The flashlight showed him that it was. Torrant emerged from it through an unpleasant silk barrier of cobwebs, and sent the circling light over an ancient washing machine, an area of dusty cement floor, a woodpile—and just beyond it, stairs leading up.
The door at the top was bolted from the other side.
She would naturally take all visible precautions. Torrant moved the knob gently and there was play. The bolt gave at the third impact of his shoulder and he stood in Annabelle Blair’s kitchen, finding the light switch a few seconds later. Pale green walls, immaculate surfaces, not so much as a teaspoon in sight. Torrant located the flimsy bolt and, after a slight delay, the screws. He fitted them meticulously back in place with the tip of a knife from Annabelle’s silver drawer, because his contorted trip through the cellar window deserved anonymity, and switched the kitchen into darkness and went deeper into the house.
Dining room in shadow and then the lighted living room, silent, waiting, subtly strange visited from this new angle and without Annabelle. Suddenly an ivy leaf fell crackling to the rug and Torrant swung and then moved with automatic caution through the room, into the little hall, up the white staircase.
He didn’t turn on the upper hall light. He aimed the flashlight through a partially open doorway into a room that was obviously Annabelle’s; he paused, tempted, before lie went on. The next room on that side was occupied solely by a tack hammer. Across the hall, then. Torrant opened the door, groped for a wall switch and stood looking in.
It was a big room, an original two thrown together, with a fireplace in the inner wall and the barest of furnishings against its faded paper: twin beds, dresser and. bureau, single straight chair. The opulent touches the Mallows had left behind them in this austerity were startingly evident even at a glance—gold-backed brushes and an initialed leather shaving kit on the dresser, a barrage of gilt and glass on the bureau-top, an alligator overnight case set on the floor beside it.
Torrant thought suddenly and jarringly about Mrs. Partridges overnight case, different from this one, probably, but equally left behind. He dropped the flashlight on the nearest bed, and because he had to pass it on his way to the bureau, opened a closet door.
Louise Mallow had pre-empted most of the space. There were her suits, grape-colored, copper, gray; a black dress that looked promising even on the hanger, a long white sheath of something that felt like silk. At the back of the closet hung a stone-marten scarf, its pale-and-dark skins chasing each other up the wall. From everything came a faint breath of some concealed sachet, not a romantic lavender, not a casual long-married fragrance but something subtle and deliberate.
Torrant closed the closet door abruptly, shutting in a ghost, and crossed to the bureau and began opening drawers. He found the pocketbook in the top center drawer, a huge polished wedge of alligator, heavy, topped in gold.
Wind brushed against the panes; a faint draught stirred the edge of one white curtain. Torrant’s ear was set like an inner alarm for the peal of the telephone, Maria Rowans warning that Annabelle Blair was returning. Apart from that one mechanical guard, which told him that the house was quiet below him, all his attention was on the pocketbook as he opened it.
Fitted leather lining, with “Louise H. Mallow” looking up at him in tiny gold letters. Lipstick, comb, compact—this her second-best, because it was a round utilitarian wafer of navy calf, unmarked. Handkerchief, smudged faintly with pink and embroidered with a pale-gray LHM. Another lipstick, somewhat tarnished—emergency ration? In the zippered change purse, three dollar bills, a quarter, a nickel, two pennies.
No checkbook, or was it downstairs in the living room desk? Torrant had a queer conviction that this pocketbook had been left untouched by Annabelle Blair, because in a case of sudden death it had probably been checked automatically by the police and released later.
At any rate, Louise Mallow had been careless about her financial affairs. Out of the three envelopes in her bag, one contained a charity appeal; the other two were bills, dated December of the previous year and stamped with mildly dunning exhortations, from department stores in St. Louis.
Torrant replaced the pocketbook in the drawer, feeling flat. He had, he thought, only what he had had all along, with a few embellishments—a woman of expensive tastes and sheltered habits, who dressed herself beautifully and passed the bills along to her husband when she remembered; who dutifully carried a letter from a charity in her two hundred-dollar pocketbook and visited the country with a lavish wardrobe.
Small wonder that, as beneficiary of Gerald Mallow’s will, Annabelle Blair had escaped the usual attack. People like the Mallows were rare birds in towns like Chauncy, suspicious because of their very plumage. Add to that the efficient, self-effacing secretary—
All of it done as expertly as the confiding tale to Martin’s doctor.
Torrant switched off the lights in the bedroom. His mind held the brief flash-lit image of Annabelle Blair’s room across the hall; wouldn’t that stand elaborating? A woman had emerged from the closet and the bureau in the big double room behind him. Mightn’t the real Annabelle—the astonishing woman who had married Martin and killed him and gone on from there—emanate from hers?
Without warning the light in the hall went blazing on, and close to Torrant there was a small half-shriek of indrawn breath. “My dear man,” said Paulette Kirby when they had both blinked the light from their eyes, “don’t do that again. You’ve taken a good ten years off my life.”
One plump red-nailed hand
