In Cold Pursuit
end of the pretense.That was at a quarter of ten. The other call came at eleven.
Because of the hour at which she had been advised of her parents’ death in the sinking of a cruise ship, Mary had an instinctive distrust of late telephone calls which subsequent years had done little to dispel. Good news, generally speaking, came by day. Late ringings signalled critical illnesses, bare acquaintances wanting to be picked up at the airport, an occasional inebriated friend who thought this would be a good time to come around for a drink.
After she had identified herself to a long-distance operator, her aunt’s voice spilled over the wire, low, tense, tumbling. “Mary. Don’t let Jenny know I’m calling—she is there, isn’t she?”
It was one o’clock in New York. “Yes,” said Mary, sounding only cordial and interested in case her cousin’s attention had been diverted from the movie. “How are you?”
“He knows where she is,” said Henrietta Acton.
Just “he,” as if to invoke Brian Beardsley’s name would be to give him some occult power. The pace of Mary’s heart quickened contagiously: had she locked the door after her when she came in? But that was ridiculous. No matter how furious he was, no thwarted suitor would hope to improve his case by storming the house of someone he had never even met—would he? In Brian Beardsley’s case, impossible to tell.
Henrietta was saying distractedly that a friend of Jenny’s—“Myrna, Mona, something like that”—had telephoned her earlier, apparently in a fit of remorse, to say that she had allowed Jenny’s whereabouts to be coaxed from her. The inference to be drawn was that if Beardsley wasn’t already in Santa Fe he was on his way there.
“. . . and then some people came in, and I had to wait for Gerald to go to bed because I’m honestly terrified of what this would do to his blood pressure. I’d suggest shipping Jenny home at once, but—well, you know the situation here, and I don’t entirely trust this friend anyway. What if it’s some kind of trick?”
“. . . I see.” Mary’s mind sped, looking at and discarding possibilities. Try and house Jenny elsewhere for a few days? The only person she felt she could ask that favor of, under the circumstances, was in Europe. Whisk her off to a motel? Any attempt at sequestration would make her suspicious at once, and if Brian Beardsley was really determined to find her, in a city the size of Santa Fe, he could. Jenny was unforgettable to even a casual eye.
“As a matter of fact, I’m not going to be home for the next couple of days,” said Mary over the miles, thinking that this was certainly a difficult way to conduct a plot. “I have a cousin visiting me and we’re going down to Juarez, just over the Mexican border. Give me a little warning next time, won’t you, so that I’ll be free?”
“Mary, I’m eternally grateful. Take care.”
It wasn’t, this time, a casual and empty admonition. “We will, thanks. You too . . .”
Jenny was absorbed in her movie, to all appearances, but the sound was turned low and the telephone was within earshot, and it would have been only natural for her to prick up her ears at the mention of herself. “Did you hear any of that?” asked Mary lightly. “I just put off a visiting acquaintance with a tale about going to Juarez—Cuidad Juarez, officially—and it suddenly struck me that it might be fun.”
There was a faint flicker of animation on the narrow face between its curtains of long black hair. “Where’s Juarez?”
Mary explained. “It’s been dull for you here, and I could use a change myself—I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. I’ve seen a lot of ads for a new motel with a beautiful pool. Why don’t you pack, while I see if I can get reservations, because we’ll have to leave fairly early in the morning?”
Jenny rose and started out of the room at her dangly marionette gait, saying dubiously, “Mexican food?”
“It can be very good, and the black bass is marvelous and so is the shrimp. You won’t starve,” said Mary, a trifle ironic.
Jenny gave her a brief, aware, over-the-shoulder smile, something she did so seldom that it had the effect of transforming her. The smile widened and brought to life her brooding blue-gray eyes, equipped with the kind of out-spraying lashes generally granted only to horses. She looked like an eighteen-year-old then, instead of an unhappy creature suspended between a scorned childhood and an adult world she had learned to distrust.
In bed, having negotiated successfully with the Casa de Flores, Mary examined a small but puzzling detail. Jenny had reacted sharply both times the telephone had rung, although she had spoken to her parents two nights earlier and they had said they would call next week at the same time. For the first time since her arrival she had been alone for a good part of the evening. Was it possible that the informing Mona or Myrna, covering herself in all directions, had telephoned to let her know that Brian Beardsley was either in or on his way to Santa Fe? Or that Beardsley himself had called?
No, thought Mary to the last. Jenny hadn’t been registering anticipation or excitement but something closer to alarm. And, far from placing any obstacles in the way of the projected trip to Mexico, she had looked as pleased as she was currently allowing herself to look about anything.
Besides, was it conceivable that she would want anything further to do with Brian Beardsley?
With whom, three months earlier, her stunned parents had discovered her to be having an affair. Apart from the fact that he was twenty-eight to Jenny’s eighteen, they knew nothing whatever about him, and upon Jenny’s announced intention of marrying him had decided to remedy this situation by quietly hiring a detective service.
Beardsley was not twenty-eight but thirty-two. He had declared himself to be