Hours to Kill Page 12

  There was a bird in the pear tree, Hilary said, and it kept squawking. She had thought—here came the righteous note—that maybe some other bird was trying to take its nest. So she had turned off her light and gotten the flashlight—

  “What flashlight?”

  “I found it,” said Hilary—and she had tried to hypnotize the bird or birds into silence by aiming the beam up into the tree. She didn’t know how she had dropped the flashlight, but it went out when it hit the ground.

  She was starting back to turn on her light again when a sound made her look back at the window, and there he was. Not all of him, just his eyes under his big hat.

  Margaret’s stomach dropped briefly. She had to remind herself that Julio Garcia was dead, that this was a country of big hats, that workmen on their way to somewhere often walked through the field behind the house and, presumably, back again. One of them might easily have been curious about the flashlight beam, straddled the wire fence, come up to the house—

  She opened the window, feeling the night air like ice on her hot body; unhooked the screen, leaned over to look out. There was nothing under the gilded net of pear branches but leaves dying into darkness and, off to the left, the very edge of something pale and square. A block of some kind, a concrete building block? She had seen some once in the angle of the house, but not this near the window.

  “I told you,” said Hilary peevishly as Margaret stepped back into the lighted safety of the room and locked the window. “Are you going to call the police?”

  It was a question she had asked herself ever since the echo of Hilary’s shriek had died—but what would she say to the police? “A man looked in the window.” No, she hadn’t seen him herself, a little girl had. If they came at all, which was doubtful, they would take one look at Hilary and depart. Or at best they would make a perfunctory tour of the grounds, and certainly whoever it was had long since fled.

  “No,” said Margaret, and Hilary gave her a look of indignation. “Somebody could kidnap me for all you care.” Margaret had to stifle an impulse to unstrung laughter at the thought of anyone capable of such folly, but she recognized it even then as not amusement but a trembling approach to hysteria. Someone had come quietly up to the house in darkness, had bothered to move one of the heavy blocks into place in order to look over the sill—had taken the time, even warned by Hilary’s electrifying outcry, to move the block away again.

  In the kitchen, assembling cleaning things, she went on impulse into the pantry and called Jerome Kincaid at the Paraguero. His line was busy, and she returned to Hilary’s room and the staggering business of cleaning up the floor. Fright had given her an artificial energy which ebbed at once; bending to the Jello and the asparagus, she was so dizzy that tiny bright sparks floated up everywhere. She sat down abruptly on the foot of Hilary’s bed, hands steadyingly at her burning cheeks, and Hilary said defensively, “Those plates were chipped anyway.” Plates? Oh yes, Cornelia’s conscientious list of damages, almost as laughable, now, as the thought of a madman making off with Hilary. Mrs. Foale was not coming back to count her dishes and glasses, thought Margaret in a soft cold whisper to herself. Mrs. Foale was not coming back at all, because she had never been away.

  Mrs. Foale was dead.

  Hilary had sensed it; Jerome Kincaid, suspecting it, had emerged from that cobwebby trip to the cellar storage room with an unseeing gaze. Margaret had kept it at bay by a series of subconscious strategems. Only Elizabeth Honeyman, as delicate and malicious as a wasp, was still bent on the destruction of an enemy already destroyed. The taking of the useless letter and the address book, the hope for damaging gossip from Julio Garcia—

  The bedspread under Margaret’s hot dry palms was suddenly another bedspread, a huddle of plaid on the cold cement floor of the storage room in the cellar. But even in that icy air it could not be— A revulsion of heat mounted to her throat, and although she had only tea to lose she reached Hilary’s bathroom barely in time. Her stomach was still wrenching vainly and emptily when the telephone rang.

  She was so braced for Kincaid’s voice that she did not, for a second, recognize Cornelia’s, somehow detached in spite of its clarity.

  “Margaret? I’m in Arizona. How is everything there?”

  “Oh, thank God. I’ve been trying ev—” No; check herself, at once; go at it calmly or Cornelia would think she was mad. “You’ve got to come home right away. I’m sorry, but Hilary’s sick and so am I. Perhaps I’d better —is Philip there?”

