The Iron Cobweb

by Ursula Curtiss

  She had wondered last night at Noreen’s non-appearance; she had been mildly annoyed that morning. When the telephone call an hour ago had turned out to be Oliver, asking if she had heard from the girl, she realized the extent of her worry.

  But nothing could have happened to Noreen. It was nonsense to connect her absence with Maire’s sudden terror, with the ghostly, ringing ‘Oun.’

  Behind her, on the floor, Maire said interestedly, “What’s that?” and Elizabeth turned to watch Jeep scribbling intently on a sheet of paper.

  “Bear,” said Jeep tersely.

  “Where’s his head?”

  The pencil never faltered. “Got no head,” Jeep said in a tone precluding further discussion, and the telephone rang.

  It was Lucy Brent, asking her in mock-tragic tones to come over and see the puppy Steven had given her for Christmas. “It looks like an overgrown mouse—and oh, God, stop that—it isn’t liking what I gave it for breakfast. Come over and help me bear this, will you?”

  “I can’t. Constance is out and,” Elizabeth said, peculiarly reluctant, “Noreen isn’t back.”

  “Oh, but I thought she . . . well, well,” said Lucy with a kind of reviving sparkle. “I’ve got the car today—do you suppose I could shut this creature into the bathroom with some newspaper and come over there? Does one do that with a month-old puppy?”

  She arrived three-quarters of an hour later, just after Elizabeth had installed the children with a basket of blocks on the dining-room floor. She entered like a commando, looking piercingly all around her as though Noreen might be concealing herself behind a chair, challenging Elizabeth at once. “Of all days to be left to your own resources—but then you’re entirely too easy-going with servants. Have you heard from her at all?”

  “No. I’m quite worried, as a matter of fact.”

  “Worried?” Lucy produced her lorgnette and stared. “My good girl, why? She’ll come back when she’s ready, when she’s gotten over Christmas—with a dying uncle or an ailing niece to account for all this. They always do.”

  Elizabeth listened to the crisp dismissing voice and looked at Lucy’s haggard, faintly haughty assurance, and thought about Noreen’s huge frightened eyes. She felt her annoyance bobbing up like a cork, and she made no effort at all to restrain it. She said, “Lucy, be fair. You don’t like the girl, you never have. If you have any reason to distrust her, or if you know something about her that I don’t, I wish you’d tell me.”

  In the startled second of silence that followed, Maire aimed a block expertly at Jeep’s head, and there was an instant storm of tears. Elizabeth lifted him soothingly to her lap and informed Maire that if there was any more throwing of blocks she would confiscate them at once; Jeep went back to the dining-room and said furiously, “Mama says you are a bad, bad gel.”

  And Lucy had had time to recover herself, to look hurt and surprised. “I didn’t mean to upset you, Elizabeth—heavens, I hardly know the girl. It’s just that an absence after Christmas does look rather like head-holding.”

  “If it were that,” said Elizabeth, “and it’s very difficult to believe that it is when you know her, she’d call me—with an excuse, I admit, but she’d call.”

  Lucy shrugged. Elizabeth thought, watching her. She does know something about Noreen, or thinks she does. Is that why they’re so hostile to each other?

  And then, because it was never very far from her mind, she thought about the Hotel Savoia, and it stung across her consciousness like an electric current: Is it possible that Noreen knows something about Lucy?

  Lucy was prepared to retreat; she said mildly, “Well, the fact remains that she isn’t here and hasn’t called you. She’d be rather a handful to kidnap. What’s your explanation?”

  “I don’t know.” She was taken up, for the moment, with the memory of Noreen’s eyes meeting Lucy’s that day on the stairs, level, equal, unafraid. Recognizing? She said again, slowly, “I don’t know. . . .”

  Lucy changed the subject briskly. “She’ll turn up. It’s a nuisance for you, that’s all, stopping your work dead . . . have a nice Christmas?” She had put away the lorgnette, and her eyes looked bright and candidly enquiring. Lucy had known where Elizabeth’s presents were stowed, had stood at the door of the cabinet one day, saying ruefully, “Aren’t you lucky, you’re all done. . . .”

  “Very nice.” Careful; she would never get anywhere if she couldn’t seem as casual as whoever it was who hated her. “Did you?”

