The answering voice was lazy. “I told you to come across.”
“For an envelope. Forgetting that?” Elizabeth hardly recognized Oliver’s tight and ugly tone. She stared ahead of her, memorizing a strip of banister, a pulse of rainy light at the hall window.
“Forgetting nothing. You had your instructions. If it’s too much trouble, I can always get in touch with Mrs.—”
“Damn you to hell!” It was the first time Elizabeth had ever heard it said like an obscenity. This was Oliver, the Oliver she didn’t know, that three months’ courtship, five years of marriage hadn’t ever permitted her to see. Different—appallingly so. Dangerous, because of his very control. Was it because he had never been so seriously crossed before?
Elizabeth listened to the silence following Oliver’s curse; it was enigmatic. Oliver said roughly, “Okay, let’s get it over with. Where —when?” and she put down the receiver as quietly as she could, unable to listen to more, swept by a cold sick reaction.
She closed the front door carefully behind her. The rain, at any rate, was clean.
She had not been alone in her watching of Oliver at the Savoia. Someone else knew, someone with a voice that held a faint, disguised familiarity, and Oliver was paying blackmail. Angrily, dangerously—but paying it.
Wind and cold and sleet-needled rain were therapy only so long. Elizabeth walked blindly and furiously away from the house, and became gradually aware that she was nearing the town and that she was chilled through. That, and a faint warning mistiness in her head, made her walk past the toy shop, the jeweler’s, the police station, to the neon nakedness of the drug store. She found an empty phone booth, she heard herself saying floatily, “This is Mrs. Oliver March. I’m at Corbett’s—can I get a cab right away?”
In the drug store proper, a black-coated woman, seal-shaped, said earnestly to a clerk, “But I’m quite sure I bought this same size bottle a month or two ago for two-forty-nine, and the other man, the red-haired fellow, charged me two-seventy-five.”
Her small head wove, peering, doubtless, for the perfidious red-haired fellow. Elizabeth watched in a mist: the clerk murmured and slid away behind a high counter, the seal-shaped woman snapped her purse open and shut in a nervous tattoo and sidled along to another display. It was a bank of hairdyes, capped by the enormous cardboard head of a blonde.
The bank was chartreuse and silver. Elizabeth walked closer, knowing that this was important, trying to think through the sudden blazing furriness in her brain. She was sick, suddenly and bewilderedly sick; that was why she had waked so raw and shaken. But this was important, this chartreuse and silver. She mustn’t lose sight of it, because it meant something, it was like a face calling out for identification. It was Jeep, with a hand clenched solemnly behind him. . . .
Elizabeth went directly up to the display. In spite of her wet hands, her faintly dizzy head, the shells of heat that went peeling and pulsating away from her body, she could still be quite sure of what she was seeing, fully aware of its meaning. The fragment of chartreuse and silver Jeep had found became magically whole, on the top of the bank at the right. It said, “Halo-Hue,” and under that, “Pink Honey.”
And Steven Brent said, in the memory of a chance encounter, “You ought to sue, it’s your color.”
She had been amused then, but she wasn’t now. She thought in a sudden merciless wave of clarity: The checks. The driving license. The hair dye.
Someone else able, at will, to become Elizabeth March.
Fifteen
OUT OF THE WEEK that slid by, while she recovered from grippe and pleurisy, Elizabeth was able to isolate certain sharp moments that stood up like barbs along the strung strained wire of her fear.
There was the moment when she awoke from a deep flushed sleep to hear her own voice whispering, “Why are you staring at me?” She whispered it to the clear image of Constance’s face, bent close and intent just above her own, frighteningly expressionless.
“Staring?” Constance’s mild echo came from across the room. When Elizabeth lifted her head, her heart still beating confusedly, she saw that her cousin was standing in the open doorway to the bathroom, a glass in her hand. “You’ve been asleep nearly an hour,” said Constance. “How do you feel?”
“Better . . .” It had been a dream, then. Had to have been, because no one would crouch over a bed like that, just—staring at a sleeping face.
There was the day Lucy Brent came, shedding her sharpness and her lorgnette, warmly concerned. “You poor thing. There’s grippe all over town, if that’s any consolation. I won’t ask how you feel, because I know you’re wretched, but I’m just on my way to town and there must be something I can get you. Books? Here, better write me a list . . .”
Noreen Delaney had just set down Elizabeth’s lunch tray. Elizabeth watched and wondered over the lift of the girl’s eyes to Lucy before she went silently out.
A dream, a glance . . . at times, during that week, Elizabeth felt like a suggestible child at the mercy of a malicious elder. Were Oliver and Constance and Lucy right after all—was she a victim of her own nerves, subconsciously putting off adjustment to the fact of a still-born child? The odd new peace, the difference in Oliver, the serenity with which the household ran without her argued that she was.
And she might have believed it, if it were not for the envelope of hair-coloring that stood like a montage over every face around her. That was not nerves, but physical fact. Jeep, whose fingers were everywhere, must have torn it from a packet in a woman’s purse.
Why, when payment on the checks had been stopped, would another woman want to assume the
