Hours to Kill

by Ursula Curtiss

  “No,” said Margaret.

  At eleven o’clock Jerome Kincaid telephoned to ask her to dinner that night. He knew there was Hilary, but couldn’t Margaret get someone to stay with her—or weren’t there evening movies?

  His voice sounded different over the phone, deeper, more purposeful. Margaret hesitated, tempted. She would simply be warned, she told herself, not admitting her own surprising pleasure; there was no need to have total rapport with every man who took you casually out. Lena could probably come, and it would be nice, more than nice, to get away from this dark house to lights, other people’s faces, a dinner she hadn’t cooked . . .

  “Oh, I can’t,” she said suddenly. “Cornelia and Philip are going to call tonight.”

  “Tomorrow night, then? Remember me to Cornelia, will you, and if they can give you an address I’d like to send a postcard. I might even be travelling out that way.”

  Margaret said yes, tentatively, for dinner the next night. She didn’t examine until later his “out that way.” She wondered if he were trying by indirection to find out where Cornelia and Philip had gone. In any event she couldn’t have told him, because she didn’t know herself.

  Had he even been at school with her or Cornelia? She hoped violently that he had, because otherwise—

  She was getting as bad as Hilary.

  The full measure of how bad she was getting, and the toll of the strangely upsetting night, came at a little before noon. The doorbell rang, and she answered it to a small, dark-skinned wrinkled man, eyes as bold as a boy’s, under an enormous hat. In spite of his worn work clothes he looked as elegant and untrustworthy as a snake. He greeted Margaret with a flood of Spanish at which she smiled apologetically, shook her head, and began to close the door.

  He slid forward and past her and was in the house, saying in heavily accented English, “No understand, no? I wind clock.”

  How had she failed to miss the quarter-hour chimes, the counting of the hours, the faint golden swing of the pendulum? The clock was dead and still in its rosewood and glass, but even so Margaret stood warily near the front door, grateful for Hilary’s interested presence at the entrance to the dining room, while the man opened the clock and wound up the weights.

  His air of secret amusement might have been habitual with him, built-in; nevertheless, it stiffened her back while he set the pendulum in motion, asked her for the time, moved the elaborately-wrought hands. When he had closed the glass door and replaced the key, he said affably, “You give me money?”

  He walked down the room toward her, at once wheedling and bold, measuring her openly. Margaret realized suddenly that he was very drunk indeed; his sinuous appearance came from an inability to stand erect and still. “Nice lady, no? Give money? Missa Foale give Julio money.”

  “All right. Just a minute,” said Margaret steadily. Every nerve in her body was alarmed at his heavy breathing, his shiny gaze that appraised the room and everything in it and kept returning to her in an up-and-down stare. “Hilary, get my bag from the kitchen, will you please?”

  Hilary obeyed instantly. Margaret got her nervous fingers inside her billfold and extended two dollars. She didn’t wait for his glance of contempt; she reached for the front door and opened it imperatively.

  He didn’t move. He was studying Hilary.

  Margaret said in a clear carrying voice, “I’m very busy just now. Goodbye,” and though it looked for a moment as though he might refuse to leave, he gave the room and Hilary a last survey, smiled to himself, and moved with insolent leisure through the open doorway and onto the porch. With the doorknob in her hand, Margaret said crisply, “You needn’t bother to wind the clock again. My husband—” she didn’t care if he noticed her ringless fingers “—will take care of it.”

  He did look at her hand, deliberately. “Got husband? Nice, no?”

  Margaret closed the door and locked it, knowing that the click was audible, worried a little about that. It would have been like Hilary to say he was the nicest man she had ever met, but Hilary looked aghast. She said in a subdued voice, “Wouldn’t you think Mrs. Foale would wind her own clock? And not pay him?”

  “Yes, you would. You certainly would,” said Margaret with emphasis, because such a sane and sensible observation from Hilary must not be allowed to go unnoticed.

  “You were scared of him, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.” And he had known it, and enjoyed it; for all she knew, he might have accepted the click of the lock as a challenge.

