PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS

“Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Josephine Tey … Dorothy Salisbury Davis belongs in the same company. She writes with great insight into the psychological motivations of all her characters.” —The Denver Post

“Dorothy Salisbury Davis may very well be the best mystery novelist around.” —The Miami Herald

“Davis has few equals in setting up a puzzle, complete with misdirection and surprises.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Davis is one of the truly distinguished writers in the medium; what may be more important, she is one of the few who can build suspense to a sonic peak.” —Dorothy B. Hughes, Los Angeles Times

“A joyous and unqualified success.” —The New York Times on Death of an Old Sinner

“An intelligent, well-written thriller.” —Daily Mirror (London) on Death of an Old Sinner

“At once gentle and suspenseful, warmly humorous and tensely perplexing.” —The New York Times on A Gentleman Called

“Superbly developed, gruesomely upsetting.” —Chicago Tribune on A Gentleman Called

“An excellent, well-controlled piece of work.” —The New Yorker on The Judas Cat

“A book to be long remembered.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch on A Town of Masks

“Mrs. Davis has belied the old publishing saying that an author’s second novel is usually less good than the first. Since her first ranked among last year’s best, what more need be said?” —The New York Times on The Clay Hand

“Ingeniously plotted … A story of a young woman discovering what is real in life and in herself.” —The New York Times on A Death in the Life

“Davis brings together all the elements needed for a good suspense story to make this, her fourth Julie Hayes, her best.” —Library Journal on The Habit of Fear

“Mrs. Davis is one of the admired writers of American mystery fiction, and Shock Wave is up to her best. She has a cultured style, handles dialogue with a sure ear, and understands people better than most of her colleagues.” —The New York Times Book Review on Shock Wave

A Town of Masks

Dorothy Salisbury Davis

Contents

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About the Author

1

HANNAH BLAKE PICKED UP the telephone as it rang a second time. Once it would have amused her secretary to get the few odd words of added dictation “out of left field” as she called it—the sentence Miss Blake was always in the midst of when her phone rang. Now she was merely bored by it, and doodled Ho-hum, ho-hum, in shorthand. Invariably, hanging up, Miss Blake would say, “Let’s take it from—” and pick up the letter from the very last word before the phone’s ringing.

Hannah, however, was aware only of the words she improvised and the impression she calculated them to make on her caller.

Elizabeth Merritt, the Campbell’s Cove librarian, was on the phone to remind her of the meeting of the library board that night. Miss Blake was very grateful. It might have slipped her mind, she was so busy these days, what with her civil defense work, the increased volume of business at the bank, and all. While she spoke, she circled the notation of the meeting already on her calendar pad.

“It’s election of officers,” Miss Merritt concluded.

“So it is. I shall be there at nine. Thank you, Elizabeth.”

She told her secretary to let the rest of the day’s correspondence go, and wished presently that she had not been so precipitant. It was as important to Hannah to be busy, as it was to create the impression of it. Her work as cashier of the Campbell’s Cove Loan and Savings Bank was not adequate to her need. Nor did all her numerous outside activities satisfy her. But now she wanted a few moments to contemplate the significance of the call. She could not remember getting such a reminder of other meeting nights, and it might very well be that Elizabeth had been instructed to call her by the nominating committee. She might be up for president of the library board.

Easy, she told herself, her mind taking nasty little darts into the past for similar occasions. In fact, she was on the library board in the first place because Franklin Wilks, president of the bank, had delegated her to take his seat. But she had served well. No one could question that. Any job she had ever put her mind to had been well done, and no one knew it better than Franklin Wilks. The trouble was that no one in the Cove except Wilks seemed to know it. And certainly he had learned it in spite of himself.

Hannah’s father had been president of the bank until his death, and when he knew that to be imminent, he had seen to Hannah’s appointment as cashier. Wilks, in time, had the grace to say that the old man knew what he was about. Before she had savored the compliment, however, Wilks had added, “Your father always wanted a son, didn’t he, Hannah?”

“Well, he had to be satisfied with what he got,” she had replied, to her immediate chagrin.

Wilks had smiled, something sly about the corners of his mouth. “We all do in this world, my dear, and we rarely know when it’s best for us.”

Meaning, she had decided immediately, that she was foisted upon him and the bank, and had turned out better than they might have expected. To this day, the whole atmosphere of that moment came back to her with a sickening vividness. And it was fifteen years past.

“Dead leaves,” she said aloud. “Dead leaves rattle.”

Her secretary looked up from the typewriter. “Were you talking to me, Miss Blake?”

“I think we may have time to finish the correspondence after all, Nancy.”

2

THERE WAS NO COLLEGE or university in Campbell’s Cove. Nevertheless this town of fifteen thousand population on the coast of Lake Michigan attracted a fair number of scholars each year. For one reason, it was a quiet, clean place, with most of its manufacturing devoted to wood products: furniture, box-making and boat-building. But the scholars came primarily because the town boasted one of the finest municipally owned libraries in the country. Some of the volumes in its religious collection were an inheritance from the town’s founders, a colony of Campbellites who had chosen the site that there they might better emulate Christ’s disciples, most of them becoming fisherfolk.

Until midway in the history of Campbell’s Cove, fishing had been its most prosperous industry. To it had come a good many emigrants from the west coast of Ireland, gradually taking it over from the diminishing disciples. The remains of the industry now were more romantic than prosperous, and the high-born of the town usually credited this to the mismanagement and stubbornness of the Irish. Whatever the cause of the industry’s decline, the Irish clung doggedly to the ruin, and though their houses on Front Street were ramshackle, they held their boats in high pride. It was a lovely sight to see the small, flat-bottomed craft glide out of the Cove at daybreak and in at sundown heavy with the day’s catch.

The Front Streeters had a staunch defender uptown—Maria Adams Verlaine. Nor was Front Street her only interest. She was active in all civic enterprises, and one of the main benefactors of the library.

Maria Adams had been sent to France to finish her education in the early twenties. There she had met Georges Verlaine and married him. He died soon thereafter, and she returned to Campbell’s Cove and her father’s comfortable house on Cherry Street. She had acquired some “foreign” ways and her late husband’s library. She cherished both. She never read anything in English, according to Hannah Blake; certainly nothing by an American until it reached her in French translation. On occasion, some of the community, wishing to ingratiate themselves, would bring her books in French. She passed them all along, from primers to James Joyce, to the Verlaine Collection in the public library. The inaccuracy of Hannah’s comment on her reading habits was evident in the absence of French titles in Maria’s personal library. But Hannah enjoyed her prejudices.

It was strange that she could like Maria at all, she often thought. Their interests were so different, and probably no one in Campbell’s Cove hurt her so deeply and so frequently. It was not a deliberate hurt on Maria’s part, which was the crux of the matter, although Hannah seldom faced it as such. They were contemporaries. But when Maria Adams went to France, Hannah enrolled in the state university. She had not married. These many years hence she could count an opportunity or two. Opportunities, she had decided, were rarely recognizable at their occurrence. She was not likely to have missed hers, seeing it, where Maria was unlikely, especially as Hannah remembered her in those days, to have known an opportunity from a calamity. And she had always been a little suspect of Maria’s French husband. Still, it would seem now that there really had been one. After years of wrangling through the French courts, the estate was settled, and a fair share of it upon his American wife, by all accounts.

