IF I WERE TO BE ALLOWED TO LIVE CERTAIN days of my life over again, that day would not be one of the ones I’d choose. Trying to act normally made life suddenly seem frightfully dull, and made me realize what a lot of time I wasted. Each time I went out and came back I looked at the hat, still there on the table. Lilac would come tiptoeing up from the kitchen with the phone calls and messages. Bowen had called Diane twice, but she was still asleep and Lilac wouldn’t wake her. Stanley had called me once, and wanted me to call back when I came in.
Otherwise there was just the usual sort of thing. I went out to lunch, came home, went to War Relief and came home from that about four o’clock. Mrs. Hilyard had phoned to see if Diane was there. They were frantic, she told Lilac. I suppose Lilac was acting under instructions, because she said Diane was not there—which is more than I can get her to do for me. It was I who finally insisted Diane call her mother.
She’d met some old school friends, she said, and had lunched with them and was staying downtown for tea and dinner. She’d probably be home late. The new lilt to her Voice must have surprised her mother into believing anything. Until she thought it over, at any rate—for ten minutes later Joan Eaton called and asked for Diane, as if she knew she was there. And Lilac lied as blandly as before.
I skipped a tea I’d been going to go to, and I was sorry I had. As the time wore on and the edge of expectancy Diane had waked with wore off, she became so quiet and still, sitting in the corner of the old sofa in the boys’ room upstairs, that I found myself getting as jittery as Stanley had been in the morning. As the winter dusk settled into darkness and the street lights and lights on cars came on, she got up and knelt down on the cushion, staring out the window into the bare forlorn branches of the trees, like a lonely child waiting for someone who could never come again.
Once she said, “Grace, you don’t thmk, do you——I mean, nothing can happen to him, can it? Why don’t they come?” But she didn’t cry any more. In a way, it might have been easier.
There was a brief moment just before Lilac came up with some sandwiches and salad on a tray for us. Colonel Primrose called. We were to stay upstairs, he said. He didn’t sound hopeful. We were to go to bed at the usual time. He didn’t want Diane to leave the house if she hadn’t left already. When I said she hadn’t, he let Bowen talk to her a few minutes. That didn’t last long. It seemed even to sink her deeper into silence and despair.
“If we only knew something,” she whispered once. She’d given up all pretense at reading after her eyes had been glued to the same spot on the same page for half an hour.
It was exactly eight-thirty when Sheila raised her head and growled softly.
Diane’s body went taut. She sprang up as if she knew what she was supposed to do, switched off the light and opened the door a few inches. The light in the upstairs hall was already off. Only the lights on the tables in the hall downstairs were on.
I could hear Lilac come up, grumbling heavily, and pad along in her felt bedroom slippers.
There was a silence as she opened the door. Then I heard her say, “No’m. She ain’ home. She gone out to the movies.”
I couldn’t make out who it was at the door.
“Yes’m. You can wait. She won’ be gone long.”
I slipped off my shoes as Diane had done, crept cautiously over to the door and out to the mahogany rail at the head of the stair well. Diane was there ahead of me. I saw her raise her hand to her mouth, her other hand clutching the rail. We could see just a small part of the lower hall—only that reflected in the mirror on the paneled wall beside the door leading to the kitchen. But it reflected the opposite wall and the table that Bowen’s hat was on, and just then it reflected the image of the woman who was walking past it into the living-room door. It was Mrs. Hilyard.
I caught Diane’s trembling arm and shook my head, though my own face must have been as white as hers. Colonel Primrose had said we weren’t to jump to conclusions. Mrs. Hilyard hadn’t even glanced at the hat. She went directly on into the living room. Lilac closed the door and padded across the hall to her kitchen door.
Diane didn’t move. It didn’t seem to me that she was even breathing any more. Then suddenly I felt her body go as taut as a bowstring. The living-room door was opening, so slowly and silently that for an instant I could have thought it was opening by itself. Then a hand came slowly out. It grasped the white fluted wood of the frame and held it. The door still opened. My heart went very cold. Those hands! I’d noticed them the first day I called in Prospect Street—strong, purposeful, determined.