  And oh, Lord, the furnace.

  Never, thought Margaret fiercely, will I take on anything like this again. Not for Cornelia, not for anybody.

  Hilary had apparently covered her tracks in the library; the bookshelves she often prowled through, as though she was assessing Mrs. Foale’s taste in literature, were stiffly, staringly neat. The photograph of Philip had probably come from here, although there was no album. If it were a picture that Philip had given Cornelia—teasingly, because Cornelia had what almost amounted to a phobia about mustaches—she would never have left it lying around loose. She was tidy and very methodical, and the only impact she and Philip had made on the house at all was in the bureau drawers in their bedroom.

  Hilary would hardly have explored there—not out of delicacy, but because her interest was not Philip or Cornelia but Mrs. Foale.

  Margaret realized with surprise that her brain had figured all this out by itself; it had simply informed her, during the night, that Philip had known Mrs. Foale at some previous point.

  Well, suppose he had? There was no law that required men to list all their previous acquaintances for their wives, and perhaps, so newly married, Philip had thought it the better part of valor to say nothing at all. Although no bride could very well object to the thin sixtyish woman of the framed photograph in the hall . . . Almost without volition, Margaret went to look at her again.

  A good sixty, sweet but austere, mouth and nose thin and wavy, light eyes, blue or gray, with autocratic lids. A crisp edge of high frill showed about the throat. She looked the very image of a bird-fancier. The sharp, almost illegible inscription in the lower right-hand corner said, “To Hadley with deepest affection, Christina.”

  Christina? Isabel, surely?

  Beside this photograph, identically framed, hung one of—no, it was not an elderly gibbon because it was signed, “To Christina with love, Hadley.”

  How odd and formal for husband and wife, or were they husband and wife? Margaret tried to imagine away Hadley Foale’s white Van Dyke and decorate him with Christina’s sedately rolled hair, but it was a complicated process and got her nowhere. There seemed to be some resemblance, but there often was between long-married couples, and in any case she might be imagining it. She had already begun to imagine that the photograph of the small dark-haired woman in the vase in Hilary’s closet was faintly familiar.

  Certainly, because of the postcard, the current Mrs. Foale was Isabel, and just as certainly the foolish little shoes and slippers had never been worn by Christina. Margaret turned away with an odd feeling of oppression and came face to face with Hilary, emerging from the kitchen with a piece of over-jammed bread which, as Margaret opened her mouth in warning, relinquished a cluster of strawberries onto the floor.

  “When is lunch?” said Hilary, treading resolutely into the jam.

  Margaret closed her eyes, but when she opened them Hilary was still there. “When you’ve cleaned up what you’re standing in,” she said restrainedly. “Maybe we’ll go out.”

  “Out to lunch?”

  “Yes.” Although Margaret thought of it in reverse terms: out of this house—anywhere, into the light and the open.

  Hilary was still suspicious of this benevolence. “Me, too?”

  “Yes, if you can ever get yourself unstuck . . .”

  They went to a small old adobe restaurant with a poplar-ringed courtyard for summer dining. Faint approving smiles followed Hilary’s silkily brushed hair, white-piped navy blazer, plaid pleat
ed skirt, but then Margaret herself was constantly astonished at Hilary’s prim outer casing. She ordered chicken tacos for both of them and, while they waited, a whiskey sour and a glass of ginger ale, realizing with a kind of gloomy outrage that she was being regarded as Hilary’s mother.

  The drinks came. Margaret lit a cigarette, gazing gratefully at part of a mountain peak, still snow-clad against a meltingly warm blue sky, and was recalled by Hilary’s voice. “Do you drink a lot?”

  Well, she had only wanted temperance lectures to make her perfect. “No.”

  “Mrs. Foale does.”

  Margaret said “Sshh!” sharply and instinctively, but no one at the neighboring tables seemed to have noticed. It was a measure of Hilary’s effect on her that, after a thoughtful moment, she didn’t say “Nonsense,” or “That doesn’t concern us,” but simply, “How do you know?” Hilary dropped her yellow glance. “There’s a huge big box of empty bottles in the cellar, in that room. I got worried about the furnace once when you were taking a shower,” she added rapidly, “and I went to look at it and I heard this funny noise—”

  “Like fire,” suggested Margaret pleasantly. “Or burglars.”

