Hours to Kill Read online

  In her own room, that door closed too, she opened the directory with fingers that rattled the pages. Children ran high temperatures with ease, they could be wretchedly ill one day and bouncing about the next, but somehow Hilary in her present state was like a toothless bulldog or a fallen oak.

  And what would the Revertons say?

  There were surprisingly few general practitioners in the town; it seemed to be a refuge for specialists. Margaret, calling grimly by alphabet, grew mountingly anxious. Ambulances sped through her mind, hospital corridors, the accusing faces of Hilary’s parents. She had a number of frustrating encounters before she got hold of Dr. A. J. Wimple. His nurse said he would come as soon as possible after office hours, probably between six and seven o’clock.

  Lena left at four; Margaret thanked her and saw her go with a queer strong reluctance. As usual after her day there, the house literally shone. Rosewood clock, pottery ashtrays, Mexican silver fireplace fan collected what little light there was in puddles and sheets, and the bank of windows in the dining room, a cold flare from the shadows of the hall where Margaret stood listening outside Hilary’s door, coated the dark table and chair tops with polished pewter.

  The sun and warmth of the morning had been swallowed up under massed clouds, and when Margaret wandered into the library, briefly reassured by Hilary’s quiet even breathing, the white mountain peaks had disappeared into a stormy purple gray. Darkness was going to come early tonight.

  . . . And how very quiet it was, almost as though Hilary’s sleep had spread through the house. Margaret stood listening, examining the very air, and realized suddenly that it was a long time since the grandfather clock had chimed and that even its soft measured tick was missing.

  Wound only the day before, it had stopped, its pendulum motionless, the imperturbably smiling sun on the painted upper panel tipped low. Margaret reminded herself that the man who had wound it had not been in great clock-winding shape; nevertheless, it bothered her sharply. Had he raised the weights only slightly, in order to give himself an excuse for coming back? (“Missa Foale give Julio money . . .”)

  At six o’clock, as though he had been waiting patiently for the fall of night, for darkness to detach himself secretly from, he came back.”

  Seven

  JEROME Kincaid had called at five. Until she heard his voice Margaret had forgotten that he was to have taken her to dinner tonight; Hilary and Mrs. Foale between them had driven everything else from her mind. She explained lightly, covering her own surprising disappointment, and Kincaid said reflectively, “You know, she looked like the kind of child who might do this.”

  There was a mutual and tentative pause, full of the possible alternative of Margaret’s asking him to dinner there. Would it do? No, she thought firmly, it wouldn’t; for one thing, it wasn’t her house to entertain in. She said to end the pause, “I’m sorry. I do wish she’d picked another time.”

  “I’ll bet this is the first time she’s been sick in years,” said Kincaid. He sounded gloomy. “Well, that seems to take care of tonight. Is there anything I can do? Errands to run?”

  “I don’t think so, thanks. If the doctor gives her something he’ll have it delivered.”

  “Maybe tomorrow, then. How’s Cornelia, by the way?”

  “Fine, I suppose.”

  “They didn’t call last night?”

  “No. Of course,” said Margaret, mostly for her own benefit, “there’s no real reason why they should.”

  “There is now,” returned Kincaid mildly. “They ought to know you’re in charge of a sick-bed, if only to make them a little more grateful. No news of your wandering landlady?”

  “Mrs. Foale?” Margaret was somehow astonished. “No.”

  What did he expect, she wondered presently, after she had left the phone—postcards? Little bulletins from abroad? He had been much too light with his question; he had only underlined the depth of his interest in Mrs. Foale. And also, for some reason that could hardly stem from all those years ago in the sixth grade, Cornelia.

  Well, he was an attractive man, both in looks and in manner, and possibly he kept track of all the women who entered his life even casually; possibly he established with all of them that wordless, effortless intercommunication. There were, thought Margaret angrily, men like that, but they ought to be labelled.

  She found Hilary awake, listlessly pinking the edge of her sheet with her scissors, forestalling any kind of severity with a complaining, “I can’t swallow.”

