Constance must have taken the call, and forgotten to tell her. Elizabeth looked at the girl in the wing chair and wondered for the first time how much Rosemary Teale had been told about the March household. The silences, the hostilities, the small inexplicable happenings. She felt her way, cautiously. “It’s seemed to me lately that Noreen’s been rather worried herself.”
“I’m sure of it,” said Rosemary Teale with an instant air of relief. “Funny you should say that, because only the other night I said to Jill—”
What she had said to Jill boiled down disappointingly to what Elizabeth had observed for herself: a vague depression on Noreen’s part, a haunted air, a thorough retreat into silence. “Except about Maire,” said Rosemary Teale. “She’s very fond of your little boy—Jeep, is it?—but she worships Maire.”
Elizabeth listened and felt herself grow tighter. She said suddenly, interrupting, “Have you her aunt’s address in Arlington? If I can get away I’ll go there this afternoon.”
Yancy Street, Hertford, Lincoln . . . Sycamore. Elizabeth made a right turn and drove slowly down Sycamore Street. It had sounded like a winding and shady road; it stretched endlessly before her, broad, arrow-straight, naked in the thin windy light. The frame houses that lined it solidly on either side seemed at first glance to be a uniform mustard-color, with curly fret-work porches and a few steep concrete steps going up.
Elizabeth found a parking place three blocks beyond the one she wanted and began to walk back. The houses weren’t all that broiled yellow; here and there a two-family building reared a bottle-green head. She passed a kerchiefed woman sweeping snow from a porch, a pink-lipped young man who gave her an inviting smile, a group of small boys with snowballs whom she circled with trepidation. And then she was at No. 203, her heart going at a ridiculous pace.
No. 203 was dressed in peeling mustard, its windowframes brown, the windows themselves curtained in straight-hanging white lace. Elizabeth mounted a double flight of concrete steps and walked to the front door, her heels echoing on the wooden porch. She knocked, and gave her attention to a row of flower pots just visible through curtains at her left.
She told herself resolutely that the door would not open on tragedy.
Behind her in the street the children shouted dimly. Icicles on the porch roof dwindled with lazy wet little sounds. The painted dark-yellow panels of the door were suddenly snatched from in front of Elizabeth’s eyes and she found herself staring at a face instead. The face said instantly, “Well, what it it?”
His voice was soft and high, ludicrous issuing; from the thick bold reddish face. Even his glasses were bold, the lenses so thick and curved that behind them his eyes were a huge fierce concentration of brown. He was a big man, not tall, with a look of solid, quick-moving power. Not Ambrose Miller, Elizabeth decided in a flicker, not anybody’s uncle.
She lifted her chin a little in the face of the steady, spectacled stare. “I’m looking for Mr. or Mrs. Ambrose Miller. Can you tell me if either of them is in?”
“The Millers?” Again the soft voice, again the scrutiny, calm, taking its time over her scarf, her coat, her booted ankles, rising without hurry to her face. “They live upstairs, but Mr. Miller had a bad spell over Christmas. They don’t see people just now.”
It was like the door of the room in the Hotel Savoia, closing on what she wanted to know. Elizabeth said urgently, “Mrs. Miller, then? It’s quite important—it’s about their niece. I’m a friend of hers. I think if they knew that they might—”
The man had stepped back reluctantly, and they were standing in a small dusky hall floored in linoleum. There was a brown plush settee, a glass-fronted whatnot, a flight of stairs at the back. Over everything, a faint compound of dust and horsehair and camphor.
“Niece?” said the man dubiously, eyeing Elizabeth. “Young kid— nineteen, twenty?”
“Yes.”
“Dark brown hair, kind of big eyes?”
“Yes, that’s the one.”
“Well, she isn’t here. If she’s got any sense she won’t come back for a while, either, after the way she took off when Miller’s arthritis kicked up. The aunt made a hassle over that, I can tell you, because it was the day after Christmas and— Say,” The man craned up the stairs, cautiously, and then back at Elizabeth. “You wouldn’t be the one who called for her, would you?”
