Rosemary Teale sat down. She lighted a cigarette with a concentration of straight dark brows and said in that low, likeably rough voice, “The thing is this. Jill and I—the three of us used to room together—were giving a party on Christmas afternoon. Noreen doesn’t drink, but I know she was looking forward to coming—she’d had a dress of Jill’s altered to fit her and she said she’d certainly be there. We missed her at the party, and then when I called here and found she hadn’t come back, I began to worry,”
Constance must have taken the call, and forgotten to tell her. Elizabeth looked at the girl in the wing chair and wondered for the first time how much Rosemary Teale had been told about the March household. The silences, the hostilities, the small inexplicable happenings. She felt her way, cautiously. “It’s seemed to me lately that Noreen’s been rather worried herself.”
“I’m sure of it,” said Rosemary Teale with an instant air of relief. “Funny you should say that, because only the other night I said to Jill—”
What she had said to Jill boiled down disappointingly to what Elizabeth had observed for herself: a vague depression on Noreen’s part, a haunted air, a thorough retreat into silence. “Except about Maire,” said Rosemary Teale. “She’s very fond of your little boy—Jeep, is it?—but she worships Maire.”
Elizabeth listened and felt herself grow tighter. She said suddenly, interrupting, “Have you her aunt’s address in Arlington? If I can get away I’ll go there this afternoon.”
Yancy Street, Hertford, Lincoln . . . Sycamore. Elizabeth made a right turn and drove slowly down Sycamore Street. It had sounded like a winding and shady road; it stretched endlessly before her, broad, arrow-straight, naked in the thin windy light. The frame houses that lined it solidly on either side seemed at first glance to be a uniform mustard-color, with curly fret-work porches and a few steep concrete steps going up.
Elizabeth found a parking place three blocks beyond the one she wanted and began to walk back. The houses weren’t all that broiled yellow; here and there a two-family building reared a bottle-green head. She passed a kerchiefed woman sweeping snow from a porch, a pink-lipped young man who gave her an inviting smile, a group of small boys with snowballs whom she circled with trepidation. And then she was at No. 203, her heart going at a ridiculous pace.
No. 203 was dressed in peeling mustard, its windowframes brown, the windows themselves curtained in straight-hanging white lace. Elizabeth mounted a double flight of concrete steps and walked to the front door, her heels echoing on the wooden porch. She knocked, and gave her attention to a row of flower pots just visible through curtains at her left.
She told herself resolutely that the door would not open on tragedy.
Behind her in the street the children shouted dimly. Icicles on the porch roof dwindled with lazy wet little sounds. The painted dark-yellow panels of the door were suddenly snatched from in front of Elizabeth’s eyes and she found herself staring at a face instead. The face said instantly, “Well, what it it?”
His voice was soft and high, ludicrous issuing; from the thick bold reddish face. Even his glasses were bold, the lenses so thick and curved that behind them his eyes were a huge fierce concentration of brown. He was a big man, not tall, with a look of solid, quick-moving power. Not Ambrose Miller, Elizabeth decided in a flicker, not anybody’s uncle.
She lifted her chin a little in the face of the steady, spectacled stare. “I’m looking for Mr. or Mrs. Ambrose Miller. Can you tell me if either of them is in?”
“The Millers?” Again the soft voice, again the scrutiny, calm, taking its time over her scarf, her coat, her booted ankles, rising without hurry to her face. “They live upstairs, but Mr. Miller had a bad spell over Christmas. They don’t see people just now.”
It was like the door of the room in the Hotel Savoia, closing on what she wanted to know. Elizabeth said urgently, “Mrs. Miller, then? It’s quite important—it’s about their niece. I’m a friend of hers. I think if they knew that they might—”
The man had stepped back reluctantly, and they were standing in a small dusky hall floored in linoleum. There was a brown plush settee, a glass-fronted whatnot, a flight of stairs at the back. Over everything, a faint compound of dust and horsehair and camphor.
“Niece?” said the man dubiously, eyeing Elizabeth. “Young kid— nineteen, twenty?”
“Yes.”
“Dark brown hair, kind of big eyes?”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
“Well, she isn’t here. If she’s got any sense she won’t come back for a while, either, after the way she took off when Miller’s arthritis kicked up. The aunt made a hassle over that, I can tell you, because it was the day after Christmas and— Say,” The man craned up the stairs, cautiously, and then back at Elizabeth. “You wouldn’t be the one who called for her, would you?”
Called for her . . . Elizabeth’s palms went damp inside her gloves while Jagoe—he introduced himself at last—continued, with relish.
Ambrose Miller had had an especially bad turn—there was a heart complication—on Christmas afternoon, and the doctor was sent for, Mrs. Miller had pleaded with her niece to stay at least until the following morning, as there was a great deal to be done for the sick man, and portions of this had floated down to Jagoe.
The aunt: “Don’t you feel you owe your uncle and me at least this much?” Noreen: “Oh, I wouldn’t leave until I knew he was better. It wasn’t the party I was thinking about, but I’ll have to phone the people I work for. They’re expecting me tonight.”
The aunt again: “I’ll call them from the drug store. After all, it’s your own flesh and blood. . . .”
“But she didn’t call,” said Elizabeth involuntarily.
Jagoe gave her a shrewd sidelong glance. “She wouldn’t, if it was over a nickel.” He said
