding world of snow, was like a symbol of safety.
She was a short sturdy girl, perhaps a year or two older than Elizabeth, with an alert squarish face. Her hair was brief and brown and shiny, her voice had a pleasant little-boy hoarseness. She introduced herself crisply when Elizabeth opened the door in answer to the knocker at ten o’clock that morning.
“You’re Mrs. March, aren’t you? You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Noreen Delaney’s—Rosemary Teale. I wonder if I could—”
She stopped, smiling. Elizabeth turned instinctively and saw Maire peering through the banisters as pink and naked as an infant in arms. She said hastily, “Come in, and excuse me a minute, will you, while I get some clothes on my daughter?”
She carried her sense of reassurance upstairs, and held on to it while she struggled Maire into a dress, located a missing shoe, and separated Jeep from a quiet study of the electric clock in her bedroom. When they were established with old magazines in their own room and she went downstairs again, the reassurance was torn away without preamble. Rosemary Teale, solid and ski-suited in front of the white brick fireplace, said, “I’m worried about Noreen, Mrs. March. I could have phoned, I suppose, but you always feel better if you see people. Have you heard from her at all?”
“No. In fact,” said Elizabeth, “I was on the brink of coming to see you. Sit down, won’t you. Miss