Called for her . . . Elizabeth’s palms went damp inside her gloves while Jagoe—he introduced himself at last—continued, with relish.
Ambrose Miller had had an especially bad turn—there was a heart complication—on Christmas afternoon, and the doctor was sent for, Mrs. Miller had pleaded with her niece to stay at least until the following morning, as there was a great deal to be done for the sick man, and portions of this had floated down to Jagoe.
The aunt: “Don’t you feel you owe your uncle and me at least this much?” Noreen: “Oh, I wouldn’t leave until I knew he was better. It wasn’t the party I was thinking about, but I’ll have to phone the people I work for. They’re expecting me tonight.”
The aunt again: “I’ll call them from the drug store. After all, it’s your own flesh and blood. . . .”
“But she didn’t call,” said Elizabeth involuntarily.
Jagoe gave her a shrewd sidelong glance. “She wouldn’t, if it was over a nickel.” He said that he had missed the crux of the matter, but that Mrs. Miller had poured it tearfully into his ears: how, while he was out the following morning, the front door bell rang and Noreen was sent to answer it. How, almost instantly, Noreen returned to the Miller apartment and without a word to anyone packed her overnight bag and, deaf to the entreaties of her aunt, walked down the stairs again and out of the house.
Mrs. Miller had slipped down at noon today to use the phone for the grocery order, and informed Jagoe bitterly that her niece hadn’t even bothered to call and inquire after her uncle.
The distorted brown eyes were watching her with sharp curiosity and a kind of malicious interest. Elizabeth rose stiffly from the plush settee. No one had dropped a glove, or a match folder, or a distinctive cigarette end in this twilit little half-room. There was nothing here at all but what must have been here for years—the darkly shining glass of the whatnot, the starving settee, the uncarpeted stairs rising into dimness.
No point in pursuing the resentful Mrs. Miller, thought Elizabeth, out in the air again. Noreen’s visitor would have made very sure of that. Bound her to silence when she returned to the Millers’ for her bag, using a threat, or—
Very suddenly, and as though she were seated beside Elizabeth in the moving car, Rosemary Teale said again, “Noreen worships Maire.”
The car jumped, the speedometer needle began, steadily, to rise.
“Everything all right?” repeated Constance. She looked tired and flushed and a little annoyed. “Why, of course, we got along very well. Didn’t we, children?”
“Aunt Constance broke a cup,” announced Maire; from the excitement in her face she had been saving these tidings for some time. Constance gave her a severe glance. “Yes, I did. Miss—because your brother was about to knock over a lamp. Jeep, tell your mother how naughty you were.”
That, thought Elizabeth, was rather a lot to ask of a small boy. She said, “You didn’t mean it, did you, Jeep?” and without chancing a reply swept them off to the kitchen for bread and butter and milk. When moderate calm had descended over the table she went back to the living-room to find Constance waiting.
Her cousin held a small round wicker basket on her lap and was sorting through it in an abstracted way. Elizabeth knew without asking that Constance was still searching for the cotter pin from Jeep’s tricycle; she would continue searching for it, mildly and un-deflectably, long after it had been replaced. It was probably a virtue, Elizabeth thought, but it could also be a very great bore indeed, and she herself always kept her lips firmly closed about a missing glove or lipstick or earring.
Constance glanced up expectantly. “Well? Sit down, Elizab
eth, you must be tired—did you find out anything?”
“Nothing that helps much,” Elizabeth said, and told her. Impossible not to remember, as she did so, that Constance had left the house early yesterday morning, shortly after Oliver, to exchange his Christmas gloves, which she had bought at a department store in Lynn. She hadn’t come back until a little before noon . . .
“How—peculiar,” Constance was saying slowly. She had stopped probing in the basket and was staring thoughtfully ahead of her. “You know, Elizabeth—of course, it isn’t really any of my affair, and I wouldn’t for worlds go against Oliver’s wishes—it does seem to me time you did something. I see Oliver’s point about the police, but under the circumstances—”
Elizabeth’s gaze swung up from her cigarette. Constance said after the barest of pauses, “—as she is in your employ, and rather young to be on her own like this, I think you’d be amply justified in letting the police know.”
