“Deal. Only don’t …”
“No, no, I won’t,” she said. “I won’t be in too much trouble. I want to telephone somebody who’ll come and help us both. Okay?”
“All right.”
She touched him, giving him a comforting pat. She got up and went over to the dresser and took the band off her hair and began to brush it. Harold lay watching her with pleasure.
When Edie came out upon the balcony, Cousin Ted was there below with the guard, who was looking out the big window at the tree. “I see what you mean,” he was saying. “That’s quite a tree, ain’t it? Pushing on the house, just about.”
“It was planted by my grandfather,” said Cousin Ted, importantly.
“A family tree? Right?” The guard, grinning at his own pleasantry, glanced up at Edie. “Don’t worry about a thing, miss,” he said cheerily. “Conrad’s will take care of it.”
Cousin Ted did not care for so much cheeriness. “Night and day, remember,” he snapped. “I’m paying for it.”
“Oh, sure thing, Mr. Whitman,” Conrad said. “I’m coming around to take night duty myself. I’ll place the men now. Don’t worry.”
He knew he was dismissed and he saluted. Conrad had a little agency. He often supplied the guards at a wedding reception. He had done that for Mr. Whitman’s wedding to his second wife. He was pleased with this job. He could charge a lot. (Night and day.) He was glad he was on the right side of Mr. Whitman. He went up to the foyer. He was gone.
Edie knew, as if he’d said so, that the guard was glad to be on the right side of Mr. Whitman.
Cousin Ted was patting his pockets, as if to check whether he had everything.
Edie ran down to him. “Cousin Ted, before you go, please—listen to me? It wasn’t Harold Page who got in here.”
“Oh ho,” said Cousin Ted with an idiotic expression of joyous secrecy. “Indeed it was.”
“Why?” cried Edie. “Because Wendy says she saw him? Cousin Ted, will you think about that, for just one minute? She saw him from her upstairs window—running, so she says. Down the drive. But she didn’t do a thing about it. Wendy went to bed. You had to come home and find Myra …”
“She simply didn’t realize at the time,” said Cousin Ted. “Now—please tell Mrs. Beck—will you, Edie?—that I won’t be home for dinner. I intend to stay with Myra as long as they will let me, which will be, I suppose, nine-ish. You’ll be safe here without me, now.”
“He was not here last night,” said Edie loudly, spacing the words, insultingly.
“Who? What?”
“Harold Page. There’s no reason to think so, except—”
“You don’t know what you are talking about,” said Cousin Ted with relish. “Charles Tyler just called me. They’ve found his bag. Oh, yes. Some small canvas affair. His name is on it. They found it in the shrubbery, down at our gates. So you may as well stop talking nonsense, Edith. He was here, all right. But this is a fortress now. He can’t get in again. Not alive.”
His thin mouth was looking viciously satisfied. He left the house.
Up in the turret room, Harold got off the bed, took off his sweat-soaked, wrinkled white jacket. He hung it over the back of a chair. It might dry. He would have warning. He would rather not look too messy when he faced them. He limped toward the bathroom. Oh wow, his right foot was puffed up, pretty bad. Maybe he could soak it. Soma, he thought.
When he was in the cramped little bathroom, he was facing one of the windows, breast high, and he felt surprised to see the world out there, and the sun shining. It was kind of a shock to him. He blinked and stared and then his gaze came downward and he saw a man, standing a few yards from the corner of the house where the dining room was. He was just a man in a gray suit but—no, he wasn’t, either. He kept moving, a little back and a little forth, and he kept looking around. He was a guard!
Harold’s head cleared. It was as if the veils and mists, through which all things had looked so dreamlike, melted away. Now he remembered, she had said there were guards, the girl had said so. Now that everything was clear and hard, Harold had the instinct to hide. He was in danger. There were guards down there and they were guarding. What? They were guarding the house against Harold Page. But Harold Page was in the house. It was kind of a joke on them, but it wasn’t funny. Guns, she had said. He thought, I sure as hell better get out of here.