  “Well, of course, a puppy—” Lucy smiled oddly. “You know, I think it’s symbolic on Steven’s part. We’re to have the patter of four little feet instead of two, and something to tie Lucy down. It’s rather sweet in a way, don’t you think?”

  Her eyes were bitter. Elizabeth felt embarrassed and unwilling, as though she were looking at a part of Lucy that was inadvertently showing. She said crisply, “Steven thought you’d like a dog and he bought one. As a matter of fact, I’d like one myself for the children, and for when Oliver’s away.”

  Lucy stood up, changed and laughing. “Elizabeth dear, if there’s one thing I envy you it’s your nice sensible head.”

  “Thank you,” said Elizabeth equably. “I’d do anything for your good walking ankles. Do you have to go? It’s not quite four-thirty.”

  “I know.” Lucy was moving toward the door, fastening the hood of her black raincoat. “But Steven’s coming home early, or at least his office said he’d left for the day when I called. Do let me know if I can baby-sit for you, or if you hear anything about—”

  It was unfortunate that Steven Brent chose exactly that moment to execute a light triple tap at the door.

  “. . . Tuesday, if you’re free for lunch,” Steven was saying, five minutes later. “Crale’s been wanting to meet you for some time.”

  Lucy’s car, pulled into the drive where Steven hadn’t seen it, had driven away in the snowy half-dark almost at once. He had been startled at the sight of his wife; Lucy, after a single brilliant glance at Elizabeth, was casual and—curt. She wouldn’t dream of interrupting them; business was business, wasn’t it, even under such pleasant circumstances?

  “Tuesday’s all right,” Elizabeth said.

  She was still bewildered and a little angry; she didn’t like bearing the brunt of Lucy’s coolness, or the knowledge that Steven could have said all this over the phone without embarrassing everyone concerned. It made a situation that couldn’t have happened six months ago. It had happened now, and even though it was small and ridiculous it was another reminder of how wrong everything was.

  Constance had marshalled the children into the kitchen and was preparing their supper. Snow slid softly against the black window-panes of the porch, and Elizabeth, watching it, wondered uneasily about Noreen. Lucy had dismissed the girl’s disappearance briskly, tolerantly—but it wasn’t as simple as that. In the two months of her stay at the house, Noreen had shown herself as reliable as bread and butter, and almost over-conscientious.

  ‘Oun,’ screamed Maire in memory, and Lucy’s echoed voice said, ‘Rather a handful to kidnap.’ And here was the night and the snow and the complete lack of communication. . . . Elizabeth stirred. She had the address where Noreen spent the night once a week with another girl. If she hadn’t heard by morning . . .

  “Elizabeth,” said Steven with nervous explosiveness, and she came back with a jolt to the porch and the papers he had flung down with unaccustomed violence. “Do you think Lucy’s happy?”

  It was the last thing she had expected him to say; it was, at the moment, the last thing she wanted to hear. She looked carefully at Steven, and he was serious, his face worried out of its usual shy calm, his fingers tapping unevenly at the table-top. Heaven only knew what it had taken to make him say this, even to someone he knew and trusted. She said cautiously, “I don’t know, Steven—I’ve always thought so,” and finished it out silently and unavoidably in her own mind: But then I am not an authority, as I always thought Oliver was happy too.
/>   She looked at Steven again, and he looked confused and unanswered. She said, “Why? I mean, are you worried about her health, or—”

  “No. It isn’t anything like that, it . . .” Steven paused, staring down at his linked fingers, before he glanced up again and said uneasily, “I realize it’s only a symptom, but—this obsession with bridge. Lucy’s gotten so that she lives for it. It isn’t natural, and furthermore—”

  He stopped himself in time; he didn’t say, except by implication, “We can’t afford it.” Elizabeth, startled and newly aware, looked back at Lucy’s increased sharpness, Lucy borrowing fifty dollars, Lucy bitter about the puppy . . . and what else might Lucy have shown Steven? Elizabeth was suddenly and immensely weary; she thought, I can fight this for myself, but not for Steven.

  Rebellion must have shown in her face, because Steven, pacing, turned and said half-apologetically, “It’s not a question people ask, I know. It’s just that . . . women tell other women things.”

