Hours to Kill Read online

  And what would Cornelia say now? In the light of the cached rum bottles in the storage room, how would her “illness” look?

  Out of the dark quiet hall, something shot with such force that Margaret shut her eyes and ducked instinctively. But it was only a flicker of time. Mrs. Foale had been caught by surprise, and the shock had spun her sideways and off balance. Quickly, quickly—

  Margaret jumped at her.

  Sixteen

  SHE hadn’t fought physically with anyone since she was twelve, and the contact with hair and flesh, the answering bite of nails and pressure of muscles, was at once horrifying and exhilarating. This was not a pervasive and frightening atmosphere, but something to fight with every ounce of strength, something that could be hurt as she was hurt.

  Not surprisingly, because she had been a nurse, Mrs. Foale was strong and skillful. She locked Margaret’s arms, and Margaret, head forced down, kicked savagely. An added wrench sent her spinning against the foot of the bed, but she was free in spite of the crashing pain in her hip and could launch herself at Mrs. Foale, unscarfed now, her dry blonde hair askew, one cheek redly scratched.

  The woman seemed to have infinite reserves of breath, although Margaret’s was jagged in her throat and she was sick and dizzy. They were locked together again, and all at once, almost unnoticed, the bureau scarf went off with a heavy smashing sound of glass and a rolling of objects.

  Where was the gun, where was the capsule? Out of reach, or Mrs. Foale would not be battling like this, forcing Margaret’s head back unendurably, sending darkness into her brain.

  Time escaped her there. She thought later that it was like swishing into Grand Central on a train: there was the altered roar, the darkness, the flashing, periodic lights. Seconds were made of elastic, minutes lost altogether in a world she didn’t know how to live in. She hurt badly in two or three places her mind could not at once identify. Close to her, looming like a great forest, was Hilary’s sprigged housecoat.

  “I’m sitting on her,” said Hilary sensibly, and she was. Academy-prim except for her flushed face and disordered hair, she was planted solidly on Mrs. Foale’s midriff. Mrs. Foale appeared to be unconscious. “I threw my puppet at her,” said Hilary, “and then I hit her with this. I couldn’t help it if it broke.”

  Margaret looked dizzily at shards of the great bowl that had stood on the hall bookcase. Valuable, no doubt, but Mrs. Foale was hardly in a position to complain.

  Hilary gazed professionally at Mrs. Foale’s flickering eyelids and reached for a large fragment. “I’d better hit her again,” she said.

  The police were courteous with Margaret, much more courteous with Mrs. Foale, widow of a resident and owner of the branched candlesticks, the magnificent clock, the peacocks from Paris. Aching in every bone, losing their faces now and then in a shimmer of fatigue or fever, Margaret could nevertheless understand how the two officers felt. It was difficult to conceive of overparking, in this setting, let alone violence and complicity to attempted murder.

  Hilary didn’t help. Her infatuation withered, she sent glances of such black malevolence at Mrs. Foale that the policemen controlled smiles. It was not until Margaret mentioned Julio Garcia that they came to attention at all.

  “What do you know about Garcia, Miss Russell?”

  Margaret told them, with a tremendous effort. She had never felt sicker. The room came and went in waves, and the two uniformed men seemed far out of reach of her voice, but she tried anyway. Her tiny, whispery voice said, “Julio Garcia said Mrs. Foale gave him money. I thought he meant when she was here with Philip, but he must have seen her here in town and recognized her when she was supposed to be in Europe. That’s why she must have paid him—so he wouldn’t talk about her. It would be too dangerous—especially if he’d said anything to Miss Honeyman or me. Maybe that’s why he came here the first time, hoping he could sell his information to me. But I was too frightened to give him a chance. If Mrs. Foale found out he’d been here, she would have known blackmail wouldn’t keep him silent. So she could have been the one who shot him. Garcia must have gone by the house after Philip brought Cornelia out here and recognized Philip, too, because he seemed to think something was . . .”

  “. . . very amusing,” said Margaret, but her voice echoed oddly and she had said it earnestly to the blank ceiling of her room, dim in the lamplight. She was in bed, neatly, flat on her back, with no memory of getting there.

