Hours to Kill
television, but perhaps . . . Just then Hilary betrayed herself; she was after all only eight, and an apprentice Machiavelli. “Did you throw away my scrapbook things?”“I didn’t touch them.” So that was it, something to do with the scrapbook, almost certainly something to do with Mrs. Foale. Now that she thought about it, how suspiciously docile Hilary had been when ordered to tidy up her room and smooth her bed. Margaret opened her mouth and closed it again, because telling Hilary not to pry into Mrs. Foale was like telling the wind not to blow.
They reached the house. Margaret used her key and the day fluttered briefly in and was shut out again. Hilary said, tossing her coat in a heap, “Mrs. Foale heralded money.”
“Pick up your coat. Heralded money?”
“That’s what this girl told me.”
“What girl?” Like all conversations with Hilary, it demanded infinite patience—and half the time Hilary was only talking to set up a screen against doing something like picking up her coat.
“A girl at the movies. She asked me where I lived and I said Mrs. Foale’s house and she said Mrs. Foale heralded money.”
Inherited, she must mean—but what an odd, unchildlike thing to confide about someone. It was a parroting of something an elder had said, of course, but still. . .
Margaret must have spoken the key word aloud, because Hilary said alertly, “Like Cornelia?”
“Like . . . ? Yes, I suppose so.”
“How much did Cornelia inherit? It’s not polite to ask,” said Hilary, answering herself rapidly in a mimicking, mincing voice.
“No, it isn’t,” said Margaret rather shortly. She knew it was natural, but she could not help being repelled by the interest in Hilary’s sharp yellowish eyes—prepared to admire Cornelia if it were a lot of money, and despise her if it were not. She wondered as she started for the kitchen how the child knew anything about Cornelia’s inheritance—and behind her, pursuingly, Hilary’s voice said, “How come you didn’t inherit money?”
“I never picked up my coat,” said Margaret.
But she went on wondering while she put potatoes in to bake, took frozen vegetables out of the refrigerator, swept up some cereal Hilary had poked under the radiator. Something Philip had said, probably; it would be very unlike Cornelia to have mentioned the money after her first glad astonishment. Philip, on the other hand, would have been self-conscious about it even though he and Cornelia were in the midst of wedding arrangements when the lawyer’s letter came.
Miss Wilma Trumbull, of Torrington, Connecticut, had left her estate to her second cousin, Cornelia Ann Russell. After taxes, the estate was an estimated fifty thousand dollars.
It was one of those thunderbolts which usually hit someone else and are duly chronicled in the newspapers, and Cornelia and Margaret sat up a good part of the night marvelling at it. Wilma Trumbull, a dour woman in her late seventies, was almost unknown to both of them except for a weekend they had spent with her once on their way to summer camp, Cornelia thirteen then and Margaret nine. They had both sent dutiful notes on arrival, but Cornelia had followed hers with a woven grass basket which was her group’s current project. A note complimenting her on her industry came back, and Cornelia was spurred to send a mutilated piece of leather handicraft at the end of the summer. This went unacknowledged, but after that birthday cards came regularly, and then the traditional graduation watch.
There was certainly nothing to suggest that Miss Trumbull would make Cornelia her legatee, or even that she had a fraction of that amount to leave. In fact she had had, both sisters remembered, the air of a woman who would devote her savings to a home for aged canaries.
. . . But how foolish, thought Margaret now, to have mentioned the inheritance in Hilary’s hearing. She didn’t know why it should seem so dismaying, but it did.
The last streaks of a flame-and-lemon sunset dropped into darkness and a chilly wind sprang up. Margaret couldn’t hear it because of the muffling adobe, but it thrust at her through the tall windowframes over the sink and sent a suspended bird mobile into circles, vivid wings dipping and turning eerily in the silent kitchen. Mrs. Foale obviously did not believe in weather-stripping—and how quiet Hilary was, somewhere in the house.
Margaret started to call, inquiringly, and thought better of it. On tiptoe—the worst of children was that sooner or later they reduced you to their own terms—she went in search of Hilary.
She wasn’t in the library, nor in the huge light-pooled living room. Of course; the scrapbook. Although the hall was dark, because the bulb had blown and the ceiling was so high it would take a human fly to replace it, a line of gold showed under Hilary’s door. Margaret wrestled with her conscience so briefly that it could hardly be called wrestling and opened the door without knocking.
Hilary, seated at the table with her scrapbook, jumped visibly, closed the book with a snap, pushed back her rocker and turned to face Margaret. Her face was flushed, her eyes bright. “Is dinner ready?”
“No, but it won’t be long. Working on your scrapbook?”
“Yes,” said Hilary, walking rapidly away from it. “Shall I set the table?”
“If you like. What do you collect pictures of?” asked Margaret lightly, trying and failing to sound like a fellow scrapbook-keeper.
“Oh, things,” said Hilary, and there was no doubt about it; she could not get herself and Margaret out of the room fast enough. And her flushed cheeks, her unnaturally brilliant eyes . . . Margaret’s uneasily roving gaze lit on the bed, lumpy again, as though the mattress led some bumbling life of its own. She said firmly, “Whatever you collect, you mustn’t cut anything out of Mrs. Foale’s magazines.” A horrifying thought struck her. “Or books. Hilary, you haven’t touched anything of Mrs. Foale’s, have you?”
Hilary was already down the hall. She said over her shoulder with dignity, “I have my own magazines. Cornelia bought them