They had come, shone their ow n flashlights around, knocked at her door to report, and gazed significantly at the empty martini glass which had seemed to swell to the size of a brandy snifter; it was clear that as soon as they were outside they would say, “Another of those old dollies putting it away alone.” Mrs. Balsam w as vindicated by the fact that the neighbors came home three days later to find empty spaces w here their two television sets, new electric typewriter, and coin collection had been, but her faith was toppled.
Now, pinning the nurse’s regard with a watch-this intensity, she raised her left hand and made an awkward scribbling motion on the air. it looked more palsied than anything else, even to her, and the nurse’s eyebrows drew in perplexity. Mrs. Balsam then fluttered her fingers as if she were typing, giving the impression of a lunatic wave, and when the nurse began a firm and admonishing, “Mrs. Balsam, Dr. Simms is very anxious that you—” her imprisoned voice escaped briefly. “Rye,” it said.
But her beseeching tone was her undoing. “Of course it’s all right,” said the nurse at once, giving the unaffected hand a warm little shake. Infuriatingly, she tucked it under the covers and administered a further pat. “Now, Mrs. Balsam, you really must rest and let Nature help you.”
Oh, my God, thought Mrs. Balsam wearily, I never know what mimes are doing and neither does she. A kind of fury at the Nature so piously invoked poured through her. The nurse, turning away from the bed, found her skirt seized with something like ferocity, and her patient, far from being calmed and reassured, raging up at her with her eyes.
When he had been in bed for half an hour, staring blankly into the dark and wondering if the effect of the magicians’ punch were going to have a fairy-tale duration, such as a hundred years, Justin got up and drank a glass of milk, noticing that the snow had almost stopped. He then settled himself for sleep, but gradually, as if he had fueled it, his brain began to remark that it was very odd about Amanda.
Fie was mildly skeptical about thought transference, even though he knew people who swore they had received urgent messages from friends or relatives not seen for years. Even granted that Amanda had somehow sensed his unavailing pursuit of her all evening, there were strange elements to the call from Williams.
For one thing, Amanda was tactful; it was out of character for her to have had another man telephone him about shared events after weeks of silence. For another, Williams had said he had been trying to reach the Lopezes, and why would he do that? At some point his short interchange with Maria Lopez had unfurled itself before Justin like a tape, and there was something in it about waiting frantically for Amanda because of a flight east for Christmas.
No doubt there were related Lopezes, but if they were of a closeness to be informed of Rosie’s whereabouts at a late hour why weren’t they in charge of her in the first place?
These were niggling little points, embroidery around the central fact that after all this time Amanda had suddenly chosen to let him know in detail about Mrs. Balsam and Rosie and the horse and the dog. If he had obeyed his earlier impulse and driven to the house, he would not now be lying in the dark, a witness to the unhappy marriage of milk and beer.
Like many impulses not acted upon, this one grew in reproach. What if there had been more to that relayed report, something which Williams had deliberately omitted and could pretend to have forgotten? Not twenty feet from the rear of the duplex was the shed which housed summer maintenance equipment: wheelbarrow, gardening implements, power mower, and red five-gallon gas can. Full or empty?
Justin got up and dressed, knowing from experience that at this rate sleep was a good two hours away. Fifteen minutes later, having replenished his tank, he was on his way.
The roads would be treacherous when the snow had been traffic-melted and refrozen, but for the moment presented no difficulties apart from an occasional tendency to drift. Justin had the night to himself; even the little town center he passed through was fast asleep. He had been to Mrs. Balsam’s house two or three times, but the arroyo still took him by surprise and after his unexpectedly swift descent into it he had to coax the car up the other side like a skier mounting a slope.
A half mile beyond that, another car had come to real grief, tilted sharply off the road, not near anything except a dim shape which Justin remembered to be an old church. In spite of its unfamiliar cant and cloaking of snow, it looked vaguely like Amanda’s. When Justin stopped his own car, visited by surmise on this particular stretch of road, and crossed to brush the driver’s window clear and beam his flashlight in, it was Amanda’s.
Left here quite a while ago, by the depth of blown white, and neatly locked. Amanda had certainly walked away from it. Had the steering gone, sending her off the road? She would have had to return to Mrs. Balsam’s to do any telephoning, assuming that the line was in order at that time. Had she been trying to reach him while he was ingesting that frightful mixture at the party, or driving Lucy Pettit to the restaurant?
His ego hoped so; common sense suggested that maybe Williams lived in the neighborhood, maybe Amanda had met him through her aunt. The original idea must have been for him to drive her home with Rosie, but—what? The clock unwatched over a drink, Rosie growing fretful because it was past her bedtime, Amanda deciding that it would be simpler to spend the night.
And saying, somehow incomprehensibly, “By the way, would you call Justin Howard and tell him I’m here?”
Funny that Williams hadn’t mentioned the disabled car, but perhaps he considered Amanda’s problems to be his affair exclusively. Justin closed his door with force and drove off to Mrs. Balsam’s.
Amanda was still awake, if not actually up; two long slots of light shone in the bedroom end of the otherwise darkened house. While Justin had been concocting arguments and seizing on inconsistencies, she had been tranquilly getting ready for bed.