  “Well, and I went and looked, and the box said blankets but there were all these bottles in it. Whiskey,” said Hilary in a low carrying hiss.

  Savingly, the tacos arrived: thin crisp brown tortillas enclosing slivered chicken, lettuce, cheese, and a delicately hot sauce. It was Margaret who was saved, because in spite of a minor amount of discomfiture Hilary had obviously relied upon the startling quality of her latest discovery to carry her through.

  And quite rightly; Margaret was much too taken aback to embark on the usual lecture. Of course, “all these” bottles might be two or three, or Mrs. Foale might have collected them painstakingly to flow wax over as candle-holders for her less fortunate acquaintance. Still, what a bacchanalian secret for the dimly elegant old house to conceal beneath its polished floors and fragile rugs.

  Hilary, busy with her tacos, appeared to have forgotten all about Mrs. Foale for the time being, and perhaps she had. Certainly there was no trace of last night’s terror, although that had been connected with the cellar. But then children were notorious for brief enthusiasms, Margaret told herself hopefully, and for conveniently short-lived memories.

  Hilary looked up just then. She said with an uncanny sombreness, “Maybe Mrs. Foale isn’t in Europe at all. Maybe she’s shut up somewhere.”

  For a horrifying second, the tall locked dark wood doors in the house flashed into Margaret’s mind. She realized then that Hilary meant a sanitarium of sorts, but reaction turned her voice brusque and angry. “If you don’t stop this nonsense, you’ll have us both shut up somewhere. Eat your lunch.”

  “I am,” said Hilary with justice, and lapsed into an offended silence. Punishingly, she refused dessert. She had always been coaxed before; Margaret could tell from the stony but waiting look of her down-bent face. “Very wise,” she said, putting on her coat. “You’re not awfully far from being fat.”

  Hilary’s very hair quivered with rage, but she stalked without argument after Margaret between the tables. They were nearly at the door when she said with satisfaction, “There’s your friend.”

  Margaret’s head turned automatically, and at a table to her left, although Hilary’s words could hardly have carried that far, so did Jerome Kincaid’s. He said something to the tanned, pale-haired woman who sat across from him and rose rapidly, with the evident intention of crossing the floor between the tables. A tray-laden waitress intervened; he gave Margaret a ruefully smiling salute and she smiled back and ushered herself and Hilary out.

  A stranger in town, had he said, or at least implied? Well, she could ask Cornelia about him on the phone tonight.

  But although she waited up until midnight, amid the uneasy safety of locked doors and tightly fastened windows, Cornelia and Philip did not call.

  Five

  NO news is good news, thought Margaret dogmatically to herself, and bad news travels fast. Still, she could not help feeling abused. For all Cornelia and Philip knew the furnace might have exploded, or she might have throttled Hilary, or Mrs. Foale might have flown home from Europe and, having heard rumors of a child on the premises, be knocking angrily at the door.

  She was further disquieted, in an indefinable way, by the cache of bottles which she looked at for herself after Hilary was safely in bed. She did not even attempt to excuse herself. In the light from the furnace room, because there was no bulb in the ceiling socket of the frigid storage room, she lifted the lid of a large cardboard carton and pulled folds of blanket aside.

  There must have been well over a case of empty bottles, not whiskey but rum, piled in winking layers and angles, a neck thrust up here, a whole curved side exposed there. Something about the label suggested that it was very cheap rum. Margaret gazed at the carton in bafflement, pulled the blanket back, tucked it neatly in, and folded the lid down again.

  How cold it was in here, and how helter-skelter for such an oppressively formal house. Of course, someone going abroad, coping with all the last-minute details of closing a house, would tumble things in behind whatever door would hold them. But as for the bottles, why not throw them out one by one, as they were emptied?

