In Cold Pursuit

by Ursula Curtiss

  Easily that, while Mary had found no one home at the Taylors’, learned from Mrs. Ulibarri that there had been no inquiring strangers of any variety, almost gone off with Owen St. Ives on his present-buying errand. All in all, it had been a frustrating period of time. And what to do now about a situation which was beginning to rasp at her nerves? Jenny was far too old to approach as one would a child with whom wild mirth and activity meant certain tears to come—not that there was any mirth in what she was doing, but there was the same sense of an attitude slipped out of control.

  Something to do with that glimpse in the market, or even with—

  Brennan’s glass went down with a crash. He said unbelievingly, “She hasn’t—”

  His chair fell over backwards as he raced the few yards to the pool and shot over the edge, not in one of Jenny’s neat entries but with an echoing, cracking splash. At any other time Mary would have winced for someone hitting the water with that impact. Now she ran after him, chest hurting and thudding as if someone were beating on it from the outside, caught up in a kind of terror entirely new to her. (“Aunt Henrietta, I don’t know how to tell you this . . .”) There was an underwater tangle of arms and legs, of dark blue and claret, and then Jenny’s white-capped head broke the surface and her neck was encircled in the crook of Brennan’s arm. Her face was contorted with coughing as he back-pedalled with her to standing depth. Sealed off from any real interest of Mary’s was the fact that he looked grim and furious.

  She got down on the concrete, partly because her legs felt unreliable, surprised at the effort required not to cry because with her strange mixture of blitheness and sardonicism Jenny had so nearly—“Oh, Jenny. Are you all right?”

  Jenny nodded, unable to speak through her convulsive coughing. There was a red graze on her forehead just under the edge of her cap, startling against her total pallor. In spite of her shaken appearance, she gave the impression of having been jarred back to normal. Brennan looked down at her and said, “Okay now?” and, his grip not particularly gentle, helped her up the steps.

  For Mary, the world still hummed and spun. “Come and sit down for a minute, Jenny. You must be—”

  “I’m fine,” said Jenny, pulling off her cap and trying for an approximation of her melting smile. She couldn’t manage it. “Stupid, but fine.” For the first time, she took in the fact of Mary’s dress. “I thought you were coming for a swim.”

  If she had, might this dangerous mood have been at least diluted? “I was, but I got sidetracked,” said Mary, because she could hardly explain her long and fruitless interval on the telephone. Something seemed to be badly missing from this scene, and she turned to Daniel Brennan, who had stripped off his polo shirt and seemed illogically to be trying to dry his hands on it. “I’m so glad you were here and watching. We can’t thank you enough.”

  “You could have dinner with me tonight,” suggested Brennan surprisingly. He had rearranged his face into amiability. “That is if Jenny’s up to it.”

  “Oh, I’ll be up to it,” said Jenny, airy, and sauntered away. The few observers were drifting off too, glancing over their shoulders. One of the two children said to the other with fascination and overtones of regret, “She almost drownded.”

  Brennan heard. “She probably would have made it by herself,” he said, and seemed to feel a trace of reaction. “If I were a drinking man . . . for someone so much at home in the water, Jenny put up quite a fight. Fortunately, I am a drinking man. Seven-thirty, or should I call you, just in case?”

  “Better call,” said Mary, although it was Jenny who had done the accepting, “and thank you again.” She collected Jenny’s terry robe and straw bag, and made a firm, unscrupulous resolution to see for herself the message from Astrid as soon as she was out of sight. Now that she thought about it, it would be only natural to show a thank-you note for a ride to the person who owned the car and had done the driving, and something had triggered that wildness in Jenny.

  The bag was already unzipped—and here was Jenny, coming back along the passageway. “Oh, you got my things. Thanks.” She seemed to be braced for a lecture of some sort, because she said rapidly as they mounted the stairs, “I dove too deep—Acton, Girl Show-off—and I knew there was nobody else in the pool and I got sort of in a panic when I saw Mr. Brennan coming at me. I’m sorry, Mary, I won’t do it again.”

