Not much older than Maire. . . .
But so very thin, so fragile. . . .
Elizabeth said softly, “Oh, God,” and slid a shaking hand once more into the cuff of rayon that lined the suitcase. Another photograph met her fingers, and she stared at it for a long moment before she knew that it was a photograph of Noreen.
Cool, deliberately flirtatious, a little bold; the eyes laughing, the vivid lips parted. A scrawl of ink in one comer said, “To Stony, from his N.”
There were still the things she couldn’t change: the shape of the face, the setting of the eyes. . . .
“I caught Steven in his shower, but he’s coming right over,” Lucy said. She looked exhausted. “He says—what’s that?”
“She had a child,” said Elizabeth, and said it again, carefully, while she looked for her coat. “She—had a child. Noreen.”
“Noreen?”
Elizabeth found her coat and put it on; she glanced distractedly about for her pocketbook and saw it in the chair where she’d flung it, contents spilling out. She said to Lucy’s staring face, “It’ll save time if I bring her picture down to the police station—where are my keys. . . .”
Her lipstick had rolled, her cigarettes were tilting out across the striped cushion; there were all the familiar trappings of nightmare. Lucy cut through them with impatience. “I’ll drive you, my car’s here. But oughtn’t we—”
“I’ll leave a note, Constance might be back before we are, or Steven . . . there was a pencil here this morning . . . oh, God, I’d better bring pictures of the children too . . .”
“I have a pencil,” said Lucy. “Go get the pictures, I’ll write a note . . .”
Noreen.
So quiet, so very solicitous, with those small deft hands. That air of almost pitiful innocence, the shadowed eyes that, Elizabeth realized now, could come from an excess of gaiety, a reckless spending of the emotions that must have damned and choked in this house. If you had a child of your own whom you couldn’t acknowledge, and had to take care of other children, bathe their small satiny bodies, see the wealth of love and belonging they’d been born to . . . Lucy—shrewd, noticing Lucy—had sensed something false from the beginning. If only—but there wasn’t time for that now.
Elizabeth managed to find one of the pictures they had taken under the tree at Christmas, with Maire looking seraphic for the camera and Jeep caressing his flyswatter.
The flyswatter. The pig . . . If she started to cry now it would be the undoing of everything, it would break through Lucy’s layer of strength and she herself would go crashing.
Lucy said briefly, writing at the telephone table, “Ready?”
“Yes. Let’s leave the front door open, in case Steven, or Constance . . .”
She stood on the bottom step of the stairs, watching Lucy’s fat little backhand that said with the haste of a telegram: “Constance —Children gone, out looking for them with Lucy. If you know anything call me at police station. Back soon.”
Elizabeth watched with a kind of dreadful fascination while her own signature flowed out from under Lucy’s pencil, sharply different from the script above. Forward-sloping, casually looped, as airy and expert as though Elizabeth herself had written it.
Lucy looked, too, and the pencil stopped on the tail of the “h” and dug sharply into the paper. There was a tiny explosion of breaking lead, and then their eyes, meeting slowly, locking.
Out of a kaleidoscope world, Elizabeth managed to say carefully, “Let’s go, Lucy.”
“Oh, no,” said Lucy slowly. “Let’s not.” Her hand reached out; without taking her eyes from Elizabeth’s face she crumpled the sheet of notepaper into her palm. She said almost casually, “We weren’t going anyway, you know—no farther than my car.”
The house shook under the wind, the gilt clock ticked. Elizabeth knew suddenly why Lucy’s eves had kept finding her face with such intensity ever since she had walked into the house. It hadn’t been shock, or pity; it had been a devouring fascination.
She said, “Where are my children, Lucy?” and must have stepped off the stairs, because Lucy said sharply, “Stay where you are!”
The whip hand. The voice like a whip, too, flicking out, biting in. Before Elizabeth could move, it came curling at her again. “You’re losing your husband,” said Lucy stingingly. “If you don’t want to lose your children too, you’ll do as you’re told.”
She was shockingly the same, except for her tone and her bright unwinking eyes. Elizabeth knew dimly that she was all the more dangerous for that. She said as quietly as she could, holding back desperation, “What do you want, Lucy? Tell me and I’ll—”
“Mrs. March,” said Lucy, smooth and ugly, “will reach for her ever-present checkbook. Oh, I’ve watched you, Elizabeth, how I’ve watched you. Quite the lady of the manor, weren’t you, when we’d go in to Bonwit’s? You could write a check—and I could sit up for nights in a row, sewing at some dreary little copy. Clever Lucy, however do you do it?”
It might have been fantasy but for Maire and Jeep, and the wood of the newel post pressed against her shoulder. Elizabeth thought back in bewilderment to the other woman coaxing her on shopping trips, urging a blouse, a dinner skirt, a nightgown—and realized what a fierce enjoyment she must have derived from every purchase. Something else to feed into the fund of hate. . . .
She said wonderingly, “You tore the roses, didn’t you, Lucy? And all the rest of it. I think you must be mad.”
“Oh, do you,” said Lucy mincingly. “I’m not, though. It’s just that you had everything—and I had nothing. I thought I’d like to see how you looked wearing your world around your ears, that’s all. It’s hardly
