She said, “Glasses?” and if she was startled at the question she didn’t show it. “No. I must have seen Mrs. Mallow driving the car—oh, half a dozen times, and I’m quite sure she wasn’t wearing glasses.” A small pause went by. “So that’s out,” said Mrs. Kirby briskly.
“Out?” repeated Torrant politely, and got a bold blue stare in return.
“My good man, you obviously aren’t house-hunting, and : you’re just as obviously interested in the Mallows. And of course,” said Mrs. Kirby, stepping casually out of her role of sympathetic friend to Annabelle Blair, “with a will like that, and an accident like that, one does wonder.”
Torrant was a trifle jarred in spite of himself. He had a number of brief impressions, among them that this woman was like some sort of nimble sponge, who could be squeezed dry of information if he knew where to catch her, and that she was relieved at the turn the conversation had taken.
Mrs. Kirby said, “She didn’t, though,” with a faintly regretful air. “Murder them, I mean. She couldn’t have.”
It wasn’t an act of faith, it was a matter of pure logic. Torrant wondered why he had ever bothered to be circuitous with her. “Right, she couldn’t have. So it goes back to the will.”
Mrs. Kirby shrugged. “That needn’t be so very complex.” Her voice was offhand, her eyes were hard. “Mrs. Mallow was a very attractive woman, and her husband looked like the possessive type. If he suddenly discovered—” the full blue gaze dropped, “evidence of an affair of some sort . . .”
Torrant watched her abstractedly, reflecting that this was not a specific theory so much as a vague and general drift of malice. Or was it something sharper than that? His memory presented him all at once with a picture of Mrs. Kirby, hand at her heart, acting out thorough surprise at the sight of him in the upper hall of the Mallow house. But when he had shone his flashlight earlier into the open doorway of the bedroom across from the Mallows’, what had it covered? Just enough to identify the room as Annabelle Blairs. The path of light hadn’t touched the corners of the room, the sides, the closet.
He said slowly, “You were in Annabelle’s room the other night, weren’t you?” and cursed himself instantly because Mrs. Kirby’s narrowed eyes went wide and she gave her small genial laugh. “My dear man, I am not a peeping tom. Besides, as I told you—”
“—you were there to get your birth certificate, which you store in a friend’s attic for lack of adequate space at home.” Mrs. Kirby shrugged. “It’s hardly a document I care to pore over. And now, Mr. Torrant, fascinating as all this is, I have some work I really must get at.”
She turned as she spoke, pulling open the drawer of a modernistic white desk, putting on her shell-rimmed glasses and picking up a sheaf of papers. Torrant collected his hat and stood. He said mildly, “Does Annabelle know you have a key to her house?”—and saw her guard go up instantly.
This was what she had been wary about, this was where the camaraderie came to a dead halt. She faced him icily, her head up and back, her whole body a statement of outraged hauteur. It might, Torrant thought in the back of his mind, be the good old days and Mrs. Kirby about to dismiss an impudent housemaid.
She said, “No, she doesn’t. But it’s hardly a tactful point for you to raise, is it, Mr. Torrant? When we both know I shut the front door behind me very securely that night?”
Torrant made two further stops in the town; one at the cafe, for a sandwich purporting to be ham but proving only that the chef had discovered a new animal, the ether at a large white house set a little back from the street behind a chaste black and white sign. He had passed it a number of times since his arrival in Chauncy; it was hospitably lit when the rest of the town was dark, but it had only held significance for the past two days. He stopped now and went in, past the black-lettered “Hissop Funeral Home,” across a short crescent of driveway and up two Iron-railed steps.
A solemn young man conducted him to the proper doorway. Torrant looked at potted palms and a pitiful array of flowers and the folded candlelit hands; he hadn’t realized until now how acutely he did not want to see Mrs. Partridge’s face. Like a child hiding its head under the covers, he thought bitterly, and took one long indelible look down and knelt briefly.
Never mind about the Mallows; there was no doubt about what had happened to Martin, or to the woman in this silent and stifling room. It wasn’t a prayerful train of thought. Torrant rose again and saw out of the comer of his eye a jarring note in among the modest chrysanthemums and gladioli.
It was a tall basket of white roses, lavish, just opening, calling attention to themselves by their very pallor. Torrant bent and took the florist’s card from its envelope among the green stems. “With deepest sympathy, Annabelle Blair.”
From killer to victim, white roses . . .
Almost without thought, Torrant picked up the basket and walked out into the carpeted hall with it. There was another doorway farther up, and more candles and flowers and a small knot of women. Torrant deposited the basket of roses just inside, where they would not be the mockery they had been for Sarah Partridge, and withdrew.
Behind him there was a rustle of interest; a woman said hushedly, “Oh, aren’t those lovely,” and another said after a tiny pause, “Annabelle Blair . . . that must be one of his cousins in New Jersey. Don’t forget to write
