Hours to Kill Page 10

  One shoulder lifted and dropped, dark against the shrill gold light. Kincaid said again, “I don’t know,” but he said it late.

  “But it’s Philip you’re after,” said Margaret persistently. After, not interested in; the choice of words was instinctive, because in spite of his ease—gone, now—and his almost musical voice, this man was a hunter.

  “In a way, yes.”

  “You can’t be after somebody in a way,” said Margaret irritably. “You are or you aren’t.”

  The little silence was taut, something bent almost to the breaking point. She realized with a surprise that made her flush that it was exactly because Kincaid did know about her past attachment to Philip that he didn’t trust her. Did he think she would refuse to believe whatever he had to say, and find some means of warning Philip? Margaret said through stiff lips, “You can tell me. It can’t possibly be worse than what I’m thinking.” At that he turned, and at something in her face he made up his mind. An edge of Margaret’s attention registered his silent wish that it were a respectable hour for a drink. He said, “I don’t suppose Byrne told either of you he had been married before.”

  Byrne: suddenly brusque, impersonal. And bigamy. It seemed just now the most trifling of offenses, but before Margaret’s heart had time to lift Kincaid said with a quiet finality, “Twice. Once while he was in college, again three years ago.”

  There was something infinitely chilling about the use of the word “again.” Margaret knew at once that Philip had not divorced his wives, but she could only gaze at Kincaid through the pounding heat of her body, and wait.

  “He seems to be unlucky. He was left a widower both times,” said Kincaid, still in an almost casual voice. “His only consolation being that both women had a little something to leave him. Margaret. . . Damn it, I knew I shouldn’t . . . Margaret!”

  Twelve

  MARGARET hadn’t fainted; had, in fact, met the shock with the head-on but expected crash of a towering, watched-for wave. What had alarmed Kincaid was a series of raking chills, close on the heels of peeling layers of heat, that shook her visibly. She said helplessly, “I’m just—I think I’m coming down with something,” and felt his hand on her forehead, surprisingly gentle.

  “What doctor did you have for Hilary?”

  “Wimple. But I can’t—”

  “You’ve got to.”

  She heard his voice at the telephone, and then it dimmed as she went, shoulder-blades shrinking against the rippling cold, in search of a sweater. She tiptoed in vain; Hilary’s roused and neglected voice said from behind her door, “Who’s here?”

  “Mr. Kincaid.”

  “Will you shuffle my cards for me?”

  “Yes, just a minute.”

  She was so cold that she couldn’t think, welcomely, and her flesh crept irritably when she put the sweater on. She went back to Hilary’s room and shuffled the cards so wildly that they kept skidding out of her fingers. Hilary said, “When is he going?”

  “I don’t know . . . there.”

  Hilary seemed to divine that Margaret could not bear another question, or indeed another word. She said promptly, “You said you’d show me how to play clock solitaire. Will you?”

  “Later.”

  “Then can I have some ginger ale?”

  “In a few minutes.”

  “But I have nothing to do.”

  “Hilary,” said Margaret with great effort, “I do not feel well and I am very busy. You’ll just have to play cards some more, or draw or go to sleep or something.” Hilary began a long complaint about her crayons, which Margaret closed the door on. She did not mean to be sharp with Hilary, who didn’t feel well either, but somehow the thought of how a child was to amuse herself, while Cornelia—

  She said to Kincaid, in the library, “What are we going to do? Are you sure?”

  Foolish, blindly hopeful question, when her own mind had been leading her to just this unthinkable place in time—but Kincaid answered her soberly.

  “Have I proof, you mean? No, if I had, the police could have taken over long ago. As it is, Byrne could sue for false arrest, raise hell generally—and bide his time.”

  “And because he might raise hell,” said Margaret, still bound in her unnatural calm, “we have to let Cornelia—”

  “You said they had a marked tour book, and that your sister wanted swimming. If you knew it was marked, you must have seen it. Not every place has a swimming pool. I’ve got a tour book in the car, let’s look at it.”