How had she managed the library in the first place, Hannah wondered. No doubt she had packed the books and shipped them out without a by-your-leave to anyone. Which was making opportunity, not taking advantage of it. And no more than the husband’s family deserved, marrying the Adams money. That was certainly all of America Frenchmen wanted. But Maria would not hear a word against them. The most irksome thing about Maria was her Gallicism. Galloping Gallicism.

Hannah was pleased with the phrase she had turned up, and driving home that afternoon went over in her mind those to whom she might tell it. Then she weighed its effect on Maria, getting word of it through a good carrier. It was a pleasant speculation.

Hannah left the car under the portico of the big, sprawling house. She stopped a moment in the kitchen to give Sophie, her “country girl,” instructions for dinner. Something light as there would be supper at Mrs. Verlaine’s after the board meeting. The lighter the better where Sophie was concerned, Hannah thought. She would be out of her apron before the coffee was poured, and tapping boogie woogie on the doorstep to be off. Hannah paused at the back door.

“You won’t have to wait after serving tonight, Sophie. I’ll stack the dishes and you may do them in the morning.”

“Thanks, Miss Blake.” Sophie’s eyes were dancing. “You’re a honey.”

Well. She was not “a honey,” whatever that might be, Hannah thought, outdoors again. “A honey” should be something light and blond and frivolous. Sweet, surely. She was neither blond nor light—although she was but ten pounds more than she had weighed at forty, and large-boned. All the Blakes had been large-boned, a fine hardy stock to have dwindled down to her in one generation. Pioneers. Nine generations American, five in Campbell’s Cove. All that to be called “a honey” by Sophie. Not especially gratifying. Still it was important to be liked by those working for you, however distasteful their manner of expressing it.

She paused on the path and breathed deeply. The roses were beginning to bloom. Soon great jagged clumps of them would be groping over the white trellises. Lovely. And in the vegetable garden the green peas were already climbing. Never had the grounds looked better. She had done well by the “Blake Place.” Never was it so rich in growth—if so poor in inheritors.

“Denny’s gone, Miss Blake,” Sophie called from the kitchen doorway.

Hannah nodded. Obviously Denny was gone. He wasn’t there. It need not be shouted to the world, telling everyone in effect that the boy suffered her and her garden the amount of time he chose, and at his convenience. On his terms or hers, however, she had done well in hiring Dennis Keogh that spring. He was a born gardener. Everything he touched seemed to smile for him, which was more of cheer than he gave in return.

She frowned and moved on to the cucumber mounds, the toes of her shoes sinking into the soft eddies of soil. She stepped back and tried to smooth out the imprints with her fingers. Sophie must have no end of excitement these days, she thought, which accounted for the improvement in her housekeeping. When Sophie did her work in a hurry it was well done. When she dreamed over it, it was slipshod. And her face was alive with freckles. Plenty of sunshine.

Dennis tolerated the girl, no doubt, throwing her a word now and then, which would be enough for a silly thing like Sophie—and earn him the delicacies of the house in return. She probably cleaned his room for him, too. Something more than Hannah had expected, offering him the room over the garage as part of his salary.

She went along to the tool shed for a trowel, having thoroughly trampled the mounds in trying to repair them. If he had many words in him, she thought, he spared precious few of them. None of the little nonsensities that were the stock and trade of most boys. Nor was he a boy any longer. He was twenty-two or three at least, and a vagrant, really. Winters in Florida, sailing boats for the idle by what she had heard, and summers in Campbell’s Cove doing the odd jobs at the wharves, and now in her garden. By no kindness, a responsible citizen. Unfortunate in days like these when every young man with gumption had the chance for a career. But typical of the times. It all came too easy, she thought, education for signing your name, a job for whistling “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” It was spoiling the young and giving the politicians a stranglehold on the nation.

The tool shed was damp and cool, the smell of earth and fertilizer pungent. Dennis was neat. Not a trowel in sight. He had quite taken over. It was very well to have a place for everything, but no need of its being a hiding-place. Even the workbench drawers were locked. The keys, however, hung in their usual place, the ring hooked on a nail at the side of the window. She took them down and turned the key in one drawer after another, deliberately leaving them unlocked.

In the bottom drawer she found a notebook which looked as though it should contain an account of expenditures. Organization beyond what she expected of Dennis Keogh. She flipped the pages, not intending to look closely at any of them, although undoubtedly it was her business. But the notebook contained writing, not numbers, neat, half-printed words with one here and there among them meticulously scratched out and another inserted above it. Poetry.

Hannah sucked in her breath and blew it out again. The wondrous, secret ways of humans, she thought. She read one phrase:

Beloved

Tell me you are waiting the long night through

She glanced out the window and saw Sophie’s white apron as the girl moved to and fro in the kitchen. Her heart was pounding ridiculously. She put a hand to it, her fingers slipping down the softness of her breast, and in the other held the book to the late afternoon light.

Beloved

Tell me you are waiting the long night through

And I will come at daybreak.

With the first bird’s singing I shall tread the dew

And whisper you awake,

Beloved.

She read no more, thrusting the book back where she had found it and locking all the drawers she had opened. The key was moist in her hand. Only with great effort did she leave the shed at what she took to be her usual step. She rounded the house and went in the front door that she might not meet Sophie until she was dressed and ready for dinner.

It was ridiculous to be upset in discovering that Dennis Keogh wrote poetry, she told herself, and that was all, really, she had discovered. Most young men wrote verse—too many of them merely scratching it on public walls. What a miserable association! Oh, bother all of it. Things were at a fine pass when she was denied the peace of roaming her own property—when secrets got locked in her tool shed. Perhaps he had left them there intending her to find them—to read them—

Enough. She began to sing while she drew her bath, catching at the words of a song popular in the twenties. It turned her thoughts to Maria Verlaine again. Tonight Maria couldn’t hurt her. She felt it in her heart. Tonight would be Hannah Blake’s night. And, getting up from her dressing-table clad in her foundation garment, she smiled and nodded in the mirror, rehearsing the humble self-assurance with which she would accept the nomination.

3

HANNAH HELD HER WATCH TO the dashboard as she drove up to the library. It was five minutes after nine. She peered into the parking area. Mrs. Verlaine’s car was there and so was Edward Baker’s. Satisfied, she drove in. She liked to be early as little as she liked to be late.

She was taken by surprise on the library steps to find Dennis Keogh standing there with an armful of books. Very handsome he looked, she thought, with the open-collared sport shirt: a young Byron or Keats. Or better Poe, with that sober mien. She wondered if it weren’t an affectation, one of youth’s many poses. Still, he didn’t need to practice it on her. Even with that thought she realized it had worked very well in getting her attention. And she was curious as to why he was lingering now on the library steps.