He had only been in this area at night, and it was a surprise to discover that the two sets of lightly snowed-over tire tracks visible on the road had both originated from this driveway. One would belong to the departing Williams, but the other? A friend of Mrs. Balsam’s dropping by, unaware that she was away?
It would be unthinkable, after all his mental acrobatics, to depart without seeing his love. Justin walked to the front door and used the black iron knocker, remembering too late the volume of the Afghan’s response. It would wake Rosie Lopez, he thought guiltily, and then: This time, we will lull her off to sleep.
The dog continued her man-eating threats. It was possible that a housecoated Amanda would not care to answer the door to a stranger at this hour, but surely she would not allow that clamor to go unchecked. Unless she was in the shower or tub? But even then, alone with a small child, she would investigate the source of the dog’s alarm.
Justin went to the other end of the house and shouted Amanda’s name twice up into the bare lilac branches outside the lighted windows. There was no reply; if anything, there was an antireply. The only awareness within belonged to the dog, Apple.
He raced around to the back, encountering a cactus without feeling it, frantic because every winter a number of people succumbed to gas from faulty heaters— but here, as though in refutation, a side window stood open. He pulled himself up on the sill so that he could see all of the room.
From its size and furnishing it was obviously Mrs. Balsam’s, and it was just as obviously empty. The only signs of recent occupancy were a discarded pair of slippers and a robe tossed on the bed.
Why was this room alone lit, and where was Amanda?
The time for speculation was past. There was, Justin seemed to recall, a glass door opening on a patio. He ran to it, collecting a snowy rock on the way, and smashed a pane just above the lock. Although he thought he reached in with reasonable caution, he cut his wrist at once, but the door was open.
The Afghan had fled at the shattering of glass, but when he had found a light switch she put her head around a doorway—to the living room, Justin recognized—and peeked shyly at an
d then recognized him. This process took the form of prancing and bowing, after which she sat abruptly back on her haunches and regarded him with glowing expectancy.
Even to someone who did not live with her, she was asking for food or water. “. . . taking care of Apple and the horse,” Williams had said of Amanda’s mission here, but the dog at least had not been attended to.
“In a minute,” Justin told her. He had not accoutred himself with a handkerchief in his hasty dressing, and he was dropping blood onto Mrs. Balsam’s carpeting. He found a bathroom on the first try, pressed tissue against his wrist, moments later was gazing into the empty guest room.
The near twin bed had been remade without the motel perfection of the other, testimony to the child’s interrupted sleep there. A fraying tip of dun-colored cloth showed under the edge of the bedspread. When Justin picked it up, because everything in this room was of importance to him, it was a shortish length of rag with a couple of knots in it.
He gave up on that. Ridiculously, as if Amanda were playing some coy game with him, he looked into the closet. It contained only hangers and a small suitcase which, from its tiny cotton underwear and striped shirt and miniature blue jeans, belonged to Rosie Lopez. Why had Amanda left it behind, with no easy way to collect it in the morning?
Because an explanation had been taking shape in his mind in connection with the tire tracks which seemed to have been made at approximately the same time. Amanda, discovering that the telephone had become inoperative, might well have had second thoughts about staying here after Williams’ departure; might have said to Mrs. Balsam’s putative friend, arriving on his heels and probably known to her, “Would you do me a very great favor and drive us home?”
In which case, on a generally maddening night, Justin might have just missed her in his swing past her house with Lucy Pettit. This hypothesis did not explain the nonfeeding of Apple, now scraping beseechingly at his knee, or the abandonment of the suitcase—unless, instead of second thoughts, Amanda had had a genuine fright.
Was there really anything wrong with the telephone, or had the voice identifying itself as Williams simply not wanted Justin to call?
Try it, right away. Justin had had automatic intentions of closing Mrs. Balsam’s bedroom window and switching off the light, as if her utility bills mattered at the moment; instead, he walked rapidly into the living room, Apple eager at his heels. Its serenity was underscored by the pretty little Christmas tree waking up on a bookcase and a novel open facedown beside the couch.
The telephone offered only emptiness when he lifted the receiver. The cord, cleanly severed, swung free. What had been by turns relief and wild anxiety and bafflement assumed an entirely different shape.
Apple placed an imploring paw on his knee. She looked ready to sob if not fed, and Justin mounted the step that led to the kitchen, turned on the light, gazed blankly around at its bright tidiness, and located a large bag of dog food in the pantry. He filled her bowl, provided her with water, stood staring into the living room while she crunched at high speed.
Theories as to what had happened here, all untenable for one reason or another, blazed and tumbled through his head. Kidnap designs on the child? The Lopezes weren’t targets for that. An intruder (leaving no signs of forced entry) expecting to find an elderly woman and coming upon Amanda instead? Simple enough to tie her up—she would know better than to resist—and ransack the place.
Had Mrs. Balsam gone away of her own volition; had she in fact gone away at all?
Gradually, Justin became aware that he was focusing on a splash of brownish-yellow on the living room wall opposite. Close up, there were flying, radiating specks. The substance wasn’t quite dry when he touched it, and it smelled like mustard. On the rug at his feet was an answering little puddle with a few smeared glints of glass, as if someone had started to tidy up and then abandoned the effort.
