Nevertheless, at the door he turned back and said only half-lightly, “Don’t forget to use those nice new locks.”
Maria locked the garage door behind him and, moments later, the door of the upstairs apartment.
Tired wasn’t exactly the word; she felt drained and subtracted from herself, and she knew defeatedly why. Torrant made an assault on emotions she had never used before and it was as bruising as the sudden activity of idle muscles. She knew the exact moment when it had begun, with Torrant standing in the doorway of Annabelle Blair’s living room and saying her name in that warm possessive where-have-you-been way.
Part of his plan, of course, but disconcerting to senses that weren’t braced for that. It led to a humiliating wonder about what it would be like if his tone were real and honest, and after that to a further wonder if there were really room for anyone else in his chilling singleness of purpose. That was as far as she had allowed herself to go. She had always known chance encounters for what they were before; she had guarded her sensibilities. Had she, she thought a little bitterly, been taught to guard them too well? Because if you had been brought up in a sterile glass room you could nearly die of a common cold.
Mixed up with all that was the flat and frightening suggestion that Torrant—and Simeon before him, and who knew what percentage of Chauncy—had made about Louise Mallow.
Are you sure you want to find out?
Maria went through the motions of dinner; a sandwich and coffee. She reminded herself stonily that Torrant wanted her out of the way and that Simeon, on all counts, was not to be trusted. That left the vague drift of public opinion, but Annabelle Blair and the Mallows had been viewed from a distance, and distance was sometimes distorting.
Her cousin had not been a would-be murderess. Maria put out of her mind the fact that all murderers, all erratics of any kind had friends and relatives who sturdily denied it. Instead, her mind slid ahead to Annabelle Blair, and there again was the small sawing edge of all her relations with Torrant.
Find out why Louise had died disinherited, and exactly what had led up to her death; Maria hadn’t thought beyond that. You might trap an animal if you had to, but you didn’t want to watch the approach, the entering, the sudden spring of steel.
Torrant did.
Maria wished herself violently out of it, away from a man who disturbed her, a woman who frightened her, a ghost who held out a tentative hand. But she had failed Louise once, and to run away again would be to set a pattern she might never succeed in breaking.
She was rinsing her cup and saucer at the sink when Simeon’s convertible slowed and then stopped in the road below. Simeon accompanied Annabelle Blair to her door but didn’t go in; lights built up slowly in the half-darkened house-front after he had driven away. It might have been five minutes or ten before the door under the wisteria opened and Annabelle Blair stepped out.
Then, as though she had forgotten something, she went back in again, leaving the door ajar. Her shadow moved briefly against the windows opposite the living room; she must have been close to them because she was definable for a moment, bent and reaching.
The shadow vanished, the front door swung wider and then closed. Annabelle appeared on the gold-windowed lawn and walked deliberately down the bank into darkness. An instant later Maria’s doorbell rang.
CHAPTER 14
THE DOORBELL sounded a second time. Annabelle knew Maria was in the apartment; she had, after all, stood in the lighted kitchenette, putting away her coffee things.
Had Annabelle discovered that someone had entered the house in her absence?
As though she had been instructed, as though something in Torrant’s parting tone suggested it, Maria lifted her telephone receiver and laid it carefully down on the bookcase, half-noting the flow of a voice along the painted wood. Then she unlocked her door and ran down the stairway into the lighted garage.
In the rush of cold air when she opened the outer door, Annabelle Blair, black-coated, was only a face hung pallidly against the dark. Her voice was surprisingly casual. “Are you, busy, Miss Rowan? If you have a few minutes I’d like to talk to you.”
“Not at all, come on up,” said Maria too brightly, and led the way. Upstairs again, she crossed the room, hearing the sound of the apartment door closing behind Annabelle, and lifted the receiver from the top of the bookcase. Violet’s now-familiar voice in her ear said amblingly, “—something to go with my blue, but I can’t see twelve-ninety-five, can you, when I’ll only wear it—”
“May I call you back?” asked Maria of the wall. She had never realized before how difficult it was to act convincingly with a telephone, particularly a telephone with somebody on it. She said, very conscious of the stillness behind her, “Yes, I am . . . Miss Blair’s dropped in.”
“There’s somebody on this line,” announced Violet’s interlocutor.
“She’s always at it,” said Violet unjustly, and administered a sharp click.
“Yes, I’ll be here,” said Maria, and hung up. Childish, she thought, turning around, but comforting in a small way. Or was it really childish? The brush of a branch against the far window reminded her of the black empty fields out in the night, the isolation of this particular road. And Annabelle Blair, seated in the rust-red rocker, wore the faint fixed abnormal smile of a plaster model.
She said, “Miss Rowan, I’ve been thinking about our little talk yesterday afternoon. Perhaps I underestimated the shock that Mr. Mallow’s will would naturally be to his wife’s only relative, and I’d like to correct what I’m sure was an oversight. I think I could arrange an advance of—five thousand dollars.”
Maria reached for a cigarette, keeping her lashes down. Going,