“You work like a Brownie, Dennis,” she said after greeting him.

“How’s that, Miss Blake?”

“Brownies, I’m afraid, are out of date,” she said. “I meant that I rarely catch you working, and yet the garden looks as though you were at it night and day.”

“Thank you,” he murmured.

“And time to read besides,” she said, laying a finger on his books. “I’ve always maintained that the busier a person is the more time he has. Well. I have a library board meeting.”

“I know.” He nodded. “Good night, Miss Blake.”

She watched him go down the walk in great, long strides that took him soon beyond her vision. Either he had planned that she should meet him there or she had startled him away from another meeting. As she moved to the door, she wondered if he would return after she was gone. Unlikely with the distance he had already put between him and the library. He was not dawdling.

One of the library assistants almost collided with her as she opened the door, the Clennan girl. She certainly didn’t waste time getting away after closing time, Hannah thought. She wondered if she knew anything at all about books. Probably not. Most librarians didn’t. Elizabeth Merritt was the exception. They had been fortunate to get a Campbell’s Cove girl with her ability. And a girl with her origins on Front Street no more than a generation back! Elizabeth was indeed exceptional. The happy recollection came to her that Elizabeth had given her name for reference in applying for the post. Just out of school, she had the courage to go after a big job, and the luck to get it. Hannah could still remember her words of recommendation as she had written them: Modest, pleasant, and intelligent beyond her years. Six years were not so long ago. She wondered if Elizabeth had a voice in the nominations.

She moved quickly through the arcade. But at the charge desk she paused. It was like an island in the high domed room. The lights were out now in the reading and stack rooms, and the indirect lighting here fell eerily upon the huge mural paintings of the Greek philosophers, playwrights, and poets. Nor had Sappho, the woman of equal glory in the man’s world, been omitted. But she had been portrayed as frightfully masculine, Hannah always thought. A maliciousness on the part of the artist, no doubt. She liked a moment alone here. But a moment was quite enough. Impressive as it was, a library should be a cozy place. The building of this one, planned for so many years, should not have been entrusted to the PWA.

She hastened on to the study room at the back. The French doors were open, the board members gathered on the veranda in the half-light which shone from the globes of the old-fashioned lamp posts. She moved from one member to another with a word of greeting, measuring her chance of the nomination by their response. Friendlier than usual, she decided, or at least more aware of her. Mrs. Copithorne shook hands, and Katherine Shane complimented her on her dress. Ed Baker bowed. But he did that to every woman, silly old fool, she thought. He was the only man on the board. A plumber, he owned his own business and had several men working for him, but he always looked as though he had just slipped out of his overalls and pulled on his coat without rolling down his sleeves. He was responsible for dozens of books on engineering, donating some the board had turned down. To impress Miss Merritt, no doubt. He was just the age for it.

“How is Mrs. Baker, Ed?”

“Oh, not so bad, Hannah. Just ailing a little, thank you.”

She was always ailing a little, Hannah thought, and small wonder with him capering over the town every night in the week. He was a born “joiner.”

She moved on to Mrs. Verlaine. Maria was fussing furiously with a cigarette lighter, the cigarette wagging in her mouth like a dog’s tail. Now and then, with the exertion she put into the unresponsive lighter, she had to push her wide-brimmed hat back on her forehead. Hannah drew a packet of matches from her purse and gave them to her.

“I keep these for such emergencies.”

“Thanks,” Maria said without moving the cigarette. “They deliberately sabotage these things. I’m convinced of it. More work for the repair shops.”

“More work for the undertaker,” Hannah said.

“What?”

“That’s the title of a book I’ve just read.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s an English book,” Hannah said, wishing that she had not mentioned it. Further exploration would need to reveal that it was a mystery.

“Of course it’s an English book,” Maria said. “Over here they’d say funeral director. More commercial.”

“I don’t see anything commercial about it. It’s simply a less macabre description of the profession.”

“And looks better in an advertisement,” Maria snapped.

It was ridiculous to be carried into something like this, Hannah thought, and to no end except Maria’s sour amusement. “Isn’t it pleasant out here?” she said. “Really, we could have meetings all summer.” She amended it quickly: “For those who want them. I expect to be away, myself.”

Maria’s dark eyes roamed over the veranda, meeting Hannah’s only in passing. “Traveling?” she murmured.

“I’m thinking of a trip to Europe,” Hannah said, convincing herself that she had been thinking of it for a long time.

Maria sent a great burst of smoke between them. “Still more work for the undertaker,” she said, giving Hannah her bird’s wing of a smile. She took off the uneasy hat and stroked the fringe of gray bangs on her forehead. “Well, here we are again,” she called out. “To what purpose, Ruth?”

“You’re right, Maria.” Ruth Copithorne whirled about from where she had been chatting. “Are you set, Elizabeth?”

Miss Merritt held up a sheaf of papers to indicate that she was ready and the nine members gathered around the table. Before Elizabeth sat down she threw on the switch for the overhead light.

“Oh, do we need all that light?” Hannah exclaimed. “It was so pleasant without it.”

When no one else responded, Mr. Baker said, “I think we better. I don’t think my wife would approve me sitting in the dark with all you ladies.”

Some of the women tittered. The light stayed on and Mrs. Copithorne, the retiring president, called the meeting to order.

The minutes of the April meeting were read, and Elizabeth Merritt made her monthly report. A concise, forthright piece of work, Hannah thought. How lacking in directness most women were in contrast to Elizabeth. It almost amounted to dishonesty. At bottom it was dishonesty—with themselves certainly. They refused to take the proper evaluation on their own worth. The librarian knew hers and wore the knowledge comfortably. A fine, honest girl. When her report was finished, Hannah suggested a vote of approbation.

All the members seconded it, and Hannah felt complimented herself for her perspicacity. She felt her chances further enhanced. It was strange, she mused, that there had been no discussion of the nominations before the meeting, at least not in her presence. Then it occurred to her that this was a good omen. They were unlikely to discuss it with the nominees themselves. As the meeting progressed, she watched for a chance to clinch the matter, her heart kicking at her ribs in anticipation.

Among the new business of the evening was a demand by the neighboring village of Wallington for library privileges at Campbell’s Cove. The discussion bogged down in a wrangle over the accuracy of the surveys setting the boundary lines.

Hannah was impatient for the floor. “Do they use our fire department?” she asked when Mrs. Copithorne recognized her.

On occasion they did, paying for the service.

“Out of tax monies?”

Presumably.

“Then,” Hannah said, “at such a time as they are willing to contribute tax money to the library fund, by all means let them have the privileges.”

“Well,” Baker said, “the library isn’t out to make money, Hannah. I don’t see the harm in letting them get a little smarter at our expense.”

He dearly loved to play Santa Claus, she thought. “Nor do I, for that matter. But there is an issue of morals in their case, their need for a sense of responsibility. Getting something for nothing is responsible for the condition of the country today.”

“Right, that’s right,” a couple of members chorused.

