A FEW MONTHS AFTER PHILIP BYRNE HAD JILTED MARGARET RUSSELL TO MARRY HER SISTER CORNELIA WHEN SHE HAD RECEIVED AN UNEXPECTED LEGACY FROM A COUSIN, MISS WILMA TRUMBELL, MARGARET WAS ASKED TO MIND THEIR HOUSE, AS CORNELIA NEEDED A HOLIDAY AFTER BEING ILL. IT ALSO MEANT LOOKING AFTER HILARY BEVERTON, AN INQUISITIVE EIGHT-YEAR OLD WHO HAD BEEN STAYING WITH THEM.
THE DARK AND GLOOMY HOUSE WAS TROUBLE ENOUGH WITHOUT HILARY BREAKING ORNAMENTS AND COLLECTING MEMENTOS OF THE ABSENT OWNER, MRS. ISABEL FOALE. AMONG OTHER THINGS HILARY FOUND WAS A PHOTO OF PHILIP, AND MARGARET REALISED HE HAD LIED WHEN HE SAID HE DIDN’T KNOW THE OWNER.
ONE DAY WHEN HILARY WAS AT THE MOVIES, MARGARET WAS STARTLED TO SEE A YOUNG MAN TRYING THE UNLOCKED DOOR. HE SAID HE WAS LOOKING FOR MRS. FOALE, THEN INTRODUCED HIMSELF AS JEROME KINCAID, SAYING HE HAD GONE TO SCHOOL WITH MARGARET, BUT SHE WAS NOT SURE SHE REMEMBERED HIM. HER NEXT VISITOR WAS MUCH MORE UNPLEASANT-A SMALL, DARK-SKINNED, DRUNKEN MAN CALLING HIMSELF JULIO WHO CAME TO WIND THE CLOCK AND INSOLENTLY DEMANDED PAYMENT.
ADDING TO MARGARET’S WORRIES, HILARY BECAME FEVERISH WITH A CHILL AND WAS IN BED WHEN MISS ELIZABETH HONEYMAN CALLED FOR A BOOK SHE HAD LENT MRS. FOALE. DURING THE CONVERSATION MARGARET GATHERED PHILIP HAD STAYED WITH MRS. FOALE AFTER HER HUSBAND’S DEATH, BUT MISS HONEYMAN HAD DOUBTS THAT HE WAS MRS. FOALE’S COUSIN, AS HAD BEEN STATED.
THAT NIGHT, JULIO CAME BACK. MARGARET, KEEPING THE DOOR CLOSED, TOLD HIM TO GO AWAY. THE NEXT MORNING SHE FOUND BLOODSTAINS WHERE HE HAD STOOD. WITHOUT THINKING, SHE IMMEDIATELY WASHED THEM AWAY. FRIGHTENED HE MIGHT COME BACK, SHE IS STARTLED BY THE DOORBELL.
URSULA CURTISS
Hours to Kill
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT © 1961 BY URSULA CURTISS
To Raymond T. Bond, with appreciation
The characters, places, incidents and situations in this book are imaginary and have no relation to any person, place or actual happening
One
THEY said goodbye in the beautiful shadowy living room, Cornelia counting her gloves as though there might possibly be more than two of them, Margaret straightening an ashtray on the piano in a brisk taking-over gesture. Philip, foresightedly, had gone out to the car and was doing a great deal of door-slamming. “Well. . . goodbye.”
“Goodbye, and for heaven’s sake don’t worry.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Cornelia with a hunted glance about her, “if it weren’t for that child. No wonder her parents are on the brink of divorce. Infanticide would be more like it.”
Save the surface and you save all—but then, just for an instant, Cornelia touched below the surface. She gave Margaret a direct look that undid all her previous appearance of blindness, and said, “I haven’t dared ask if you mind this. Coming here, I mean.”
“Don’t be foolish,” said Margaret lightly. She saw Cornelia flush unhappily and, for the moment, didn’t care. She opened the door and the clear spring day came slicing into the room, across waxed floors and Oriental scatter rugs to the fluid white adobe fireplace with the beaded birds on the mantel above it. “Better go, it sounds as though Philip’s counting to ten.”
She would not hide from Philip, but neither did she want her hand in his, even for an automatic instant. She compromised by standing on the flagstoned porch while Cornelia walked down the steps and across the lawn to the waiting car. Philip, bare-headed in the sun, took his wife’s arm and handed her into the car. Back on the driver’s side, he looked up at Margaret, smiling, and threw up a hand in salute. “See you on the twentieth, Mag. Take care.”
