Annabelle still wore her faint reflective smile. “That hat, I suppose. For a moment you looked—about thirteen, holding on to your hat brim . . There was a pause, and then she said slowly over the sound of the sleet, “You know, don’t you, Maria.”
For Maria it was almost like being seasick; there was the same sway and roll of a familiar horizon, the closer countersway that was dizzying to lock at. She couldn’t think at all, but she heard her own voice say blankly, “Yes, I know.”
“Well, then—” Had the other woman made a sudden movement, there in the dusk? She was staring over Maria’s shoulder, not finishing what she had started to say, head tilted alertly as though she were listening. “I thought, just now, that I heard something.”
But there was nothing except the busy rustle of sleet—was there? Against her will, in the face of that straining stare over her shoulder, Maria turned; it didn’t cross her newly-numbed mind that this was the oldest trick of all. She turned, and the hands were instantly at her throat.
CHAPTER 18
THE CHARCOAL DAY had turned suddenly into night. The sleet and the wind caught the pattern in front of Torrant’s headlights and twisted it mockingly, so that for a blinded second he was not quite sure of what he saw as the Renault neared the garage on Vanguard Street and came to a wrenching stop.
He was out of it with the motor running and the door open behind him, because now the close raw brilliance showed him the only thing that mattered in this or any other pattern: Maria Rowan’s face, tipped back against the garage door, eyes closed, lips parted as though she were gasping. And in front of her, hands on her—
Simeon whirled. The Renault’s headlights held his face briefly against the darkness, white, parrotlike, lined thinly with blood from eyebrow to jaw. He said sharply, “She’s all right. Stay with—”
The rest of that was lost in his hard running footsteps and the cloaking patter of sleet. Maria took a step away from the garage door and stumbled, and Torrant caught her and held her tightly. Her breathing was rough and spasmodic; she had, he thought, been nearly unconscious. When she had quieted a little he lifted her face and looked at it and kissed her cheek lightly. He said, “Now. Where is she?”
Maria stared at him for a wild blank moment, and then she said, “Oh, God,” and slipped out of his arms and began to run. Across the road, up the steep bank toward the Mallow house; Torrant caught her arm there and she gasped something he didn’t hear and shook it off furiously.
The guarded white door stood invitingly open, the light inside gilding the sleet and the wisteria and the frozen brown lawn. There was no sign of Simeon. There was the tiny hall and the curving staircase, the shadowy living room full of the silence that seemed to be built into the very walls. And all at once, in the doorway of the red-painted sitting room opposite, there was Annabelle Blair, who must have watched them come in; Annabelle, with a gun almost casually in her hand.
Maria, beside him. With the small part of his mind that wasn’t concerned with Maria, Torrant measured the gun-compact, businesslike, probably a .32, he thought—and then the hand that held it. That was what needed attention, and it didn’t somehow look as businesslike as the gun.
He shifted his weight with care, watching the white fingers, and Annabelle went on gazing at Maria and smiling a faint unreal smile. She said, “Gerald never knew how useful this would turn out to be. Ironic, isn’t it?”
He had to turn her attention, and the poise of her body, away from Maria. “Ironic as hell,” Torrant said, and saw the flicker of her eyes and began to move. He stopped almost at once, halted by something that was absurd but still shocking. And behind him, more slowly, with an echo of his own bewilderment, Maria said it again.
‘ Annabelle Blair is dead. She was in the car with Gerald and she’s been dead for—is it five weeks? This is my cousin, this is Louise.”
“I’ve called the police. I gave them Mrs. Judd’s address,” said Louise Mallow, five minutes later. She seemed not to want to mention Simeon by name, as though it might bring him back out of the sleet. “I tried to fight him, outside, and then I remembered Gerald’s gun and ran back here. I thought he was going to kill me—he came as far as the lawn, and he looked demented. Even when he began to run again, I was afraid to let the gun out of my hand,”
She had examined Maria’s throat anxiously. It was a painful red now, it would be ugly tomorrow. She had insisted that Torrant make drinks for Maria and himself; her own sat untasted beside her. She said directly, “I don’t know how much time I have before the police come here. I suppose I’d better begin at the beginning anyway.”
Louise, Torrant said to himself firmly. Not Annabelle, after all these days of watching and probing and baiting. Louise. He went on staring at the woman who was bewilderingly the same and not the same. Composed, but not the automaton she had made of herself. Not empty-eyed, now that she wasn’t hiding under a borrowed personality, but steady and bitter and honest. He realized with a fresh sense of shock