  “Some women,” Elizabeth amended, lightly and firmly.

  The snow had increased its velvet swing; outside the porch windows, under the apple tree, the ground was alive with luminous sloping shadows. Steven said suddenly and surprisingly, “You’ve had enough to cope with, haven’t you, without this?”

  Elizabeth looked wordlessly startled, and he said “Sorry—am I speaking out of turn? I thought, the other night when Maire cried out like that—”

  She almost told him then. His face was sober and his eyes quietly curious, and she could have gotten it said without the tears and trembling with which she had told Oliver. And Steven, she knew instinctively, would believe her. But, distantly, a car went slushing by, and she remembered the lonely tail-light of the Brents’ old Ford dying into the dusk. She would have liked to pin down Steven’s impression that Maire had seen something to frighten her here, among them—but she was firmly determined not to discuss Lucy with him, or to be the cause of delaying him an instant longer.

  She stood up, and said without answering anything directly, “Everybody hits a low point some time or other. As a matter of fact, it sounds as though Constance is hitting one right now in the kitchen—I’d better take over.”

  At the door Steven said casually, “Tuesday for lunch, then—I’ll call you about the time. Christmas go off all right?”

  “Beautifully, thanks. . . .” Closing the door behind him, standing for an instant at one of the flanking windows to watch the white and drowning snow, Elizabeth found that her mouth was still stiff from smiling. Steven turned at the hedge to wave, and she lifted a hand. All at once the glass and the distant figure and her own gesture sharpened and became the ingredients of another scene.

  The face in Noreen’s window, the lazily upraised hand. The drench of perfume said that the intruder had been a woman, but the face itself, looked at abstractly, was not nearly so definite. At that distance, sharply wrong in its surroundings, it could have been a woman’s . . . or a man’s.

  Elizabeth had the children on their way to bed when Maire’s terror returned.

  She had been chattering about giving her baby a bath. At the foot of the stairs, without warning, she gave her dreadful clear cry and hurled herself wildly against Elizabeth.

  Jeep, clutching his bedtime armful of trucks, stopped in bewilderment. In the living-room, Constance came startledly to her feet, saying, “Good heavens, what is it?” Elizabeth ignored both of them. She disentangled Maire very gently from her skirts and sat down on the bottom step of the stairs. She made her voice as businesslike as she could, because the commotion along her nerves told her that whatever had frightened Maire was the dark and secret core of her own pursuing evil.

  She said, “Now look here, Maire, what’s this all about? Where is this—oun?”

  Even said like that, crisply and rebukingly, it carried its own small echoes. Elizabeth had a moment of pure unreason, as though something unknown might be there very near them, horribly eager for the summoning. Nonsense. She stopped holding her breath; she watched Maire’s eyes, to which vision had slowly returned.

  Maire turned her head, fearfully, pressing closer to Elizabeth. She was staring over her shoulder, and Elizabeth followed the wide watchful gaze to the paned glass inner door, the small space between that and the front door itself. Nothing there but shadows and a few bright reflections. . . . “See?” said Elizabeth, ashamed of her own relief. “There’s nothing there at all, silly.”

  Maire gave her a dubious look. She was quiet again, but still tense. She repeated slowly and wonderingly, “Nothing there. Oun’s all gone,” and took her hands out of Elizabeth’s and walked sidlingly into the living-room. Elizabeth watched her, Constance stared as though mesmerized; Jeep said, wriggling, “What Maire doing. Mama?”

  Maire seemed unconscious of all of them. She went the length of the room with that odd, wary, stiff-legged gait, keeping well away from the windows, eyeing the porch door with particular care. Constance turned her head in fascinated silence. Elizabeth stared everywhere Maire did, and thought, her heart beating hard, Something’s been at one of the windows.

  Because it was glass, any and every glass surface, that Maire was ready to shy at.

  But she was, at not-quite-four, quick and self-possessed and almost dangerously without fear. Over-imaginative, possibly, but well aware of the dividing line between fact and her own sportive fancy. And she knew by name everyone and everything that concerned her in the immediate world of the house.

  What was it that could leave an observing and articulate child with nothing but a wild crying syllable to describe it?