  “I’ll come home as soon as I can,” said Cornelia’s cool dry voice. “Philip’s dead.”

  Fifteen

  SHE might have been saying, “Philip’s in the shower.” In answer to Margaret’s stunned, “What?” she repeated, “Philip’s dead.”

  The wires hummed blankly, airily. Fever or not, thought Margaret wildly, she was quite rational, and Cornelia had just said that Philip was dead. Her tongue finally got itself untied, and said, “How—what happened?”

  “The pool. We were going out to dinner, but we had trouble with the car and it was awfully hot and Philip wanted a swim, so we went back to the motel. Philip had made cocktails and we had them beside the pool. Philip drank mine instead of his own. It must have been the cocktail, because when he was at the deep end he got a cramp. I tried,” said Cornelia in that curiously detached way, “but I couldn’t get to him in time.”

  Margaret closed her eyes hard on the vision of Cornelia’s strong, effortless, swimming-meet stroke. She said automatically, “Where are you now?”

  “At the Alvarado, waiting—there seem to be a lot of technicalities,” said Cornelia. Her voice shook for just an instant. “But everybody’s been very kind and given me time to get rid of all the pool water I swallowed. I’ve been sick all along, as a matter of fact.”

  So she had probably not been in a pool for anyone to see and remember what a strong swimmer she was; thank God at least for that. There was someone official with her, Margaret could tell from her voice; probably someone connected with the motel, ready to deny any responsibility for the tragedy. Shouldn’t Cornelia be trying to cry, or putting on some semblance of hysteria?

  Numbly, she heard Cornelia say, “I suppose it doesn’t seem quite real yet. Your friend Mr. Kincaid telephoned that he is coming—I told him I’d call you. Oh, and Margaret—”

  This was important.

  “Take care of things in the house, will you? Philip left some awfully important envelopes in our room, and of course I’ll have to see what to do about everything.” The capsule in the envelope. Margaret did not dare say, “I’ve got it; it’s safe,” or even, “Be careful,” because it was possible that someone was listening at Cornelia’s end—and did she imagine a very faint close breathiness on the line, as though Hilary were at the bedroom extension again? She said as steadily as she could, although the pantry was beginning to lurch a little, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything here,” and uncounted miles away in another state Cornelia said goodbye and the receiver went down.

  It seemed incredible that the house should be so quiet and unchanged, the dining room full of silky light and shadow, the living room a deeper tunnel of gold and dark. The beaded peacocks on the mantel, the seagulls glimmering in two arcs of crystal on the desk, did not know or care that Philip was dead.

  He had drunk the cocktail—poisoned or drugged—that he had mixed for Cornelia—how had that happened?— and then he had been seized by a cramp in the pool. He must have known at the last that Cornelia was going to let him die. It would have seemed to him monstrously unfair and impossible, in spite of what he had planned for her, that she should simply go through floundering motions instead of calling for help.

  He must have intended Cornelia to drown—and what a daring, perhaps a disarmingly bold plan that had been. It would certainly be brought out that she had been a strong swimmer, and what man in his right mind would have chosen that method, particularly when, alone with her in a car for days, he had had countless opportu
nities? And he must have covered himself in the event of an autopsy on Cornelia. Margaret could not imagine how, except that his job gave him access to all kinds of experimental drugs.

  Gaze deliberately focussed on near objects, one at a time as she passed them, Margaret walked the length of the living room, into the hall, opened Hilary’s door with a silent swiftness.

  Hilary was shamming sleep, so expertly that the mind reeled at the mountainous task of confronting her with having listened in on the extension. But nobody, thought Margaret, gazing at her in the dim light from her own bathroom across the hall, certainly not Hilary, slept so neatly, breathed so evenly, was so perfectly composed as to brows and lips. Dreadfully, wooden little Mrs. Foale reposed on the pillow beside her head. The painted face could not be said to sleep, because the crude long-oval eyes, one lower than the other, stared emptily up into the dark; the primitive mouth seemed stretched, in this dim light, into the grimace usually connected with death by strychnine.

