Hours to Kill

by Ursula Curtiss

  This was San Rafael Road, but she couldn’t be sure that Julio Garcia was—had been—the snake-like man in the big-brimmed hat. The man who had referred to himself as Julio. Yes, she could. The blood on the porch, from a bullet wound, and the sound she had thought so comforting after he had left, the hum of a car. San Rafael wasn’t long; it was a quiet residential area between another road from which it branched off at the bottom and a highway it joined at the top. Hit-and-run victims must be very scarce on San Rafael, especially hit-and-run victims with the same first name.

  How badly you must want a man dead to try first with a gun, then lie in wait with a car to finish the job. And how ticklish for his killer when he survived the bullet and wove his way to sanctuary, where he might easily, probably would, name his assailant.

  But Margaret hadn’t let Julio Garcia in, had held the lock against him.

  She didn’t know that she had put her hands to her face until Kincaid’s voice, sounding as though it came from some distance away, said gently, “What goes on here?”

  He had secrets of his own where Mrs. Foale was concerned, and no intention of divulging them; remember that. Margaret took the drink he handed her, and even the iciness of the glass was steadying. “It’s this house, I think.” She managed a very minor smile. “It’s not the most cheerful place in the world at best, and now with Hilary sick too . . .”

  Kincaid nodded, glancing around him and then back at her face. “Your sister and her husband still haven’t called?”

  Margaret shook her head.

  “It isn’t my business, I suppose,” said Kincaid, bending a look of severity on his own drink, “but feeling the way you look as though you feel, couldn’t you get in touch with them and have them come back?”

  How sharply inquiring his lifted glance was. Could this be pure solicitude? Margaret said, finding the source of her own haunting worry as exactly as if she had touched a bad bruise, “I can’t. I haven’t the faintest idea where they are.”

  He received that with a short incredulous silence. “You mean they just—drove away in the other direction?”

  “That was the point,” said Margaret, defensive in spite of herself. “They didn’t want to be bound by a lot of schedules and reservations, and they did have one of those marked tour books with them, and it isn’t the tourist season yet so they wouldn’t have any trouble finding places to stay.”

  “I see,” said Kincaid. He sounded curious. “And what were you going to do if you fell and broke your hip?”

  “I was going to be very careful not to, I suppose.”

  “Man proposes,” Kincaid said sententiously, and got up and walked to the windows, where he stood contemplating the greening lawn. “They must have had some general idea of where they wanted to go, or did they?”

  “Roughly toward the Coast, I think. Cornelia wanted some swimming.”

  “Well, that narrows it down,” said Kincaid pleasantly. “It’s only—what? A thousand, fifteen hundred miles?” He turned to her, smiling, aware of the precise second in which Margaret had begun to resent being catechised. “You’re very polite not to tell me to mind my own business. It’s only that you look as though you couldn’t take much more. Anything I can do for you before I go? Look at the furnace?”

  Margaret gasped; in her single-minded fear, the night before, she hadn’t even thought about the furnace. “Yes, if you wouldn’t mind. It probably needs water.”

  It did; she could hear the rush in the pipes moments later. And then silence. How fortuitous, but still how odd, that it should have entered his head to look at the furnace. She couldn’t recall ever having mentioned that particular problem . . . Into her own mind, never quite forgotten, flashed the first glimpse she had had of him: hand going out cautiously to try the front door, head tipped listeningly.

  Walking crisply, she went to the cellar door, pushed it wider, called down, “Is it all right?”

  “Seems to be, but it belongs in the Smithsonian.” His voice sounded very distant, but seconds later he appeared at the bottom of the stairs and came up toward her. Something gave her the impression that he had had to hurry. She said involuntarily, “There’s a cobweb—” and at her glance he slapped a hand over his dark head.