  In the moments that he was gone, Margaret sat perfectly still, willing Cornelia to remain what she was through the veil of fever, simply someone who had to be found. Mrs. Foale had dropped into dimness, so had Julio Garcia. She would have to find out, later, why Kincaid was so sure Philip married women for their money and then killed them to get it, but just now she would close her eyes and try to recapture the tour book.

  Open on the coffee table, face down, as though Cornelia had just been consulting it when Margaret and Philip arrived from the airport. She remembered saying something like, “Everything all mapped out?” and Cornelia shaking her head while she turned the book face up. “Not really—we’re going to travel like a couple of vagrants. I want to know where the pools are, though. It’s going to be warmer as we get down into Arizona.”

  There had been a few neat little x’s in the margins, and a photograph at the bottom of a—Margaret shut her eyes—left-hand page. Something with palms, because she had remarked that they always looked like false trees to her, to be folded up and carted away when a tropical movie scene had been shot.

  Cornelia couldn’t come to any harm in a pool; she wasn’t much of a diver but she swam like a fish. But there was the car, thought Margaret in a gathering rush of panic, there was the very food Cornelia ate.

  The front door opened and closed and Kincaid came in with the tour book. Margaret looked up at him. “What happened to the—his first two wives?”

  Kincaid glanced away. “Maybe nothing,” he said. “That’s the trouble. Maybe he just gravitates to women who have money of their own and something wrong with them. The first was a diabetic and died of insulin shock. The second had a heart attack—she’d had rheumatic fever as a child and wasn’t very strong.”

  Cornelia had fifty thousand dollars and nothing wrong with her—except that she was just over a severe bout of what had been diagnosed, by telephone, as flu. The recurrent type; the newspapers had warned about that.

  “Here’s Arizona,” said Kincaid, deliberately brusque after a glance at her. “Now, let’s see . . .”

  It wasn’t quite the hopeless task it had seemed at first. Margaret found the photograph of a motel under palms in the Arizona section, and thought she remembered that two of the x’s on that page had been near the top, one close to the bottom. She was right; those three had swimming pools and restaurants with cocktail lounges. One was in Prescott, two in Phoenix.

  Kincaid bracketed them with a pencil and produced a road map. “They started south, so chances are they wouldn’t retrace their steps north. They’d probably keep going southwest or west. Your sister wants a rest, and that would mean not more than two hundred and fifty or three hundred miles a day, maybe a little more or less —that’s if they kept moving and didn’t settle down somewhere. That would bring them roughly—” Something about Margaret’s still and total silence made him glance up. He slapped the tour book shut and stood. “You ought to be in bed, and I ought to be shot. I’ll do the telephoning from my place, and call you as soon as I find out anything. I’ll call you anyway. You’d be surprised at how often people fall into conversation on trips, and mention their plans.”

  “Not people with plans like Philip’s,” said Margaret. “For all we know, he may have gone in exactly the other direction, he may have already—”

  “You’d know,” said Kincaid.

  For a moment, in the hot confusion of her mind, Margaret thought he meant it in some occult sense. Then she understood, and said in th
e same dead steady voice, “Out in all that desert? I doubt it.”

  Kincaid started to speak and checked himself. Then he said, “The doctor will be here before twelve. In the meantime, is there someone you could get to come in and help out for a while?”

  “No . . . Yes, I think so. If you aren’t a policeman,” said Margaret over the distant and querulous rise of Hilary’s voice, “how do you know all this?”

  Kincaid’s hand tightened on the doorknob and relaxed again, but the brief movement had released the catch and let in a thin flash of spring-colored light that seemed to cut the faded old Oriental rugs. “Byrne’s second wife, Ellen Morrow, was my first cousin. I grew up with her.”

  The glance he lifted to Margaret from an apparent absorption with the stripe of light was very clear and absolutely empty. “I’ve had my eye on Byrne for quite a while.”

  What was it that he hadn’t said?

