There couldn’t be, of course, because Constance was out and the doors were locked. That distant click was the refrigerator, the muffled sound on the stairs was wood reacting to heat . . . and this was precisely what she was supposed to be feeling: that the bathroom, a refuge ten minutes ago, was in reality a trap.
The thought brought steadiness with it. Elizabeth said, “Stop that!” to Maire, who had placed a dripping washcloth on Jeep’s head, and knelt forward to intervene. She wasn’t in time. Jeep, emerging from the cloth with his eyes screwed shut, flung a double handful of bath water at Maire, who leaped up in a stung-pink slipperiness that evaded Elizabeth’s fingers, seized the towels from their rack and plunged them triumphantly at Jeep.
Elizabeth scooped them both promptly out of the tub and spanked them impartially; in an interval between howls she heard a door close somewhere on the same floor. Constance was back, and could bring her dry towels. She fixed the children with a bleak eye, said, “Don’t move, either of you,” and opened the bathroom door and stepped into the hall. She got as far as “Constance? Could you hand me—” before her voice died in her throat. “Did I frighten you?”
Oliver was smiling at her. He took his shoulders away from the wall, breaking the terrifying immobility with which he had been standing when Elizabeth glanced up the hall. His face was watchful behind the smile, but it had lost its look of—was it rage?
“It was just—you’re early, aren’t you?” Elizabeth said it before she thought, because the finding of any words at all just then was an accomplishment.
Oliver’s eyes changed. He said flatly, “Yes, a little,” and started past her. Elizabeth was saved from speech by a violent splash from the bathroom behind her.
“Bad boy,” said Maire with an undercurrent of admiration.
“Bad gel,” said Jeep, complacent.
“Hand me a towel, would you, Oliver?” said Elizabeth, and escaped.
She dried the children and put them, suddenly meek and full of virtue, into their pajamas. She tried to forget, because it was so disturbing, her first impression of a total stranger—waiting, menacing—who had spoken and smiled and turned into the man to whom she had been married for five years.
The children went thumping downstairs in search of Oliver. Elizabeth sat still on the edge of Maire’s bed, recapturing in spite of herself the sound that had made her step out into the hall. It had been the closing of a door, and involved in it was the protesting shiver of faintly warped wood. There was only one door in the house that closed that way, and it was the door of Constance’s room.
So that Oliver’s early return from Boston, at a time when she would normally have been busy in the kitchen with the children’s supper, was not as casual as he had tried to make it seem—was not, in view of his stormy face, casual at all.
What had he seen in her cousin’s room—or searched for, and failed to find?
Seventeen
AT TEN-THIRTY that evening, because the silk scarf she had tied over her hair was wet with melted snowflakes, Elizabeth went reluctantly back into the house.
Oliver, deep in a book, glanced up and said, “Still snowing?” and went to the window to look. At the desk, pen poised over a sheet of notepaper half-covered with her small decisive writing, Constance lifted her head to say dutifully, “Jeep cried out a few minutes ago, and I went up. His head seemed a little warm, I thought. Do you think he might be catching cold?”
“Probably,” said Elizabeth, and hung up her coat and scarf. “I’ll go have a look.”
Jeep was snuffling damply in his sleep. Elizabeth felt his forehead and the hand she could find; he was warm, but not alarmingly so. The morning would tell. She tucked in the covers and went downstairs again. Oliver had abandoned the window and was back with his book; Constance was sealing an envelope at the desk. Elizabeth paused a long moment in the hall at the foot of the stairs, and then found her voice.
“Isn’t there—don’t I smell something?”
Constance lifted her head, the light glimmering in her glasses, and sniffed thoughtfully. Oliver rose sharply to his feet. Elizabeth said hastily, “Not smoke.”
Perfume. A tiny teasing whiff of it, as surprisingly present as a strange hat and coat draped over the newel post. It was a heavy scent, sweet, musk-laden, with a tired edge. It was the kind of scent that would be thoroughly at home in, perhaps, the Hotel Savoia. . . .
It was the scent that had hovered in Noreen Delaney’s room, so palpably wrong in its surroundings, on the day an alien face had stared blindly up at Elizabeth’s studio.
It didn’t take her long to find the source. The hall closet door hadn’t quite caught when she closed it, and the perfume was bolder when she swung it wide. Under her scarf, which had slithered to the closet floor, was a handkerchief, damp from contact with the wet silk, and reeking.
Constance wrinkled her nose as Elizabeth lifted it. “That isn’t yours, is it, Elizabeth?”
The handkerchief bore no initials. Smoothed out, it was a small square of white linen, a woman’s, but other than that, anonymous. Whose fingers had dropped it, how long had it lain there before dampness had released the latent fumes?
To Elizabeth, it was suddenly the very smell and touch of hate. Aware of Oliver’s grimace, she walked steadily to the hearth and dropped the handkerchief onto the smouldering logs. Behind her, Oliver was silent; Constance said startledly, “Oh! Did you have to—?”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth,