  “Yes, you can,” said Margaret after an alarmed second. “You’ve been asleep, and your throat is dry. Wouldn’t you like some soup?”

  Hilary recoiled from the mention of soup, tea, milk, eggnog, or ginger ale. She finally unbent to sherbet, which she swallowed, Margaret noticed, as though she were eating jagged stones. Tonsillitis? Quinsy? Damn the Revertons for dropping her off so blithely, and would the doctor never come?

  Like an answer to prayer, the doorbell rang. Margaret had left the porch light on with the coming of darkness; she put a hand to the lock, thankfully, and snatched it back as though she had been scorched.

  There he was, the man who called himself Julio, only a thin width of curtained glass away: big hat, shabby serpentine body, smiling at her with foolish determination, brim-shadowed eyes taking in the empty room behind her. While she stood there, frozen, he put out a finger without moving his gaze from hers and pressed the doorbell again. It made a mad nightmarish sound in Margaret’s ears, face to face as they were.

  She lifted her voice to penetrate the glass. “Go away, please. There’s someone sick here.”

  He said something she didn’t hear, Spanish or indistinct English, and turned the doorknob. Although the lock was on, Margaret’s heart gave an enormous pound of panic: he could probably smash the door open, if he tried hard enough, and he could very easily break a pane just above the lock. She gathered her voice and repeated clearly, “Go away. At once.”

  His hand went out, the doorbell shrilled again. He was very drunk indeed, and very determined; he had found a source of money in this house and knew she was here alone with a child.

  The doorknob turned again, the wood pressed slightly in. Margaret’s throat was tight with not bursting into gasps of panic; he would, in that case, smash the glass instantly. She could not turn off the porch light and walk away, because then, for all she knew, he might be trying the back door, or the cellar entrance, or the windows. He might get in, in this strange black New Mexico night, and then two dollars, or ten, would not calm him. She would simply have to stand here, holding him off with a stare as immobile as his, until he gave up, or the doctor came, or something, something happened to get her out of this.

  Hilary called her, querulously. Margaret didn’t turn her head. She was too terrified to move, to turn her back on him for the necessary time it would take to get to the telephone, call the police, identify herself and her address and her complaint.

  The man outside made a sudden movement of fury, mouthed something she didn’t hear, and tinned and wove out of the light. On the very edge of it, face now buried in darkness, he turned back and lifted a fist and shook it at her.

  It ought to have been laughably melodramatic, behind the safety of the lock, but it was not. It seemed to Margaret, shaken as she was, as primitive and menacing as a gorilla’s beating on his chest: an expression of rage, a warning of violence to come.

  He was really gone; she could feel the night grow impersonal again. A car hummed by, a bird called sleepily’ somewhere; any immediate threat had withdrawn.

  . . . But this did it, she thought, going into Hilary’s room and taking deep deliberate breaths to quiet herself. When Philip and Cornelia called, she would tell them frankly that the house and Hilary were too much for her. She might even fabricate an urgent message from New York. She would, she must, get out of here as fast as possible.

  “Very unusual,” said Dr. Wimple, looking at her closely and doubtingly. “These people are gentle as a rul
e—courteous to an extreme. I suppose now and then one of them gets a wine-drinking streak on, but it certainly seems peculiar. You’re sure you didn’t—say anything to him?”

  “I gave him some money,” said Margaret wearily, “because he demanded it. I did ask him to leave, because it looked as though he wouldn’t. Should I have had him to lunch?”

  She had already regretted telling Dr. Wimple anything at all, and would not have if his solicitous inquiry about her pallor and her shaking hands had not released her into a burst of pointless tears. He had offered her a sedative, which she refused; he seemed now, in a kind and studious way, to put the blame on her. Easterner, his manner said, suspicious of anything not clad in a business suit, frightened at the first well-intentioned Spanish-American she came across.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said briefly. “Now, about Hilary . . . ?”

  Oh yes. Hilary was to have, he wrote busily, acromycin every four hours, around the clock; he would have that sent. Margaret could continue the aspirin and the alcohol sponges, and fluids were important. He would like a report on Monday morning.