The “Mag” had slipped out; he was the only one who had ever called her that. It was a shock to realize that memory could be so one-sided. “Take care yourself,” she called back, and waved to Cornelia’s ducked-down face through the windshield as the car edged out of the drive, and she stepped into the house again. The pale shining day vanished, the dim elegance of the immense living room surrounded her. The beaded peacocks glowed against the white chimney, the rosewood grandfather clock across what seemed to be acres of floor chimed eleven—and somewhere, water was running. Margaret took a long breath, recalling herself to the guardianship of a rented house and a strange child, and called, “Hilary . . . ?”
Even though—or perhaps because—Cornelia was her sister, it was difficult for Margaret to go over, in imagination, the scene that must have taken place between Cornelia and Philip when, with all plans made for the vacation the doctor had recommended after Cornelia’s severe bout of flu, the housekeeper they had arranged for had fallen and broken a hip.
“Well, that’s that,” Cornelia would have said—close to tears, probably, because she was still weak. It wasn’t only a question of Hilary, the daughter of friends of Philip’s who were trying a reconciliation in Mexico City; the house was not a house to lock the door upon lightly. There was the antique furnace to be considered, the paintings, the locked closets and cupboards full of Mrs. Foale’s silver and valuable china. You took on, in a rented house, all the responsibilities of the owner, and if it were left invitingly dark for night after night, while newspapers accumulated visibly on the front lawn, you asked for trouble.
It was certainly Philip who would have thought of Margaret.
Even through the happy blindfold of six months of marriage, Cornelia would have been shocked at that. “Margaret? Oh, Philip—”
“She’s your sister, isn’t she? If she knew you’d been ill, and hadn’t been able to get away, and had a relapse just because you wouldn’t ask her—”
“Yes, I know, but. . .”
They would have argued it back and forth then. True, Philip and Margaret had been as good as engaged before Cornelia came to his attention—but Margaret was an adult and knew that those things happened. She was, Philip would urge, very attractive, went about a good deal, had probably forgotten him long since. She might even be congratulating herself on a narrow escape.
Pause here; Margaret did not fill it even in imagination.
Then Philip: “Darling, you’re sick. It’s not as though we were asking her to take over while we went on a jaunt we could have some other time just as easily.” He would have started to get indignant, just listening to himself. “Sure, I wish there were someone here we could ask—but I’ll tell you this, Margaret wouldn’t thank you, nor me either, if this flu turned into pneumonia and she weren’t told . . .”
This strain of flu had been developing into pneumonia, all over the Southwest; Margaret, who had never paid much attention to any New Mexico dateline before, had read it with a kind of absent concern. Lucky that Cornelia was strong, and all but immune to anything but a head cold. Philip—but after the wedding and the reception, and the scald of Philip’s light kiss because people might think its omission odd, she had stopped thinking about Philip.
“I’ll put the call through,” he would have said to Cornelia, “and you talk to her. If she’s tied up and can’t come, that’s that and we unpack. But at least let her know.”
And Cornelia had. It was only the second time that Margaret had talked to her since the wedding and their departure for the Southwest, and she was so steeled to an off-hand exchange of news that she was totally undone by Cornelia’s dangerously tight, almost breaking voice. The bruising memory of Philip retreated; there was only Cornelia, four years older than she but now in unfamiliar need of her.
The fact of the child, Hilary Reverton, wasn’t really surprising. People liked Philip and he liked them, and he had a host of startling friends: chairmen-of-the-board, jazz musicians, Village couples with zoo-like names, proper Central Park West families. Once she had had tea in Philip’s apartment, in company with a hen he was boarding for someone . . .
There was a TWA flight from New York to New Mexico early the next afternoon. Afte
r maneuvers with her office, Margaret was on it.
Philip met her at the airport at shortly after midnight. Margaret had napped since Amarillo and any sense of reality was queerly suspended; she got off the plane, body still humming slightly with vibration, and instead of throwing her arms around someone, like most of the other passengers, shook hands with Philip.
She said, “How’s Cornelia?” and Philip, dim in the dark, said, “Better, but I wouldn’t let her come out. Margaret, you’re an angel to do this for us.”
