The wind felt raw and honest after the subtle ugly chill inside. Torrant walked across the grass and down the stone steps, gazing automatically at the garage across the road. The gaze became a stare; he bent his head, cupping a match against the wind, and managed to go on watching obliquely the two small points of light, perhaps two inches apart, in the window above the wide double garage doors. Abruptly, the lights withdrew.
Torrant got into the Renault and started it on the fifth try. He made a cramped U-turn and drove briskly by the faded old house again and past the willow grove. There was a sharp curve here, sharp enough to give him, when he parked the Renault and entered a field over a low stone wall, a view of Annabelle Blair’s front lawn.
He didn’t think she could see the car here. He leaned against a tree and smoked a cigarette, waiting, but in spite of the coat and scarf on the settee and her coldly imperative air, Annabelle Blair did not emerge from the house.
Had she changed her mind about going out—or was she telephoning to someone? Had she, holding the door as he left, looked up and seen those twin points of light in the window over the garage?
Torrant examined her again in his mind, trying to shut out the hatred born of knowledge. Not an attractive woman—and yet she had drawn Martin to her. ‘Handsome,’ Polly Stark had said, and that came close because it was a cold word with which to describe a woman. The longer Torrant looked at her, the more she seemed like a, person who, fearing an attack in the night, had left a dummy in her place.
It was a clever and very convincing dummy, planned to the last detail of colorless mouth and nails, severely knotted hair, low-heeled shoes that half-disguised the slender legs, dark dress of such uncertain cut that it might have been designed for a feather bolster. The eyes gave it away, with the blankness of a personality held in abeyance, the emptiness left behind when a brain went roving away on some secret pattern of its own.
There was snow on the wind now, which made it even less probable that she would issue forth from that peculiarly dim old house. Torrant left the half-shelter of the tree, started back to the Renault and stopped. The doors of the Mallow garage were opening.
Even through the snow-flaked gray distance and a few trailing willow branches, the navy-coated figure that emerged, closed the doors again and turned its back to use a key was familiar. It was unmistakably the girl in the newspaper store, who had studied him so analytically over her collar. After that brief pause for certainty and a further moment of surprise, Torrant moved rapidly.
The Renault seemed to catch some of his urgency; it started almost at once. Torrant drove off between the fields, turned into the first road he found, idled along it with one eye on his watch and eventually turned back. The snow was now more businesslike than the windshield wipers and he drove carefully, peering through the white spin.
The girl in the navy coat was a faster walker than he had thought; he had driven well past his turn-off before he caught up with and cannily passed her, backed, and opened the far door. He said through the snow, “I’m on my way into town— can I give you a lift?”
It wasn’t a day on which she could decline without making a point of it. She said after the smallest hesitation, “Thank you very much,” and got in.
Torrant felt as though he had netted a strange and wary bird which he mustn’t alarm too soon. He said as he put the car in motion again that it looked like a storm, and the girl beside him said that it did, didn’t it? That took them to the end of Vanguard Street, where he introduced himself and learned—again there was that tiny reluctance—that her name was Maria Rowan. Did she live in Chauncy? No, it was just a visit.
She was polite and uncommunicative, sitting as far away from him as the Renault would allow, gloved hands primly in her lap. Torrant was interested in the frequency of the brilliant side-glances she managed to give him although the dark head didn’t turn. He kept his own gaze sedulously on the road, wondering mildly about that; he said presently, “I hope you’ve been luckier than I was about accommodations.”
It was boldly inviting, but she left it there a moment before she said, “As a matter of fact, I was able to rent the garage apartment from your friend Miss Blair.”
His friend Miss Blair. Torrant gave the choke some unnecessary attention and said neutrally, “I’m afraid I can’t claim to be a friend, exactly. I met Miss Blair for the first time this morning.”
“Oh?”
Maria Rowan’s politeness and distance and clear disbelief began to irritate Torrant; he had to stop himself from saying in her own tone, “Yes, oh.” They had entered the main street of the town now, and although she had slid the strap of her handbag over her wrist with an air of briskness, she was still watching him with that oblique glance. Torrant felt it with a growing combination of amusement and annoyance: she was not to be questioned, but he was there to be stared at like a baffling exhibit in a museum.
He didn’t look at her as they drew to a stop before the traffic light at Chauncy’s only busy corner. He said casually, “See much through those field glasses of yours?”
There was a moment of astounded silence. Torrant soberly re-adjusted the choke. Maria Rowan turned her head and gave him his first full and honest view of olive-gold eyes under delicately peaked dark brows, a self-possessed mouth, short dark hair ruffled by