  Wimple shouldered into his coat, picked up his bag, and reached for the doorknob. Margaret only realized then that he had not pronounced on Hilary at all; he had said, “Hmm,” and after a look at Hilary’s throat, “Mmm-hmm,” and after counting Hilary’s pulse he had burst into a veritable song of humming, and put all his instruments briskly away.

  “What has she got?” asked Margaret baldly, and Wimple looked at her as though she had crept in to rifle his office files. “A bad throat,” he said repressively. “Nodules. Goodnight, Mrs. Reverton.”

  “Goodnight,” said Margaret.

  The man would not come back, of course he would not, but after she had given Hilary her first acromycin capsule, coaxingly wrapped up in jam, Margaret inspected the doors and windows again and even made herself descend into the cellar. The entrance door there was locked, and there wasn’t a door in the storage room —was there?

  If she didn’t look now, she would lie awake and hear all kinds of stealthy sounds. It was just a room, after all, and a very untidy one at that—an addition, and uninsulated because of its bone-chilling cold. Margaret opened the door on dimness, walked between the carton of rum bottles and huddled bedspreads, stepped around some trunks and a few dismantled lamps, and was at the end of the room. No door. Only one window and that —she felt in the shadows for metal—securely fastened.

  How did Cornelia stand this house when Philip was away?

  Hilary had had her acromycin at seven and would need it next at eleven, so there was no sense in a very early dinner and bed. Margaret made herself a drink, astonished at her pang because she did not have to pour Hilary’s accompanying tomato juice, and went into the library to look for something to read.

  There was a whole section of books on birds and bird-life; sets, well-read from their backs, of George Eliot, Trollope, Dickens. Jacketed novels here and there among them were like a naughty wink in a reading-room.

  They were as out of place as the incongruously gay slippers; the cache of empty rum bottles. Had these been signs of defiance by Isabel Foale? But whom had she defied? Not her husband; he was dead. Elizabeth Honeyman, with her arrogant finely-netted face, her air of possession over the house? Or the house itself, the eclipsing darkness and subdued beauty and waxed formality?

  And here, gilt on dark green, was The Art of Spanish Cooking. Miss Honeyman could not have missed it if she were really looking for it; it stood between a pale-bound set of Jack London and a crimson series of Jane Austen.

  Drink in hand, Margaret went to the phone. She informed herself that it was only courtesy to let Miss Honeyman know that the lost was found—who knew, the woman might be starving to death—but she was consciously braced against the sardonic little smile, the haughty eyelids, the weary voice.

  “Miss Honeyman? Margaret Russell. I called to say that I’ve found your cookbook.”

  “Have you.” Her own imperative visit notwithstanding, Miss Honeyman appeared to have to search her mind as to what Margaret was talking about. “I’ll—let me see, I’ll stop by, shall I?”

  “Yes, why don’t you?” said Margaret and then, unpremeditatedly (although nothing like this was ever really unpremeditated), “Oh, someone’s called me, a Mrs. Withers I think, to ask about Mrs. Foale’s relative, the one who came west with her. Apparently, she has been quite anxious to get in touch with someone in the family.”

  Did it sound as thin and obviously improvised over the phone as it did to her own ears? Apparently, because there was a considerable pause before Miss Honeyman repeated, “Mrs. Withers?”

  “From Philadephia, I believe,” said Margaret firmly. “On her way to the coast.”

  Miss Honeyman sifted this in another little silence; Margaret had a clear vision of the eyebrows going up, the triangular eyelids lowering. Then the voice in her ear said, “I’m afraid I wouldn’t have the slightest idea of where she could locate the young man—Isabel’s cousin, that is. I believe he went back East, as I understand he had some blood pressure condition that couldn’t tolerate our altitude. In fact,” a touch of asperity crept in, “he spent most of his visit here in bed. Not a help, under the circumstances.”