Strangers. No, worse than strangers: people who had exchanged rash intimacies at a party and had to face each other the next day. It was probably more difficult for Philip, who had exercised the man’s initiative and knew how well aware she was of it. He said when they were in the car, “Oh, Lord, this kid, this Hilary . . and Margaret only half-listened.
I won’t like him at all, she had told herself comfortingly; I’ll look at him from this distance and think, How could I ever have thought I was in love with him? And he was, taken apart, no more flawless than any other man. He needed a shave at this late hour, and he got out a cigarette and lit it without offering her one. He swept past a line of cars and dived in to safety just as Margaret shut her eyes before a glare of oncoming headlights. She might—mightn’t she?—have been wretchedly unhappy married to him, but would this ride, so sharply different from remembered rides, never end?
Cornelia’s letters had prepared her for the house, long low white adobe behind a sweep of wall; the porch light reached out to bare boughs and a faint lacy glimmer of lawn chairs. Neither Cornelia’s voice on the phone nor Philip’s obvious concern had prepared her for the house-coated girl who opened the door.
Cornelia had been promising to diet for as far back as Margaret could remember, but although she wasn’t tall a faint plumpness became her; she had looked, with her corn-colored hair, like a radiant milkmaid. The radiance had gone now, along with at least ten pounds, and there were shells of shadow under her eyes. She said hastily, “I’m better, really—all I need to do is lie around and soak up some sun for a few days. And don’t look at me like that, Phil, I’m not going to bed until we’ve all had a drink. Margaret, that chair is hard as rock, try the couch. How was the flight out. . . ?”
They were obviously happy, both of them, Margaret thought; already, with the prospect of getting away alone with Philip, Cornelia was reviving. She described their desperate house-hunting—“There’s nothing in town at this time of year, absolutely nothing”—and their relief when Mrs. Hadley Foale, sojourning in Europe, had decided to rent her house. It was much too big for them, but there were trees and lawns, indispensable to Eastern eyes, and beggars couldn’t be choosers.
The arrival of young Hilary Reverton had posed a problem. They could hardly refuse an appeal from old friends of Philip’s; on the other hand, the real estate agent had let it be known that Mrs. Foale was fanatical on the subject of children and pets in her home. Cornelia, coming down with flu, had spent most of a day moving ornaments to high closet shelves, putting away the good glasses, cautioning Hilary about Mrs. Foale’s property.
“Every time I opened my mouth, Mrs. Foale came out,” said Cornelia wryly. “In fact, I’m sure Hilary thinks Mrs. Foale created the world, but whether she’ll . . .” Her voice stopped, her gaze stilled on a point to Margaret’s right. Margaret half-turned her head, and met the examining gaze of a small bathrobed girl in the hall doorway. She seemed to be seven or eight years old, although Margaret arrived at that only from her size; her face was startlingly knowledgeable. She studied Margaret as another woman might have, with an unhurried encompassing glance, and then looked at Cornelia. She said baldly, “Who’s that?”
“Why, that’s—that’s your Aunt Margaret,” said Cornelia, falsely hearty. “Would you like to come in and be introduced, Hilary?”
“Hil,” corrected the child.
Cornelia closed her eyes, either out of fatigue or exasperation. “Hil.”
“Is she going to stay while you’re gone?”
Cornelia said yes, in the same submissive way. Neither she nor Philip told the child to go to bed; it entered Margaret’s mind that Hilary, crossed, was somebody to reckon with. A look at Cornelia’s wan face drove that and everything else out of her head; she said decisively, standing up, “I still feel as though I’m flying, so I think I’ll get to bed . . .”
The sound of running water, in the quiet immediately after Philip and Cornelia had left, proved to be the overflow from a bathroom basin in which Hilary had left the hot water running full tilt. Margaret mopped it up and wrung out towels with a consciously determined cheerfulness. She reminded herself that Hilary, at eight, was still very young, and that if children never did things like this nobody would be required to superintend them. She reminded Hilary that the house was a rented one; Mrs. Foale’s tile floor was not apt to be improved by lying under an inch of water, Mrs. Foale’s towels were now soaking wet.
Hilary listened docilely. At the end she said, “Do you dye your hair?”
“No. Don’t walk in the puddles, Hilary.”
“How come it isn’t the same color as Cornelia’s, if you had the same father?”
“Because it isn’t. If you’d move your foot, please—no, the one you’re standing on the towel with . . .” Wrists aching, Margaret glanced up with compunction, but Hilary wasn’t there.
