Mrs. Miller had slipped down at noon today to use the phone for the grocery order, and informed Jagoe bitterly that her niece hadn’t even bothered to call and inquire after her uncle.
The distorted brown eyes were watching her with sharp curiosity and a kind of malicious interest. Elizabeth rose stiffly from the plush settee. No one had dropped a glove, or a match folder, or a distinctive cigarette end in this twilit little half-room. There was nothing here at all but what must have been here for years—the darkly shining glass of the whatnot, the starving settee, the uncarpeted stairs rising into dimness.
No point in pursuing the resentful Mrs. Miller, thought Elizabeth, out in the air again. Noreen’s visitor would have made very sure of that. Bound her to silence when she returned to the Millers’ for her bag, using a threat, or—
Very suddenly, and as though she were seated beside Elizabeth in the moving car, Rosemary Teale said again, “Noreen worships Maire.”
The car jumped, the speedometer needle began, steadily, to rise.
“Everything all right?” repeated Constance. She looked tired and flushed and a little annoyed. “Why, of course, we got along very well. Didn’t we, children?”
“Aunt Constance broke a cup,” announced Maire; from the excitement in her face she had been saving these tidings for some time. Constance gave her a severe glance. “Yes, I did. Miss—because your brother was about to knock over a lamp. Jeep, tell your mother how naughty you were.”
That, thought Elizabeth, was rather a lot to ask of a small boy. She said, “You didn’t mean it, did you, Jeep?” and without chancing a reply swept them off to the kitchen for bread and butter and milk. When moderate calm had descended over the table she went back to the living-room to find Constance waiting.
Her cousin held a small round wicker basket on her lap and was sorting through it in an abstracted way. Elizabeth knew without asking that Constance was still searching for the cotter pin from Jeep’s tricycle; she would continue searching for it, mildly and un-deflectably, long after it had been replaced. It was probably a virtue, Elizabeth thought, but it could also be a very great bore indeed, and she herself always kept her lips firmly closed about a missing glove or lipstick or earring.
Constance glanced up expectantly. “Well? Sit down, Elizabeth, you must be tired—did you find out anything?”
“Nothing that helps much,” Elizabeth said, and told her. Impossible not to remember, as she did so, that Constance had left the house early yesterday morning, shortly after Oliver, to exchange his Christmas gloves, which she had bought at a department store in Lynn. She hadn’t come back until a little before noon . . .
“How—peculiar,” Constance was saying slowly. She had stopped probing in the basket and was staring thoughtfully ahead of her. “You know, Elizabeth—of course, it isn’t really any of my affair, and I wouldn’t for worlds go against Oliver’s wishes—it does seem to me time you did something. I see Oliver’s point about the police, but under the circumstances—”
Elizabeth’s gaze swung up from her cigarette. Constance said after the barest of pauses, “—as she is in your employ, and rather young to be on her own like this, I think you’d be amply justified in letting the police know.”
“You’re right, of course,” Elizabeth said, and glanced unnecessarily at the clock. “I’ll—they may want to come here, so I think I’ll wait until the children are in bed.”
Foolish, even dangerous, to postpone the deadline.
And utterly impossible to explain her own last-minute reluctance, as though she walked on the edge of a precipice and any positive action on her part would be the equivalent of the push that would send her plunging.
“Do,” said Constance soothingly, in her other existence. “Now, isn’t this annoying. I know I picked up that cotter pin . . .
The deadline narrowed. Jane Perrin phoned to say that her sister was up from Baltimore, and would Elizabeth and her cousin and Oliver come and meet her over highballs that evening? Elizabeth said that they would love to but were sitterless, and went away from the phone more edgy than she had been before its beckoning ring.
Jeep slipped on one of his beloved trucks and cut his lip with a tooth; Maire said pleasedly, “Can I see the bleed?” Elizabeth poached eggs and stirred cocoa and cut toast into slender fingers, and kept seeing the clock, and Oliver’s stormy face when she told him she had called the police.
With darkness, the melting snow had frozen. The night was full of tiny sliding reflections, the lilacs thrust against the pantry window, bony and silver. Maire and Jeep begged to be excused their bath so that they could sit under the lighted Christmas tree, and Elizabeth said yes and went back to the dishes.
The hot water rushed and rinsed; the lilacs tapped at the black panes. Elizabeth turned off the faucet once to make sure that it was only the lilacs; she was suddenly and pricklingly nervous. Which was ridiculous, of course, because Constance and the children were only two rooms away.
You’re all alone with Constance, observed her mind.
And: Oliver will be late tonight, because of the icy roads.
She turned sharply and reached for a dish towel, and her unsteady fingers sent a cup smashing to the floor.
She thought, picking up the pieces, that if the beginning of fear had been like a virus, then this was the final, the killing stage.
when a random and foolish thought could affect her nerves like a pounce