He went back to the round room and stole across to the opposite window, the one where the green leaves were pressing high on the window glass. He leaned cautiously into the embrasure. He couldn’t see to his right, through so many leaves. He looked downward, to his left, and there was the big window and he could see into it and there was Wendy.
She was right down there, standing the way she always had stood, on her two feet at once and her feet apart. She was talking to somebody. There was another figure standing behind her. But Harold didn’t look at it.
He looked a long time—about twenty seconds. He drew back and crossed the room and put himself down on the bed, on his back. He had expected to feel funny. He hadn’t thought it would hit him quite so hard. He felt as if he’d been socked in the stomach. He had to understand this, now, and live through every bit of the pain. He had to let it hurt him. He’d learned this. He lay on his back with his wrist across his mouth.
Chapter Five
SCHEMES were racing through Edie’s mind. She was standing beside the big carved chest, where the telephone was. Ought she to call the doctor at the Mental Hospital, this Dr. Wesley, the one who knew and had counseled Harold? He could help. He could say, for one thing, that Harold was not a madman, and for another, that he had not escaped. Surely he would be concerned, and would understand why Edie could not throw the boy to these wolves without trying everything else, first. He would understand what terrible damage might be done by a repetition of the same kind of injustice that had hurt the boy so much once before. He would be on Harold’s side.
Or would it be best to call a lawyer, here? What lawyer? Or would it be best to call a cab, and just get Harold Page out of this house, maybe with the driver’s help? Just face the guard down, and go. She could cash traveler’s checks. Where could she go? With a boy who needed a doctor. To what doctor?
She was still standing beside the telephone when Wendy and Ronnie Mungo came in.
“What in the world is going on?” demanded Wendy, stopping by the window. “Daddy’s got armed men around the house? How stupid!”
There she stood and Edie could feel herself pulling together with one clear purpose, to fight this enemy. She said, dryly, “Why? Aren’t you afraid of the famous madman? Hi, Ronnie.”
The man saluted. Wendy said, contemptuously, “Afraid of Harold? One word from me and he’d cry salt tears.”
Wendy was nineteen now. She was pretty. Her hair was dark with certain reddish lights in it, and it was abundant, and it swirled prettily around her golden face, in which her eyes were the color of tea-in-a-cup without any cream. She was just a fraction of an inch shorter than Edie, but she wore very high heels on her very tiny feet. She wore bright colors. She wore, now, a yellow dress with green buttons down the front and a green scarf tucked in at the neckline. The dress was cotton and had cost as much as all of Edie’s summer dresses put together. Wendy’s figure was an hourglass. Edie’s was the straighter, the daintier—yet Wendy made Edie feel faded and diminished. Poor.
Wendy was moody and the mood, for now, was pouting. She kept her back to Ronnie when she spoke. “Ronnie? Six-thirty?”
It crossed Edie’s mind that Wendy’s peers had never liked her, either, that she could remember.
“I take it we are going through with this dinner party?” said Ronnie Mungo in his pleasant tenor. He was as tall and elegantly made as ever, although not so young as when Edie (aged eighteen) had thought of him as an “older man.” He had a well-practiced smile; he seemed as friendly as a puppy, in spite of his practiced manner of speaking, which took care to take nothing very seriously.
&n
bsp; “It’s supposed to be given for us,” said Wendy sulkily.
“Well, fine.”
Wendy threw her green purse on the sofa and herself after it. She was not pleased with life at the moment.
Ronnie came to lean on the back of a chair and take the cover off a candy box. His blue gaze slipped to Edie, who was standing her ground, who was not, this time, taking herself off with some small excuse to leave them together. He winked at her. “Our little flower,” he said in a pseudo-confidence, “is drooping.…”
“Oh, shut up,” said Wendy, who was drooping sulkily where she sat.
Edie looked away from the man’s face, the one she had studied curiously, whenever the two of them had gone by, in these last few days. It was time to study Wendy.
Edie could feel herself hardening, feel herself gearing for battle. She knew exactly why she had, so soon and so easily, believed in Harold Page.
