A minute ticked by and then another. Annabelle was not going to answer the door. Torrant quoted softly under his breath, “Miss Otis regrets—” and across the road Simeon gave the envelope a final flick and turned away. He had none of the self-consciously brisk, busy-anyway look of a man who is sure he has been outwaited. He was, very faintly, smiling.
He was halfway to his car when his head came up sharply. Torrant got only a rapid glance of the beaked face as it lifted; instinctively he had put out a hand and caught Maria’s wrist and pulled her roughly away from the window. Her hip collided with a corner of the counter, and she closed her eyes and said tartly, “Thank you.”
“Sorry.” Torrant moved abruptly out of the alcove. He could not have explained the lightning fear that had struck through his mind when Simeon glanced up at the window. But Mrs. Partridge had somehow turned into Maria Rowan, dragged from a pond with her dark hair dripping because she saw things she shouldn’t see. She was openly intent about it; all she lacked, Torrant thought irritably, was a fedora.
He said decisively, “Mrs. Partridge changes things. You’ll be much better off back in New York and out of this. You’re naturally concerned, and if you like I can keep in touch—”
“Thank you,” said Maria composedly. “I’ll be right here.” Torrant gave her a weary look. He knew at the back of his mind that this was unfair, that the claim she exerted, the demand to be cared for and worried about, was unconscious on her part. It was a matter of walk, possibly, or depth of gaze or cut of features—but it was there. He could not let anything happen to her.
He used the only weapon he had; he said coolly, “About the only thing you can be certain of during your cousin’s stay here is that her husband left her out of his will. Are you sure you want to know why?”
“Yes,” said Maria after a second’s silence. “Quite sure.” Her head had gone back a little; apart from that she showed no reaction at all. After a moment she took a cigarette and lit it, deliberate and thoughtful, and deposited the burnt match carefully in an ashtray. She said with a random air, “It was two years, wasn’t it, since you’d seen Martin Fennister?”
“Yes.”
“People change,” Maria remarked to her cigarette.
Torrant sifted that instantly, with a kind of ferocious amusement: Martin losing his mind, unknown to his wife, his doctor, his friends, his neighbors and his professional contacts, and suffering a delusion about his father’s death . . . He glanced at Maria’s challenging eyes, gave her a small ironic bow and reached for his hat.
Something toppled from the bookcase as he lifted the hat, Maria’s navy pocketbook. Torrant bent for it, his inner gaze on another pocketbook, Annabelle Blair’s ready and waiting with her coat and gloves and suitcase. Somewhere, cataloguing the woman who had owned and used and carried it, there was a third: Louise Mallow’s.
He put his hat down again and prepared to be persuasive.
The public library, a small T-shaped brick building on the street leading into Chauncy’s small center, sat on a slight rise under black-boughed maples. It was two blocks up from Hazel Street, where Mrs. Partridge had turned off into darkness.
At nearly one o’clock Torrant tried the main entrance, found it locked, and followed a curved brick path that led around to the right and ultimately to a side door that opened on lights and silence, books and long tables, the warm dry fragrance peculiar to libraries. At a desk in the foreground a dark-haired woman was ruffling through a card index. Torrant’s hopes lifted at once; she looked alert, intelligent, bored with the empty room and the silence.
A friend of his, he told her, a Miss Blair, had promised to pick up a book for him the night before and he hadn’t been able to get in touch with her. Would—he glanced at a card propped on the edge of the desk—Mrs. Biscoe know if Miss Blair had been in last night?
His voice went glibly through the prepared speech; his mind said, Two blocks. Not far to go, after the taxi driver had let her off at the library steps with books under her arm. And at Hazel Street, no street-lights close enough to reveal her there, waiting—
“Yes, Miss Blair was in last night,” said Mrs. Biscoe, innocently cheerful. “For quite a while, in fact. If you’ll tell me the name of the book you wanted I’ll check and see whether she took it out.”
Torrant was jarred; it took him a moment to remember the name of any book at all. The librarian said at once, “Oh, no. If it’s in it’ll be at the new-fiction stand, over there. But I remember quite clearly that the book Miss Blair took out was from the stacks.”
Torrant thanked her and moved mechanically off to the new-fiction stand. The lights had gone out on his carefully-reconstructed murder scene, and there was only the small grim spark of his own hatred to work by. It took him a while to orient himself in this new darkness, and he had gazed blankly at rows of book titles, and the library door had opened and closed a number of times on tiptoeing feet and subdued voices, before he remembered something the librarian had volunteered. Annabelle Blair had been in—for quite a while. Noticeably long, and in the stacks.
At the desk a tiny old man in a black chesterfield was balking at a book fine
