“What’s the matter?” Elizabeth said, staring. “Lucy, what’s . . . Are the children all right?”
How white and strange Lucy looked. How quiet the house was, as though two small and rebellious children hadn’t been put to bed twenty minutes ago, as though they were only Lucy and herself here.
As though —
Lucy found a thin echo of her normal command. “Elizabeth, take it easy. Don’t—”
But Elizabeth was already on the stairs and running.
Eighteen
NOT NIGHTMARE, but fact—the waiting crib, the empty bed, the plush pig smiling foolishly at the dreadful silence.
Elizabeth went downstairs again, holding herself as quiet and calm as if she had discovered the children on a cliff-edge, where a sudden sound, an incautious gesture, would send them over.
Think, now. Before you pick up the telephone to call the police, think about what could have happened to Constance, to delay her. If one of the children had gotten hurt in any way, she would have had to take both to the doctor. Just because your children weren’t in their beds at six-thirty on a black wild February evening didn’t mean they’d been kidnaped.
And even if they’d been kidnaped it didn’t mean you’d never see them alive, or button them into their pajamas, or spank or catch them close to you again.
On the other hand, if they had been kidnaped, it might be dangerous, even fatal, to call the police.
At that instant, Lucy said sharply, “Elizabeth!” and then, more gently, “Here, for heaven’s sake, have a drink of your own bourbon, and don’t look like that. There’s been some mistake, the messages got mixed up. . . .”
“Messages?” said Elizabeth, and with the words she swam up to reality, and knew that she hadn’t been there before but only existing in a merciful sub-layer. “Lucy, if you know anything at all about this—”
“There was a message for Constance,” repeated Lucy, pausing in her nervous circling of the room, “at that damned bazaar. I got stuck as a sponsor, God knows why, and I was sitting beside Constance when one of the caterer’s men came up to tell her she was wanted on the phone. It was somebody calling from the Touraine, she said, to say that you —” was Lucy’s glance faintly inquiring? “—didn’t feel well enough to drive home alone and would Constance please take a taxi into Boston and meet you as soon as possible. Like fools, we didn’t check it in any way. We both thought—”
“I see.” And, incredibly detached, Elizabeth did see: her behavior of the last few weeks had seemed like the logical prelude to a crack-up. She said steadily, “The message wasn’t from me, of course.” Oh God, the moments going by. “So Constance left, arranging with Noreen—?”
“No. Constance was in such a fluster that I said I’d come over and stay until you both got back, so she called Noreen and told her that. I got here at the dot of six, and I’ve been waiting ever since. They’ll probably walk in now,” said Lucy, forcedly brisk, “having been on some perfectly logical errand, and here we’ll be, ten years older.”
Neither of them believed it. Lucy’s set face and wide worried eyes were a flat contradiction, and the faint repeated thundering of the wind said what Elizabeth could not bring herself to say: that no errand would keep Noreen out with two small children, one of them just over a bad cold, on a night like this.
While Constance, drawn away and disposed of by a false telephone message, sped in all innocence to Boston.
What to do?
To Elizabeth it seemed like a crisis she had tried to rehearse for at intervals ever since Maire had lain roaring in her bassinet. She would go to bed tired, furious, rebellious—and wake to think. What if I got up, now, and went into her room and the bassinet was empty? What would I ever do?
It had happened at last, and she knew she had never had an answer.
Oliver would know, but Oliver wouldn’t be home for hours, and she had no idea of where to reach him, unless—
Five desperate minutes went by at the telephone, with Lucy roaming nervously past her, before she found she could no longer stand the operator’s leisurely connections, the paging at the hotels she called, the polite, faraway negatives.
Elizabeth looked at the clock, the cradled phone, the black windows. She thought clearly, This is what you’re here for, this is the ultimate responsibility. She said, “I’ll look upstairs and see if anything’s—gone. Then I’ll call the police.”
“I’ll try Steven again, he wasn’t home when I called before. He might—”
Elizabeth lost the rest of that, she was running again up the stairs which she had descended, in some impossible measure of time, not quite fifteen minutes ago. She flung open the door of Noreen’s room and switched on the lamp.
She hadn’t quite liked sniffling at the girl’s cologne on the day an alien face had stared up at her out of this window; probing the small amount of privacy left to a household employee wasn’t pleasant. She was ruthless now, throwing the closet door open, staring hard at the few dim shapes on hangers, gaze going instantly to a small suitcase on the floor at the back.
Had the suitcase been emptied?
It hadn’t.
Downstairs, Lucy’s voice said tensely, “—gone, both of them . . . What? Well, what else could it be? Get over here as fast as you can, will you?”
And Elizabeth stood staring at the open suitcase on the bed.
There was a beige cardigan and what looked like a nightgown, stockings rolled in a ball, a pair of black stilt-heeled pumps, very worn. Carefully folded away, a small cotton dress, flowered in peach and blue, still in the basting process.
A dress for a child of four, or five.
Elizabeth picked it up, half-numbed, and the child herself