“Getting nothing for something hasn’t helped it either,” Mrs. Verlaine said snidely, and out of order.

Hannah looked at her. To retreat was to lose the nomination. “You’re merely turning a phrase, Maria.”

“Look under it then for the maggots.” Verlaine snapped. “‘The condition of the country today—’” Her voice trailed off in sarcasm.

Mrs. Copithorne tapped the gavel for order. “Miss Blake has the floor.”

“I am merely suggesting to this meeting that Wallington be alerted to responsibility as the complement of privilege, and I know of nothing to alert a citizenry faster than taxes.”

“Hear! Hear!” someone called.

Hannah’s point won the discussion.

“You’d make a good administrator, Miss Blake,” Katherine Shane remarked, leaning across the table toward her.

“I am a good administrator,” Hannah said rather louder than she intended, but she did not want the Shane comment to be lost. Nor was it, she decided, and the fact that Katherine made it was a good sign. She remembered her compliment on her dress earlier that evening. There was no better sign of a rising star in Campbell’s Cove than Katherine Shane’s running after it with her wagon.

The meeting drew to the business of the nominations at last. Then Maria Verlaine raised her hand. “I’ve got a few remarks I’d like to make before we proceed. May I, Ruth?”

Mrs. Copithorne recognized her.

“Tonight is nomination of officers, and next meeting will be the last until fall, I presume—” She paused to squash out a cigarette.

Hannah wondered if she were going to mention that Miss Blake suggested meeting all summer. It would be like Maria, telling all of them that Hannah Blake loved meetings so well.

“Between now and next meeting,” Maria resumed, “we have the problem of bludgeoning two citizens of the Cove into serving on the library board next year.”

“No-o-o,” someone murmured.

Maria glanced in the direction of the protest. “Then we shall have if what I am about to propose is followed. I have a question for you, ladies and Mr. Baker. What is wrong with the men of Campbell’s Cove? And is the disease common throughout the country?”

Her voice had a thin stridency which commanded attention. A shiver of wind through the trees beyond the veranda was the only sound.

“I ask it in all seriousness: is the comic strip ‘Bringing Up Father’ a true picture of American life? Are Maggie and Jiggs archetypes of our culture?”

She might have waited for this sort of thing until Ed Baker was not among them, Hannah thought. He was studying the backs of his hands, miserable. No need to say of a man in his presence that he was out of step. But like Maria. No tact.

Maria at that instant turned to him. “Ed, I make no apologies to you. We’re all adults here, or as close to it as we are likely to be in our lifetimes. You must have thought about this yourself. I’m sure you’re not on the board because you enjoy being the only man amongst us. I’m sick to death of jokes about it, and I’m sure you are of having to make them. You’re not an oddity. Or if you are, I belong in the same coop.”

She’s off on her white horse, Hannah thought as Mrs. Verlaine paused to light another cigarette, off to a new crusade. But for all her savoir-faire, she, too, was nervous, speaking in public. Chain-smoking. But how she could make a point, and how she selected her points to make. As sharp as an arrow. Hannah could see the head on the item in the Campbell’s Cove Gazette: Mrs. Verlaine Castigates Cove Men. It would be the one issue of the meeting to pique the editor’s interest. The new officers would be lucky to get their names listed, and the Wallington business which she had carried would be lost entirely. She glanced at the secretary of the meeting. Little fat obsequious Nellie Home was scribbling as fast as her stubby fingers could manage the pencil.

Maria looked at the president. “John Copithorne was asked to serve last year, Ruth. Have you any idea why he refused?”

Mrs. Copithorne shrugged. “He just leaves these things to me, I guess.”

“And Franklin Wilkes,” Maria turned to Hannah. “He reads occasionally, doesn’t he?”

The question caught Hannah like a twinge of pain. Maria had gone to work on her in this devious fashion. It was her way of discrediting her before the nominations were in order, of calling attention to the fact that Hannah Blake did not actually belong on the board at all, that she was there by the tolerance of the members who had actually invited Franklin Wilks. She strove desperately to clutch something with a point out of her fragmented thoughts.

“Only Dun and Bradstreet,” she said tightly.

Maria’s only acknowledgment was the flicker of a sardonic smile. There was a discussion then of the proportion of men to women among the borrowers. Gradually, Hannah got control over her temper and put on a smile to further hide the disappointment she sensed coming to her. Maria worried the argument to its last drama, announcing that she would resign from the board if the new members did not make for a better representation. But she would not resign. She would be there next year, Hannah thought. She would be there with her bobbed locks flying and her wits as edged as sharks’ teeth.

In the wake of Maria’s coup, Edward Baker was nominated. It was unanimous, no other name being put forward. But Hannah knew her defeat lay with Maria Verlaine. She made a fine gesture of congratulating Baker. He bowed lower than ever, already puffed up with his sense of importance. For a second Hannah pitied him: a plumber president of the library board—a haberdasher in the White House. He would no doubt take to music, to reading poetry and philosophy.

Poetry.

“Elizabeth.” She laid her hand on the librarian’s arm, as she was taking her papers inside at the end of the meeting.

“Yes, Miss Blake?”

“Will you have dinner with me one night soon? I have a project in mind and I think you might find it interesting.”

4

HANNAH SUGGESTED THAT THEY take their coffee on the veranda to be beyond the clatter of Sophie’s clearing up. Moving through the house, Elizabeth remarked on one piece and another of its fine old furnishings. It was strange, Hannah thought, that she had not been here oftener these past few years, at least, since Elizabeth had made her own mark in the community.

“And the house itself,” Elizabeth said as they reached the veranda, “it has such a lived-in atmosphere.”

Intended as a compliment, Hannah thought. “Illusion would be the better word for it,” she said. She could say things to her that she would not admit to others. Not that the girl was receptive. Hannah’s feeling was more that Elizabeth had somehow seen her at her worst and was here, nevertheless. “Still, in its day it has been lived in abundantly. My great-great-grandfather built it, you know, except for the south wing and the portico. They’re Victorian, and ugly. But I’m reluctant to tear them down.”

“I can understand that,” Elizabeth murmured.

Can you? Hannah wondered. She said, “There seems to be something here I should preserve. I don’t know what. But all my life I’ve been carrying it around. Every once in a while I wonder if perhaps it isn’t an empty box.” She sighed. “I shouldn’t dare to look.”

“Why not?”

Hannah poured the coffee. Only someone very safe and happy could ask that. “Empty boxes are sometimes useful,” she said. “I hear your brother’s doing very well these days, Elizabeth.”

“He’s district manager now,” the girl said. “And he started at the Temple Market, a clerk.”

“A delivery boy,” Elizabeth amended.

“Your mother must be very proud of you both. I’m very glad for her. I’ve always had a great affection for her.”

“And she for you, Miss Blake. She asks for you after every meeting.”

“I must visit her. Or perhaps you’ll bring her here to tea some Saturday?”

“Mother would like that.”

And you, Elizabeth, she thought. Would it be a trial, a charity for her sake? “Tom’s still a bachelor?”

