Hours to Kill Read online

  Pregnant, thought Margaret vaguely, going back to the dishes. Well, Mrs. Foale, a thin, fadedly pretty woman in her sixties to judge by the photograph in the hall, undoubtedly corresponded with younger relatives and friends.

  And if it was not Hilary’s concern, it was not hers either.

  At eleven-thirty, Hilary brought in the mail.

  Margaret sorted it because Cornelia had asked her to. Philip’s job as representative for a chemical concern on the Coast required so much travelling that he was, very discreetly, putting out other lines. If a letter came from Phalanx, Inc., she was to open it against their expected call.

  There was no letter from Phalanx, Inc. Margaret riffled automatically through envelopes, handwritten and typed: two for Cornelia, one for Philip, bank statements for each of them, and a postcard to Mrs. Hadley Foale.

  No one wrote intimacies on postcards, and Margaret read it almost without thinking. The tiny cramped writing said, “Dear Isabel, So thrilled and envious at your wire. Aren’t you the lucky one? Do wish you’d planned to embark from N.Y. so we could have seen you. Have a wonderful trip and keep us posted. Love, Grace.”

  The card, mailed from New York almost a month ago, was inaccurately addressed and had been a number of places, to judge by the scribbled notations, before arriving here.

  “Is that yours?” asked Hilary, craning upward, and Margaret said crisply. “No. You’re standing on my foot, Hilary.”

  “I have very big feet for my age,” said Hilary complacently. “As big as Mrs. Foale’s.”

  Perhaps because of the solemnity with which Margaret invoked the name, Hilary had come to say it with a kind of round owlishness, the “Mrs.” almost swallowed, the “oh” in Foale deepened and exaggerated. In this intonation, Mrs. Foale became a vengeful two-headed deity, dangerous to trespass on in any way. “What,” demanded Margaret astoundedly, “do you know about Mrs. Foale’s feet?”

  “She left some shoes in the shoebag in my closet. I thought you didn’t want me to leave my shoes lying all over the room,” said Hilary righteously, “so I took hers out and put mine in.”

  “Oh, you can’t do that,” Margaret said, starting instantly down the hall. This would, with Hilary, be the entering wedge; she had a horrified vision of the house being briskly rearranged, some objects broken, others irretrievably lost—and always with Hilary’s air of prim reproach. Besides, she had only one extra pair of shoes, red sneakers coming out at the sides, which could hardly be said to lie all over any room.

  Hilary’s was really the prettiest room in the house, and the only one that was ever filled with light. Against the white walls, the furniture was painted a cool apple-green, and lacquered birds in blossomy branches glowed on the twin bureaus in a pattern that was only broken when a drawer was pulled open. There was a small rocker beside Hilary’s lumpily made bed, and a little curved comer fireplace with a raised hearth.

  Margaret opened the closet door, and it was as she had feared: a pile of shoes had been tumbled rudely into a corner, while the ragged sneakers, side by side, reigned over the shoebag. Hilary would undoubtedly be seized by the urge to clean out the closet, presently, and hurl Mrs. Foale’s shoes somewhere else, and Cornelia would have everything to replace when she got back . . .

  “Look,” said Margaret sternly, bending to pick up the shoes, “in a rented house you have to leave things just as you found them. Including shoes.”

  But Hilary had been right, she thought absently; Mrs. Foale’s feet were small, and surprisingly, shabbily gay. A pair of worn brocade slippers turned up in an Oriental point, black velvet flats with broken gilt embroidery, scuffed red calf, faded yellow satin—all, for some reason, at variance with the personality otherwise stamped on the house.

  Although was it her personality, really? The heavy old mission furniture, the oils framed in dimming gold, the stately clock, the preoccupation with birds, might all be the choice of the late Mr. Foale—at least Margaret assumed he was late. She slipped the last sandal back into its nest, and Hilary’s voice said rather truculently, “How come she didn’t wear any high heels?”

  A very tall woman (hardly, though, from her shoe size) minimizing her height? A very small woman, capitalizing on it? “She took them all abroad,” said Margaret summarily, and closed the closet door. “Come on, let’s see about lunch.”

