Hours to Kill
for me,” and Margaret could not help admiring the adult quality of the evasion.She must, she thought as she followed, get over her own ridiculous obsession about Mrs. Foale’s privacy. People who rented furnished houses to total strangers always undertook a certain amount of risk, not only of cigarette burns and liquor rings but of rampant curiosity. Presumably they locked up, along with their silver and other valuables, bank statements, income tax records, everything in the personal area of their lives. If they didn’t, they should. Certainly people with dangerous secrets did not rent houses at all. (Where had that unpleasant adjective come from?) Walking briskly, Margaret went into the kitchen to put on the chops.
That done, she fixed her own drink and Hilary’s ceremonial tomato juice, which they always had just before dinner in the library—but Hilary said instantly, “Can’t we have it in here tonight?” and gave a theatrical shudder. “It’s freezing in there.”
“Is it? All right,” said Margaret amiably. Hilary had taken something out of the library, then, or disarranged the shelves, and she had probably secreted whatever it was she found under her mattress, or moved it hastily from there to her scrapbook. Suppose, just possibly, she had matches?—although she was much too complicated for mere arson.
They had dinner and, after the dishes, a game of checkers which Hilary won handily. She offered to play again but Margaret glanced at the clock and was firm. “Time for your bath. In fact, you ought to be in it by now.”
Hilary was spinsterish about her bath. She collected her pajamas and robe and powder mitt before she even began to run it, and although Margaret insisted that the door be unlocked while she was actually in the tub, it was locked for long fussy intervals before and after. As Hilary got up to leave the room, Margaret opened her book and reached abstractedly for a cigarette; two minutes later, with the water rushing behind the bathroom door, she was in Hilary’s room.
The mattress had been hastily lifted and dropped, but there was nothing under it now. The scrapbook held, instead of cats or dogs or horses, pictures of people—all, Margaret realized bewilderedly as she flicked the pages, in evening or formal daytime dress, and all very handsome. They had been clipped from newspapers and magazines, in color and black-and-white; recognizable celebrities mingled with sleek befurred or tuxedoed advertising models. Margaret had never seen Hilary’s parents, but she was suddenly and uncomfortably sure that they were legendary Village types: sneakered, turtleneck-sweatered, so casual as to be, to this particular eight-year-old mind, ramshackle. It was the only possible sense to be made of Hilary’s clippings.
The scrapbook underwent a change toward the end. A burnt match had been carefully taped in, and what looked like either a dessicated moth or a long-pressed flower. Hilary had evidently not known how to affix the folded white handkerchief, brushed lightly with lipstick in one spot and bearing an “I” in forget-me-nots.
Dossier on Mrs. Foale, thought Margaret, trying to push down with amused tolerance a little welling coldness. She turned another stiff gray page, but the scrapbook was empty from that point on.
No, not quite. A small photograph was stuck into the binding near the end. It showed a man standing on an adobe porch—this porch, from the odd mosaic beside the door, the trickles of ivy, the white iron chair with the lacy heart-shaped back on which he rested one hand. His head was a little bent toward what seemed to be a letter, and from his air of absorption he was unaware of the camera.
Margaret picked up the photograph for an incredulous closer look, even though familiarity had leaped at her at once. The man was Philip—Philip with a mustache.
The bath water stopped running, the lock gave a warning click. Even though the door stayed closed Margaret thrust the photograph rapidly back, closed the scrapbook, and went soundlessly from the room almost as though, it occurred to her later, Mrs. Foale and not a child of eight might have appeared without warning.
And she still wasn’t used to the altitude; couldn’t be, because her heart was pounding.
Four
THE wind strengthened during the night until not even the thick walls and recessed windows could hold it at bay. Margaret woke at three o’clock to a pour of cold air and a rustling of papers on the bureau. When they began to skitter about the floor she turned on the light, got up, groped after the papers through narrowed lashes, closed the windows, and went back to bed.
At once, a branch began to scrape against the wall behind her head, a raking gravelly sound that had no regular pattern to lull her mind. How odd that Philip hadn’t mentioned knowing Mrs. Foale, or at least the house—had, indeed, given the opposite impression, turning to Cornelia with an inquiring, “Mrs.—what’s her name?” and gazing up curiously at the black iron chandeliers in the living room when Margaret noticed them.
It might have been a different house, of course; adobe and white iron lawn chairs and ivy were standard in this part of the country. But the distinctive mosaic beside the door . . . Then again, thought Margaret, turning over resolutely, people were said to have doubles.
But if you had once loved a face you knew it instantly, in any setting, even behind a mustache. (What had ever possessed Philip to grow a mustache? Although it became him, in a peculiar way.) Margaret realized with a little trickle of clarity through her drowsiness that at some point in the last forty-eight hours she had gotten over Philip, and was looking at him impersonally. It was like the pleasure of a stopped toothache, and she warmed herself with it for a while before she drifted back to sleep.
The house and the wind might have been waiting for just such a signal. Doors, including her own, began to slam and suck open and slam again like pistol shots. Although she had