  “I still think,” said Oliver, peering concentratedly at the hub on Jeep’s tricycle, “that you’re getting wound up over nothing. Everybody takes an illegal day off now and then, and Noreen’s been pretty good about that so far. Of course, the day after Christmas isn’t the most tactful time to . . . The cotter pin’s gone off this.”

  Constance rose and went silently out of the room. Elizabeth stared out at the falling snow, at white-iced cedar branches trembling close to the glass. She couldn’t have explained her own feeling of foreboding, her conviction that this was not an ordinary, inconvenient absence—not even, perhaps, a willing one. She said in a muffled voice, “Suppose something’s happened to her?”

  “You mean the North Shore white-slave ring?” Oliver appeared to consider this solemnly before he bent to the tricycle again. “Got a tweezers?”

  Elizabeth’s irritation escaped. “I wish you’d put that damned thing down and help me think what to do.”

  Oliver put the tricycle on its side, dropping his own patience at the same time. “All right—I don’t see, frankly, what there is to do.”

  Constance came back again and handed him a bowl full of small miscellaneous objects collected from around the house, said murmuringly, “Would it be in there?” and sat down again. Elizabeth said, “I could call the police.”

  “They don’t send bloodhounds out after every missing nursemaid—particularly over the holidays.” Oliver looked at her, and shrugged. “Well, where did she go for Christmas?”

  “To an aunt and uncle in Arlington. But it’s a two-family house and the phone isn’t in their name. Besides, she was coming back early to spend a few hours with the girl she used to room with here in town.”

  Constance was frowning at her hands. She said unexpectedly, “I quite agree, Elizabeth. If she were sick, or something had come up in the family, she’s the kind of girl who’d get in touch with you. And she’s so very young and—gullible that it does make you feel responsible.”

  Oliver looked moody at the joining of forces. “Well then, why don’t you go see the other girl—do you know her name?”

  “Rosemary Teale—I think it was Rosemary. In Pinckney Court, which I suppose I could find.” Useless, again, to try and define for either of them her own faint but growing dread, her feeling that Noreen and the children stood together in jeopardy, and for the same reason. People didn’t bother to conceal
things from children or, often, from young, inexperienced, rarely seen-or-spoken-to maids.

  The difference was that children could not tell. Maire screamed at reflections in glass, and Noreen was missing.

  Rosemary Teale, Pinckney Court . . . “I’ll go tomorrow,” said Elizabeth.

  But, as it turned out, she didn’t have to.

  Twelve

  ROSEMARY TEALE, silhouetted in navy blue against the icy blinding world of snow, was like a symbol of safety.

  She was a short sturdy girl, perhaps a year or two older than Elizabeth, with an alert squarish face. Her hair was brief and brown and shiny, her voice had a pleasant little-boy hoarseness. She introduced herself crisply when Elizabeth opened the door in answer to the knocker at ten o’clock that morning.

  “You’re Mrs. March, aren’t you? You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Noreen Delaney’s—Rosemary Teale. I wonder if I could—”

  She stopped, smiling. Elizabeth turned instinctively and saw Maire peering through the banisters as pink and naked as an infant in arms. She said hastily, “Come in, and excuse me a minute, will you, while I get some clothes on my daughter?”

  She carried her sense of reassurance upstairs, and held on to it while she struggled Maire into a dress, located a missing shoe, and separated Jeep from a quiet study of the electric clock in her bedroom. When they were established with old magazines in their own room and she went downstairs again, the reassurance was torn away without preamble. Rosemary Teale, solid and ski-suited in front of the white brick fireplace, said, “I’m worried about Noreen, Mrs. March. I could have phoned, I suppose, but you always feel better if you see people. Have you heard from her at all?”

  “No. In fact,” said Elizabeth, “I was on the brink of coming to see you. Sit down, won’t you. Miss Teale?”

  Rosemary Teale sat down. She lighted a cigarette with a concentration of straight dark brows and said in that low, likeably rough voice, “The thing is this. Jill and I—the three of us used to room together—were giving a party on Christmas afternoon. Noreen doesn’t drink, but I know she was looking forward to coming—she’d had a dress of Jill’s altered to fit her and she said she’d certainly be there. We missed her at the party, and then when I called here and found she hadn’t come back, I began to worry,”