  Something told Mary that Jenny did not often apologize, so she only said mildly, “I’d take it very kindly.” Now that it was all over, she felt extraordinarily trembly; such events, she thought, wobbling the key into its hole, could be harder on the spectator than the participant. In their room, she examined the scrape on her cousin’s forehead. “Are you sure you’re all right? Not dizzy or anything?”

  “No, and I’m not going to throw up, either. Honestly, stop worrying about me. The Actons are famous for their thick skulls,” said Jenny with a bitterness that her light tone didn’t conceal, and went into the bathroom to change. It was clear that she wanted the incident closed, and equally clear that any question as to what had led to her singular behavior would be met by an air of baffled innocence.

  She took the straw handbag with her instead of dumping it on the floor beside her chair as she usually did. The next sound you hear, Mary said to herself, will be that of notepaper being torn into tiny, flushable pieces. She was wrong; the sound she heard, and which shot her upright, was entirely different.

  10

  IT was like a private and fleeting roll of thunder, and it came from someone falling heavily against the other side of the locked communicating door directly behind the chair in which Mary was sitting.

  She was instantly out of the chair, holding up a silencing hand as the bathroom door opened and Jenny’s startled face emerged. Concentrating, she could hear a man’s voice, controlled but urgent. “Come away from there.”

  Mumble, also male.

  “Come away!”

  After a few seconds there was the quiet but distinct closing of a door, not on the corridor. Mary realized for the first time why there was so relatively little coming and going on the stairs: those invisible occupants had taken the adjoining room as well, although until now there hadn’t been so much as a whisper from it. There was a bumper sticker which read “Help! The paranoids are after me,” but this seemed to be a case of the real thing.

  Jenny was still staring, her unconcern pierced at last. “All this place needs is little bunches of garlic over the doors and windows to keep vampires out.”

  “I think you’re right,” said Mary with feeling. She tried to be entertained at the notion of Dracula in sombrero and serape, but remembered instead the nonchalance with which the employees here attempted to use passkeys. She looked at the decorative little chain on the door: a determined child could get past it. For purposes of security, they might as well be living in a paper bag.

  Had someone, moments ago, thought to hurl himself into this room? Would he try from the corridor? “It will be a horrible nuisance to pack everything up,” said Mary, “but I’m going to see if they can put us elsewhere.”

  The door-chains were undoubtedly standard throughout the motel, but at least she and Jenny would be removed from the now unnerving presence which was so much closer than she had thought. She started for the telephone, and Jenny said tentatively, “Or we could go back tonight.”

  Mary shook her head firmly at that. She found night driving taxing even with a companion to ward off drowsiness, and the prospect of long hours of it, with stretches of divided highway turning suddenly into two-way traffic and Jenny almost certainly fast asleep, was unthinkable. In any case, the problem that had brought them down here wasn’t resolved. She lifted the receiver, and put her request.

  Expectably, the clerk did not ask what was wrong with the present room, so that it might be corrected, nor did he inquire about the state of the lamp. He simply assured Mary that there was no other accommodation in the motel, and sounded amazed that she could think there might be. He was not he
r familiar adversary, for whom she was developing a certain admiration, or he would have added a bland, “Lo siento.”

  Because even this token regret was lacking, and to test his reaction, Mary said that surely the room next to theirs was unoccupied?

  There wasn’t so much as a flicker of hesitation, let alone a pause to consult a chart, although the Casa de Flores must have contained at least fifty rooms. Two-thirty-eight, said the clerk at once, formed part of a suite and was most certainly occupied.

  Mary replaced the receiver and sat down on her bed with the Juarez directory. As with any half-formed decision, her resolution had hardened in the face of an obstacle, and her distaste for this room, and in fact for this whole place, had grown proportionately—or, she supposed, disproportionately. But there it was: she hadn’t liked the Casa de Flores from the moment she set foot in it, and this new circumstance was a violent underscoring.