So silently that it didn’t seem possible to me that a human being could move that way, Mrs. Hilyard came out into the hall. She stood there, still holding to the doorframe, listening intently. I could faintly hear the rumba coming cheerfully from Lilac’s radio downstairs. Mrs. Hilyard went with quick noiseless steps to the kitchen door and bent down, listening. She came back, as quickly and as silently, to the hall table, raised her head to listen again for an instant, and seized the hat. She turned quickly, held it in the light and looked inside it. Her hands were steady as iron.
She gave one quick sideways glance at the kitchen door, folded the hat with two unhurried motions, and before I could be sure I’d really seen the unbelievable and terrifying smile of triumph on her pale face reflected in the mirror, she was gone. The front door closed as quietly as the other one had opened.
I left Diane standing there, ran back into the boys’ study and pulled back one edge of the window curtain. I could see her distinctly. She was just stepping off the bottom step onto the sidewalk. She gave one glance to the left and right and walked coolly across the sidewalk to her car. And my heart sank. Colonel Primrose had slipped up, for, except for her, there was no one in the street.
Then I caught my breath. Ten yards farther down, a man stepped out of the shadows. His hat was pulled over his forehead, his overcoat collar turned up, his hands in his pockets. He took three quick steps along the sidewalk, looked quickly back over his shoulder, and then, just as my heart gave a kind of primitive, savage thrill at the idea that Mrs. Hilyard wasn’t going to get away with it after all, he leaped at her with a kind of animal savagery just in the movement of his body. Mrs. Hilyard swung round, and I saw his hand rise and fall, and I screamed as she crumpled to the ground. He leaned over her, picked up the hat and stuffed it into his pocket with one swift motion, turned and ran down the street. Mrs. Hilyard lay there motionless.
It was so swift and deadly that I couldn’t believe it at all, and then Diane was there, shaking me.
“what is it Grace? What is it?”
I pointed down to the street. Men were running up now, and bending over her.
“Oh, Grace, it’s mother! They’ve killed her too!”
It wasn’t Diane’s mother I was thinking about; it was the man with his hat pulled down on his face and his coat collar up, creeping up in the street behind Mrs. Hilyard and striking her down, and I realized with a sudden thrill of horror that, impossible as it was, the man was Stanley Woland. And it was I myself who’d let him know the hat was at my house, and who’d warned him that Colonel Primrose knew it. That was why he hadn’t come. It was all so desperately clear. And I knew now why he didn’t want the bloodstains on Bowen’s coat to point to him.
I went slowly across the room and slipped my shoes on. Downstairs I could hear voices already, and the tramping of feet. They were bringing Mrs. Hilyard in. I got halfway down the stairs and stopped. Colonel Primrose was coming in. Bowen Digges with him. Two men I’d never seen were carrying Mrs. Hilyard into the living room. Diane slipped past me and ran down the stairs; Bowen went quickly to meet her.
Colonel Primrose stopped at the newel post, waiting for me. His face was so grave that my heart sank deeper.
“Did he … get away?”
Colonel Primrose shook his head. “By no means,” he said. His voice was as urbane as ever, but there was a grimness to it that I hadn’t often heard. “He didn’t get away, the sneaking scoundrel. He almost added a third to the list.”
“Mrs. Hilyard,” I said quickly. “Is she—”
“She’ll live.”
Outside the open door I heard the scraping of feet then, and heavy voices. A car door opened. They were crossing the sidewalk then and coming up the steps. I ran quickly down. Colonel Primrose went with me to the door. I’ve never seen his face so cold with anger and contempt before.
Captain Lamb was standing by the open door of the car in front. Sgt. Phineas T. Buck was coming up the sidewalk and, beside him, his hat still down, walking along with one wrist shackled to Sergeant Buck’s, was Stanley. They went straight to the car. I watched them breathlessly, with a kind of cold horror. And then, as Stanley started to get in the car, he struck his head against the top of the door, and his hat was knocked off and rolled on the sidewalk. He bent down to get it, turning toward me, and in the light from my windows I saw him clearly. The strong jaw and hard mouth, the black hair shot with gray, the dark sun-tanned face.
I turned slowly to Colonel Primrose. “Bartlett Folger!”
He nodded coolly and closed the door. “The wicked was spreading himself like a green bay tree,” he said.
“But, colonel!”
“But, Mrs. Latham! You told me so yourself.”