  Margaret closed the door with a sense of quiet horror, put her hands briefly and coolingly against her feverish face, and went into her own room.

  How was it that the very air testified to recent tenancy? Was there an actual if tiny stir left, or simply an imprint of curiosity, of alien feet on the rugs, an alien stare bringing subtle life to silent beds, bureaus, curtains?

  Margaret did not at the moment care. She was possessed by two immediacies: to make sure that Hilary, listening on the extension, had not looked around for envelopes to inspect and perhaps pocket; after that to put her sick aching body to bed and plunge the memory of Cornelia’s voice, clear, deliberate, into forgetting sleep.

  She moved toward the bed lamp, and stopped in her tracks. That was not the familiar shadow of the stand-lamp in the far comer. It was a figure, a woman, still as the paint on the walls, waiting to see what she would do. There was only a bulk of skirt, shabby even in outline, and some sort of head-scarf. A very faint crisp scent, not noticeable except to newly, sharply edged nerves, was on the air.

  Margaret had only checked herself for a brief second that sounded in her own head like a clash of cymbals. Plummet into the bathroom and lock the door? No, there was Hilary. Rub her eyes as though she were blind and inattentive with sleep, saunter toward the other bed— no one could know which bed she slept in—and the telephone extension on the table there. Start unbuttoning her sweater obliviously as she went, and then snatch up the receiver, because danger hung far heavier on the air than scent.

  Above all, seem not to know who stood there, shorn of her wasp-like slenderness and delicacy, become suddenly a blunt instrument. Forgetting the scent that was as habitual as her tweeds and her pride.

  Margaret moved, one foot after another. She hadn’t stared at the comer; she had known in an immeasurably small flicker of time. She undid the bottom button of her sweater and then the next, and all the time, idly, chest burstingly tight, she was getting closer to the telephone. Almost beside it, she bent and turned back the bedspread. Her hand flashed out, and the shadow in the corner said softly and sharply, “Don’t touch that!”

  Margaret dropped her hand at once. Better women might have seized handset and all and dropped down behind the shelter of the bed, or sprung across the room in a diving tackle. Her own reaction was an instant and paralyzed obedience, because this woman’s driving purpose was not to be trifled with.

  “There’s an envelope,” said the carefully masqueraded voice. “Give it to me, please.”

  How meticulous she was, even in this extremity—and if Margaret turned over the capsule Cornelia had hidden under her mattress, there went Cornelia’s plea of self-defense. There went Cornelia. Fever gave Margaret a clarity she could not have achieved under other circumstances. She said, “I don’t know who you are or what you want, and the only envelope I’ve seen is in—” she nodded in half-darkness “—the top drawer of that bureau beside you. I can only warn you that there’s no money here.”

  If she would turn her back, for just an instant, but she did not. Her voice said out of shadows, “You get it for me, and I’ll tell you if it’s what I want. Be very quiet, because we don’t want to wake the child.”

  She knew—of course she had known, from the jigsaw puzzle and countless other small evidences which Margaret, accustomed to living with Hilary, had not noticed.

  Carefully, Margaret moved around the bed and across to the bureau. In the darkness she hadn’t seen a gun or any other weapon, but she was as conscious of one as she had been of a presence in the room when she first entered it. She said as she pulled open the top drawer of the bureau, “I can’t see very well, you know,” and a flashlight beam—Hilary’s, that she had dropped?—came on instantly. The piled and slipping wedding photographs turned to sheets of blind gold as she toppled them, pretending to grope beneath. What now, what further delay—

  She whirled, saying frantically, “It was there, I put it there,” and the suddenness of her movement shot the flashlight beam up and a little back.

  Furious gold-carved face inside a loose and shielding scarf, pale eyes icy under bleached but still perfectly arched brows—not Miss Honeyman at all. The flashlight snapped off, and Margaret could almost have cried out with a childish horror of being left in the half-dark with Mrs. Foale.