“Still.”

“Not for want of girls, I dare say.” It was well known in the town how wide his choice.

“Probably not,” Elizabeth said. “Isn’t that a starling?” She fled to the edge of the porch as though the bird were waiting there to greet her.

What a turn that little flight gave Hannah. When Elizabeth was a child Hannah had often called at her house to bring Mrs. Merritt here to sew. It was shortly after John Merritt’s death and his wife was left to support two children. Hannah was in her late twenties then, and Elizabeth seven or eight, a beautiful child with great solemn eyes. No other child had ever affected her so, and she remembered now the impulses that drove her to touch the girl, to smooth her hair and run her fingers over the golden skin. And once, when Elizabeth had drawn away from her, she had pinched her. Why, God only knew. So, then, had Elizabeth fled from her to the farthest corner of the room. Nor had she ever been persuaded to go for a ride in the Packard touring car Hannah drove in those days. She could remember coaxing, begging the child. Elizabeth had forgotten it, please God. Would that she herself could forget it.

“There’s a flock of starlings in the rose arbor,” she said. “They’ve been coming every year since Father gave them their first welcome. Do you remember him?”

“Indeed I do, Miss Blake.” Elizabeth turned back, all smiling, which was the way with many people when Hannah’s father was mentioned. All she needed to do to escape an awkward situation was to mention him.

“I remember him coming to our zoology class in high school to speak to us,” Elizabeth mused aloud. “I can even remember how he started—something like: ‘I have finally convinced your teachers that a live bird may contribute as much to man’s knowledge as a dead one.’”

“How typical of him,” Hannah said. “He had such a nice sense of humor.” Which was not part of her inheritance, she thought. She got very little from him, and all the things she wanted that were denied to her had seemed to be his by virtue of his nature and not by his wish at all.

“Do you know,” she continued, “he used to keep those windows on the garden—that’s the study—he kept them open from early March to hear the first robin until the wild geese went south in November. He died in winter. I’ve always thought it sad that there were no birds singing for him those last days.” She laid her hand on Elizabeth’s, hoping to persuade her to an understanding of what she told, or of what she felt even more than of what she told. “I suppose it’s foolish of me, but I keep a little vial of bird seed near his grave.”

“No. I don’t think it’s foolish,” the girl said. She reached for her coffee, her hand slipping naturally away from Hannah’s touch.

Hannah folded her hands tightly. “You pray for the dead, don’t you? It must be a great comfort.”

The sarcasm she intended was lost, or ignored.

Elizabeth smiled. “No greater than your conviction that heaven is there and waiting for those of us who behave ourselves.”

“And yet we don’t know, either of us,” Hannah mused aloud.

“Your garden is lovely this year, Miss Blake.”

“Isn’t it? I have a new gardener—the Keogh boy.”

“I know.”

“Oh, do you know him?”

“He’s at the library a lot.”

“I believe he told me he came from downstate,” Hannah said. “Actually, I hired him without recommendation.”

“A tribute to his charm,” Elizabeth said, rather lightly.

“Charm” was not the quality with which she had been taken certainly, Hannah thought. She tried to remember what it was about him that decided her. “Some day I’m going to ask him for references as a matter of principle,” she said.

“His father is a minister.”

That was news to Hannah. Most interesting. “Do you like poetry?” She kept her eyes on Elizabeth as she put the question. The girl apparently made no association between Keogh and the subject.

“Some poetry,” she said easily.

“It’s rather a lost art in our times, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure that it is.”

“It’s either being written or it’s not, wouldn’t you say?” Hannah demanded.

“Perhaps it’s not being published. Sometimes when an art seems dormant, artists are off working night and day at it. When it comes out, perhaps we’ll have another golden age starting.”

And that was the hesitancy with which she was impatient, Hannah thought. “What a lovely thought,” she said. “How wonderfully optimistic you are, Elizabeth. It’s exactly what I hoped for when the project I want to discuss took shape in my mind.”

“I dare say I read it somewhere, Miss Blake.”

“How characteristic of you, Elizabeth. If I had said it, I should certainly claim it for my own. Well. Has it ever occurred to you that precisely the sort of poet you describe might be hiding away here in the Cove?”

“I don’t suppose I ever thought of it before. But why not?”

“Why not indeed!” Hannah said. “I’ve no notion whether we have poets or dunderheads, of course. But don’t you think it might be interesting to try to find out?”

“Very.”

“I’ve had this in mind for a long time. My father was something of a poet, though few people were aware of it.”

“I’m not surprised,” Elizabeth said. She was remembering the quiet, white-haired man as he walked to and from the bank every day, Hannah thought, and his way of pausing at a bird’s song, of stopping anyone who chanced to pass. “That’s a wren you hear,” he would say even to a stranger. “That’s a scarlet tanager—rare this time of year.” Indeed he might have been a poet.

“I should like to set up a modest sum,” she continued, “by way of drawing any poets we might have in the Cove out of hiding, so to speak.”

Elizabeth thought about it for a few seconds. “You were devoted to your father, Miss Blake,” she said tentatively.

“He was the only man—I ever really knew.” Hannah ended it flatly, for it was not what she had meant to say at all. Suddenly she felt tears rising to her eyes. She wanted very much not to be ashamed of them, and one word from the younger woman would have saved her, even the kindness of meeting her eyes at this moment, but she could draw nothing from her, and she felt helplessly mawkish as she plunged on, saying things she wanted to say even while she knew they called forth no response.

“He was devoted to me, too, in his fashion. The Lord knows why. In the way men love ugly things, I suppose, an old chair they are forever barking their shins on. I always wanted to help him, to surprise him. My help was a hindrance. My surprises made him nervous. Have you ever known anyone like that, Elizabeth?”

“I’ve known people who thought it of themselves,” she said quietly. “They weren’t always right.”

“You’re very kind,” she said, and it was as kind as the girl could be from the distance she chose to keep.

“May I have a drop more coffee, please, Miss Blake? It’s very good.”

More noncommittal kindness, Hannah thought, pouring the coffee. “Thank you,” she murmured. “I wish you would call me Hannah—at moments like this at least.”

Elizabeth smiled, but the smile was an effort. “I’m afraid I was reared in the tradition of ‘Miss Blake,’” she said. “I remember when my mother came here as a seamstress.”

The rejection hurt, couched in any terms Elizabeth chose. The desire to strike back was irresistible. “I remember when your father brought her up from Front Street to your nice little house on Pilgrim.”

“She came from a nice little house,” Elizabeth said, lifting her chin.

“I’m sure,” Hannah murmured. “It’s only in the last thirty years that Front Street has gone to ruin.”

“Have you ever been in any of the houses there, Miss Blake?”

“No. I’ve not had the occasion.” Nor had she wanted it, raucous and loud as they were, overrun with children, their only discipline the hard hand of the priest on them.

“They’re starched and proud,” Elizabeth said.

“And full of ignorance and prejudice,” Hannah added.

“No more than the rest of this town in its attitude toward them.”

