In Cold Pursuit
price, Mary felt vacant with fatigue, but she knew that there was something essential missing from the room. Not their suitcases—Jenny was now rummaging through hers and plucking out her bathing-suit—nor the bag containing the Bacardi and limes and fruit juice for which she had stopped at a market on the way . . .“I’m going to take a shower, unless you want to be first,” said Jenny, and Mary stared at her, suddenly transfixed, realizing what she had been failing to find on any of the surfaces in the room. “Our books. I thought we took them out of the car?”
“We did. I put them on top,” said Jenny, dawningly anxious because she was a reader too, “while I got our coats. Do you suppose they’re still there?”
“Either that or they’ve been turned in at the desk. I’ll call.”
But she didn’t, at once; even though the books were of the essence because she had only a single half-read paperback in her bag, and she was certainly not going to drive back over the bridge to El Paso for reading matter tonight, Mary felt incapable immediately of a simple, or possibly not so simple in this place, telephone call.
The shower began some tentative starts and stops, as if it had baffling controls, and the bathroom door opened a crack. “Mary? Would you hand me in my shower cap? I think it’s in the lid of my suitcase.”
“If you’ll hand me out half a glass of water.” The ice was clearly going to come at a snail’s pace, and a drink would have a restorative effect.
Jenny was aghast at the suggestion, but Mary assured her that the water was perfectly safe in places like this. She found the shower cap—pale yellow, frilled at the edge, giving Jenny, who had modelled it for her one evening when she was feeling sportive, a ruffly blonde look at odds with her long introspective face—and the exchange was made.
Mary’s Mexico-going knife, useful for peeling fruit from the market, turned up in the bottom of her handbag and she cut a slice of lime to add to her drink. It tasted rewarding indeed after the long drive. The heavy door onto the corridor was not as soundproof as its appearance suggested, because over the rush of the shower Mary could hear a fast incomprehensible interchange of Spanish and then a rattle of china and glasses as the cart outside that other room was towed away.
Who was in it, so extraordinarily watchful and alert? The Mexican divorce laws had been revamped, so that Juarez was no longer a Mecca for film and other celebrities. But possible causes for nervousness would make a long list, and crossing a border was automatically a kind of refuge. Certainly —and here Mary spelled it out for herself—the man was nothing to do with her or Jenny. Henrietta Acton, panicky about her only child and warned by the earlier leakage, would not have mentioned the Juarez trip to anyone at all. And Jenny, ahead of Mary and so with a better look at that out-thrust face, had registered no reaction whatever.
But then, she wouldn’t. And she had been completely willing, almost eager to come down here. Mary had to acknowledge the fact, queerly not considered before, that she hadn’t the faintest idea what Brian Beardsley looked like.
This was nerves, born of temporary fatigue; she was not one of the ironclad people who could drive for a good part of the day, take a quick shower, and be ready to leap into the local scene. She would have to be careful about imagining Beardsley everywhere; look at her real if fleeting suspicion of the blue car which had followed them so faithfully for so long.
Moreover, that fast assessment from two doors away hadn’t seemed in any way personal. It might have been made by someone detached and professional—almost, thought Mary with unknowing irony, a bodyguard.
In Santa Fe, Meg Taylor, in charge of the house while their widowed mother was in the hospital, was saying suspiciously to her younger sister, “I saw you talking to that man this morning. What did he want?”
“What man?” Pippa, who looked at least three years older than her actual fifteen, had lately taken to fluttering her eyelashes at every male who happened her way, and this had led to a number of unwelcome lectures.
“I turned back to put a letter in the mailbox and I saw you,” said Meg, grim and insufferable with authority, “and you know how Mom worries about the way you behave. Who was he?”
“I don’t know, just somebody looking for that weird girl who’s staying with Mary Vaughan,” said Pippa, sulky. “She came along early this morning looking for the newspaper after Samuel chewed it up —” at the mention of his name the Great Dane ducked his head coyly, like a dog being complimented “—and I told her we’d try to keep him in tomorrow morning and she said not to bother because they wouldn’t be getting a paper, they were going to Juarez. So that’s what I told this man, and then, naturally, he asked me to run away with him but I said my sister was in charge of my entire life and I had to get permission first.”
“Oh, shut up,” said Meg, and, in a fault-finding mood because in spite of her mother’s injunctions and her own harangues on the subject she was being stuck with the housework as well as all the cooking, “I shouldn’t think you’d hand out information like that to a total stranger.”
Pippa rolled her eyes for patience. “Gone to Juarez,” she said scornfully. “Big deal.”
4
HOW dangerously close he had come to fatal error.
She had gotten farther than he had expected on the very little gas remaining in her tank, which had worked out so well, as he had failed to immobilize her at her house, that it seemed an omen. The outskirts of the city were behind them, the traffic very light,