  Had the same man caused that half-cry in the night? And from whom? It needn’t have been during the small hours. Fatigue distorted the time sense, so that bar service might still have been available and a waiter have encountered—what?

  Someone all bandages, like the Invisible Man? In the throes of drug withdrawal the hard way? With two heads? Mary put her nerves severely back into place and found the number of one of the American chain motels. The telephone rang as she stretched out her hand to it.

  She expected the clerk, prepared to move them after some upper-echelon consultation because this was clearly a touchy area in the motel. Instead, Owen St. Ives said, “Mary?” It was the first time he had used her name. “Someone told me there was an incident at the pool, and from the description it can only have been Jenny. Is she all right?”

  Mary felt an odd but recognizable sensation, twin to the one she had experienced in the early days when Spence, after they had quarrelled on their way to a party, had attached himself to a girl with waist-length copper hair until he learned that she not only owned but fully intended later on to play the harp standing ominously in a corner. She said, mentally arming herself against any more surprises in this vein, “Yes, luckily,” and then, as Jenny emerged from the bathroom, “Hold on a second, here she is.”

  Jenny’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “Owen St. Ives,” murmured Mary, and handed over the receiver which, she realized belatedly, had come alive again with his voice in the tiny interval of transition. Ostentatiously busy and unlistening, she measured herself a drink to take the place of the one untasted beside the pool.

  She had already learned not to think seriously about ice here. She added water to her Bacardi, and there at her feet was Jenny’s straw bag, abandoned in her curiosity at the ringing of the hitherto silent room telephone. It was unzipped as before—a technicality—and approximately thirty seconds ago Mary would have bent for it instantly. Now, because of some brand-new and complicated reaction, she had to force herself to remember those moments of terror while she stared at the water, and the very real fact that with a little more impetus in that downward plunge Jenny might have broken her neck. .

  But the note that had to be the cause of it all, purportedly from Astrid, wasn’t there, at least in a fast search. Put that beside Jenny’s proposal that they leave Juarez tonight and you got—what?

  “Mary?” Jenny had the mouthpiece of the receiver against her palm, and her eyes looked beseeching. “He wants to know if we’ll have dinner with him.”

  “We’re already committed,” said Mary, not pointing out that it was Jenny who had done the committing, “and I do think that under the circumstances—”

  “Mr. Brennan doesn’t want me, ” said Jenny, explaining it kindly. “He was only being polite.”

  It was true that his invitation to Jenny had lacked enthusiasm; evidently he hadn’t appreciated that underwater tussle. “Whichever you want, then, it’s up to you,” said Mary.

  She half-regretted the words as soon as they were out, even though it would scarcely be possible to forbid Jenny to do anything. Couldn’t it be considered a trifle odd that the day after their arrival here they were dining separately with people who were in effect strangers? Or was that simply a carry-over, a false echo of the feeling of imminence that had driven her out of St. Ives’s car? Yes, because it was only the briefly shared responsibility at the pool which had prompted Daniel Brennan’s invitation. The receiver went down with a little click, cutting off what had been for Mary an undeciphered pattern of words. “He’s going to meet me downstairs at seven-fifteen,” said Jenny. “You don’t really mind, do you?”

  “Not at all, but,” said Mary, entirely reasonable, “I think you ought to make it a fairly early evening after that bang on the head.”

  Jenny gave her a glance which might have contained amusement, moved to the mirror, stared, bent closer. Any amusement departed. “Good God, what am I going to do about this? It looks like the mark of Cain.”

  The graze on her forehead had indeed darkened and acquired a kind of tight burnish. Mary said, “Well, makeup . . .”

  “An inch of it?”

  There was a gift shop in the lobby which might conceivably harbor something other than souvenirs at exorbitant prices. Mary offered to try to locate a Band-aid, as she was going down for a newspaper anyway, and Jenny muttered, “Oh, I’d look great in a Band-aid, with maybe some grass-stains and a skinned elbow to go with it.”

  Mary left her still peering into the mirror. She had no intention of buying a newspaper, but in view of the tacit truce achieved after that scene in the market it did not seem wise to mention the actual and elementary mission which had occurred to her.