The time little Wendy, who had half a dozen cashmere sweaters, had taken Edie’s one best one, and worn it, and torn it, and sworn she had never touched it. The time little Wendy had told her grandmother something. Edie was sure of it!… Because Wendy had wanted to go to Palm Springs for the weekend with her parents, but could not have gone unless they took Edie, too, to look after her. The very one-and-only weekend Edie had been supposed to have a date with Ronnie Mungo. And (get on, quickly) the time little Wendy had said she saw Edie in the solarium, on the morning that the parakeet had escaped from its cage and been destroyed by the cat. Time after time. Incident after incident.
Two kinds. The times when Wendy lied because she wanted something, and the times when Wendy lied because she did not want to be punished for something she had done.
So Edie knew that Wendy was the enemy. Not Granny. Not Cousin Ted. Under the pressure of shock, after what had happened to Myra, they were merely being larger than themselves, Granny more maddeningly frivolous (or whatever you could call it) and Cousin Ted actively stupid instead of just bumbling about.
But it was Wendy who had put Harold Page into this affair, where he did not belong. He had nothing whatever to do with it, and Wendy knew that. Otherwise, why wasn’t she afraid of him? There was a coincidence, of course. Harold had written to say that he was leaving the hospital on Monday. So Wendy had seized upon that, and the pattern that he fit so cozily, when she had lied last night.
Edie was hardening and at the same time flaming. Oh, Wendy was a liar, although she took care to lie only as often as it was wise to lie and continue to be believed. Edie did not doubt that she had lied to get her divorce and nearly wrecked the boy, that time. This time, she was not going to get away with it. By a saving coincidence, her cousin Edie happened to be here. Edie had not allowed the boy to walk into the trap and she would smash the lie and destroy the trap before she would give him up. But she had better not flame. Better be cool, be careful.
She said coolly, the latent anger almost hidden, “Myra is still in a coma, since you ask.”
Wendy did not move an eyelash. Ronnie Mungo responded pleasantly. “She’ll come out of it, won’t she?”
Edie went nearer him. Let Wendy brood, if she was brooding. “I guess so, Ron. Myra was in this room when you brought Wendy home last night? Did she say anything special?”
Ronnie tucked the candy into his cheek. “Myra? We-ell, we had a sparkling exchange, you know?” He sat on the arm of a chair and let his rump fall into the seat, so that his legs dangled. “Let me see. Myra said ‘Good night.’ And I replied. ‘Good night,’ I said.” He grinned at her. Irreverence was his specialty. But Edie thought his bright eyes wondered what she could be wondering. Or did they guess?
“What did she say to you, Wendy?”
“Who? Nothing. I didn’t listen.” Wendy shifted and sat on her foot. “If Myra is going to be groggy all the rest of the summer,” she said sullenly, “that’s going to put the frost on a big wedding.”
Ronnie said to Edie, as if this were an aside, one grownup to another, “This is the bother, you see?”
Is it? thought Edie. Is this really what’s bothering her today? Are her moods swinging wider than ever? Is she larger than herself by the shock? More unreliable than her already unreliable self? She said aloud, “Myra can hardly help being what you call ‘groggy.’”
“Oh, Cousin Edie,” said Wendy, thrashing around, “that’s not the point. I don’t see why we need Myra at the wedding. She’s not my real mother.”
“She’s a reasonable facsimile,” said Edie, idly. She was thinking, No, Myra is not. Myra, to you, is nothing. Who is anything, to you? Are we going to find out?
Wendy said crossly, “Look, I’m trying to think.”
You think, thought Edie. You just think, little cousin. Because somebody hurt Myra last night. The police found “signs of a struggle.” And if it wasn’t Harold Page, who was it then?
Ronnie Mungo listened to the silence shrewdly for a moment. Then he said, “I’m not so crazy about waiting at the altar in a white jacket while the bride comes down the aisle, like doom in lace. It’s possible to have a ‘little’ wedding. Wait, I’ve got it. The word is ‘quiet’?”
Wendy swiveled her dark head and sent him a long stare.
“Or,” he said, shifting his long legs to lie stretched out in the chair, “maybe you want to call the whole thing off? Another day, another bridegroom? In which case, we better not make an announcement at this party. Or even go.”
