For the first time she began to show reaction, hands going to her cheeks in remembered dread. She said falteringly, “I didn’t know what to do. I thought that maybe if I stayed and did as they told me, I’d be able to catch Mrs. Brent at something—because I could see by then that she was so jealous of you,” her eyes went to Elizabeth, “that she hated you even more than she hated me.”
“If you’d only come to us in the beginning—” That was Oliver, keeping his voice in check.
“Would you have believed me,” Noreen made a small hopeless gesture, “If I’d made accusations with no proof at all about a very close friend of yours? When you’d never seen me before a few weeks ago—and had a child you didn’t know about and was using an assumed name?”
She said it quietly, forcing them to consider it. Oliver stared at the fire in silence; Constance, on the couch, shifted uneasily. Elizabeth remembered her rush of certainty earlier that evening when she had found the photograph of the child in Noreen’s suitcase, and said slowly, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. . . .”
“I wonder—what about her child?” asked Constance awkwardly in the silence that followed the soft closing of Noreen’s door upstairs.
Elizabeth shook her head, seeing again the small cotton dress on the girl’s bed. Unfinished. She would ask tomorrow, because by tomorrow she would have room in her mind for something else beyond the indelible picture of Lucy, braced, vicious, holding the kitchen scissors. Had Lucy, waiting for Jagoe to arrive and turn to advantage the inexplicable absence of the children, intended merely to cut the telephone wire if it became necessary?
Or, if Elizabeth had struggled with her, would she have used the scissors in another way?
She would never know that, nor would there ever be a firm base to her own conviction that Lucy, activated solely by her own destroying hatred, had allowed herself to be coaxed into a scheme for profit as well. With the stolen checkbook, the driver’s license, the hair dye, they wouldn’t have had to use the ransom money until—something Jagoe had said in his rage came back to Elizabeth—they were safely away. The plan itself had been hurriedly contrived, forced by her own announcement of a trip to the Cape. Lucy couldn’t allow her victim to leave the source of contamination, because peace and perspective might have undone all her slow and infinitely cunning work. She had gambled everything on tonight; that was why she had looked so white and brittle and unlike herself at Elizabeth’s unexpected return. . . .
How very delicate the timing had been, how slender the margin of safety between Noreen’s departure with the children and Lucy’s arrival at the house. Elizabeth looked up at Oliver, who had reappeared with fresh drinks for all of them, and said, “What made you phone the police when you did?”
“I called here to say that if it was too late when I got rid of the Treadwells I’d stay in town. When I didn’t get any answer—it was about a quarter of six—I waited ten minutes and tried again. I got thinking about the fire in the studio, and,” said Oliver grimly, “I phoned the police here and turned the Treadwells over to poor Bishop and got into my car and drove like hell. It seems that the Teale girl—Noreen’s friend—called my office when Noreen turned up at her apartment with the kids. They told her I was on my way home, so there they all were in the girl’s car, half-frozen, waiting at the bridge.”
The girl’s car, waiting . . . something stirred in Elizabeth’s mind, became the memory of a black car, the faintly familiar figure of a man, sun bouncing from his glasses—and Constance. She sent a quick startled look at her cousin, and Constance was standing, playing nervously with a pin at her throat, clearly wanting to get something uttered and having trouble with it.
It came with a rush. “I suppose we’d better have something to eat—sandwiches, I thought,” said Constance distractedly, and then, “No, let me . . . I did want to tell you both, though it seems such an odd time for it, that—that I’m going to be married to Horace Willett.”
In the middle of their exclamations she escaped to the kitchen, blushing brilliantly, and Elizabeth swallowed an unsteady impulse to laughter. Aunt Kate’s vigilance over the affections of her useful daughter had instilled a habit of secrecy in Constance, and the evasions, the mysterious exhilaration, the experiments with uplifted hair boiled down to nothing more sinister than Mr, Willett. No wonder his distant figure had seemed familiar; he was the rosy, prosperous owner of the market where Elizabeth dealt and where, for the past four months, Constance had shopped so diligently. . . .
But Constance had left the room, and she was suddenly alone with Oliver, and almost afraid to move and find that although Lucy was gone the glass wall was still there.
But if Lucy had built the wall, the hard polished coldness between two people who loved each other, she herself had laid the groundwork. It had begun, she realized bewilderedly, with her own silent retreat in the hospital—and after that, when Lucy had started to make such skillful use of the emotional temperature of the house, she had walked arrogantly away from Oliver, putting more and more distance between them, expecting him to follow blindly and without question. And Oliver, stubborn, baffled, hurt beyond comprehension, had not.
. . . Had Lucy left her mark after all?
Constance moved distantly about in the kitchen, and for Elizabeth, suddenly and enormously shy, it