  He had stared at her without seeing her at first, but that might have been the brilliance of the kitchen after the dim stairs. “I’m at the Paraguero. Call me, will you, if anything comes up, or there’s something I can do?” Margaret said she would, and at his insistence wrote the motel name on the front of the telephone book. When he had gone she locked the front door behind him and then realized emptily that there was no need to do that any more, certainly not in the daytime. Julio Garcia was dead. She had not fired the gun at him, nor aimed the car that had killed him, but she was responsible just the same.

  And why didn’t Cornelia and Philip telephone? Contrary to what she had told Kincaid, she didn’t feel understanding at all, she felt growingly angry at both of them. They knew she was unable to get in touch with them, no matter what the emergency, and yet they went blithely on their way. Perhaps they were superstitiously afraid of bad news and a summons to cut their vacation short; it was still an unforgivable thing to do.

  Part of her rush of feeling was fear masquerading as anger: suppose something had happened to them? Nonsense, she would have heard. It was much more likely that Philip had emerged from a phone booth in a gas station or restaurant, smiling at Cornelia, saying, “I just called Margaret—thought I might as well while I was there. Everything’s fine.”

  It was the kind of thing Philip would do: airy, highhanded, putting Philip first, and for which he would have an engaging explanation later. Margaret realized with shock, how completely, almost without her knowing it, her feeling for Philip had changed. The stubborn remnants of love had become detachment, then cool criticism, now—not suspicion, exactly, or was it?

  Certainly his affections were easily bestowed. Mrs. Foale, Margaret and Cornelia, in that order, and in how short a time? Odd, now that she thought about it, that a man so charmingly selfish should allow himself to be swayed so readily. Selfish people generally hewed to a line, made for a single goal.

  Margaret discovered her fingers curled so tightly into her palms that the nails bit. She unclenched them, wondering shakenly at herself, and went in to check up on Hilary.

  Hilary was playing with the puppet Kincaid had brought her, dangling it absorbedly over the edge of her bed. Her bent position and the exertion of not tangling the strings turned her face an alarming red. Margaret persuaded her to sit high against banked pillows instead, felt her hands, looked for the jar of jam she had left there because Hilary never took aspirin without it, found it, a mass of strawberries and smashed glass under the bureau, and gazed inquiringly at Hilary.

  Hilary saw the glance coming. “Does your friend Mr. Kincaid know Mrs. Foale?”

  Does he indeed? “No. What happened to the jam?”

  “It broke.”

  “I thought it just might have,” said Margaret pleasantly, with a vision of herself squeezing out a sponge implanted with jagged slivers, “and I think I remember telling you that it certainly would if you went anywhere near it.”

  Effortlessly, Hilary’s face took on a downtrodden expression. “I thought it might be good for my throat, like honey only you never buy any honey, and I didn’t want to bother you.”

  “Oh. Well, thank you, Hilary,” said Margaret containedly. “That was very thoughtful.”

  There was no more jam, only marmalade. Hilary took her aspirin in that, shuddering prolongedly, while Margaret picked the biggest pieces of glass out of the heaped strawberries, cut herself in spite of her care, and finally resorted to wet paper towels. When she had finished and stood up rather tiredly—at least this was jam, not blood, her mind said—Hilary was subdued. “I asked about Mr. Kincaid because doesn’t this look kind of like Mrs. Foale?”

  The puppet danced jerkily on the bedspread. It was a woman in a bright cotton fiesta dress,
the crude wooden face adorned with black-rimmed eyes, curved and expressionless black eyebrows, a red puppet smile that didn’t know what was going on above. Hilary moved a finger, possibly by accident, and the black-painted head dropped senselessly down on the blue and orange breast.

  “I think it does,” said Hilary fondly, and Margaret said with an effort, “Well, maybe.”

  She had only needed a jiggling wooden little Mrs. Foale, capable of sudden grinning leaps and fallings, to make her day perfect. No, she hadn’t needed it. The memory of Julio Garcia’s shadowed and foolish smile, his nightmare ringing of the door, her own iron refusal, were quite enough.

  Police are investigating. She was obstructing justice, probably, by not reporting the time and the exact spot on San Rafael Road at which he had appeared, leaving blood from a bullet wound. Was she an accessory after the fact, simply through having washed the blood off the flagstones?

