For a split second, Annabelle Blair’s face was not impassive, and because of that tiny flashing change Maria felt called upon to explain what she remembered a moment later: that she had packed the letter with some other mail in her suitcase. And Annabelle, smooth and cool again, said, “It isn’t necessary, Miss Rowan. I hadn’t planned on renting the apartment, but for such a short time and under the circumstances . . .”
Had she, Maria wondered now, agreed only because of the letter? Almost certainly she hadn’t known of its existence before; a part of that swiftly-controlled reaction had been surprise. But then Maria had been surprised at the letter too.
It had come a few days before Christmas, addressed in a blue unfamiliar hand, forwarded from the old house in Connecticut where she had lived with her father until his death two years before. The rest of the mail that morning had been Christmas cards, and she had scooped the lot into her purse on her way to the bookshop . . .
There was still some coffee left in the little drip pot. While she waited for it to heat, Maria wandered violently around the apartment, hands gripped tightly together, and stared minutely at things she didn’t see while she concentrated on remembering everything about the letter that was so important to Annabelle Blair.
Good stationery: heavy, plain, the handwriting across it rapid and decisive, as you might expect from a woman who, twelve years ago, had been Gerald Mallow’s radiant bride in the face of her family’s bitter opposition. Maria couldn’t recall much of the wedding; she had been thirteen at the time and totally wretched in a navy blue breton which her father had somehow thought suitable for the occasion and which, unless she carried her head thrust forward like a turtle’s, rose eerily into the air. She did remember the set faces of the Hathaways and the Killians, her father’s half-amused detachment, and the slender defiant look of her cousin Louise’s back as she stood at the altar with Gerald.
It should have made for drama, but it didn’t. Louise never came back brimming with tears of remorse, nor did Gerald Mallow, as the family half-hoped, tire of her and her considerable money and turn her into the snow. Instead there were serene Christmas greetings every year and an occasional gay postcard from Florida or Bermuda, and the daring gesture turned over the years respectably dull.
So that the letter was, in a way, a legend come to life. Apart from that it was so idle a communication that Maria had wondered mildly that her cousin had bothered to write it at all.
It had begun: “Dear Maria—I don’t know whether you remember me but I remember you very well, you were at our wedding in a wide-brimmed navy hat.” That hat. “Did you know that Margaret Killian died in September? I think that leaves us each other’s only relatives. I am writing this from Chauncy, a small town in Massachusetts where Gerald has bought this old house and some land which he plans to sell to one of those huge housing enterprises. His secretary is along to expedite matters. We are all strangers to the East . . .”
Pleasant, rambling, and more than a trifle pointless. There was certainly no reason why, an hour after she had put it aside, Maria should suddenly think of the letter as a small half-hopeless gesture, like a hand lifted in supplication over the heads of a hostile crowd.
She had dismissed the feeling, uneasily, because out of his own deep shock at her mother’s death, her father had taught her to be everybody’s companion and nobody’s keeper, a spectator who could enjoy amusement without risk. Louise Mallow was hardly more than a name to her, and the bookshop in which Maria was part owner was at its busiest before Christmas. Maria had shelved the letter, telling herself that she would reply to it later.
But Christmas came and went, and there was the usual flood of January returns at the bookshop: the maiden aunt to whom somebody had sent a camping guide, the earnest young man who wanted to turn in Winston Churchill for a manual of Yogi exercises, the gentle widower for whom, suggestively, Five Thousand and One Knots were not enough.
And then the lawyer’s letter—also postmarked Chauncy— came, and baldly, shockingly, Louise and Gerald were dead and there were “effects.” Would Miss Rowan, at her convenience, present herself in Chauncy to claim these effects?
Maria had learned detachment, and Louise was after all a stranger, but a simple phrase like “each other’s only relatives” struck through that disarmingly. She began to wonder what would have happened if she had answered her cousin’s letter promptly: would Louise have asked her up to Chauncy during the holidays? And if she had gone would Louise—why did she think of this?—be alive now?
She went to Chauncy. Partly in response to the lawyer’s letter, mostly for the gesture she had left unanswered, and because her cousin Louise, if she had survived her husband of twelve years, would have had to go to court to claim even her dower right. And because she had a sudden feeling that her father’s well-studied detachment had not been a matter of armour but of blanketing, a comfortable insulation that hardly knew it was selfish. It wasn’t pleasant going to Chauncy as Louise Mallow’s cousin, because people placed only one interpretation on that.
No one thought of murder. Because Annabelle Blair wasn’t swaying and sultry or blond and fetching, no one thought of the twin deaths as anything but accident even when it was common knowledge that she would inherit. If she had flown to
