Or had this door been opened a short time ago, while another face looked in?
It was a pleasant room, perhaps because it had been furnished out of odds and ends, and surprisingly airy after the shadowed space below. A windowed kitchenette alcove faced the old house across the road, fir branches brushed against the glass in the dormer at the far end. The walls were painted a warm off-white that took kindly to chintz curtains, an old rocker in rakish brick-red, a flowered armchair beside a black-lacquered bookcase, the dull blue studio bed where Maria slept.
The field glasses she had left on the counter beside the sink were gone.
Maria made sure of it after she had closed the door behind her and—an ironic gesture now—locked it. Her first reaction was a stung anger, although she knew that wasn’t quite reasonable: the field glasses did not belong to her, and using them as she had was a further abuse. But for anyone to unlock her door, to enter her room in her absence, to be at leisure to inspect anything she owned . . .
Anyone? Annabelle Blair.
The radiator gave an enigmatic hiss. Maria stopped her furious walking and sat down in the flowered armchair, wondering abruptly if this was all calculated and she was responding nicely, if Annabelle had left the field glasses in the garage deliberately, knowing that Louise Mallow’s cousin would use them and thereby provoke an open breach.
She hadn’t wanted to rent Maria the garage apartment. The presence of the real-estate agent, to whom Gerald Mallow’s lawyer had sent Maria, had forced her to, because it would look odd if the secretary who had benefited by Gerald’s will refused to accommodate his dead wife’s only relative.
But if Maria confronted Annabelle Blair with the entering of her apartment, the other woman would be justified in drawing herself up, in saying, “I’m afraid, Miss Rowan, that under the circumstances . . .” she would smile her faint cold smile and be rid of Maria without blame.
It might be that, or it might be the silent and contemptuous rebuke it seemed on the surface. Either way, Annabelle had made the first move on the shadowy board.
That was at one o’clock. At nearly two the slam of a car door in the road outside brought Maria to the kitchenette window. Annabelle Blair, black-coated, unhurried, was walking around the front of a green car that looked familiar to Maria. She couldn’t place it until the driver’s arm went out to close the far door more securely. A cuff of purple tweed under some nameless brown fur, a plump red-nailed hand with a brief flash of rings—Mrs. Kirby, the ebullient real-estate agent who had handled both the sale of the Mallow house and the renting of the garage apartment.
Business, wondered Maria at the window, or one of those unlikely friendships that women drift into?
At the moment it didn’t look very like either. Mrs. Kirby called something indistinct through the snow, and called again before Annabelle stopped and half-turned, something almost savage in the motion of her shoulders. She nodded. Then she turned again, put out a hand to the lock of the white door under the wisteria—keys for any and all occasions, thought Maria grimly—and, a moment later, closed the door behind her.
Vanguard Street settled back into its peculiar isolation,. and in spite of her odd expectancy Maria’s telephone did not ring.
Darkness came early, wiping the snowy afternoon light off the windows. Maria patched together a dinner out of her waning supplies and ate it sitting in the flowered armchair with her eyes firmly on a book. She had coffee then and cleaned the little kitchenette meticulously, a nuisance she rushed through when she dined at home in New York. When that was finished and there was nothing to do but pick up her book again or go to bed, she looked around at the silent apartment with the night at its windows and felt flat and a little foolish; she wondered for the first time what she expected to get out of all this vigilance.
Statistics on Annabelle Blair’s weekly milk consumption, or the name of the laundry she dealt with? The extent of her daily exercise, the frequency with which she had groceries delivered? Because surely the woman who had persuaded Gerald Mallow to change his will in her favor, and who had then contrived the Mallows’ death in an accident that went unquestioned, would show her no more than that.
Annabelle Blair, the perfect secretary, would have thought of everything.
Maria took a bath in the midget tub and prepared herself for an unprecedented amount of sleep. She didn’t get it. She was probing in the bottom of her suitcase for her brush; idly, she lifted out the thin sheaf of papers she had brought with her, intending to do something about them, and discovered that the removal of the field glasses had been an excuse or perhaps an afterthought.
Because the letter was gone, the random innocuous letter that was only important because the signature in blue ink at the bottom—Louise Mallow—had been cut so very soon afterwards into a white marble headstone.
The field glasses were one thing; her dead cousin’s letter was quite another.
Carefully, feeling cold and shocked, Maria turned out the contents of her suitcase on the studio couch and went through them, making herself shake out and fold everything that might possibly conceal a smallish sheet of cream notepaper. She did it scrupulously but without conviction, because she knew very well where she had put the letter. So had Annabelle Blair known, because Maria had told her, explaining herself like a defensive child.
She remembered clearly standing in the dim stiff living room of the house across the road while Mrs. Kirby introduced her and then went on, loudly persuasive, into the subject of the garage apartment. Annabelle