  Rubbish disposal in this part of the Southwest was, Margaret had discovered, a complicated affair to a New York apartment dweller. Paper and all other burnable matter had to be incinerated; garbage had its own domain; cans, bottles, and other non-burnable, non-garbage objects fell into a third category and were put out weekly for collection. The contents would sum up the user fairly accurately, if anyone were interested.

  The conclusion seemed inescapable: Mrs. Foale did not want to be known to drink. But why? It was only such a barrage of bottles that might give rise to comment in even the most noticing of rubbish-collection men.

  Mrs. Foale did not want to be known to drink at all. Mrs. Foale had presented a certain surface to the town, and drinking did not go with it.

  Margaret found it odd, tried to find it pathetic, and was sharply disturbed instead. She wished that Hilary had not prowled into the storage room, nor discovered the size of Mrs. Foale’s feet, nor found the snapshot of Philip, but it was too late now. Mrs. Foale had come to make a shadowy third in the house, and there was no escaping her; the very locks and fastenings that shut out the dark shut her in more securely.

  Hilary refused her breakfast in the morning. Margaret at first suspected a carried-over grievance about the allusion to her weight, but Hilary did not have the enjoy-ably martyred air she would have worn in that case, and her eyelids were heavy. Her hands and forehead felt warm, but not alarmingly so. Margaret gave her an aspirin, settled her at the dining-room table with a jigsaw puzzle, and went in search of a thermometer.

  There wasn’t one in the otherwise well-stocked medicine cabinet in her bath. Margaret found it in the bedside table drawer, along with a left-over blue and yellow capsule and, in Cornelia’s scrawl on an envelope, a telephone number which was probably the doctor’s.

  Hilary’s temperature was 100, not much in a child, but enough to bear watching. What a fool Margaret had been to send her to the movies—but the flu epidemic was theoretically over and this was probably some routine twenty-four-hour thing. At least she had the Revertons’ number in Mexico City, and the doctor’s, in case she needed either. Meanwhile, she would have to put Hilary to bed.

  Hilary balked, foreseeably; she was beginning to relish the idea of Margaret run off her feet, fetching and carrying and worrying, but she could not resist an argument. Margaret was firm but crafty. “When Lena comes I can go out and get you some new magazines and you can work on your scrapbook.”

  As though Hilary cared any more for photographic models when she had Mrs. Foale to work on—but Hilary gave her a measuring look. “All right,” she said.

  At nine, Lena arrived. Margaret had a second cup of coffee and walked into the town in the bemusingly springy, sunny
, bird-chirpy morning. The mountains might have been laid with fresh damask above their vast blue-purple lower slopes, but color and softness were emerging everywhere. Bare patches of earth were gold rather than dun, the blueness of the sky, to an upward glance, seemed to stain the immediate air. For that matter, it was hard for an East-coast mind to conceive of a really bitter winter in a land where low adobe houses, white or blurred pink or clay-colored, sheltered so safely among so many walls.

  In town, she bought magazines and sherbet and a card game for Hilary, and discovered herself lingering on the way back. She quickened her footsteps deliberately; she must not allow her dread of the house to grow any deeper. She was committed to it until Cornelia and Philip returned, and to give in to near-fear would be to surround herself with nightmare.

  Gaze preoccupiedly bent, she turned in at the gate and came face to face with the woman who had been Jerome Kincaid’s companion at lunch the day before. She was also, upon her first greeting, the woman who had telephoned the house asking for Mrs. Foale.

  Her name was Elizabeth Honeyman, and she pronounced it as though it hurt her tongue. She was in her late fifties or early sixties, although well-cut tweeds gave her a look of almost wasp-like agility. It was impossible to tell whether the pale banding of hair around a face like a chic wood-carving was the result of age or sun until, close up, her tanned skin showed its fine tight creping. Her small raspberry smile, when it appeared, was amazingly sardonic; tired, haughty gray-blue eyes gave the impression of being infinitely superior to and bored with Margaret after less than a minute’s interchange.

  Would it, she wanted to know in her rather weary voice, be all right if she reclaimed a cookbook she had lent Isabel several months ago?