  Margaret went into her own room, stretched out on her bed, and stared at the ceiling for some time. The ceiling was white and uninformative, and solved no problems at all. She sat up presently, pulled open the drawer of the bedside table, and used the telephone extension to dial the number Cornelia had left on the envelope there.

  It drawled blankly back at her as it had Saturday noon when she had tried to get a doctor for Hilary. People away for the weekend, then, although Cornelia had said they didn’t know anyone in the town, or an office of some kind.

  The blue and yellow capsule was still there. It said a good deal for Cornelia’s distracted state of mind; she was religious about keeping all medicines safely contained in their properly identified bottles in a cabinet for the purpose.

  Margaret’s fingers went out independently, dropped the capsule into the envelope, folded the envelope securely, thrust it back into the drawer. Asked for a reason, she could only have produced a sequence of phrases that might bear no relation to each other: Philip had stayed in this house secretly with Mrs. Foale; Mrs. Foale had given Julio Garcia money; Julio Garcia was dead and Mrs. Foale was abroad; Philip and Cornelia were gone, too, and had not kept their promise to telephone; Cornelia who, so ill that Margaret was here on her account, had been doctored by telephone.

  What had Muir said, in explanation? That the flu had been in many instances severe, that when he wasn’t in his office he had been at the hospital.

  Like a spider flashing into sight in an otherwise well-kept drawer came the thought that if Cornelia had died, Philip would be quite well off.

  Ten

  IT was a relief to have the spider out, if only to dispose of it. Cornelia had not inherited her cousin’s money until just before her marriage, and if it had been such a thunderbolt to both her and Margaret, Philip, a total stranger to Miss Trumbull, could not possibly have known about it in advance. And any other predication was unthinkable.

  He had lived in Connecticut at one time, of course, but the chances of his having known one elderly woman there so intimately that he was familiar with the contents of her will were so remote as to be impossible.

  Besides, fifty thousand dollars really wasn’t that much money, not with present living costs and to a man of Philip’s tastes. Cornelia had some stock, of course, as had Margaret; it had been left to them by their parents. But even so . . .

  Hilary’s remembered voice said like a knell, “Mrs. Foale heralded money.” And oh, God, what was she doing here, not disposing of the spidery thought at all but encouraging it, watching it flee secretly here and there? Even if Philip could have coaxed Mrs. Foale’s inheritance out of her, the very fact that she was abroad was proof that he hadn’t. A young woman of wealth would hardly have married a man of Hadley Foale’s age, and people didn’t go to Europe on a shoestring. Nor did they stand contentedly by while the man who had bled them married someone younger and prettier.

  Mrs. Foale’s face, at the wedding.

  Margaret jumped violently off her bed, looked curiously at her own face in the mirror, washed it with bitingly cold water. She felt caught in a dangerous spiral from which only activity, any kind at all, could release her.

  She brushed Hilary’s pillow-matted hair, over Hilary’s assertion that she had a very tender scalp, and dispatched her to the bathroom to put on fresh pajamas while she changed the sheets and remade the bed. The puppet Mrs. Foale fell in a disjointed heap on the floor, clattering unpleasantly, and she put it on the bureau after an instantly-averted glance at its face. Hilary’s scrapbook emerged from under the pillow. Margaret picked it up and flipped the pages swiftly.

  There was nothing new after the handkerchief, but Hilary had pencilled something on the facing page in warily light, almost invisible writing. Margaret bent closer and read: “Letter in l out w.”

  The lock on the bathroom door clicked. When Hilary came in Margaret was sliding a fresh case over the pillow and turning back the sheets; the scrapbook was on the bedside table. “Jump in,” said Margaret, falsely bright, “and after I take your temperature I’ll get us some lunch.”