  “Give it to me,” said Mrs. Foale. Without a pretence at Elizabeth Honeyman’s deep arrogant voice, her own was hard and flat and rather high. “The medicine. Philip told me he thought she had hidden some.”

  Margaret couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. The transition from Mrs. Foale dead in the storage room, another of Philip’s victims, to this woman who gave an impression of springing at her, although she stood statue-still, had left her hollow and cold with shock.

  Although she would have had to keep out of Elizabeth Honeyman’s way, because hatred had a sure recognition of its own, this woman would have been safe anywhere else. She had lost weight, altering the contours of her face, and the dark bangs had become brushed-across blonde hair. Her skin had looked very white in the snapshot; tan make-up made a surprising difference. Add very high heels, and a small plumpish brunette woman who was supposed to be abroad could register at one of the motels in the town and even move about without worry.

  “I said give it to me,” said Mrs. Foale sharply. Because of her total stillness and her air of frozen control, the brief half-seen contortion of her face was frightening. “I heard her just now. She killed Philip, and she isn’t going to get away with it.”

  It was more than that, thought Margaret, crystally alert, more than hatred for the woman Philip had married, even out of expedience, and who might be held responsible for his death. Philip would never have run the risk of acquiring poison himself, so Mrs. Foale had done it for him. With something as concrete as the capsule, the police would pursue that point. Without it, Margaret’s tale of attempted murder was simply a desperate defense of her sister.

  She said because she couldn’t stop herself, “Was she to let Philip kill her instead?” and Mrs. Foale said contemptuously, “You and your sister were both fools—to think that Philip was in love with either of you. I want that medicine, and I want it now.”

  “I don’t know where—”

  “Then you’d better find out. I have a gun,” said Mrs. Foale, “and I’d just as soon go and get that child out of bed.”

  She’ll have to shoot me anyway, thought Margaret blindly. Not so risky, people would think it was suicide because I couldn’t face what Cornelia had done. But can I stand by while she shoots Hilary? Can I betray Cornelia, who is going to need every scrap of help she can get?

  Mrs. Foale broke out of her immobility in the comer. Without drama, the more dangerous because of the grotesquely bunched skirt and trailing scarf that almost hid the gun in her hand, she walked toward the door. It was pure bluff, of course. She would not aim a gun at a sleepy eight-year-old girl and pull the trigger.

  “Wait,” said Margaret shakenly. “I’ll get it for you.”

  Stiff
ly, shutting her mind to everything but Hilary across the hall, she walked to the bedside table, got the envelope, walked back with it. Her chest hurt badly with foreknowledge. She said delayingly, “I suppose you’re getting on a plane now, or something?”

  “Don’t suppose anything,” said Mrs. Foale coldly. She opened the envelope and the capsule, Cornelia’s certain defense, rolled briefly on her palm, blue and yellow, at once poisonous and life-saving. How had Cornelia been so rash as to let Philip know about it? But of course she had been unaware of Mrs. Foale’s existence, so she had thought it a safeguard.

  And how predictable I was, thought Margaret bitterly; rushing into Hilary’s room when she screamed, staying there, cleaning up the mess. All the time in the world for this woman to use her own key and enter the house to do what Philip had told her to do. Mrs. Foale apparently was accustomed to doing what Philip wanted her to do. The elaborateness of the conspiracy attested to this. What part, Margaret wondered, had Mrs. Foale played in Philip’s previous marriages?

  What extensive planning they must have done this time, the two of them, when Philip decided Comelia’s inheritance made her a suitable bride—and victim. First, spirit Cornelia away from her friends and her familiar background; the Foale house would do nicely for that. But Mrs. Foale was known to be a youngish widow, and had been there with Philip, however discreetly, in the past. When Cornelia suffered a fatal accident there must be no faintest hint of another woman on Philip’s horizon, and appearing to be abroad would seem to be the most conclusive measure.

  Mrs. Foale walked toward the bathroom. She was going to flush the capsule down the toilet, irrecoverably, destroying her own complicity with Philip. She hadn’t thought about the snapshot of Philip and his letter in the lipstick yet, but she would.