“You’re right, of course,” Elizabeth said, and glanced unnecessarily at the clock. “I’ll—they may want to come here, so I think I’ll wait until the children are in bed.”
Foolish, even dangerous, to postpone the deadline.
And utterly impossible to explain her own last-minute reluctance, as though she walked on the edge of a precipice and any positive action on her part would be the equivalent of the push that would send her plunging.
“Do,” said Constance soothingly, in her other existence. “Now, isn’t this annoying. I know I picked up that cotter pin . . .
The deadline narrowed. Jane Perrin phoned to say that her sister was up from Baltimore, and would Elizabeth and her cousin and Oliver come and meet her over highballs that evening? Elizabeth said that they would love to but were sitterless, and went away from the phone more edgy than she had been before its beckoning ring.
Jeep slipped on one of his beloved trucks and cut his lip with a tooth; Maire said pleasedly, “Can I see the bleed?” Elizabeth poached eggs and stirred cocoa and cut toast into slender fingers, and kept seeing the clock, and Oliver’s stormy face when she told him she had called the police.
With darkness, the melting snow had frozen. The night was full of tiny sliding reflections, the lilacs thrust against the pantry window, bony and silver. Maire and Jeep begged to be excused their bath so that they could sit under the lighted Christmas tree, and Elizabeth said yes and went back to the dishes.
The hot water rushed and rinsed; the lilacs tapped at the black panes. Elizabeth turned off the faucet once to make sure that it was only the lilacs; she was suddenly and pricklingly nervous. Which was ridiculous, of course, because Constance and the children were only two rooms away.
You’re all alone with Constance, observed her mind.
And: Oliver will be late tonight, because of the icy roads.
She turned sharply and reached for a dish towel, and her unsteady fingers sent a cup smashing to the floor.
She thought, picking up the pieces, that if the beginning of fear had been like a virus, then this was the final, the killing stage.
when a random and foolish thought could affect her nerves like a pounce in the dark.
She had forgotten the spoons, and the cocoa pot. She carried them to the sink and washed them, making herself move briskly, making more noise than she had to in order to defy the golden kitchen silence, the black windows, the rattling night.
Because of that, she didn’t hear the knock in time. What she did hear was the faint creak of metal as someone tried the knob of the back door. Had it been entirely the lilacs, then? Who—?
Elizabeth was suddenly so terrified that she dropped the dish towel and stood still, one wrist gripped tightly in her other hand. She could feel the receding hollowness in her chest where fear had hit her like a physical impact, and then desperation carried her out into the middle of the kitchen, where she stood frozenly and faced the back door.
It opened, hesitantly, and Noreen Delaney came in.
And Elizabeth stared, shocked into silence.
Thirteen
NOREEN’S FACE, inside the blue figured folds of her kerchief, was white and incredibly worn. The bluebrown shadows under her eyes had deepened until they looked carven, the eyelids themselves were swollen and gray. The small pale mouth was down-drawn and rigid, as though only the most desperate of efforts were keeping it steady.
Relief, and even any kind of normal greeting, fled from Elizabeth for the long suspended moment in which Noreen stared back across the kitchen at her, eyes empty of everything but fatigue. This was the girl who had left the house three days ago, flushed and smiling. . . .
She found her tongue at last and said very gently, “What’s the matter, Noreen?” and Noreen answered her barely above a whisper.
“Do you still want me to work for you, Mrs. March?”
“Of course,” said Elizabeth, deliberately crisp. “Whatever it is can wait until you’ve had some hot tea. I’ll put water on. . . .
So there was a small cup-and-saucer interval in which Noreen could steady herself, and Elizabeth could try to quiet her own leaping urgency. Instinct told her to go very carefully indeed, now that the prize was within her grasp, because Noreen Delaney must be coaxed and not pulled out of her defensive retreat.