  The sky to the south was eggplant-colored and a precursory little wind had sprung up. It was going to rain again, and soon. At this hour the forecourt was more than crowded with cars; two foreign compacts were sealed in by the careless length of a Lincoln with Texas plates. Mary counted seven blue ones, none of them resembling the one which had stayed so long in her rear-view mirror.

  The auxiliary area where she had had to park that afternoon contained three blue cars, all unfamiliar. It didn’t prove anything. If the vehicle in question did have some connection with Jenny, if in a tit-for-tat gesture Brian Beardsley had hired someone to trail her, it might be parked somewhere on a side street. Still, if Mary had listened to this tale from someone else, she would have said incredulously, “You mean she suspected this car and she didn’t even look to see if it was right there at the motel? She can’t be very bright.”

  The air darkened subtly, and a discarded paper cup and a corkscrewed cigarette package spun erratically across the asphalt in what might almost have been the wind of Brian Beardsley’s passing. Because Mary, standing there in the parking area, was suddenly and paradoxically sure to her bones that he was here in Juarez and that Jenny had seen him that afternoon.

  She told herself that she ought to feel reassured. The enemy had been encountered, certainly without prearrangement, and right now, upstairs, Jenny was solely absorbed in how to disguise the injury brought about by her own frightening recklessness. She was skilled at evasion, but there could be no doubt about her eagerness to dine with Owen St. Ives. Before the arising of that circumstance, she had seemed anxious to leave Juarez; now, she might be hoping that Beardsley would see them together.

  On the other hand, he hadn’t come all this way for nothing. The very lack of any overt move could be interpreted as purposeful—spiders did not build noisy webs—and Mary’s dislike of the Casa de Flores, and even this deserted area in which she stood, changed to something much sharper.

  She went back the way she had come, running a little now and then; to get out of the wind, she assured herself. Jenny, opening to her knock, said selfconsciously, “No paper? Mr. Brennan phoned a minute ago, he’s going to call back.”

  “Oh.” Mary hoped she had not stared, as at an apparition. “You’ve, er, cut your hair, I see. It looks nice.”

  It wasn’t quite the proper description. Using Mary’s manicure scissors, Jenny had sawed her ha
ir into bangs to cover the offending graze. The slightly uneven black fringe, too short, robbed her long narrow face of its individuality, like the before-and-after cosmetic ads which undertook to bring all features within the limits of an arbitrary norm. Mary was reminded of a tall spindly comedienne doing a little-girl impression; only a huge bow and Mary Janes were missing.

  “I look horrible, I know,” said Jenny, desperately nonchalant, and Mary, recognizing that this was not the moment to observe that at least she had gotten rid of a lot of split ends, assured her that on the contrary the effect was quite—she hunted for a word which might beguile—dashing.

  Under other circumstances she would have taken the inadequate scissors in hand and softened the T-square angles at her cousin’s temples. Now, she sat down on her bed with the directory and announced her intention of finding another motel for the night: “The longer I stay in this place, the less I like it, and I’ve just remembered a place we might be able to get into.”

  Jenny gazed in consternation. “But what about dinner?”

  “It’s still early.” Mary was ruffling through the pages to the J’s. “We can dress and pack and I’ll take the bags over while you wait downstairs.”

  Here it was: Jaime’s Hotel, almost in town and on a main street, where she had stayed on two or three occasions and to which in case of necessity she had a mysterious entree, as yet untried, passed on by a friend. Jaime’s had none of the pretension of the Casa de Flores. Its paint was in need of repair, its beds made protesting sounds, its upholstered-appearing chairs were apt to send an unwary sitter ricocheting. But the two-storied annex where Mary had always stayed was built around a flagstoned center courtyard where the swimming pool was willow-hung and flower-fringed, and the atmosphere was friendly and the food good. Mary sometimes suspected that its raucous neon sign and the faintly raffish pink light emanating from it at night were deceptions: Jaime’s did not need to woo tourists for its survival.