  Letter in l out w. Add “l”, cross out “w” in some sort of written code Hilary had hatched up? No, Hilary would never waste her time on anything so childish as codes. She was staring straight ahead of her like an image, the thermometer all but swallowed between her compressed lips, and Margaret glanced rovingly around the room. Everything seemed in order, the bureau drawers closed as she had left them after her search for Mrs. Foale’s address book, the closet door innocent, the flowered linen curtains straight and unstirring although the sunlight was warm and one window was open.

  “You have another minute to go,” Margaret said lightly. “I’ll be right back.”

  Rapidly, silent as a thief, she went out the kitchen door and around the house until she was under Hilary’s south window, the one whose screen had been unlatched by Hilary the night before. (How had she forgotten that?) The window looked deceptively low-set from inside the room; the construction of the house made it a good six feet to the curved adobe sill. Margaret did not have to search far. Dried leaves had drifted about in the night, but with the sun overhead the shadow of the house was wiped out and she saw the wink of gold at once.

  It was a lipstick case, not very new, and empty, only a shell of gilded metal. Margaret fitted the top back on, dropped it into her pocket, and entered the house as cautiously as she had left it. Hilary’s temperature was a little under 102, but it wasn’t time yet for either aspirin or capsule. Margaret put the thermometer away and took the lipstick case out of her pocket. She said very casually, “Is this what you threw out the window last night?”

  Hilary communed suspiciously with herself and nodded.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “In the piano.”

  “Oh,” said Margaret thoughtfully. It didn’t occur to her to doubt the truth of this. Hilary had never lied directly to her; like a conscientious adult, she had taken refuge in evasions and confusing half-statements. “Whereabouts in the piano?”

  “Well, I happened to hit a key one day and it sounded sort of quavery, so I opened up that little part that lifts up—I thought I could fix it,” said Hilary virtuously, “and there was this lipstick.”

  “And what was in it?”

  “Nobody would put anything in an old lipstick,” said Hilary deprecatingly.

  “Hilary, I happen to know there was a letter in it. What did you do with it?”

  If she had not been so tense, Margaret could have laughed at Hilary’s jaw-dropped expression: the look attributed to undercover agents who are presented, in a scorned underling, with the superior they have been ordered to contact. After a long pause Hilary said, “I threw that out the window, too. It isn’t nice to read other people’s mail.”

  For which Margaret could read: “I thought I heard you coming and I was afraid to be caught with it.” However much earlier Hilary had found the lipstick, she hadn’t discovered its significance until moments before Margaret had opened her door the night before; otherwise she would have had it safely stowed away
somewhere.

  Margaret went on fixing her with a compelling eye. “But you saw who the letter was to.”

  “Mrs. Foale.”

  “Dear Mrs. Foale, or Dear Isabel?”

  If Hilary noticed this lapse from virtue she didn’t show it. “Dear Isabel. Can I have scrambled eggs for lunch?”

  “In a minute. Who was the letter from?” Adults glanced automatically at signatures, but did children? Yes. At least Hilary had. For the first time since Margaret had seen her, a cool little bathrobed figure in the doorway of the hall, she was visibly shaken, not far from defiant tears, at something that bothered and bewildered any eight-year-old. But all she said was, stonily, “I don’t know. Some man.”

  Margaret knew from that, there was no need to say pressingly, “Philip?” She wouldn’t have in any case. Apart from Hilary’s sensibilities (remarkably bouncy), what if Cornelia knew all about Philip’s affair with Mrs. Foale and the two of them had been putting up an airy front for her, Margaret?

  In that case, if she gave any more emphasis to it, Hilary would go back to her parents—in the unlikely event that they ever came for her—full of Philip’s involvement with Another Woman, Margaret’s black suspicions, any embroidery that occurred to her. The Revertons, in the manner of close friends, would hardly keep this to themselves. Philip’s deception might easily get back to the home office in New York, cause irremediable gossip, earn her a well-deserved bitterness in every quarter.

  Unconsciously, Margaret had arrived at a landmark. The bare possibility in her mind now was not that there might be something wrong, but that everything might still be all right.