Torrant put out of his mind, willfully, the brooding and speculative look Simeon had worn about the car crash, and the fact that the other man had been before him in examining the wrecked convertible. He looked up to find the dark eyes regarding him thoughtfully. “Who is this woman who drowned last night?” asked Simeon.
Somewhere in the forefront of the restaurant a tray of dishes went crashing and a woman gave a startled squeak. Both sounds seemed to halt at the very edge of the booth. “A Mrs. Partridge,” said Torrant levelly. “She worked for the Mallows as a cleaning-woman.”
“For the Mallows . . . I see. I asked,” said Simeon, “because I met Mrs. Kirby on the street this morning and she said she had telephoned Annabelle about it and Annabelle had seemed quite—upset.”
“But not,” Torrant said coolly, “as literally as Mrs. Partridge.”
“I wasn’t being funny, Mr. Torrant,” said Simeon; he looked surprised and a little austere, an affronted parrot, as he picked up his check. Was he perhaps overdoing it? “It’s another more or less personal tragedy as far as Annabelle is concerned, and unfortunately that kind of coincidence can turn a sensitive woman—morbid.”
Torrant shook his head. “That would be too bad,” he said.
There was no message on the table in Mrs. Judd’s hall; there had been, Mrs. Judd told him stiffly, no telephone calls at all. She looked longingly as she spoke at the room key Torrant was bouncing in his palm, and he dropped it briskly into his pocket before she could gather the courage to ask for it back.
He thanked her and turned away; at the foot of the stairs he said casually, “By the way, Mrs. Kirby is a widow, isn’t she?” and watched her lips tighten into the peculiar primness he had noticed once before.
“Her husband left her,” said Mrs. Judd.
Was it Paulette Kirby she disapproved of, or the departing husband, or the situation as a whole? It took Torrant a little while to coax it out of her. Jonas Kirby had been liked and respected in Chauncy in spite of the fact that he came from a wealthy Boston family who had turned their backs in horror at his bohemian ways. He was a contentedly unsuccessful painter, living alone, keeping his own odd hours and getting his own odd meals in a barn converted into a studio. People had shaken their heads doubtfully when, after one of his periodic trips away, he brought home a bride from Chicago.
According to Mrs. Judd, Paulette had come up to the darkest expectations, forcing Kirby out of his comfortable studio and into an elaborate new house, entertaining lavishly and sometimes raffishly. All of it had come to a sharp end on a summer night five years ago, with a guest killed instantly in the Kirby driveway under the wheels of his host’s car.
Jonas Kirby served five years for manslaughter. The claims and the lawyers ate up the servants and the big house and the all-night parties, and Paulette Kirby, composedly ignoring the muttered questions about who had actually been at the wheel of the car, scraped together what was left and bought the small house on Chauncy’s main street and hung out the wrought iron sign.
But Jonas Kirby didn’t come back when he got out of prison. Some people said that proved his wife’s guilt; a more neutral faction held that prison changed a man. And therefore, Torrant thought, Mrs. Kirby’s ebullient laugh and bold glance and—give her this—head held high in a hostile town.
He went upstairs to his room thinking that it explained a good deal about her, and wondering if her hard icy dislike of Louise Mallow was merely the resentment of one woman toward another who has all the things recently lost. Opulence, position, a devoted husband—
Torrant caught himself sharply there. It was a Chauncy’s-eye view and all he had, but somewhere there had to be a distortion. A worm in the apple, a thorn on the rose . . .
It was nearly seven o’clock that evening when the phone call he had been waiting for with a mounting expectancy came through.
CHAPTER 13
MARIA ROWAN’S TONE was cool and more than a little crisp over the wire. Torrant took time to marvel at the perversity of that. She had watched Annabelle Blair like a hawk ever since her move into the garage apartment; now, when there was a definite goal for the watching, her voice held an edge of stiffness.
She said, pointedly brief, ‘“Annabelle just left with Simeon.”
For dinner, probably, at this hour. Torrant hoped so. Certainly the inner woman—literally—had to be fed. ”You’ll phone the house if she comes back unexpectedly?”
“Yes,” said Maria detachedly, “but what good that would do—” It was not a question but a reserved comment.
Torrant said, “It’s a big house,” and hung up. Five minutes later, the flashlight he had bought that afternoon beside him on the seat, he was driving toward Vanguard Street through the windy darkness.
Some portion of his mind had presented him earlier with a rutted lane on the near side of the willow grove, possibly the entrance to some long-mouldered outbuilding. His headlights found it now, and the Renault rode nimbly into the lane and the frozen field. Torrant left it behind screening willows and, using the flash, cut in back of the grove.
A faint glow met him on the other side of the willows; Annabelle Blair had left the lights on in the living room and pulled the shades to the sills. Had she been thorough in her locking-up, or had she forgotten a window somewhere? Women were often chary of cellars, and after a deafening collision with a paint bucket at the rear of the house, Torrant found that Annabelle Blair was no exception.
The window was small and cobwebbed, set deep among barberry bushes that Torrant cursed in silence. It went up with a loud shuddering noise, and he had to remind himself that the look