  All the pain in her throat had seeped deep inside her chest, and the whistly sound that had waked her was her own breath, going shallowly, effortfully in and out, as though all but a very small space at the top had solidified. When she lifted her head from the pillow air struck coldly at her damp hair and neck, turned the damp pillow icy when she lowered it again. The sheet beneath her was wet. How long had she lain here, talking to herself, with fever pouring out of her?

  Cornelia—but Kincaid was with her, or on his way to her, worth an army of lawyers. Hilary . . . Margaret struggled up on her elbow, threw back her covers, and was put firmly back by a big gray-haired woman who seemed to materialize out of the wall.

  “Awake, are you? How do you feel?”

  Somebody had sent her. The police? Margaret said, “I have to—”

  “Have to nothing, you’ve got pneumonia,” said the woman briskly. “I’m a nurse, and you’re my job. If it’s the little girl you’re worried about, she’s fine, dead to the world. And you had a telephone call from a Mr. Kincaid. You’re not to worry; he’s taking care of everything and he’ll be back tomorrow. Now . . .”

  A thermometer went into Margaret’s mouth, but she did not remember its being taken out again. She woke to the nurse’s voice saying . . feel better if you do,” and realized that she had been staring at a spoonful of clear soup. She drank it obediently, and went on drinking it until warmth spread through her and seemed to ease her breath.

  She slept again until the phone rang. The nightmare waiting came back, until she remembered, and the nurse was saying, “Well, I think she might—” and handing her the receiver.

  It was Kincaid, and his voice was so comforting, so like coming home, that Margaret was momentarily weak against the pillows she had braced herself on. She said to his first query, “I’m all right; how’s Cornelia?”

  “Still pretty groggy.” He sounded as close, miles away in the night, as though he were standing beside her. “I suppose she told you she was drugged . . . Hello? Margaret?”

  Drugged. Not responsible, not accountable.

  Kincaid’s voice went on, saying something about a doctor and a blood test for Cornelia and a confusion of cocktail glasses; Margaret could only realize that Cornelia had not placed herself in even greater jeopardy. She was safe from suspicion because she had been physically incapacitated. It could be proved that she had been drugged, that she would not have been able to rescue Philip.

  “. . . reputation, all along the way. Cornelia was supposed to be a drinking-and-barbiturate problem. After Philip had packed, he remembered two samples he’d forgotten, and he asked Cornelia to put them in her suitcase. He said he was going to combine business and pleasure—and of course she handled the bottles, tightened the caps to make sure they wouldn’t open, wrapped them inside clothing so they wouldn’t break. Her fingerprints were all over them.”

  Foresighted Philip—and he would have done it so well. The frantic but loyal husband, hiding his wife’s addiction, hoping a vacation alone together would straighten her out.

  He would have done it beautifully.

  “There’ll be some formalities here,” said Kincaid, “but I think that’s all they’ll be. Now—are you really okay? Is Hilary behaving?”

  “Oh, beautifully,” said Margaret, and began to laugh and burst into a fit of coughing instead. When she could speak again she told him about Mrs. Foale. And she was right; he had been convinced that Mrs. Foale was dead when he found, inside a layer of linens in one of the storage-room trunks, new and expensive clothes, some unworn. />
  Labels, of course. And even without those, an unmistakable Eastern cut that would destroy her new protective coloring.

  “Where is she now?” asked Kincaid, and Margaret realized that she didn’t know. She said, “Hold on a second,” and lowered the phone to call to the silent and fascinated presence just outside the door, “Mrs. . . . ?”

  “Snaith,” said the nurse imperturbably, putting her head around the door.

  “Do you know what became of Mrs. Foale, the woman who was here when the police came?”

  “Oh, they took her with them, for questioning they said. They took her gun with them, too. They said it would be easy to tell if it had been used to shoot Garcia. And they asked her if she had a car. It sounded as if they thought she was the hit-and-run driver who had killed him. She gave Johnny Ortiz a terrible bite,” said Mrs. Snaith, finishing with a certain relish.

  Margaret conveyed this information to Kincaid. With Cornelia safe, and Mrs. Foale no longer an unknown darkness but a dyed, dried blonde who had hardly improved her case by biting a police officer, she felt limp and empty with relief, incapable, just now, of containing happiness.

  Or so she thought until Kincaid’s voice, changed, warmed, said in her ear, “Hilary gets a medal, sometime tomorrow. Who’s this Mrs. Snaith, a nurse? Is she staying with you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Somebody,” said Kincaid with severity, “has to take care of you until I come back, as soon as I can make it.”