  How nettled she must have felt for her voice to reflect it still. Because she had counted on being mentor to the second Mrs. Foale, and had been shut out on the account of a man at whom she hadn’t even been allowed to get a full and critical look?

  Margaret eased her cramped fingers on the receiver and gazed steadily on the blank pantry wall. “I see. . .well, thank you, I’ll tell this woman if she calls again that he’s gone back. I suppose it was the cousin she’s after—almost a twin to Mrs. Foale, she said?”

  “Oh dear, no,” said Elizabeth Honeyman through an invisible, astringent little raspberry smile. “She’s quite mistaken if she thinks that. I only caught a glimpse of him once, but he was as fair as Isabel is brunette, with a little blond mustache. I should say he was several years younger. Amusing, isn’t it, the physical contrast someone sometimes finds in families. . . ?”

  At last the malice showed through like scrapped metal, a raw dry sparkle under the studied tones. Miss Honeyman was neither a fool nor a gossip. Deliberately, she was letting Margaret know that she did not believe the man who stayed in the house with Mrs. Foale was her cousin.

  Nor did Margaret. Beyond any reasonable doubt, beyond any doubt at all in her own thunderous head, it had been Philip.

  Eight

  EVEN if it had been Philip, that was no reason to stand here with her mid-section gone hollow, her hand as tight and still on the cradled receiver as though it had been fused there.

  With an effort, Margaret got herself away from the telephone and into the empty shining black-windowed kitchen. Almost unaware of what she was doing, she made herself a second drink and sat blankly down at the table with it, gazing fixedly at nothing.

  No, not nothing: dim montages of Philip’s face when she had first known him—bent toward hers at a cocktail party, waiting smilingly outside the apartment door, turned to her on the street, in restaurants, in countless places. Words went with the overlapping images, the things Philip had told her about himself in that first and often-regretted freedom with which people attracted to each other unroll their inner selves like maps for inspection.

  He loved mountain climbing, strictly as an amateur, of course; he had done some on a trip abroad during college and still did, whenever he found a height to go up.

  He was all alone in the world except for a divorced aunt who spent such time, effort and money in looking half her age that she shunned such a tall mature relative as though he had been a mass of extra calories. Margaret had met her once, slim, sable-caped, hair a delicate silver-gold, on the arm of a handsome dark man outside the Plaza. When she and Philip had moved away after introductions and the briefest of pleasantries, a fragment of the light voice had followed them: “. . . by marriage, of course. But isn’t
he enormous? . .

  In the course of tea at his apartment, Margaret had wormed a collection of photographs out of Philip, and in none of them had he worn a mustache.

  So much for the prostrating effect of the altitude, the cousin whom he had gallantly accompanied out here in her distress, the mustache.

  How long did it take to grow a mustache? Of course, if you were in any kind of hurry, you could buy one.

  The thought of Philip going out to buy a mustache, pricing them solemnly, trying them on, was so ludicrous as to be cheering. Margaret clung to her amusement, and it carried her safely through dinner, the washing of the few dishes, the inevitable wandering back to the library.

  There it deserted her. The caching of the liquor bottles was now explained; a sorrowing widow and her ailing cousin would have to be very careful indeed of every overt move, and great numbers of empty rum bottles would not do at all. The mustache had altered Philip’s appearance on arrival, and the tale of the blood-pressure condition had kept him out of sight, except for a random glimpse like Miss Honeyman’s, from then on. Obviously, anyone who went to that amount of trouble was anxious to avoid recognition—then, or at some future time.

  It could be argued that if all this had taken place before his marriage to Cornelia, it was strictly his own concern. What had shaken Margaret so badly was not so much the fact that Philip had lied, but that he had lied so well, so smilingly, glancing around the living room on the night of her arrival and saying wryly, “Cosy, isn’t it? But a stroke of luck for us that Mrs. Whatever-her-name-is decided to rent it.”

  And what about Isabel Foale, going abroad so precipitately? Had she thought Philip was going to marry her—was morally bound to marry her—and then, learning about Cornelia, cut herself off from a situation she couldn’t bear?