This was her aunt’s; the guest bath was across the hall and off the plant room, which had been chosen for that purpose because of its exposure. The basin was occupied by a tube of toothpaste. Amanda opened the cabinet above to replace it, and stared.
Did a stroke sometimes have a precursor? Yes; she had read somewhere that people could suffer very small ones, causing subtle personality changes, without even being aware of the fact. Mrs. Balsam, a relatively lighthearted housekeeper when her husband was alive, had turned into something of a martinet after his death —“Like Englishmen in the jungle, I suppose,” she had explained apologetically to Amanda—and she would never ordinarily have rummaged through her medicine cabinet this way, toppling bottles and vials and tubes.
Not that there was all that much there, because she was not a believer in panaceas for all occasions. Aspirin, the blood-pressure pills which she took only sporadically because they had side effects, deodorant, nonprescription eyedrops, sunscreen, rubbing alcohol, capsules for the hay fever to which Mrs. Balsam was prey, and something of which only a small red cap remained.
Amanda handed the damp washcloth to Rosie, said, “I’ll be right back,” and crossed the hall and snapped on the light in the other bath. This medicine cabinet contained far less, only the overnight amenities which a thoughtful hostess would provide, but the effect of a frantic, uncaring search was the same.
She felt a flash of compassion and guilt. When had she seen her aunt last? Two weeks tomorrow, when they had gone to see a group of touring aboriginal dancers, woolly-haired and ashy-gray, whose crouching prowl with knees lifted high, accompanied only by a strange clacking instrument and culminating in a leap, was enough to bring a chill to the spine.
Mrs. Balsam, coming back for a drink at Amanda’s house afterwards, had seemed her usual self—“How would you like to have one of those running after you in a bad temper?”—but then Amanda herself had been somewhat preoccupied for a month. It occurred to her now that her aunt might have been taking a medication more dramatic than she cared to admit to, something in, say, the nitroglycerine class, and become panicky when she mislaid it.
In the other bathroom, Rosie was sitting on the floor and applying the washcloth industriously to her perfectly clean feet; was this out of deference to the guest room, or some association with hospital-bed baths? Amanda tucked her in, opened one window a cautious few inches, remembered her own spotlit feeling out in the dark with Drougette and drew the flowery curtains together. She was about to turn out the light when Rosie sat up in alarm and said, “Where my raggie?”
Luckily, Maria Lopez had remembered even in her haste to pack the strip of frayed and knotted cloth, no-colored from countless washings, which had once been the pink satin binding of a crib blanket and was now Rosie’s cherished sleeping companion. Amanda put this dubious talisman into the small hand, said goodnight, and left the door half open so that light from the hall streamed reassuringly over the foot of the bed. Then, although she was not fanatically tidy by nature, and certainly not in someone else’s house, she straightened the contents of both medicine cabinets.
It was consciously the erasure of something warped, which she wished she hadn’t seen at all.
The man in the shelter was ignorant of the jostling and toppling he had done in his one excursion out of hiding here. That had been obscured from him by his rage at the fact that he had found no antibiotic for his flaming, throbbing hand; no painkiller other than aspirin, to which he was dangerously allergic.
He had been driven precipitately below again, clutching a tube of antiseptic cream from which the cap had fallen loose, by the rumble of some heavy vehicle approaching the house. It wasn’t an ordinary car, and it threw him into a frenzy of fear. Suppose the old woman had discovered somehow that he was here, suppose the dog had sniffed him out?
The cut, a deep jagged tear inflicted by barbed-wire two nights earlier, had infected at once. Climbing and then descending the ladder had been agony, and seemed to have extended the area of red around the puffed-out heel of his hand. If all went as planned he would be out of here tomorrow afternoon, but he couldn’t bear this pounding, suppurating thing that long; he was beginning to have a terror of gangrene, of being shut up here with his own smell, of ultimately losing his hand.
The shelter was very cold. The electric heater had worked for only two or three hours, so he had spent most of his time stretched out in a lower bunk, blanket huddled around him. Now, by an association of ideas, it occurred to him that penicillin and other antibiotics were often kept in a refrigerator.
The old woman had to go to bed sometime. After his single expedition to the upper regions he thought he could find the refrigerator in the dark, and if in spite of all his caution she woke up and came out and found him, she was, after all, an old woman.
Chapter 4
There was nothing about her to suggest that by the middle of Christmas week Ellie Peale’s name would feature in newspaper headlines, her face flash out of television screens. The pose used, a three-quarter view in which she gazed questioningly at the camera, seemed to indicate her own surprise at such a turn of events.
She was nineteen; small, five feet one inch, and slender, a hundred pounds, with brown eyes and darker brown hair.
