Nothing about that to make her stomach drop precipitately away, as though she had been lost and then found again. Maria clasped her hands in her lap and regarded them absorbedly. And Torrant said amiably to Annabelle Blair, “I thought you’d like to hear the good news. Your cleaning-woman is coming back.”
There was a tiny complete silence, more noticeable than a sound. Then Annabelle Blair said politely, “I don’t believe it could be the same person. The cleaning-woman we had here has moved away to Connecticut.”
“But she’s planning a visit to Chauncy—we are talking about Mrs. Partridge, aren’t we?” inquired Torrant, still amiable. “She’s arriving on the noon train tomorrow, according to her sister here in town. With a little persuasion you might get her to help out for a few days.”
To Maria it sounded like elaborate nonsense—surely a woman living alone, and particularly a woman who left her house as seldom as Annabelle Blair, couldn’t be in dire need of a cleaning-woman’s services.
But Annabelle was saying slowly, “Yes, I suppose I might.” Maria glanced away from the intent and whitened face, and reached for her teacup.
She was bewildered by what happened then. Torrant’s hands swooped down and caught her own, the right one a fraction of an inch away from the cup’s handle; she thought for a dizzying instant that the cup was going to go. Then he pulled her to her feet with a light and practiced motion. He said, smiling, “I may be vague about names but I never forget a cocktail date—and you did ask me, remember?”
Maria freed her hands quietly. She said good-by to Annabelle Blair, whose face looked queerly mottled, and found her arm slipped through Torrant’s at the door. She didn’t understand any of this; she was stiff with resentment at being used so briskly for Torrant’s own ends, and at his cool assumption that she would be a good girl and respond on cue.
The white door closed behind them. Two steps away from it in darkness, Maria moved free. She said crisply, “I suppose there was a point to all that?”
“Yes,” said Torrant, equally crisp, and crossed the street at her side. He was, Maria realized astoundedly, very angry.
He entered the garage with her in silence, striking a match to find the wall switch. “I think I’d better come up with you for a few minutes, if you don’t mind. For one thing, Miss Blair will be watching to see if I do. For another, I’d like to talk to you.”
Maria nodded, set completely adrift by his tone, and led the way upstairs without speaking. She turned on lamps and the long vivid room grew up around them, dismissing a little of the chill.
Torrant closed the door and leaned against it and looked at her thoroughly, as though he were a psychiatrist and she an interesting new patient. He said at last with elaborate gentleness, “When you were little, did your parents ever tell you about taking candy from strangers?”
Maria stared back at him, flushing. She said impatiently, “Oh—” and stopped dead.
This time the silence was longer. It contained Annabelle’s sudden affability as she poured the tea, her explanation that it might taste strange, her annoyance at the sound of the door knocker.
“You’re obviously here because you aren’t satisfied about your cousin’s death,” Torrant said, still patient, “and Miss Blair, being no fool, is well aware of it. If she’s what you think she is, didn’t it occur to you that she might be a rather risky companion for tea? She seemed disappointed when we left.”
Not disappointed, thought Maria, remembering. Furious and somehow balked, her skin wearing the mottled look of concealed passion. Her own face stayed hot. Part of that was shock at the thought of what might have been attempted in that sombre living room across the road; most of it was humiliation at standing here like a child under the biting tolerance of Torrant’s questions.
The kettle, boiling just then, as though Annabelle Blair had drawn up two alternatives. The bribe, and after that, without the slightest reaction to its refusal, the invitation to tea . . .
Torrant looked disconcertingly into Maria’s mind. “What were you talking about, just before I knocked?”
But she had the point now, and she would not be scolded for this further naïvete. “Nothing,” said Maria shortly, and turned away to light a cigarette. “But I thought you were a friend of Miss Blair’s?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then that business about the cleaning-woman . . . ?” Torrant crossed the room to the kitchenette alcove and stood directly in front of the window, letting himself be seen by any watcher outside. He said, “Mrs. Partridge worked for the Mallows for a week or ten days, and was in the house for a couple of hours every day. I think she worries Miss Blair, and for reasons I won’t go into now I want her worried. For that matter, I don’t think she likes my coming up here with you like this. People are apt to match notes.”
Maria ignored the disarming air of that. She said with faint triumph, “If that’s true, wasn’t it rather foolish to tell Miss Blair exactly when Mrs. Partridge was arriving?”
“If she were going to be on that train. But she’s coming tonight. I gathered from her tone that she liked your cousin.” And, it crossed Maria’s mind to wonder where she had picked up the impression, other people hadn’t.
“The earliest train she could catch will get her to Boston at a few minutes after seven. I told her to take a taxi from South Station and meet me at the Grotto for dinner at about eight.