  Lena was not due for another two days, and Hilary seemed in some mysterious manner to create dust as well as disorder; further, to reproduce it instantly. After lunch, Margaret dispatched her to a movie, not without some argument.

  “I’m pasting in my scrapbook.”

  Now you are, said Margaret silently. “You can do that when you come home.”

  “Are you coming?”

  “No, I’ve got the house to do.”

  “I don’t like movies.”

  “Yes you do,” said Margaret, marvelling at such flawless perversity. “I’ll walk down with you, and pick you up when it’s over. The air will do you good.”

  Hilary got into her coat with a face like thunder. “I’m not allowed to go to movies.”

  “You’re allowed by me,” said Margaret, but she wondered uneasily about that as she walked back to the house alone half an hour later. Hilary could not really find movies that abhorrent; what, then, had she been doing, or planning to do, that she hated being forced to leave? She had a one-track mind, she was also enormously devious about gaining her own ends. In her determination to lay bare every aspect of the absent Mrs. Foale, she would stop at nothing—not even locks if she could pick them, and it seemed very possible that she could.

  Which was eminently wrong, shocking, even, at such a tender age—but that did not explain Margaret’s own deep nervousness, turning almost into an edge of fear. That came of summoning up Mrs. Foale so constantly, of course; she had succeeded in bewitching herself instead of Hilary.

  In the house, she went at once to Hilary’s room but it was blameless: the bed obediently straightened out of its earlier lumpiness, the rocker drawn up to a small table which held Hilary’s scrapbook and scissors and a cup of the omnipresent flour paste.

  Where else had the child been after lunch? In the library, where the television set was. Margaret walked down the cabinet-lined hall, through the dim length of living room and then dining room, and turned off into the small book-lined room where she and Hilary usually sat after dark. It seemed in order, except for some spilled checkers, a dish and spoon under Hilary’s chair, two broken crayons in imminent danger of being trampled into the floor, and a futile mumbling about macaroni from the pictureless television set. Margaret snapped it off, picked up the dish and spoon and crayons and checkers, and gave up. She would have—the very thought was exhausting—a long severe talk with Hilary tonight. Meanwhile she would look at the furnace, tidy the house, and perhaps wash her hair.

  The cellar was as neat as a pin, cement-floored, brightly lit. At the foot of the stairs was a locked door, to the right a laundry room which Margaret had never investigated and didn’t now. To her left was the room containing the very old gas furnace which she never approached without trepidation; it always seemed to give an angry roar of activity as soon as she approached. It did need water again—Philip had said something about steam leaks—and Margaret turned the faucet and waited for the gauge to show the proper level.

  On the far side of the furnace was a bolted door leading to the outside steps; beside it another door, undoubtedly locked. She tried it, curiously, and it wasn’t. It opened on a folded cot, a nest of tables, a few large cardboard cartons, a heap of bedspreads; all glimpsed, half-guessed at, in dark gray light that was, in spite of the proximity of the furnace, bitterly cold. Margaret closed the door again, glanced at the water gauge and turned off the faucet.

  Mrs. Foale was obviously the kind of woman who never threw anything away. For some reason, the thought was immensely reassuring.

  Without Hilary bickering at her heels, or engaged in some silent and even more disturbing pursuit, Margaret
went rapidly through what had to be done in the way of housework. She finished the kitchen, put away the laundry, arrived that morning, dusted the rosewood clock, and removed Hilary’s crayon drawings from the living room mantel, a forbidden spot because of the beaded peacocks, blue and green and white, infinitely delicate, that rested there. Hilary drew endless repetitions of a tall peaked house, a crescent moon, and stabs of snow or rain falling. A psychiatrist would undoubtedly have found this significant; Margaret suspected that it was the only thing Hilary, who was not very interested in crayons anyway, knew how to draw.