“Don’t you like Campbell’s Cove, Elizabeth?”

“It’s my home,” the girl said. “That gives me the right of criticism.”

“Of course. Isn’t it a shame more of us don’t exercise it? But then, we have you—and Mrs. Verlaine. She has a taste for criticism, too.”

“The poetry fund,” Elizabeth said gently. “How do you plan to set it up?”

That closed the matter. Like dirt in a hole in the ground. “Nothing so pretentious as a fund,” she said. “That is something to be arranged when I’m dead and gone. My idea was to promote interest by way of a contest for the present. However, should we discover some destitute genius, it might well be that a fund should be started—by the community, to which I should subscribe, naturally.”

“I see,” Elizabeth said with small enthusiasm.

She was looking for the motive, Hannah thought, perhaps calculating it as a move to steal some of Verlaine’s fire.

“The reason I’m approaching you at all, Elizabeth, is that I want to do it anonymously.”

“I see,” Elizabeth said again, this time to cover some confusion of her own.

“My father was a modest man, Elizabeth. In my mind I shall do it as a memorial to him—if the arrangements can be made. You are hesitant. May I ask why?”

“My first reaction was that you might find yourself with a collection of jingles,” the girl replied promptly.

A nice escape.

Hannah smiled. “You are a snob, my dear, which is not unpardonable. I, too, foresaw that possibility, and decided to chance it. If we get nothing but jingles, well, we shall have a jingle contest.”

“You would like it sponsored by the library?” Elizabeth asked presently.

“Yes. I realize it must go before the board, and I should like you to present it—the donor anonymous. And forever, Elizabeth. I do not expect to be called to the platform after the award is made.”

Elizabeth colored.

“A fool may know his own folly,” Hannah pursued in her self-abuse. “He’s the greater fool for persisting in it—There goes Sophie.” She waved in acknowledgment of the girl’s shouted farewell.

Elizabeth also waved. Sophie skipped and ran down the driveway.

“Such a sweet girl,” Hannah said, “but so young and foolish. Do you know where she’s off to?” She leaned forward, anxious to see her visitor’s response, knowing her to be uncomfortable. “To the wharves. She has such a crush on young Keogh, and you know when he leaves me, he putters the rest of his time about the boats. Comes back to his room at all hours.”

“Does he?” Elizabeth murmured. Not a question, certainly.

Hannah rocked back in her chair. “There should be moonlight tonight. I dare say he’ll take her out to the point and back if he can borrow a boat.”

“I dare say,” Elizabeth repeated. She took a cigarette from the tray. Hannah had never seen her smoke.

“I have some brandy, too, my dear. I’m a teetotaler myself, but I’m not narrow where others are concerned.”

“Thank you, no.”

“I’ve annoyed you with my gossip. You know the boy, don’t you?”

“And I know Sophie,” Elizabeth said. Of course. She was a Catholic, too, Hannah thought. A clan of all classes. “Forgive me, Elizabeth. But then, it’s natural for him, isn’t it?”

“What’s natural?”

“To take what pleasure he can with the girl, I suppose.”

“And it’s not natural for the girl,” Elizabeth said tartly.

“Well, I was brought up to a sense of modesty, but then, I’m out of date. Men, it seems, must go to sewing bees and women make love—to be in touch with the times. I had not thought you were so modern in your ideas, Elizabeth.

“I’ve never thought myself especially modern. Maybe I’m not the right person to be the intermediary on your poetry project, Miss Blake.”

Far enough with the taunting, Hannah thought. “Nonsense. I only wish that you were to be the judge of the contest. But we must leave that to the board. I think a thousand dollars award would make it worth the effort, don’t you?”

Elizabeth was impressed by the sum, she knew.

“Into what prizes would you break it down?”

“I should not want it broken down at all. One prize. I have never seen the value of consolation prizes, having won a good many of them in my life.”

“I suppose that will be at your discretion,” Elizabeth said, getting up.

Arrogance, that, in someone other than Elizabeth. “I should think I’m deserving that,” Hannah said. “Let me drive you home.”

“Thank you, but I like to walk and, as you say, the moon will be up soon.”

Hannah went to the portico with her. “I’ll be in touch with you about the presentation.”

Elizabeth turned and accepted the hand she offered. “Dinner was lovely. Thank you, Miss Blake.”

“You’re very kind,” Hannah said.

She could feel a stinging pain in the back of her throat as she watched the girl’s quick retreat down the long driveway. Why don’t you sing, Elizabeth? You’re near to dancing. Why don’t you sing, when you’re so happy to be off and free of Hannah Blake?

5

SHE CARRIED THE COFFEE tray to the kitchen, the clacking of her heels echoing through the house as she moved from one carpet to the next. She washed the china and put it away. It was dark now beyond the kitchen casements, and the crickets had set up their long night’s crying. Some people called them friendly, Hannah mused. But she always thought them unwilling prisoners—on the hearth or beyond it, and found in their melancholy noise the sound of pain, as though they moaned night after night, I hurt, I hurt, I hurt.

Restless, she got her suede jacket and went outdoors. An extra set of keys to the car jangled in the pocket. She stilled them with her hand and heard the motor of the night mail plane to Chicago approaching and then going on. The quarter moon was rising, lying on its back, rolling in silent, derisive laughter, she thought.

She got the car out then and drove away from town, charging the road. Abruptly at the first intersection she braked and circled back, coming on the Cove by the shore road, Front Street, within the town limits. The smell of fish grew heavier near the wharves. At the docks she slowed down, and peering along them she finally caught sight of Sophie’s yellow blouse in one of the boats moored there. It was difficult to be certain, for the only light fell from the string of naked bulbs hanging along the pier. But it was Sophie, all right, her hair like a white mop she was shaking out in the wind. Hannah provided her with a hair net, but she tore it off the minute she set foot outside the Blake door. The boy in the boat with her was Keogh, as she had expected. He was working at something, always working at something—a fisherman’s net, by the long, steady pull of his arm. Between that and Sophie he was well occupied for the evening.

She returned home, and having put her car away, went directly to the tool shed. The notebook lay as she had last seen it in the bottom drawer. She took it to the workbench beneath the wired light bulb and climbed up on the iron stool. She reread first the piece she had scanned on her discovery of the book. He was really a poet, she thought, and certainly there was a woman somewhere whom he worshiped, and certainly it was not Sophie.

How strange that he should take Sophie for a companion here—poor, bland, giggling little Sophie. The minister’s son and the farm girl—the eagle and the sparrow. But Sophie would be as easy with her kisses as she was with laughter, and she was very clean—scrubbed-looking, scrubbed raw, in fact. Perhaps that was enough for him; no questions from her, nothing but faith and adoration, leaving him the dark sanctuary of his own thoughts unentered upon. And Hannah had come to believe these last few days, watching him from the window late afternoons and early mornings, that the dourness was sincere, that he cared not whether one found it interesting or dull—that, in truth, he was unaware of it entirely—even as her father had always seemed careless of the impression he made on people. Only Hannah Blake went around without a world of her own.

