Torrant, listening, felt as though he had reached the dead end of this particular street. There were no loose ends here, only the familiar scene of the wife counting her husband’s drinks, the familiar tragedy at the finish. Beside him, Maria stirred. Across the table, Maurice said, “It was quiet then, see—nothing doing at the bar at all. So I could hear them talking just before they left, and she sure sounded nervous about the car.
Abruptly, Torrant was back at that table again. And Louise Mallow said, “Gerald, I tell you I’m frightened.”
“Let’s not go into that again, sweet. I told you I’d see to it and I will.”
“But every time we drive away like this I keep wondering—”
“Don’t. She’s built for stress and strain. But if it bothers you that much . . .”
The waiter had arrived with the check then, ending the conversation. Maurice seemed regretful about having spun out his tale; he had been giving Maria a number of dark and admiring glances. Torrant said perfunctorily, “Thanks very much—have a drink on us when you get the chance,” and watched Maurice depart reluctantly in the direction of the bar. He said to the still-silent Maria, “Ready for another?” and nodded at their waiter.
He wondered whether Louise Mallow had been frightened of the car’s being tampered with or of Annabelle Blair, who knew so much about Gerald’s business affairs; he wondered whether Gerald had used the feminine gender about his convertible or the woman he thought so arrogantly that he had bought.
He glanced at his watch, and he was suddenly relieved that Sarah Partridge was arriving by taxi.
Mrs. Partridge had no intention of taking a taxi.
From South Station to Chauncy it was upwards of fifteen dollars, if you gave the driver anything at all, and by catching a train an hour earlier than the one she had mentioned to Torrant she would be able to make connections and be fifteen dollars to the good. It wasn’t only a matter of finance; Mrs. Partridge’s hard-working soul rebelled at such a lavish gesture.
She had persuaded her sister Molly to throw a few things into a bag for her while she telephoned the Lynnfield taxi, and her shouted instructions to call Mr. Torrant in Chauncy about this change of schedule had almost made her miss the train.
There hadn’t been time to buy a magazine. She settled stoically down to her journey, a round rubbery little woman in a black cloth coat and a hat with a sat-upon air. She didn’t look remotely holidayish, but behind her folded lips and her formidable brown gaze, she was pleasantly excited over this unusual development in her life.
The Mallows, dead like other people for all their finery. That had been a shock in itself, because she never looked at a newspaper and her sister wasn’t a letter-writer. Mrs. Partridge couldn’t cudgel up any feeling at all about the husband; she was dimly but genuinely sorry about the wife. She was a little confused as to Torrant’s interest in the whole affair, and doubtful about the wisdom of going to meet a strange man until Molly assured her bluntly that her honor would be perfectly safe. And for the moment, even though she didn’t know how she could help him, Torrant had made her feel important. Not an anonymous creature to be instructed about the mop-boards, or scolded about a dull patch on the dining room table, but someone to be listened to with interest.
At Providence, dutifully, Mrs. Partridge began to think.
She caught the connecting train at South Station with several minutes to spare. It stopped at what seemed to be every mailbox, but the fifteen dollars of saved cab fare was consolation for that, and there would still be time to freshen up at her sister’s house before she went to meet Mr. Torrant.
There was only one other passenger for Chauncy, a college boy who swung off the train before it had stopped; by the time Mrs. Partridge had dismounted he was already an echo of footsteps and a diminishing whistle. Overnight bag gripped firmly in one hand, she left the lighted platform and walked briskly into the darkness.
Hazel Street, then right on Cherry and up the hill to Willet’s Pond: her sister’s house was only around the curve at the foot of the answering descent. The night was icy and quiet around her, but Mrs. Partridge was hardened to discomfort and, a countrywoman, unbothered by small random noises in the dark.
What might have sounded like following feet, if you didn’t know better, was the occasional shift of branches overhead, the reaction of wood to bitter cold, a quake from the iced-over pond. What might have been breath behind her, surprisingly close, was the dip of a shrub—
Mrs. Partridge’s body went into the pond like something out of a cruel comedy: a thin crash, a splash, a great untidy black star in the faint glisten of ice. Moments later there was Mrs. Partridge’s head, breaking the surface in a terrified , stillness of mouth and eyes, and presently that was gone, too.
CHAPTER 10
ROBERT MOSS, aged nine, stopped on his way to school to speculate upon the faintly sunken star in the ice. He stopped because it was his habit to linger wherever possible on this particular journey, and because everything about Willet’s Pond was fascinating for the simple reason that the pond was out of bounds.
It was a deep, dangerous place; a magnet for children in the summer and a killer of one almost every year, with its thick lazy weeds concealed under an innocent surface. In the winter it was equally tempting, freezing more smoothly than any other pond in town.
But it wasn’t quite smooth this morning. Standing near the unrailed edge, oblivious of his lunch box and school books and the bite in the gray air, Robert considered that. There were always a number of boys who ignored
