He was briefly torn between the certainty of being punished for taking this forbidden shortcut and the probability of getting someone of roughly his own age, but with more daring, into awesome trouble. Eventually he trotted home, bursting with virtue, to tell his mother about the whitish and queerly flattened ball visible through the new ice on Willet’s Pond.
Robert was a nagger, and twenty minutes later Henrietta Moss, armed purposefully with his books and lunch box, headed schoolwards with him again and detoured to peer through the ice for herself.
Robert did not go to school that day, and in the course of what followed nobody remembered to punish him at all.
Torrant knew later that there had been things to warn him, the small shock waves generated in a country town by any startling event. There was Mrs. Judd on the telephone in the lower hall, saying agitatedly, “Think of it, a little boy like that . . .”, the proprietress of the newspaper store shaking her head sagely and muttering something about drainage, the policeman holding court on the corner of the main street. But when the waitress at the Bluebird Cafe told him the news he gazed at her blankly, as though there were two Sarah Partridges and this one had nothing to do with him.
The Mrs. Partridge in Torrant’s mind—for whom he and Maria Rowan had waited until after nine o’clock at the Grotto the evening before—had decided not to come to Chauncy after all. On second thought she had distrusted this trip arranged by a total stranger, or perhaps his own intentness had frightened her off. In any case she had abandoned the project and stayed cosily at her sister’s home in Lynnfield.
That was one image; the other was what the waitress had just told him. The two clicked mercilessly together and became the actual Sarah Partridge, dragged an hour ago from a Chauncy pond.
And Torrant had put her there.
He left the restaurant and his untouched coffee, dropping a bill on the table and leaving the waitress wide-eyed. He got into the Renault and drove away from the town, looking at but not comprehending the arrowed signs. Fields and houses and other cars ravelled away behind him, but he would not have been able to find his way here again; he was wholly absorbed in the bitter knowledge that except for him Mrs. Partridge would be alive this morning, breathing the bleak air, occupying herself as usual, presently seeing the sun go down harmlessly on another day.
Without ever seeing her face, he had plucked her out of her existence in Lynnfield and killed her. And—might as well look at this too—he had complimented himself on his arrangements while doing so.
There was the taxi he had instructed her to take at South Station, the hour of her arrival deliberately falsified for Anna-belle Blair, but not for Maria Rowan. Torrant slid his mind past that with an effort and thought about the taxi instead, the safe sure means that was to have whisked Mrs. Partridge to their appointment at the Grotto.
But she had obviously been walking near the pond, and, familiar with the countryside, she had known the pond was there. She certainly hadn’t—this hard-working middle-aged woman who had sounded so cautious over the telephone-gone teetering along its icy edge for the sheer joy of risk. There must have been someone waiting . . .
Torrant’s numbness receded gradually, giving way to a controlled fury at whoever it was who had placed this black burden of responsibility on his shoulders. Had Annabelle Blair done it in person, standing back in the shadows with her blank-eyed stillness, or had she implemented someone?
She could buy people now, with the Mallow estate so nearly within her grasp. She would hardly tolerate having that snatched away by the random reappearance of a cleaning-woman, but would she dare risk an accomplice? Hired hands so often got hold of the whip, and she looked well aware of that, as carefully solitary now as she must have been while she steered Martin Fennister to suicide.
There was Simeon, of course—how sure of herself she had had to be in order to summon him boldly to the town where his friend had died. And Paulette Kirby, with greed and determination behind her ebullience. And Maria Rowan.
Torrant turned the car abruptly back towards Chauncy.
Mrs. Judd was in the lower hall again, with an air of having sped in from the kitchen at the sound of the front door closing. Torrant was no longer surprised at her nervous and propitiatory glance; he thought remotely that he might have been a tiger in a cage with one bar missing. He nodded without speaking and was heading toward the stairs when she said hesitantly, “Mr. Torrant, I don’t know whether you’ve heard—”
“About Mrs. Partridge? Yes, Mrs. Judd.”
“A terrible thing, isn’t it? And such a sight for a little boy to see. Now I suppose the police will be asking . . . What I wondered,” said Mrs. Judd, plunging, “is if under the circumstances I ought to say anything about the phone message Mrs. Partridge left for you yesterday. Did you find it, by any chance?”
Torrant stopped dead, staring at her through the gloom of the hall. She was elaborately hopeful, as though messages were something like four-leaf clovers, to be stumbled upon if you were lucky. He said, “No, I didn’t,” and kept his voice down with an effort. “What was the message, Mrs. Judd?”
“Something about the train she was taking, an earlier train, I think. I wrote it down, and I thought I put it on the table here until I’d have a chance to bring it upstairs—that’s .what I always do when I’m busy, and I had some potatoes boiling over,” said Mrs.