  There was still time to wash her hair and get it reasonably dry before she went to collect Hilary. At Cornelia’s insistence, because there was a telephone extension and a bath of her own, Margaret had moved into the big high-windowed double bedroom. She washed her hair, towelled it, and had begun to comb it dark and wet against her head when the doorbell rang.

  It seemed to peal through the quiet house, freezing the comb in mid-air, stopping Margaret’s breath and pale scrubbed reflection in the mirror. It was the kind of mischance that was always overtaking her, and certainly nothing to make her heart beat faster about. Let it ring, she couldn’t very well go to the door like this. Unless—it did ring again, wincingly loud and imperative—it was a telegram from Cornelia and Philip, or from Hilary’s parents . . .

  One small high dimity-curtained window faced on the porch. Margaret approached it with caution, stood on tiptoe, and looked out at a man, dark head turned away from her as he absorbed the silence of the house.

  Not a telegram, and even the most persistent salesman would give up after three unavailing rings—but while she watched he opened the screen door gently and put a hand on the doorknob, trying it with care and intentness.

  And, thought Margaret over a great pulse of shock, in her anxiety to see what Hilary had been up to, she hadn’t locked the front door behind her when she came in, and it was open.

  Three

  MARGARET shot down the hall and into the living room, towel clutched about her shoulders; she had called loudly, “Is that you, doctor?” even before she glanced through the window over the stiff brocaded settee. The man had retreated instantly; he was standing at the edge of the porch, admiring the snow-capped mountains in the distance and lighting a cigarette. It seemed hard to believe that only seconds before he had been trying to enter the house, thinking it empty.

  With fear turned into anger, Margaret snatched the door open. She said icily to the face that turned, “I’m expecting the doctor here, any minute. Was there something . . . ?”

  Light eyes, neither blue nor gray; strong-boned face with something disarming about it, an air of usually getting what he wanted. “Mrs. Foale?”

  “Mrs. Foale is abroad and has rented this house,” said Margaret. Her wet head felt cased in ice by the incoming air.

  “Abroad?” She might have said in orbit. Not a brogue, Margaret thought, unconsciously cataloguing things in the order of their importance, but there was one not far behind. “You wouldn’t have her address, by any chance?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Wait a minute,” said the man, staring at her, and then, parenthetically, “Should you be standing there in the open door if you’re waiting for the doctor?” He stepped inside, but lightly; not quite closing the door behind him, carefully not frightening her. “You don’t remember me.”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Margaret again, distantly, but she wasn’t frightened.

  “Jerome Kincaid,” he said expectantly. “And you’re— wait, don’t tell me—you lived in Connecticut, in Fairfield . . . you used to arrive at Rumford Elementary School in an old green Chevrolet . . . your father was an etcher . . . Russell. Margery Russell.”

  “Margaret,” she corrected, and had a sudden dizzyingly clear remembrance of the school playground, green, shady, with swings and slides.

  “And Miss Hatch,” he said, intercepting her. “I was back in Fairfield last year and she’s still principal and still going strong. You had a sister in my class—Comelia, was it? Blonde. Is she out here in New Mexico with you?”

  Margaret said yes, guardedly. They were both sitting down now, she on the brocade settee, Jerome Kincaid in a wine-colored wing chair near the piano. Did she actually remember his name, or was that persuasion? Childhood held so many half-memories—a particular pair of mittens, a set of long eyelashes above freckled cheeks, a boy who defended your turn on the slide. Imagination could easily creep in.

  This man had turned the doorknob, had planned on entering the house unobserved.

  Margaret said, lashes down, “Rumford . . . for heaven s sake. Do you remember Willy Burnett?”

  He tilted his head frowningly. “Somebody at school?”

  “Yes. Oh, you must remember—somebody threw a snowball with a stone in it and he lost the sight of one eye, just after Christmas vacation.”

  She was deliberately pinpointing it for him, inviting him to step into a trap, because there had been no Willy Burnett. Kincaid considered it, appearing to try for recollection, and shook his head. “No—but I do remember Eleanor Something, a friend of Cornelia’s, doing a back flip at the beach one summer and cutting her head open on the diving board. Eleanor was fine, and Cornelia passed out cold on the float.”