He turned, measuring the distance from the kitchen. The quiet house, lying to him all along, must have echoed when that happened.
The police, he thought with a peculiar reluctance. They might smile over a hurled mustard jar; a cut telephone cord was something else again, and there was a small child involved. But there was one more thing to do here first, one place still unexplored, and for some reason it filled him with dread. The plant room.
Unlike the Christmas tree, the plants, deep green and pale, a few in flower, trailing and thrusting and burgeoning, did not wake at the passage of air but only trembled a little in their damp earth-scented sleep. Justin, for whom houseplants died the instant they discovered where they were, had never envied this luxuriant collection; now he found it sharply unpleasant although the room was innocent enough.
No, not completely. Between the back wall and a tub of some leathery growth that looked freshly fed was an inch or two of navy leather strap.
A woman’s handbag.
Chapter 14
At the sudden sound of the telephone giving an abbreviated scream before commencing its orderly pealing, Amanda’s nerves jumped uncontrollably and water sloshed out of the glass she was holding to the protesting Rosie’s lips. Was this call for her, or—?
“Don’t answer it,” ordered Dickens flatly.
“I have to.” It took all her courage to start rapidly toward the doorway as if there could be no possible interference, administering automatic little thumps to Rosie, who had gotten water up her nostrils and was coughing and spluttering. “I told the hospital to call me at any hour and that I’d be waiting. They’ll think it’s very odd.”
She knew that this was absurd—at any large institution shoulders would simply be shrugged; they had done their best—but her fast lie had produced in Dickens a greed to learn that Mrs. Balsam was safely dead. It flashed clearly across his face in the split second before he wheeled out of the kitchen, his previous prohibition turned into sharp purpose. “Make it quick,” he said over his shoulder, “and watch it.”
In the living room, the other man stared tensely as Amanda picked up the receiver, trying wildly to think of a signal in case this should be Justin. “Hello?”
“Miss Morley?”
“Yes.” It was a woman’s voice, crisp, authoritative, surely heard before at some unidentifiable point.
“This is Saint Swithin’s Hospital—” Oh, God, thought Amanda in real horror. I’ve done it, I’ve killed Aunt Jane—“and although we don’t usually do this I’m calling because Mrs. Balsam is agitating herself so about a message she wants you to have. She can’t speak, you understand, but she managed to print a few words.” Dickens had edged so close that Amanda felt and twitched away from his body heat, but he needn’t have; the nurse’s voice had a carrying quality—and her little pause was obviously for sounds of gratification. “That’s wonderful,” said Amanda with difficulty. “What—was the message?”
Because it was impossible not to ask; Dickens had the means to force her to call back, and the essential damage was already done. He was listening tightly and— again that somehow dreadful tune-in—sending out not alarm but a rigid fury.
“Actually, for you to stay away from her house,” said the nurse, and added apologetically, “I wouldn’t take that personally, if I were you, but she certainly feels strongly about it at the moment.”
The words seemed to bounce off the walls. “Tell her I understand,” said Amanda, staring with fixity at her Christmas tree, “and that everything is—” in spite of herself her voice went uneven “—under control, and I’ll be in to see her in the morning.” She could do at least that much for Mrs. Balsam, who had made such a desperate and ironic effort to protect her—or was she, in staking claim to a small piece of the future, doing it partly for herself?
She put the receiver down in the kind of silence which might explode if someone lit a match. It came to her with a rush of astonishing bitterness that where she ought to have been rejoicing at what had to be an improvement in her aunt’s condition she had in fact thought, Why? Why now?
And Dickens had
to be looked at, sooner or later. Amanda stepped away and turned her head deliberately. He had either recovered from his rage or slid into a deeper one, because although his gaze drove at her like blue sleet he showed his white teeth at her in an oblong smile. So,” he said almost pleasantly, and let his contemplation rove down to her feet. “Better put on some boots or something, you may be doing a little walking.’ His glance touched Rosie, who, Amanda realized with sudden dread, was raising her hand uncertainly to her mouth. “Leave her here.”
Very briskly, as if the mere fact of motion could sidetrack the disastrous notion dawning in the child’s head, Amanda set her down in the small armchair beside the telephone table. She could not be allowed to cry, because Dickens’ new civility was not really that at all and he was now under a new pressure. Amanda started out of the room, and Rosie said piteously but with the beginnings of determination, “Where my raggie?”
It was the one thing about which she was not so much difficult as impossible. The fraying strip of cloth was guarded in the Lopez household like the family jewels, laundered by hand so that it should not join an occasional sock in some mysterious limbo created by the washing machine—and it was back at Mrs. Balsam’s house.
“I’ll get it for you,” said Amanda.
In her bedroom, lighting a cigarette with the smoke-allergic murderer in mind, she was glad of this challenging diversion; it kept her from thinking about what was going on in the living room. Dickens didn’t care how wet her feet got. He was now faced with the fact that Mrs. Balsam was alert and aware, and, provided with a detailed description of him, would take her pencil and print his name.
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