Again, disconcertingly, Annabelle Blair gave her that peculiar glance; Maria held herself furiously away from the pity in it. “Your cousin was a very proud woman, Miss Rowan. I gather that she had led a somewhat sheltered life until the time of her marriage. I believe that a husband who was—” her eyelids dropped, “unfaithful, drove her beyond herself.”
For Maria the dropped gaze, the oblique glance that preceded it, tore the delicate and dreadful web apart. There was a great deal she didn’t understand, and there might be an oddly real look to this new background, but she should not have forgotten, even for an instant, that this woman would naturally want to discredit Louise.
She said crisply, “Is that what you came to say, Miss Blair? I appreciate your being frank. I’ll be equally frank—I don’t believe it.”
Annabelle Blair didn’t move. “Gerald believed it. I happened to overhear something he said to your cousin one evening shortly after we came here. Or aren’t you going to believe that either?”
Maria looked at her in silence.
“He said—” Annabelle Blair stood up suddenly, buttoning her coat, and the red rocking-chair gave a few surprised creaks, “ ‘Don’t get any ideas, pet, just because we’re off in the wilds. I have things fixed so you don’t get a cent.’ ”
Gerald, Maria repeated foolishly to herself after she had locked the doors again; she called him Gerald. It had always been Mr. Mallow before, proper, secretarially sedate. Urgency had tricked Annabelle Blair into letting the familiar first name slip out.
Blankly, not minding the thrust of cold air, Maria opened the window at the back of the apartment a few inches. It seemed necessary to do something to this room, this altered place which was suddenly enemy territory. She turned and gave it an unfriendly look, and the patches and flares of color she had liked before seemed uncontrolled and subtly disordered. But then she wouldn’t be staying in it long, now— would she?
It would still go on holding echoes, whether she heard them or ran away. ‘Don’t get any ideas, pet, just because we’re off in the wilds.’ Why was she so sure that Gerald Mallow had actually said that to Louise? Because Annabelle Blair, inventing it, would have said ‘my dear’ and ‘out in the country?’ Or because the arrogance of it fitted her own preconceived idea of Gerald?
Maria knew bleakly that she was examining fragments of a pattern because she didn’t want to look at the whole. But she couldn’t shut out the vivid pieces of this new design. There was Gerald’s red-capped head an inch away from a bullet, Gerald starting in alarm at an alien taste to what should have been a familiar sedative, Gerald seized with the symptoms of poisoning after dining alone with his wife.
Was it possible, after all, that Louise—
Maria caught herself sharply there. Sitting on the end of the studio couch, fingers of one hand ruffling distractedly at her hair, she said the half-incredulous phrase again to herself, as Gerald Mallow must have said it. Is it possible that Louise—?
Annabelle Blair had built up those scenes for Maria; had she subtly, deliberately, distorted them for Gerald? If, as Torrant said, she had persuaded Martin Fennister to believe in a death sentence that didn’t exist, then she would have been able with the aid of accident and circumstance to convince Gerald Mallow that his wife had tried to kill him.
Maria clung to that, and to the only other factor that stood out clearly among shadows. If Louise had tried to kill Gerald, and somehow been caught in her own trap, why was Annabelle Blair so very anxious to be rid of her cousin?
It wasn’t, certainly, a desire to spare Maria’s sensibilities; in those betraying last few words she had been cool and deliberately brutal, watching for the impact. Was there something she had to do, that mustn’t be seen from this vantage-point across the road; was she fidgeting in her prim and proper role? Was there some tell-tale thing in the Mallow house itself, that Maria might sooner or later discover?
Or was there something in the garage below her, where the Mallow convertible had been housed?
Not a thing, Maria assured herself; she would have taken care of that long before this. Nevertheless the thought stayed with her, through another cigarette, an absent-minded tour of the long room, a surprising reluctance to open her door again tonight and go down into that damp silent area.
In the end, she wrent. At the last minute she had told Anna-belle, with a convincingly shaken air, that she would consider her offer after all, and surely the woman had gone away lulled. Besides, Maria was familiar with the small spill of light now coming from the second floor of the Mallow house; it meant that Annabelle was tucking herself in for the night. Even then, she held the apartment door wide after she had flicked on the switch that lit the garage, listening to the safe and utter silence below her before she went down the stairs, instinctively cautious.
The naked ceiling bulb shone on dusty concrete, spotted faintly with oil, and the usual appurtenances of garages everywhere: lawn mower, ancient grass rake, garden hose coiled like a dusty snake. The shadowed area under the steep lift of the stairs contained an array of paint cans, a cob-webbed window’, the dim shape of the oil burner.
Maria stood in the pale-yellow silence and concentrated, after a single ticketing glance around her, on the tool chest under the window at the side of the garage. If the Mallow convertible had been tampered with—and Louise had