Hilary was in the kitchen, mixing flour and water into paste for her scrapbook, the sink, the counter-tops, and two eggbeaters . . .
Never mind, thought Margaret. Lena comes tomorrow.
Lena—Margaret didn’t know and never found out her last name—was a small, slim, dark girl who came twice a week to do the cleaning. She did not know that Hilary was a student at progressive school in New York and the problem child of problem parents, and she treated her with a calm indifference which, to Margaret’s astonishment, Hilary appeared to love. She followed Lena everywhere, making important statements which Lena would interrupt with a “You want me to make laundry, ma’am?” to Margaret, or an off-hand, “Nice big girl picks up her clothes,” to Hilary.
Margaret, released, went into the town to make the acquaintance of the library. There was no need to shop when she had done that, as Cornelia had laid in provisions for at least a week, so she wandered through the plaza, examined books and jewelry and pottery in shop windows, watched blanketed Indians, dark and inscrutable over celery-tops tickling their chins, emerge bag-laden from grocery stores.
The town fell gradually behind her, but it was farther than she had thought to the narrow tilting street that led to Mrs. Foale’s house. Even though she walked slowly, as warned, the unaccustomed altitude caught her halfway and she had to pause, chest thumping, legs leaden, head very slightly swimming.
She realized, standing there among the sharp delicate branch patterns on an adobe wall, just why she had been so very anxious to get out today. It wasn’t so much Hilary, or the endless vigilance over Mrs. Foale’s lace-thin old Oriental rugs, Mrs. Foale’s books and cabinets, Mrs.
Foale’s birds of velvet or beads or crystal or porcelain. It was the actual darkness of the house—spawned, it almost seemed, by the tremendous vigas in living and dining rooms; further nurtured by the deepset windows. Light seemed an enemy there, something to be kept at bay. In late afternoon, when the snow on the mountains to the north was a radiant flushed pink, the house was sunk so deeply in shadow that lamps had to be lit.
Cornelia and Philip would be—where? At a motel in Arizona, beside a swimming pool? They hadn’t laid out any hard-and-fast plans; if they came to a place they liked they would stay there, if not they would simply wander, with no pressures, no deadlines, no more immediate worry than how to enjoy themselves. They were to phone Margaret the day after tomorrow and let her know where they were and where they expected to be, chiefly in case of contingencies over Hilary. But they had left Hilary’s parents’ Mexico City number and also the doctor’s—and Hilary was eight, after all, not a tumbling-d
own two or a try-anything five. Nothing was going to happen to Hilary.
On March twelfth, disturbing to Margaret even at the time, Hilary began a quiet, microscopic study of Mrs. Foale.
Two
IT began with a letter.
Margaret was washing the breakfast dishes, and wondering absently how Hilary had managed to distribute so much yolk out of one poached egg, when Hilary’s preoccupied voice said from somewhere, “What does p-r-e-g-n-a-n-t say?”
“Preg—” began Margaret, and dropped a fork as though it had burned her. “Hilary, come here, will you?” Hilary came with a promptness that betrayed her; she never, with her wits about her, obeyed any order on time. She carried what was obviously a letter, and Margaret seized it at once with a mixture of speed and severity.
“Where did you get this?”
“In a drawer.”
“What drawer?”
“In the pantry. I was looking for shoelaces,” said Hilary virtuously. “Mine are all in knots, and you said you’d get me some new ones yesterday and you didn’t.”
“You couldn’t expect to find shoelaces in a pantry drawer,” said Margaret sternly, “and even if you did they’d be Mrs. Foale’s shoelaces. Hilary, you must not pry.” She tried to pin Hilary’s disconcerting yellowish eyes, but they were downcast in the squirrel face-plump cheeks, nubbin of chin. “Do you know what prying means?”
Hilary’s lashes stayed down. “Looking where I shouldn’t.”
Margaret tried not to think that this glib definition indicated a long history of prying. “Well, then, you know better. Put it back right away,” her own gaze flickered tempted down to the lines of ink and then lifted again, “and if you need anything like shoelaces, remind me when I go out. Have you made your bed?”
In two days she had become well acquainted with Hilary. Teachers at the progressive school had probably discussed her in her hearing, as had friends of the Revertons’. Hilary was complacent about being a problem, as well she might be. Cornelia and Philip had knuckled under to it; Lena accepted it as philosophically as bad weather. Margaret was unable to do either, and as a result she and Hilary treated each other like hostile Indians.
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