  Even if she had just entered the house for the first time Margaret could have found Hilary simply by following the thin curls of colored wax, some ground into the floor, out of the living room and down the hall. At some point, then, Hilary had been out of her room and listening, but when Margaret opened her door she lay in her bed like something carved on a tomb. She was, plainly, rising above the blizzard of bright waxy scrolls that covered her bedspread, the visible part of her sheets, the floor.

  Laboriously, Margaret’s mind informed her that when she had closed the door earlier Hilary had been complaining that her crayons were all blunted. She had found a pencil sharpener, and this was the result.

  Hilary opened her mouth. Margaret said wearily, “I know. You didn’t want to bother me. Would you like some ginger ale now?”

  It was, she knew, going back to the kitchen, very bad for Hilary or for any child; the vanishing of all known landmarks of adult reaction was bound to be upsetting. But she could not have cared just now if Hilary had laid a wall-to-wall carpet of crayon shavings; thinking about Hilary at all was a defense her mind had flung up. If she thought enough about Hilary, so irritably that every square inch of her body felt sore to the touch, she would not be able to think about Cornelia, alone with Philip on some unwitnessing stretch of desert road—

  And that was what Kincaid hadn’t said, hadn’t thought she could stand. Cornelia was perfectly safe while she was alone with Philip, simply because Philip was too clever to risk any close investigation. Whatever happened would happen under the eyes of simon-pure witnesses who could testify to a tragic accident. Philip was used to looking stunned with shock and grief by now, and he would do it well.

  How unbelievable it always looked in the newspapers, the chronicling of a fifth wife or a tenth husband exhumed on somebody’s at-long-last suspicions. How, you wondered, had the opposite partner gotten away with it all these years, why had no one ever questioned this rapid matrimonial turn-over before?

  But no one had, and the record was there to prove it, although it was impossible to overpark without getting a ticket.

  Hilary said with interest, “You’re shaking.”

  “I’m cold.”

  “I thought you said you were sick?”

  “I’m sick and cold,” said Margaret out of her pounding throat, “and the doctor is coming and if you’re all right I think I’ll lie down for a few minutes.”

  And Hilary did have feelings, well-buried but nevertheless there, because her still-flushed squirrel face went solemn, her yellowish gaze was genuinely alarmed. She had simply never been face to face with any demand on her feelings before.

  “If you get sick,” said Hilary practically and offendedly, “who’s going to take care of me?”

  Dr. Wimple arrived at shortly after twelve. He took Margaret’s temperature, looked down her throat and into her ears, listened to her lungs, counted her pulse twice. By persistent questioning, Margaret found that her temperature was almost 103, her right tonsil was badly infected, there was congestion in her lungs, her pulse was fast.

  He asked if she had ever had quinsy and if she tolerated penicillin, and gave her a shot there and then which she could only liken, later, to a kick from a vindictive horse. He said that she would have to go to bed at once, wrote out a prescription that he would have delivered, and asked after her little girl.

  “Oh, she’s not mine. She’s—her parents—oh,” said Margaret despairingly, “I can’t go into it.”

  She went with Wimple, still shuddering uncontrollably now and then, while he examined Hilary, said something about secondary infections, and removed a long curl of red crayon delicately from the heel of his shoe. “Now, can you find someone to come in? Otherwise I’d advise the hospital.”

  For the first time in her life, Margaret found the thought of a hospital appealing. To enter another world, high, white, sterile; its corridors lighted and travelled at night, however hushedly; its very routine, shutting out any other possible activity, soothing. Hilary could probably be wangled in, too, bringing the nursing profession to its highest, most haggard peak.

  But she would be shut away from even indirect contact with Cornelia. “I have someone I can call,” said Margaret, folding her arms tightly around herself, “and she can take care of both of us.”

  Wimple put things back in his bag. He had offered Hilary the used tongue depressor, and she had answered primly, “There might be germs on it.” As he straightened beside the bed a piece of paper floated to the floor, and he picked it up, glanced at it, and returned it to Hilary after a lightning glance at Margaret and a somewhat delayed smile. “You’re quite an artist, aren’t you?”