  How well she remembered that. Cornelia coming groggily out of her faint on the warm, salty white-painted float, Margaret swimming back to shore with her, side-stroke, so that she would have her face out of the water and one arm free in case of trouble.

  She felt a tremendous ease; she forgot that she sat there, towel cloaking her shoulders, hair drying as wispily as a child’s, until the clock chimed warningly. She jumped up distractedly. “Oh Lord, Hilary’s out of the movies.”

  Jerome Kincaid stood too, smiling. “Hilary’s not yours, I take it?”

  “No, nor Cornelia’s. She and Philip were taking care of her for friends when Cornelia got sick—I’ll have to rush.”

  “Couldn’t I pick her up for you? My car’s outside.”

  “The very last thing I told her was about strange men, but if you’d be kind enough to give me a lift down to the theatre—”

  Belatedly, Margaret remembered her towel and her hair. She rushed into the bedroom, used a lipstick hastily, put on a navy chiffon scarf and her lemon wool coat, caught up her pocketbook, and came rushing back.

  Kincaid said, smiling at her as he held the door, “Do you run everywhere? How old is this Hilary?”

  “A terrible eight.”

  “Parents?”

  “Reconciling in Mexico City.”

  “Oh.”

  They spoke with a comfortable elision that Margaret * could not remember with anyone outside her own family.

  Kincaid seemed to have an exact picture of the Reverton situation in his mind, although of course he could not. Margaret said randomly as the car moved down the hill, “What did you want with Mrs. Foale?”

  “Nothing. We have a friend in common in New York, and I was at a loose end, so—”

  So you thought you’d slip in and have a look at her house and her things while she was out, finished Margaret’s mind. The comfortableness was gone, because for all his odd friendliness Kincaid considered it no business of hers what he had wanted with Mrs. Foale and had told her an easy lie instead.

  The feeling of having intruded, of having earned a rebuff, was so sharp that Margaret could feel her face color—but there was the theatre and there was Hilary, looking sour and, at the sight of the car, adopting a pained squint.

  “Is that Hilary?”

  “Yes.”

  “She looks like a handful.”

  “She’s very nice, really,” said Margaret, and had the small satisfaction of a lie of her own. “Thanks very much for the ride.”

  “But you’re not getting out? Tell her to jump in, and I’ll drive you back.”

  “Thanks,” said Margaret steadily, “but it’s a lovely afternoon and I want the walk.”

  Kinc
aid knew exactly what had happened; she saw a betraying flicker of muscle at the comer of his mouth. “Is that good for wet hair? And what about the doctor?” Margaret gazed at him speechlessly, thinking, Go to the devil, saying finally with dignity, “He’s obviously going to be very late on his rounds today. Thank you once more . . .”

  She turned away. A horn sounded impatiently behind Kincaid, but before he put the car into gear he said, “I’m not due on the Coast for a few days. I’ll call you if I may.”

  He was gone. Hilary said at Margaret’s side, “Who was that?”

  “A friend. How was the movie?”

  “All right, but I have an awful headache. I told you,” said Hilary reproachfully, “that I wasn’t allowed to go to the movies.”

  Margaret felt an instant pang of contrition. Hilary’s eyes looked sharp as a hawk’s, and she made no objection to television, but perhaps . . . Just then Hilary betrayed herself; she was after all only eight, and an apprentice Machiavelli. “Did you throw away my scrapbook things?”

  “I didn’t touch them.” So that was it, something to do with the scrapbook, almost certainly something to do with Mrs. Foale. Now that she thought about it, how suspiciously docile Hilary had been when ordered to tidy up her room and smooth her bed. Margaret opened her mouth and closed it again, because telling Hilary not to pry into Mrs. Foale was like telling the wind not to blow.

  They reached the house. Margaret used her key and the day fluttered briefly in and was shut out again. Hilary said, tossing her coat in a heap, “Mrs. Foale heralded money.”

  “Pick up your coat. Heralded money?”

  “That’s what this girl told me.”