Hours to Kill
to movies.”“You’re allowed by me,” said Margaret, but she wondered uneasily about that as she walked back to the house alone half an hour later. Hilary could not really find movies that abhorrent; what, then, had she been doing, or planning to do, that she hated being forced to leave? She had a one-track mind, she was also enormously devious about gaining her own ends. In her determination to lay bare every aspect of the absent Mrs. Foale, she would stop at nothing—not even locks if she could pick them, and it seemed very possible that she could.
Which was eminently wrong, shocking, even, at such a tender age—but that did not explain Margaret’s own deep nervousness, turning almost into an edge of fear. That came of summoning up Mrs. Foale so constantly, of course; she had succeeded in bewitching herself instead of Hilary.
In the house, she went at once to Hilary’s room but it was blameless: the bed obediently straightened out of its earlier lumpiness, the rocker drawn up to a small table which held Hilary’s scrapbook and scissors and a cup of the omnipresent flour paste.
Where else had the child been after lunch? In the library, where the television set was. Margaret walked down the cabinet-lined hall, through the dim length of living room and then dining room, and turned off into the small book-lined room where she and Hilary usually sat after dark. It seemed in order, except for some spilled checkers, a dish and spoon under Hilary’s chair, two broken crayons in imminent danger of being trampled into the floor, and a futile mumbling about macaroni from the pictureless television set. Margaret snapped it off, picked up the dish and spoon and crayons and checkers, and gave up. She would have—the very thought was exhausting—a long severe talk with Hilary tonight. Meanwhile she would look at the furnace, tidy the house, and perhaps wash her hair.
The cellar was as neat as a pin, cement-floored, brightly lit. At the foot of the stairs was a locked door, to the right a laundry room which Margaret had never investigated and didn’t now. To her left was the room containing the very old gas furnace which she never approached without trepidation; it always seemed to give an angry roar of activity as soon as she approached. It did need water again—Philip had said something about steam leaks—and Margaret turned the faucet and waited for the gauge to show the proper level.
On the far side of the furnace was a bolted door leading to the outside steps; beside it another door, undoubtedly locked. She tried it, curiously, and it wasn’t. It opened on a folded cot, a nest of tables, a few large cardboard cartons, a heap of bedspreads; all glimpsed, half-guessed at, in dark gray light that was, in spite of the proximity of the furnace, bitterly cold. Margaret closed the door again, glanced at the water gauge and turned off the faucet.
Mrs. Foale was obviously the kind of woman who never threw anything away. For some reason, the thought was immensely reassuring.
Without Hilary bickering at her heels, or engaged in some silent and even more disturbing pursuit, Margaret went rapidly through what had to be done in the way of housework. She finished the kitchen, put away the laundry, arrived that morning, dusted the rosewood clock, and removed Hilary’s crayon drawings from the living room mantel, a forbidden spot because of the beaded peacocks, blue and green and white, infinitely delicate, that rested there. Hilary drew endless repetitions of a tall peaked house, a crescent moon, and stabs of snow or rain falling. A psychiatrist would undoubtedly have found this significant; Margaret suspected that it was the only thing Hilary, who was not very interested in crayons anyway, knew how to draw.
There was still time to wash her hair and get it reasonably dry before she went to collect Hilary. At Cornelia’s insistence, because there was a telephone extension and a bath of her own, Margaret had moved into the big high-windowed double bedroom. She washed her hair, towelled it, and had begun to comb it dark and wet against her head when the doorbell rang.
It seemed to peal through the quiet house, freezing the comb in mid-air, stopping Margaret’s breath and pale scrubbed reflection in the mirror. It was the kind of mischance that was always overtaking her, and certainly nothing to make her heart beat faster about. Let it ring, she couldn’t very well go to the door like this. Unless—it did ring again, wincingly loud and imperative—it was a telegram from Cornelia and Philip, or from Hilary’s parents . . .
One small high dimity-curtained window faced on the porch. Margaret approached it with caution, stood on tiptoe, and looked out at a man, dark head turned away from her as he absorbed the silence of the house.
Not a telegram, and even the most persistent salesman would give up after three unavailing rings—but while she watched he opened the screen door gently and put a hand on the doorknob, trying it with care and intentness.
And, thought Margaret over a great pulse of shock, in her anxiety to see what Hilary had been up to, she hadn’t locked the front door behind her when she came in, and it was open.
Three
MARGARET shot down the hall and into the living room, towel clutched about her shoulders; she had called loudly, “Is that you, doctor?” even before she glanced through the window over the stiff brocaded settee. The man had retreated instantly; he was standing at the edge of the porch, admiring the snow-capped mountains in the distance and lighting a cigarette. It seemed hard to believe that only seconds before he had been trying to enter the house, thinking it empty.
With fear turned into anger, Margaret snatched the door open. She said icily to the face that turned, “I’m expecting the doctor here, any minute. Was there something . . . ?”
Light eyes, neither blue nor gray; strong-boned