Maria found herself tiptoeing across to it. That was ridiculous, because she had locked the outer door herself, but she had the edged and close-to-panic feeling of someone in a private forbidden place, anxious to be finished and away before its dangerous guardian returned. She knelt before the tool chest—and somewhere behind her in the garage there was a terrifying clatter of sound.
After a second of pure blankness she was on her feet and running, not looking around her, not wanting to see. The stairs and the safety at the top filled her whole consciousness, so that she nearly tripped over the thing that had caused the commotion.
The saw, the heavy wooden-handled saw that had hung from a nail beside the stairs. Vibrations it wasn’t used to, and now her last journey down, had slid it up the nail and over the end. Maria leaned weakly against a post, getting her breath back and regarding the saw with hatred, and then she walked slowly and reluctantly back across the garage.
The tool chest had now, out of all proportion, taken on the character of a mission. It was a squat scratched metal thing, an inch or two out from the wall; its closed lid was tantalizing. And Annabelle Blair wanted her out of here so urgently that she had offered first a bribe and then a subtle threat of publicity.
Maria forgot that these were two steps on the way to a possible third, and in her absorption she failed to notice, or put down as inevitable in cement-floored places, the delicate new brush of cold across her ankles.
CHAPTER 15
TORRANT SLEPT uneasily that night, and because of his constant awareness of Simeon across the hall, or the sense of gathering tension that he took with him to sleep, or merely the pickpocket draughts at the top of Mrs. Judd’s house, he dreamed of Martin Fennister.
Martin behind a camera and later behind an old-fashioned; Martin at the airport saying “You’ll be back,” and handing Torrant a grenade cleverly shaped like a silver flask. The images fled when Torrant awoke; the feeling of reality stayed with him for a long black minute. He found cigarettes and matches without turning on the light, and the taste of smoke and the small red glow dulled the edge that had brought him out of sleep.
He wondered, propped up in darkness, whether Martin ever came alive for Annabelle Blair when she was asleep and helpless. Did she see him perhaps, facing his private terror alone? Counting out a killing number of sleeping pills? Or— the crowning irony—writing a last apology to her before his brain stopped functioning? Torrant’s hatred was as comfortable as an extra blanket, and eventually he went to sleep under it. . .
The morning was dark and frozen. He went into town for his breakfast and the newspaper that Mrs. Judd had nerved herself up to ask for, and in the cafe heard a number of seasoned rumors that had an air of truth. The Medical Examiner had found Sarah Partridge’s head injury compatible with a fall and there had been water found in her lungs, proof that she had entered the pond alive. Add to that her sister’s statement that Sarah hadn’t used that shortcut for years, and would have been hurrying to get in out of the cold, and you had just one more accidental drowning.
Interest had gone out of the affair as far as the town was concerned. Mrs. Partridge had never been a colorful figure, and no one connected her death with the earlier accident in which Gerald and Louise Mallow had died. It was expert, Torrant thought, buying Mrs. Judd’s newspaper. It was practice made perfect . . .
Mrs. Judd, glancing at his bleak face, explained agitatedly that she had only wanted the newspaper in order to see what movies were playing in the adjoining towns; she pressed five pennies upon him and hoped it hadn’t been a nuisance. “Miss : Rowan called while you were out, and” said Mrs. Judd with a withdrawn air, “I wrote it down. Here it is.”
Wrote what down? Torrant took the slip of paper with a sudden tenseness, feeling Mrs. Judd’s triumphant gaze. The p note read, “Miss Rowan called while you were out.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Judd,” said Torrant containedly, and went rapidly out.
He didn’t know what he had expected but he was relieved when Maria answered his ring. She was wearing something slender and black, which would account for her pallor and her too-brilliant eyes; it wouldn’t account for the intensity that was in the apartment like a current.
She offered Torrant coffee with a perfunctory air. She sat down in the red rocker and got up again as though there had I been a pin in the cushion and took the end of the studio couch instead. She said, “I called you because I thought you might be interested in something I found in the garage last night. My cousin’s glasses. That’s why Louise didn’t take the wheel that night, that’s why—”
“Hold on,” said Torrant, and looked at her carefully. He was willing to swear that she hadn’t slept much, and that it was nervous fatigue as well as excitement that gave her this dangerous glow. “Where were the glasses?”
“There’s a tool chest,” Maria began, deliberately quiet, “on the left-hand side of the garage as you go in, under the window. I thought I’d have a look at it last night, because—” A number of silent seconds went by; Torrant wondered if her color had heightened. “I found the glasses between the back of the chest and the wall,” said Maria as though she hadn’t stopped, “and I know they were Louise’s because her initials were stamped in gold inside one of the earpieces.”
Past tense. Torrant said, “Let’s have a