She turned a page and read further until she came to the phrase:

Your breasts are pale moons, stung each with a kiss

She grew almost sick with the shock, with revulsion really, and yet she could not take her eyes from the line, reading it and rereading it, even to the study of the hand in which it was written, the rounded block figures, the tall strokes of the high letters, and the strong, bold lines tearing through the t’s. She read on, one page after another, lingering over, savoring the sensuous passages, a gnawing growing inside her like hunger, ripping through her then, catching at her very bowels, twisting and turning her until the iron edges of the stool on her legs where she pressed them against it was pleasure.

Her mouth was dry, for she had been breathing through it, deep, shuddering breaths. For how long she did not know. She swallowed hard and coaxed up the saliva against the bitterness. Calmly then, with the almost detached feeling of someone coming out of a high fever, she closed the book, returned it to its hiding-place, and went outdoors.

“God, You are my witness,” she whispered, walking through the silver quiet of her garden. “I never intended this.”

But even in this she knew that she was asking false witness. She had indeed been seeking what she found.

6

“YOU HAVE THE FIGURE of a girl of twenty, Miss Blake,” the masseuse remarked, kneading away at the flesh about Hannah’s waist.

Hannah pretended not to hear her. She had not come several hundred miles to listen to callow chatter. At twenty she had not had much of a figure, and while she had been coming to Sulphur Springs twice a year for a long time, the baths had not improved it. They had merely helped to keep it within an eighteen dress size.

More than that, however, they imposed on her a disciplined relaxation. She often confided to the health mistress the strains and anxieties her work placed her under, getting some satisfaction out of the fantasy she wove for her. Sometimes she even managed to carry a sense of it about within herself, having nothing to do between baths but sit quietly, blanketed, on the sun porch. She would conjure up her dreams of industry and acclaim, wave after wave of them until they carried her beyond Campbell’s Cove, beyond Odenah County, to the very threshold of the governor’s mansion. There she let them wash away, knowing that if they were real indeed, she would have no need of this disciplined relaxation.

But these days she permitted herself none of the dream—or at least no more of it than what she conceived to be the incidental pleasures to its fulfillment—the visiting of bookshops in Chicago on her way home, the arrangement of the books themselves and the banishment of the trashy bric-a-brac collected now on the bookshelves. Most of it had been her mother’s, and had been unnoticed, unmoved except by a dozen Sophies through the years who somehow managed to break glasses by the set, but not to so much as chip the nose from a mountainware maiden at the pump.

The things cherished, and the things abandoned, she mused. To be a pioneer at twenty was easy, at thirty not so easy, at forty difficult, and at fifty unimportant, making it impossible. But she was not yet fifty. What a mortal combat she had chosen for herself in her decision to champion Dennis Keogh’s poetry at all costs! The Covites would be up in arms—the Copithornes, the Wilkses, the Shanes, all except perchance Verlaine, who years ago had championed a poet, Andrew Sykes, and won his devotion. It was a crabbed devotion, but one Maria was well qualified to return.

Just this once Maria might be with her, but all the rest would cry, “Shame! Shame!” And they would say of her, “Hannah Blake, of all people, Hannah, warden of the Presbyterian church, co-founder of the Decency in Books and Entertainment League.” In the end, a few of them might realize how much of sacrifice to taste and training this crusade had cost her. And when Dennis Keogh was acclaimed the poet she believed him to be—But that was part of the dream she forbade herself.

For the moment her high purpose was to gather again all the scattered strands of poetry in her own life that one by one had slipped away for want of a pattern. That itself was a poetic thought, she mused—the scattered strands—a little maudlin, but creative. Creative. The years that word cut through! Creativeness. Almost thirty years ago at the University, her roommates talking one night after lights were out about creativeness: she could close her eyes now and recall the whole gray atmosphere, the reflection of the street lamp on the ceiling, shadows, the whispers, giggles, the silence at the sound of approaching and retreating footsteps and the noise of flushing water, muffled laughter—the house mistress and her kidney trouble.

“I think Hannah is creative.”

She heard the words still and she remembered the face of the girl who had said them although her name was gone, a pugged, hopeful face always turned up at you with eyes that pleaded for attention, for all the world like Katherine Shane at home today.

And she remembered the sort of buoyed-up silence that hung in the room after the remark, and the little escaped hiss through someone’s teeth which punctured it. They’re thinking I’m not creative because I’m a mathematics major, she had thought lying stiff and straight in bed that night, and I’m a mathematics major because my mother wanted to send me to Vassar and my father took my side. I’m rewarding him.

“Look at Einstein,” she had said in her own defense, when no one else confirmed or denied the little one’s observation.

“That’s different,” someone had remarked, and she could not remember what had followed, except her own feeling of being different as the only girl majoring in mathematics, the only girl in a classroom of forty, and playing honeymoon bridge with the little pug-faced one on Saturday nights.

The masseuse slapped her unbecomingly. “Sleeping?”

She sat up and pulled the sheet about her. “Einstein is creative,” she said, staring at the masseuse, and thinking that it would serve the bold creature right if she were to think her crazy and unlikely to remember a tip.

The big woman grinned, wiping the sweat from her face on her forearm like a farmhand. “He sure is, honey. Better get your clothes on before you catch cold.”

7

MRS. VERLAINE SAT AT the head of her table pouring coffee with the grace of a dowager queen. “There’s one thing I do like about it,” she said. “That’s asking Andy to judge it.”

Andy, Hannah thought. That was Maria’s way of keeping before them that she was the one on intimate terms with Andrew Sykes, that the poet might consent to judge the Campbell’s Cove contest if he were asked by his old friend, Mrs. Verlaine—Maria Verlaine whom he had met in Paris, and on whose suggestion he first came to the Cove to research materials for an epic poem on the Campbellites and their religious travails. He had subsequently treated of the Shakers, the Quakers, and the Lord knew how many other vagrant sects, but still each summer he came to the Cove to work—in peace, he said, and to visit with Maria. She wondered if Maria had not at one time hoped for something more than an annual visit from the vigorous old gentleman. And perhaps she got it. Maria was not liable to scruple. Marriage to her had no doubt come to seem no more than an American convention, highly advertised to the purpose of extending the business of the clergy. When Maria went to church at all it was to the Christians, and she admitted that she went not so much to be in communion with her God as to be reminded of what Alexander Campbell’s followers went through.

Well. The judge might be Maria’s, but the contest was not. Nor would the poet it uncovered be hers either. Hannah could almost see her surprise, the cigarette dangling from her mouth. Do you mean to say that lad has been in Hannah’s garden all summer? My God! Hannah smiled, bringing her cup to the hostess. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?

“The buffet is lovely, Maria,” she said. “You always set such a nice table.”

“I enjoy doing it,” Maria said. “So does Annie. She says it keeps us both from getting out of tune.”

Annie Tully was Maria’s housekeeper, maid of all tasks. She had come up from Front Street to the job twenty odd years before, a young widow, her husband drowned in one of the heavy lake storms.