  “That’s Mrs. Foale,” said Hilary, divided between pride and invalidism, and Margaret and the doctor, equally taken aback, gazed at a purple outline of face, one sharp-lashed blue eye lower than the other, a scribble of black bangs, a crude red smile.

  “Very nice,” said Dr. Wimple, recovering first, and then to Margaret, as he eased himself into the living room, “An imaginative child, isn’t she?”

  “Very.” Although she wasn’t, really. “Thank you, doctor.”

  “Had any more trouble with your visitor of the other night?”

  Why did he ask that just now, and was it only her nerves that thought he was examining her, watching for some betrayal by eyes or mouth or hands? “No. I’m sure he was quite harmless anyway,” said Margaret, meeting his gaze steadily. “I was coming down with this throat, I suppose.”

  “I did the autopsy on a hit-and-run victim on this street that night,” said Dr. Wimple, equally off-hand, “and took a bullet out of him. Julio Garcia, his name was. But of course the man you saw would have told you if he’d been shot. He’d certainly have been looking for help.”

  He could not have seen the bloodied flagstones in the dark; lie couldn’t know, even though her face must be flaming. This was the tiniest portion of what she could expect if she told the police about Julio Garcia’s last visit, because although she had neither gun nor car they would find it difficult to believe that she hadn’t known he was hurt, impossible to understand the panic that had driven her to wash the stones of the porch.

  To explain that she would have to explain about Philip and Cornelia and herself and Mrs. Foale—without a scrap of proof. She would look like a classically jealous and bitter woman, determined to cave the roof in on the man who had humiliated her. More important, they would almost certainly detain her for questioning, or whatever it was they did, and she would be out of touch with Cornelia at this time that mattered most.

  “I don’t think it could have been the same man,” said Margaret, allowing doubt to creep in. “At least, I certainly hope . . .”

  She gave the doctor an imploring look, to which he rose. “It’s very unlikely. With that loss of blood, you’d have known. I’d like you to call me—let me see—on Wednesday, and I’d keep the child in bed, too . .

  Margaret called Lena and then went fugitively to bed. For just a few minutes, she thought; just long enough to get warmed through, to put down her aching head and not thi
nk about anything at all.

  She shivered for some time under the blankets, and all at once her body let go and was still. She had to fight a gradual cocoon-like drowsiness, because Hilary was in bed across the hall and Kincaid might call with news at any minute. And the prescription would be coming from the drugstore.

  Active consciousness came and went like waves on a beach. At one instant she was gazing at the drawer-pulls on the bureau across from her bed; in the next, with the drawer-pulls still half there, Cornelia was at the bottom of a tremendously long ladder, trying strengthlessly to climb up it to safety.

  Reality, when her eyelids jerked wide again, was worse. Cornelia was not alone, she was with Philip, lulled, unsuspecting; possibly—because that was the way things worked—even happier than she had been before her brief black doubt.

  Mrs. Foale slipped wispily between Margaret and the bureau; Mrs. Foale, who had trusted Philip so little that she had secreted small evidences of his connection with her and the house. How furious Philip would be . . . Margaret realized with the dreaminess of fever that she had never seen Philip angry. He seemed to have an automatic pilot that took over when he was crossed and, with a shrug, preserved the sunny surface.

  Mrs. Foale had not been part of the marriage pattern; that was why she had gotten away. Everything about her departure spoke of flight, and her request to Elizabeth Honeyman for her address book indicated a desire to stay safely away.

  But how very odd, under the circumstances, that she would have rented the house to Philip and his bride. Unless she didn’t know—but she must; the rent checks would be signed by Philip.

  Have to get up, thought Margaret in a tangle of dreams and warmth and physical surcease. Have to be alert for a telephone call from Jerome Kincaid, look after Hilary, shake off this dangerous somnolence, almost trance-like, which was holding the beat of fear and immediacy just under the surface. She gathered the coverlet closer about her, warding off an anticipatory chill before she got up, and when her eyelids lifted again the shadows in the room had deepened and Lena was in the doorway, saying shyly and distressedly, “I’m sorry to wake you, ma’am, but the man from the drugstore is here and there’s a lady . . .”