The children, Elizabeth thought doggedly. Mustn’t allow herself to forget the only thing that mattered. If Lucy wanted money, why didn’t she—
But Lucy was staring at her, and saying curiously, “You never thought you’d want something you couldn’t buy, did you, Elizabeth? Because you’ve always had everything. The clothes you wanted, the home you wanted, a husband so deaf and dumb and blind to anyone else that he only spoke to other women to consult them about you when you got home from the hospital. ‘What shall we do about Elizabeth?’ Never mind that you were all right, and the children were all right—just poor, dear Elizabeth. You lost a child, yes—but you had two others safe at home. Do you realize,” said Lucy, suddenly shaking with rage, “that I was to come to the rescue—I, who’ll never have a child at all?”
This was it. Far away—and how long ago?—Lucy’s remembered voice said about a Christmas puppy, “We’re to have the patter of four little feet instead of two, and something to tie Lucy down.”
This was the seed of Lucy’s hatred. Left alone, it mightn’t have grown to the monstrous thing it was, but there was Oliver, whom Lucy must have wanted, and there was the symbol of the checkbook. Not the money itself, but the gesture; even now, standing in a controlled terror, Elizabeth knew that. No matter how classic the circumstances, Lucy could not be bought, could never have been bought. What she wanted of Elizabeth, what she had wanted all along with such terrible eagerness, was not her money but her destruction, complete, in a wiping out of love and sanity and safety.
And Elizabeth knew now what she had to do.
She moved, breaking the rigidity that seemed to have been a matter of hours rather than minutes. She couldn’t see the telephone, but it was there, behind Lucy’s thin braced body. She said, “I’m going to call the police,” and took a step forward.
Lucy moved too, but it was only the hand that had stayed behind her back while the other crumpled the note with the betraying forgery. She had been holding something that, while Elizabeth froze, took a slow silver bite at the air.
Lucy had the kitchen scissors.
Shining, complicated things: you could cut spinach with them, or uncap bottles, or unscrew stubborn jar tops. You could sever a telephone wire with them very easily, or open a vein. Lucy must have gone for them as soon as she finished her call—
Her telephone call. Elizabeth made herself stop staring at the scissor points and looked at Lucy instead. “You’re waiting for someone, aren’t you, Lucy?”
“So are you.”
“Who?”
Lucy laughed, a sharp startling sound. “Who do you think?”
The back of Elizabeth’s neck was wet. She said the name as she thought it, slowly, incredulously; “Steven?” and Lucy laughed again and said shortly, “You’re more of a fool than I took you for.”
The telephone rang. Elizabeth felt her heart catch and pause, and saw Lucy stiffen. It rang again, and it was all she could do to stay still, to go on watching and realize with a sudden quickening that if she had a chance at all, if the trap were not to close completely, it was this.
Because Lucy, in spite of her immobility, didn’t like the loud imperative summons either, or the things it had to mean—a hand holding a receiver somewhere, a voice waiting impatiently to speak, a wonderment growing in even the most casual mind, because houses containing two small children were rarely vacant at this hour of the night.
The telephone rang again, and Elizabeth steeled herself. If she could reach it before it stopped . . . Lucy’s first peak of triumph was past; she was edgy now with the waiting and the delicate, dangerous balance between them. It showed in a flicker of pulse at one temple, a rigid stilling of her fingers so that the scissors pointed awkwardly in. She had been breathing fast and audibly before; she seemed now not to be breathing at all.
Gather your muscles, so very quietly, aim for that thin strong unmoving wrist. The whole maneuver had to be a single uncoiling action, or Lucy would be warned and the scissors might find her face.
The phone sounded once more—for the last time? Elizabeth took a final lightning look at that other face—and felt every impulse in her body come to an astonished halt.
Lucy Brent seemed to have forgotten her existence. Her eyes, dark in the pallid high-boned face, had the huge silent swelling stare of a cat’s. And she wasn’t only watching. She was listening, filtering sounds out of the windy night. Elizabeth, who had heard only the roaring and oblivious silence of desperate concentration, listened too, gaze trained warily on the woman with the scissors.
That long trembling scrape was the lilacs bowing against the windowpanes. The thump was a shutter, flung loose in the wind—
But the brief ringing peal, so close to Elizabeth that she jumped, was the doorbell.
The doorbell.
She knew later that one of the most difficult things she had ever done in her life was turn her back on Lucy and that dangerous stillness. That—waiting. As though, when she reached the front door after five or six running, interminable steps, she might let in another and horrifyingly familiar enemy—the person for whom Lucy waited.
She wrenched at the doorknob, and it protested—or did she sob?—and the door swung wide so suddenly that she swayed.
Nineteen
AN ENORMOUS PINK POLICEMAN, so like a policeman that he might have sprung from Elizabeth’s own wild brain, stood or the step, holding his visor against the buffeting of the wind.
He said politely, “Mrs. March? We’re just checking around— your husband called the station and asked us to. Has this man any business here?”
Elizabeth had her attention so riveted on his own rosy reassurance that it was an effort even to look away at the man anchored firmly beside and a