He sounded as if he didn’t care. Maybe, to get along with Wendy, you had to seem to care even less than she. Edie sat down, to listen.
“I wanted the whole show.” Wendy pouted. “The cake and the flowers. And eight bridesmaids.”
“And the veil?” said Edie, her anger slipping. “Which, I presume, you missed, the first time around.”
“Edie, will you kindly …” Wendy sounded exasperated, but only as if with a fly. “She never got married at all, Ron. And what are you, Edie … twenty-five?”
“Withering on the vine,” drawled Edie. She settled into the chair.
Wendy got up and crossed to the solarium doors and stood there with her back to them.
Ron said in a moment, casually, “So you’re a social worker now? Get a bang out of that, do you, Cousin Edie?”
“In a way,” said Edie slowly. She was trying to cool down.
“Doing good, eh? I don’t understand that sort of thing, believe me.” He was playing with his key case, tossing and catching it.
Edie said sweetly, “I believe you.” He was an attractive man, to women. He must be, thought Edie. He’s been married twice already. Why did his wives divorce him? Something dark moved in her blood as she wondered.
But Wendy turned around and came waspishly back into the conversation. “Why are you trying to understand her? It’s me you’re going to marry.”
“Oh? Then it’s on?” said Ron, lightly.
Wendy was full of storm. “If we’re not going to have a big wedding, what is there to wait for?”
“Okay,” he said. “How about tomorrow?”
Edie could see Wendy’s face changing and she gasped, “Wendy, you can’t.”
“I most certainly can,” said Wendy coldly. “The divorce is final. I’m of age, now. I will get my mother’s trust money when I marry. And I have spelled it out and spelled it out and I’m not going to spell it out anymore. Because I can … if I want to.”
She went prancing across the carpet on her tiny feet, like a child in a tantrum.
Edie said, frowning, puzzled, “With Myra in the hospital—”
“So much the better,” snapped Wendy. “She doesn’t particularly want me to marry Ronnie.”
Does she not? thought Edie. Does she not, indeed? And when was it that you spelled it out so many times?
Ron got up and moved toward Wendy. His pleasant voice, with its constant undernote of mockery, might have been designed to tease. “Ah now, naturally, I am not good enough for you. But the old folks will be reconciled, in the end.” He was reaching for her.
But Wendy stepped away.
“Tomorrow?” she said coldly.
“Well, no,” he answered, quickly serious. “As a matter of fact, we can’t get the red tape cut that soon.”
“But we can get our blood tests tomorrow.”
“True.”
“Can we get on a plane to Paris? I mean soon. After the whatever-it-is … the three days?”
“Should be possible. I’ll see.”
“All right, Ronnie.”
Edie sat marveling at this exchange, so cold, so coldly decisive. She began to think that Granny was right. These two would suit each other very well.
Now Wendy was softened and she kissed the man’s cheek lightly. “Go away, now. Be back by six-thirty and we’ll go to this party.”
“Have to take one of those bodyguards along?” he said, with a mock shudder.
“Of course not,” said Wendy. “How would Harold know where I was? Anyway, maybe they’ve caught him by now and put him back where he belongs.”
“I won’t worry about it if you don’t, sunshine,” Ronnie said. “So long, Cousin Edie. Do good, now.”
Edie said thoughtfully, “I’ll try.”
When he had gone, Wendy seemed to think herself alone. She didn’t look at Edie. She went prancing toward the door to the long dining room and sent her high voice calling, “Becky? Beck-yyy? Come here, will you?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but turned.
Edie said, with the deadliest calm she could manage, “Wendy, when you marry Ronnie Mungo, what are you going to do with the baby?”
“The what?” said Wendy.
“Your child. Your son.”
There may have been a flush under the golden skin of the pretty face. But Wendy said flatly, “He is deaf as a stone. How could I do anything with him? Somebody will have to take care.”
“What does Ronnie say, about the baby?”
Wendy was staring at her. “Not a word. We don’t discuss it.” Then she whirled to turn her back. “Didn’t she hear me!”
“What,” said Edie, in the same deadly tone, “is your idea of marriage, I wonder?”
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