The policeman gave his catch on ungentle urge forward, and light from the hall reached ruddily out for the shadowed face. It caught the bold curving planes of flesh, and shimmered in the heavy glass lenses protecting his eyes. She had seen that face before, she had talked to it, had said, “I’m looking for Mr. or Mrs. Ambrose Miller,” at a two-story house in Arlington.
She found her voice. She said shakily over the wind, “Officer, there’s been a kidnapping here. This man and—”
Jagoe—his name came back to her in the instant before he spoke—had been staring coolly at her, as though daring recognition. Now he glanced over her shoulder, at Lucy. He said in the high soft voice Elizabeth remembered, “You damned stupid fool. You—”
The policeman stopped him, after a blink of astonishment. He said to Elizabeth’s wet face, “Just a minute, ma’am, what’s that you said about a kidnaping?” and hoisted his captive briskly inside.
Elizabeth told him.
The words came out in a harsh tumble, further shaken by her glance at the gilt clock, and Lucy’s voice, interrupting, was damning. “I don’t know what to think. Officer, I’m utterly bewildered. Mrs. March has been ill, of course, and has been employing a nursemaid much too young for the job, who’s simply taken off on some lark of her own and brought the children with her. As for this man—” Her eyes roved with a remote and scornful air over Jagoe’s face, the white socks just visible over his shoes, the stained pigskin gloves. “Is it necessary to say I’ve never seen him before?”
“Oh, you’ve never seen me before, Mrs. Lucy Brent.” Jagoe’s rage came out in a high, slow trickle. “Then I suppose you’ve never—”
Elizabeth was sickened by what came after that; the policeman listened until a shocked and incredulous scarlet overtook him and he said peremptorily, “Here, now! I’ll call the station and report the children, Mrs. March, and then we’d better all go down and get the rights of this.”
Elizabeth’s ears still rang with Jagoe’s detailed obscenity. She wanted, out of a mixture of rage and wonder and revolt, never to look at Lucy again; Lucy who had gone to the Hotel Savoia with this man, who—why had she never realized this before?—had deliberately registered them under the name of March, in Elizabeth’s handwriting. That would be the evidence that had been shown to Oliver. . . .
But Lucy didn’t matter now, except that she or Jagoe must be made to tell where the children were, because she couldn’t stand much longer the peculiar torment that had begun inside her own head. It was a telescoping of all the years since Maire’s birth, and a blending of her voice with Jeep’s into a thin, lost-sounding cry. It was a condensation of panic and blind trust, calling, “Mama,” when she was unable to find or answer it.
The policeman started purposefully for the telephone. Elizabeth put her bowed head into her hands, pressing the heels of her palms in so that they hurt, and heard the front door open.
Oliver walked in.
His face was chalky, and grimmer than she had ever seen it, with a curious admixture of tenderness for Maire whom he carried still crying in his arms. He said over his shoulder to the policeman, “It’s okay, skip it,” but his eyes caught Elizabeth’s and didn’t leave them. Behind Oliver, Noreen Delaney was clutching Jeep. His cheeks were runneled with tears, his fast-closed eyelids the only clean portions of his sleeping face.
Noreen moved gently with him. Her own eyes were wide and hollowed as she came across the room to where Elizabeth was standing and crying without any sound at all. She contrived the transfer of Jeep very deftly, so that he barely stirred when Elizabeth’s arms came about him.
Maire stopped wailing at the sight of Elizabeth and the familiar room. She struggled higher in Oliver’s arms, peering over his shoulder at the assembled faces—Lucy’s in carven white ice, the policeman’s, confusedly gaping. It was at Jagoe that she directed the unnerving, single-track stare of childhood before she said simply, “Oun, Daddy.”
“He won’t hurt you, baby. Believe me, he won’t,” said Oliver softly between his teeth. He didn’t even glance at Jagoe; there was no one in the room for him but Elizabeth. He said almost lightly, “Speaking of which, did either of these—?”
“No,” said Elizabeth. “No, I’m all right.”
She slid Jeep to her hip and reached for Maire’s hand. She walked past Jagoe, she walked past Lucy, who flattened herself with a curiously feral movement. She heard the policeman say with desperate patience, “Mr. March, this man here—” and then she went on up the stairs to put the children to bed.
“But where were they?” said Elizabeth shakily, afterward. Her hands were still unreliable; she kept them tightly together in her lap, waiting for the reaction to go away. “I was half mad. I thought—”
“I took the children, Mrs. March.” On the couch, Noreen Delaney lifted haggard eyes. “I never dreamed you’d be back in time to miss them, but when Miss Ives called and told me Mrs. Brent was coming over to stay with the children, I got—frightened. It seemed so funny, things working out like that when you and Mr. March were both in Boston. I didn’t know what she might do if she got alone with the children, so I called a friend of mine, Rosemary Teale, and she came right over and drove us back to her place. We all stayed there until— “
Constance could stand it no longer; she interrupted in bewilderment, staring from face to face. “But I don’t understand. What made Noreen suspect—? Do you mean to say that she and Lucy Brent knew each other before?”
Lucy, a statuette, not glancing at any of them while she repeated her cool denials, had been allowed to
