“Friends of friends,” said Torrant, turning from the bureau. “Someone told me to look up the Mallows, Gerald Mallow and his wife. They bought some property here several weeks ago, I understand, and I thought I’d—”
“Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Judd, and stared at him with shocked eyes. “Oh dear. Of course, it wasn’t quite a month ago, so I suppose your friend hadn’t heard about the accident.”
She stopped there, feeling nervously behind her for the doorknob, because her new lodger seemed suddenly to have turned to stone—or, thought Mrs. Judd, ice. His politely amiable face didn’t change, but the hand that had begun to unsnap his suitcase went sharply still. He said, “What kind of accident, Mrs. Judd?”
“A car crash,” said Mrs. Judd distressedly. “It was a bad night, and the roads were slippery . . .” She looked at Torrant and placed her own interpretation on his steady unmoving stare. “The paper said they were killed almost instantly.”
Tarrant moved at last. He walked toward one of the windows; he said over his shoulder in a tone that was very nearly casual, “Wasn’t there someone travelling with the Mallows— a secretary?”
“Yes, she’s still here. I suppose there must be things to do in a business way. Otherwise I can’t see why she’d want to stay around a little town like this. They say he left her everything.”
Because the room was so still that she could hear the stir of tree branches outside the windows, Mrs. Judd added as she opened the door, “Blair, I think her name is. She’d be able to tell you ail about it.”
“Yes,” said Torrant gently. “Yes, Mrs. Judd, I’m sure she would.”
The bedroom was cold and the wind loud around the top of the house. The uneven flap of a curtain settled into Tor-rant’s restless half-dreams and became something else, something to do with a woman who carried death around with her as casually as a purse. At one point he found himself sitting bolt upright, staring into blackness; then the far lonely cry that had waked him came again on the wind, and it was not a dying shriek of terror but a rooster. He went back to sleep and met Annabelle Blair there, smooth-plumaged and crowing.
The morning was dark, still rattling with the wind which Mrs. Judd’s house seemed in some mysterious way to inhale. Torrant shaved, showered under a contraption evidently designed by a fun-loving plumber, and went in search of his landlady to inquire about the car in the garage behind the house.
“The little blue one? That’s my son Eddie’s,” said Mrs. Judd, separating egg-whites in the kitchen. She began at once to reflect that Eddie, away at Marine training camp, would not be wanting the car for some time; she looked at Torrant and there was none of last night’s peculiar tightness in his face. She said, “I suppose you could rent it if you want to while you’re here. You’d take good care of it, wouldn’t you? Eddie thinks the world of that little car.”
This was not strictly true; Eddie had been known to offend the neighbors with his bitter morning greetings to the Renault. Still, it was a car and it went, on occasion. Mrs. Judd wiped her hands and went to get the key.
Because he had been in a number of small New England towns before and his mission here was what it was, Torrant paid Mrs. Judd in advance, drove into the town and bought a newspaper from the woman who had directed him to his room without asking either of them where Annabelle Blair lived. He did that very casually at the post office, after breakfast in Chauncy’s only restaurant.
“The Mallow house, fellow and his wife got killed right after they bought it? Vanguard Street,” said the clerk, and gave directions. “You’ll know it when you come to it, big old place right on the road, with a garage across the way. It’s off by itself, so you can’t miss it.”
Off by itself, its garage across the street . . . how convenient, how tempting a situation for a hand that was ready to kill again, at a time of year when the roads were slippery and the going dangerous under the best of conditions. But if the isolation had served Annabelle Blair’s purpose, it would also serve his own. Torrant thanked the clerk and went back to Eddie Judd’s Renault.
He had been acting on the vaguest of instincts when he approached the Fennister house with care; his reconnoitering of Vanguard Street was deliberate and cold. He wondered as he drove what Gerald Mallow had been doing in a town like Chauncy, small, half-asleep, startlingly rural. It was pretty country, full of fields and barns and willow-ringed ponds, but it was a mystifying goal for a business trip so extended and involved that Mallow had been accompanied by his wife and secretary.
He came upon the house around a stand of willows, and stopped the car and let the motor idle while he gazed at the shell that held Annabelle Blair.
It must have been beautiful once; it still had an air of elegance that rain and ruin could not wash away. It was classic colonial, facing squarely on the road, proud of its fanlight, now cracked, its doorway under spidery wisteria, its white stone cornerings that had turned gray just as its yellow paint had become tan. There were battered shades at uneven levels behind its small-paned windows—and there was, as Torrant watched, a flicker of movement at one of the white curtains in an upstairs room.
Torrant almost smiled at his windshield; he said to himself, Company, Annabelle, and put the Renault into gear and nosed slowly into the edge of the road without a glance at the garage opposite. He was leisurely, because this was what he had come for; he took an unhurried moment to light a cigarette before he opened the door of the car and, of necessity, came crouching out of it.
The