She set the tea to steep, listening tautly to the rustle of fabric, the click of a hanger in the small back hall. She jumped when the swing door from the dining-room opened and Maire put her head inquisitively in.
“Out,” said Elizabeth firmly.
“Who came in?” asked Maire, equally firm.
“The wind. Back to your records, it’s nearly bedtime.”
Maire vanished. At the stove, Elizabeth poured tea and was aware out of the corner of her eye that Noreen had emerged into the kitchen again and was standing uncertainly beside the table. She carried the cups over and managed to set them down without a quiver; she sat down herself with an air of briskness, and after a second or two Noreen murmured her thanks and took the opposite chair.
In the living-room, Constance was evidently aware of the situation; the musical nursery-rhymes had reached a strenuous pitch. Elizabeth heard that, and the imperative questions lined up in her own mind. She waited, edged and expectant, while Noreen met her eyes and then bent her head and stirred her tea. When nothing happened at all after that, when the silence grew harder to break with every passing second, Elizabeth looked hard at the slanted-down face across the table and said, “Something happened over Christmas, didn’t it, Noreen?”
“Yes.” It was blurred and almost inaudible, and the girl’s eyes didn’t lift, but still it was a start.
Elizabeth gathered her firmness. “Hadn’t you better tell me about it? If there’s anything at all we can do—” the irony of that struck at her even as she said it “—we’d be only too glad to.” She caught the answer to that before it came, because there was so very much at stake. Everything, in fact, depended on this young and frightened girl, inarticulate to begin with, now frozen into muteness. She said, “People can help, sometimes, even when you think they can’t.”
Noreen looked up then. She said, “There’s nothing you can do,” in a voice of dead quiet.
Does she know, thought Elizabeth in sudden fury, does she know what a knell that is? Half of her went out in pity to the beaten-looking girl opposite her; the other half was tigerish, defending everything she loved, seeing a possible ally turning timidly away.
The anger prevailed. She set her cup down with care and said, watching her words as though they were printed on paper, “Look here, Noreen. What you do with your own time isn’t any concern of mine. I do think that in this instance, for my own peace of mind, I’m entitled to some sort of explanation. In the first place, you look as though you ought to be in bed—and if you’ve been HI, or had any kind of . . . shock—that’s where you better go. Is that it, is that the trouble?”
Silence for a moment, and then the echo of the front door closing. That would be Oliver, Elizabeth thought bleakly, just
when she would have wished him miles away.
Noreen was crying soundlessly, her mouth shaking, her lids lowered. The tears slipped down her pale cheeks, and Elizabeth watched them and hardened herself. You could fight fire with fire, but you couldn’t turn timidity on itself.
She said, “Is it something in this house that’s kept you away, Noreen?”
The girl shook her head; she didn’t look at Elizabeth. Was it impatience at her own tears, an effort at control? Or an answer, to be reassured by?
Elizabeth didn’t find out, because the door opened and Oliver came in, with the children noisily in his wake. The kitchen was all at once in turmoil and that, for the time being, was the end of it.
The children were pleased to see Noreen, and Elizabeth watching with a focus that had narrowed to obscure everything else, watched the girl’s arms go tightly around Maire at the first opportunity.
Had Noreen’s absence had anything to do with a threat to the child—was Maire, who had been shaken to her center by what she called ‘the oun,’ to become a target too?
It was an intolerable thought. Elizabeth thrust it back with an effort and concentrated on the reactions instead.
Oliver said flatly, “I think you’re being hard on the girl. She’s of age—suppose she’s been going around with some guy who’s been shipped out to Korea, or just out, period, and she’s embarrassed to tell you she spent every available minute with him?”
Constance said thoughtfully, “I had a few words with her, Elizabeth, and I’ve a notion it’s family trouble. Oh, not the uncle or aunt, but perhaps some disreputable relative she won’t admit to but was called upon to help. People do have relatives they hide, and if there’d been some sort of scandal, or trouble with the police . . .”
The Iron Cobweb Page 10