  Margaret did not remark that she had been taking care of herself, in sickness and in health, for a good many years and with a fair amount of efficiency. She said modestly, “I’m all right,” but when she hung up at last she did it as dreamily and foolishly as a girl with her first interested telephone call.

  She woke in the night; she had known that she would. Mrs. Snaith was asleep in the other bed, a comforting bulk with curlers on top. Safety could exude itself as strongly as danger, and the house was quiet and dark and secure.

  How very icily clear Cornelia’s voice had been for someone drugged.

  How incredibly arrogant of Philip to have underestimated Cornelia’s instinct for self-preservation. She had not been diabetic like his first wife, nor been weakened by rheumatic fever like his second wife. He had been foolish to think Cornelia would not question continued illness. The suspicions that made her hide the capsule before she left on the trip would be aroused. Alerted to danger, she must have noticed signs that made her mistrust Philip, at least enough not to take chances until she had proof. Well, she had her proof when she managed somehow to switch the glasses so that Philip drank the lethal cocktail he had made for her.

  If he had gone to the trouble of establishing Cornelia as a habitual user of barbiturates—had, in fact, been introducing small amounts into her daily food or drink against the inevitable autopsy (“I’ve been sick all along”)—he must have had a supply on hand. How quickly did drugs show up in the blood? If, for instance, Kincaid had said urgently to Cornelia over the phone, “Take something, quick . . .”

  Her stomach, thoroughly emptied of pool water would have been receptive to drugs, indeed. Warned by Kincaid, she would have been able to help herself to barbiturates from Philip’s supply. The blood test, of course, would show that she had been drugged.

  A little chilling, much more comforting for Margaret, that she would never know to what lengths Cornelia had gone to save herself before or after Philip’s death.

  Hilary was abroad early, a dedicated Florence Nightingale under Mrs. Snaith’s admiring and uninitiated eye. She hovered in Margaret’s bedroom, trying on her gloves, leaving only a faint smear of peanut butter on the back of one. She seemed untouched, Margaret thought wonderingly; the night had come and gone and left her just as she was.

  Just then, by way of restoring the norm, Hilary knocked over a yellow-shaded lamp. She said without righting it, “She was a horrible woman, wasn’t she?” The books said no; said gently, “Dear, she was sick.” No book had been written yet for Hilary, or the toppling of Hilary’s idols. Margaret said gravely, “Yes, Hilary, she was dreadful, and quite dangerous. You were awfully good last night, and very brave. Mr. Kincaid’s going to give you a medal.”

  Hilary was alerted at once. “Gold?”

  “Leather,” said Margaret. “Leather medals are the best, and the rarest.” She closed her eyes, exhausted although she had only been awake an hour, and heard the doorbell ring.

  There was a murmur of voices in the living room, and presently Mrs. Reverton was in the bedroom with her arm around Hilary. She was a handsomer, grown-up edition of her daughter, with black-lashed yellow eyes, black hair cut in jagged scissor points around her lean wide-awake face. She wore pink toreador pants and a black and white striped jersey half-buried by a wild profusion of necklaces, and from the soundless way she had entered she was barefoot. She looked weird and happy, and when Mrs. Snaith had departed to collect Hilary’s belongings she was full of thanks and solicitude.

  “My husband and I—well, I won’t bore you with that, but tell Philip and your sister, will you, that the operation was a success?”

  Hilary shot Margaret an appalled look. Savingly, Mrs. Snaith appeared with a question as to the ownership of a white cardigan, and in an astonishingly short time the Revertons were packed and ready to go. Hilary roused herself from a repressive contemplation of her mother’s bib of necklaces—clearly she would have preferred a single austere strand of real pearls—to say to Margaret from the doorway, “Will you send me my medal?”

  “I certainly will.”

  “Will you come and see me when you get back to New York?”

  Wonders would never cease. “Yes, Hilary, we will.” Hilary mulled that over, although her mother was calling her impatiently. “Who’s we?”

  Margaret smiled at her from the bed. It was not quite over yet, and there would be a period of trouble for Cornelia, but just at the moment she felt so sure and serene that it was all she could do not to stretch like a cat. “Me and my friend Mr. Kincaid,” she said.