Had Noreen’s absence had anything to do with a threat to the child—was Maire, who had been shaken to her center by what she called ‘the oun,’ to become a target too?
It was an intolerable thought. Elizabeth thrust it back with an effort and concentrated on the reactions instead.
Oliver said flatly, “I think you’re being hard on the girl. She’s of age—suppose she’s been going around with some guy who’s been shipped out to Korea, or just out, period, and she’s embarrassed to tell you she spent every available minute with him?”
Constance said thoughtfully, “I had a few words with her, Elizabeth, and I’ve a notion it’s family trouble. Oh, not the uncle or aunt, but perhaps some disreputable relative she won’t admit to but was called upon to help. People do have relatives they hide, and if there’d been some sort of scandal, or trouble with the police . . .”
Lucy Brent said airily, the next day, “Not a word about the last moments at the sickbed? Heavens, I misjudged the girl.”
It was the airiness, and something under it, that took Elizabeth out that afternoon to see Lucy.
The Brents lived in a house that Elizabeth had always coveted, a shapely old house set under maples with a deliberately prim picket-fenced lawn. The harbor lay below it; behind rose a tumble of gray mossy rocks that ended the park above. At some point in its lifetime the house had been painted a serene smoke-blue that looked like a reflection from the water; Lucy and Steven had added the snowy shutters and the white brick chimney.
Elizabeth, arriving, glanced around her at the charming yellow and white and russet living-room Lucy had contrived out of auctions and cunning. “Where’s the puppy?”
“Oh, the shepherd?” said Lucy, casual. “As a matter of fact I— we gave him to the people down the lane. He was a dear little thing, but you know me about the house . . .
Elizabeth did know, which startled her all the more: Lucy was one of those rare and expert beings about whom order always seemed to appear without effort. She had a sudden flashing vision of Lucy driving off into the snow the afternoon Steven had dropped in without warning; of Lucy iced and angry, walking into the house, looking at the puppy, picking up the telephone . . .
Lucy was looking at her, and saying, “It must be wonderful to have Noreen back and be able to get out again. She still hasn’t said—?”
Elizabeth shook her head, and told her. She made it short and matter-of-fact: her own visit to the house on Sycamore Street, Noreen’s stricken silence. And she watched, and went completely unrewarded. Lucy said reflectively, “She must have gone of her own free will—people don’t abduct grown girls in full daylight. Did you get to see the aunt?”
Elizabeth said she hadn’t, and Lucy shrugged. “I supposed she’ll tell you some day—when she gets around to it.”
There was, again, that odd intimation of something known and withheld. Elizabeth didn’t pursue it, she had tried that and failed. She sat through another cigarette, and thought that she reminded herself a little of a research chemist who had set cultures to grow, and went the rounds now and then to see what was happening.
A number of people got killed that way, finding out too late which tube contained the deadly thing.
Elizabeth had said she must go, and was fishing for a glove that had slipped down between the cushion and the arm of the loveseat, before she discovered that Lucy wasn’t quite the impeccable housekeeper she had thought. Something else came up with the white pigskin. A twist of metallic purple that had, surely, covered a bon-bon.
She went upstairs early that night, leaving Oliver and Constance in possession of the living-room, because there seemed no further point in pretence. They knew she was in another world, their eyes discussed her. There were invisible head-shaking-s, soundless comments. Elizabeth wondered curiously and a little coldly if this was how you felt when you were getting—peculiar.
Who could hate her enough for this, when she stood in nobody’s way? When her life boiled down to the facts that she was a perhaps-happier-than-average wife, the mother of two small children, a writer of very small renown? No fortunes at stake, no momentous secrets, no one she had wronged, or been wronged by. Nothing to single out her existence from any other woman’s, except to herself because she loved it.
Unless—and this was openly terrifying—there were no reason at all. Any more than an avalanche had reason, or a lightning bolt. Someone near her slipping out of control, destroying blindly, purposelessly, for destruction’s sake. . . .
Elizabeth brushed her hair ferociously, trying to deaden the sound of Noreen Delaney’s voice saying tonelessly, “There’s nothing you can do.”
Because if someone were deriving pleasure from tearing flowers and ruining Jeep’s birthday, forging her checks and removing her sleeping pills, turning Christmas morning into a quiet horror, that form of domestic upset would very soon start to grow tame. There would have to be a stronger, sharper excitement. . . .
Oliver came into the bedroom, startling her; she had planned on being in bed, feigning sleep, because that was easiest. He went past her into the bathroom; the shower rushed briefly. Elizabeth smoked a cigarette and waited, and at the appointed moment stepped casually past him. “Water still hot? If it is, I think I’ll have a bath.” It took her a long time, afterwards, to forget the moment when she came back into the bedroom, and Oliver looked at her and put down a cigarette, unlighted, and crossed the room to her without saying anything at all. She turned her back swiftly, pretending absorption in a bottle of cologne, but his hands came down on her shoulders, light, workless, demanding.
“Oh, don’t, don’t —” Panic wrenched her away, turned her suddenly rigid, risking a glance, not daring to glance again at Oliver’s dark and angry face.
The
