Elizabeth bitterly resented the scene that followed. Maire, who had already denied anything to do with the roses, denying it more vehemently. Oliver saying patiently, “It’s all right, honey, no one’s going to scold you. We just want to know, and then we’ll all forget it. I bet it was fun—was it?” and Maire, her face already a bewildered scarlet, bursting into frightened sobs because her three-year-old world had turned upside down and she didn’t know how to defend herself.
Elizabeth cried at last, “Oh, stop it, can’t you see she’s telling the truth?”
Noreen, silently disapproving, had gone upstairs to put Jeep into his bath. Oliver kissed Maire, perched her on his shoulder and carried her up. Constance said in a low voice, “You know, of course what it must have been. Noreen had some sort of accident with them, and then did that to make it look like the children. She seemed quite upset when she was cleaning up.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “You didn’t talk to her.”
In the kitchen, shaking the crimson flutter into the wastebasket, Noreen had glanced up apologetically. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. March, I tried to get it all cleaned up before anyone saw.”
Elizabeth had a flicker of hope. “Oh, I see. You—”
The girl colored instantly, her eyes wide and startled. “Oh, I didn’t, Mrs. March. Your lovely flowers—I can’t imagine how it happened. . . .”
No way out there, because her bewilderment was like Maire’s and there was, although for different reasons, the same inability to fight back. And because Elizabeth was almost sure she had caught in Noreen’s eyes, and had had to pretend to overlook, the same incredulous speculation she had caught in Oliver’s.
Dinner, coffee; Constance and Oliver a little more talkative than usual and sending—weren’t they?—worried messages at each other. Elizabeth found herself always one topic behind, felt her mouth curving meaninglessly and her gaze too absorbed, as though she were the hostess and these two difficult guests. There was still the evening to get through, three hours of it if she were to cling to normalcy, to behave as though nothing had happened at all.
As though adult hands hadn’t deliberately torn and mutilated the roses. Not an accident, with the stripped stems standing formally in the pitcher, but the mockery of mischief, a frightful parody of a prank. As though evil had gone romping through the house.
The book on the Hiss trial; where had she left off? Elizabeth went through the motions of finding her place and glanced up instead at the quiet room around her.
At the desk at the other end of the room, Constance was seated solidly at her evening pastime of recipe-clipping. Lamplight shone down on the pale brown hair, profiled the long nose, the musing lips, the faintly stubborn chin. It was, thought Elizabeth, like a character-cameo: the odd mixture of greed and austerity, naivete and a disapproving fortyish firmness. While she watched, her cousin held up a clipping and frowned at it, and the scissors flashed with a surprising violence, slivering the paper.
Oliver, stretched at an easy angle in the deep leather chair, was intent on a newspaper column, dark head bent. She couldn’t see his eyes but his mouth looked skeptical. His whole attitude was completely absorbed in what he was reading. She had been mistaken at dinner, then; he had forgotten about the roses, he—
Without warning, Oliver’s eyes met hers over the edge of newspaper. There was nothing casual about the suddenly lifted glance. He was doing, Elizabeth thought, exactly what she was doing— pretending to read, wondering, remembering. She dropped her own gaze sedulously, turned a page.
Two alternatives: which was nicer?
She hadn’t left the dining room when she thought she had; she had simply stood there, her fingers following an independent pattern of their own, her mind not registering this.
Or someone else had come by and wrenched the heads off the roses. If she lifted the protective covering off the ‘someone else’ it became Steven or Lucy Brent, or Constance or Oliver. There was also the possibility that Noreen was lying, but if that were true then Maire could be lying too, and Maire was not.
Steven, Lucy, Constance—Oliver.
Could this, wondered Elizabeth raggedly, be what we are going to do about Elizabeth?
Eleven o’clock was the normal time of release. Elizabeth rose and was startled to find how easily deception came. The yawn, the casual, “I’ll look at the children, shall I?” to Oliver, the carrying out of the coffee cups. In the upper hall Constance said abruptly, “You look terribly tired, Elizabeth. Why don’t you stay in bed tomorrow—just read and nap? Noreen’s here and there won’t be anything I can’t take care of.”
“I might,” Elizabeth said, and forced a smile. “You’re awfully good, Constance. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”
“Nonsense.” Constance blushed through her briskness. “It’s been nice for me too, you know. Hadn’t you better take one of your pills tonight . . . ?”
‘It’s been nice;’ did that mean Constance was about to conclude her visit? Elizabeth went along the hall to the children’s room and opened the door with caution. All she could see of Maire under the quilt was pink-gold curls and an outflung arm; she nearly stepped on Jeep, peacefully asleep on the floor beside his crib. She stooped, lifted him into the crib, kissed the warm cheek gently and pulled up the covers. Jeep made an instant and drowsy demand for his truck. She found it, put it into the groping fingers and tiptoed out.
There was no hope of pretending sleep before Oliver tonight; he was there in the bedroom when she came in. Elizabeth turned down her bed and got undressed in silence. Oliver took studs out of his shirt cuffs, put them in a leather box and said casually, “By the way, when do you go to Hathaway?”
“For my checkup? The first week in December—I’ve