“How quaint a way to put it,” Hannah murmured.

“How was the vacation?”

“Nice, thank you. The Ozarks are lovely this year. I do love the mountains.”

“And mountaineers?” Maria blinked her eyes at her maliciously.

“Very nice in the mountains,” Hannah said. She could not linger to see the effect of that parry. Ed Baker was almost climbing her back, two cups in hand and both clattering in their saucers. He had brought Mrs. Baker to the supper, picking her up after the meeting—to show her his importance now, no doubt. And she probably needed convincing.

“You’re mighty keen on this contest, aren’t you, Hannah?” he said across the table, able to speak now that he was relieved of one of the cups.

“In a way. Don’t you think it will add to the prestige of Campbell’s Cove Day?” It had been decided that the winner should be announced in September, on the occasion of the annual town festival.

“No question of it. And I don’t think putting that kind of serious note to it’s going to hurt either. Serious times, these.”

“I can’t help wonder who has that kind of money,” Katherine Shane said, sashaying up to Baker.

“You can just about count them on your fingers,” Ed said.

“Don’t,” said Elizabeth Merritt good-naturedly and rather as though she were reprimanding a small boy. “Mr. Baker, you know my brother, Tom?”

“I certainly do. Best third baseman a Cove team ever had. How are you, Tom?” The men shook hands.

Hannah was torn between the desire to see Tom Merritt, who rarely was home to join Cove activities, and following Katherine Shane. For some reason, perhaps that she thought it would get her attention, Katherine had decided to harp on the contest. Every objection that Verlaine had raised at the meeting, and which Elizabeth had successfully countered (how fortunate she had been so thorough in her rehearsal of Elizabeth, and that she knew Maria and her tactics so well)—all these objections, Katherine was pursuing now in private conversation. A saboteur, no less. Maria might have put her up to it. Maria, with her pride in a reputation for good sportsmanship, couldn’t very well do it herself.

“I don’t see the point in closing it so early, I must say,” Katherine was telling the Copithornes. “Just two months.”

Oh, she must say, all right, Hannah thought, closing in on the remark. “As I understand it, Katherine—How are you, John? As Elizabeth explained it, Katherine, the sponsor or whatever you want to call him, purposely set an early date so that the entries submitted would represent work done. Nor does he want a patriotic jingle whipped up for that occasion. Apparently he’s interested in working poets.”

John Copithorne grinned. “Do you know any working poets, Hannah?” He put the emphasis on “working.”

“I expect anyone writing poetry thinks he’s working,” she said.

Copithorne smoothed the hair around his bald spot. “You got something there, all right. It’d sure be work for me.”

Really, Hannah thought, moving across the room to the Merritts, Maria had not been altogether wrong about the Cove men. John Copithorne was president of the town council, he was active in the Parent-Teachers, and he was a dentist. He also raised Sealyham dogs. That should make for a gentleman. Well.

“Tom Merritt, it’s nice to see you.” She extended her hand.

“Thanks, Miss Blake.”

“You’re doing well with the Worthy organization, I understand.”

“Still peddling groceries.”

“I think Elizabeth told me you’re their district manager now.”

Merritt grinned. “That just means I need a bigger bicycle.”

He was a salesman all right, Hannah thought, and on the whole she liked salesmen. There was among them a frankness and openness, a comradeship into which you were immediately welcome.

“Have you ever thought of going into business for yourself, Tom?”

“Many a time.”

She laid her hand on his arm. “When you’re serious about it, come to see me at the bank. I can be of great help to you.”

“I will, Miss Blake. I’ll remember that. Can I get rid of that cup for you?”

“Thank you.”

She watched him to the table and saw Maria intercept him as he was about to return. He lighted her cigarette and stayed on for an exchange of words with her that sent them both into laughter, their heads rolling back with it. Maria got a coughing spasm from that and the cigarette smoke. Hannah turned away. She saw Elizabeth watching her brother.

“He’s very handsome, Elizabeth. There’s a strong resemblance.”

The girl smiled a little, and nodded. “Excuse me, Miss Blake.”

Hannah caught her arm as she was passing and pressed it. “You were magnificent tonight, my dear,” she whispered. “I shan’t forget it.”

Elizabeth eased away. “I wish you would, Miss Blake. I intend to now.”

It had been a responsibility for Elizabeth, Hannah thought. It would be for one who took things so seriously. In anyone except the girl, her abruptness now would have been rude. She watched her chance for another word with Tom, hoping to hear the story from him which had sent Verlaine into such hysterics. She dearly loved a good joke herself. She approached him while Maria was refilling Elizabeth’s coffee cup.

“Dry summer, isn’t it?” he said.

Dry, she thought, bone-dry.

“Tom, I’m a little concerned about Elizabeth.” That commanded his attention. They were very close for brother and sister, so close that she often wondered if Elizabeth were not the ideal by which he measured every other woman and found her lacking. “She’s so serious about everything these days.”

“It’s this damned poetry business,” he said, a response she had not expected.

“She is something of a fanatic,” Hannah tested. Elizabeth, she saw, was laying her cup on the table, untouched, and coming toward them with more haste than dignity.

“It’s downright ridiculous,” Tom said.

“And what’s ridiculous?” Elizabeth said, her hand on his arm.

He looked at her. “That you get involved—”

Elizabeth cut him off. “That’s my business.” But it was her eyes that silenced him, Hannah thought. They were splendid in their anger. Elizabeth turned to her. “Forgive me, Miss Blake. You understand?”

By which Hannah understood an apology for having divulged something of the contest and its sponsor, since Tom seemed on the verge of taking it up with her.

Tom permitted his sister to draw him to the table where Verlaine linked arms with both of them, and led them, laughing, into the study. Their going left Hannah depressed, lonely for all the people in the room. She wandered from bookcase to bookcase, all the titles she had at some time in her life intended to read. Had Maria read them? Some were new, some old. She remembered, a long time ago, having made herself a reading list which would span twenty years of her life, reading two books a month. Twenty years—and the books unopened, the years closed; the years unopened, the books closed. She turned away.

She had no right to feel as though she were a guest of honor, she told herself, since she had deliberately cloaked herself in anonymity. Now that the issue was won she already wished that she had not so disguised herself. She had done it because of a mortal dread that the idea with her name on it should have been rejected. Foolish, she told herself now. But it was hard not to have at least a word of approbation from Elizabeth who shared the secret and carried the responsibility of it. A thousand dollars was a good deal of money, and no one should know the worth of it better than Elizabeth. But she had been tight-lipped through it all, earnest, and almost dogged in her persuasions through all Verlaine’s objections. “It smacks of chest-thumping, flag-waving,” Maria had said. “Poetry is an art, not something to be dished up for blue ribbons at the county fair.” If some of today’s so-called poetry could be dished up at county fairs, Hannah thought, a few more people might get a taste for it.

She found a comfortable chair and tried to give herself up to the contemplation of Maria’s house. As children they had played together in this very room, their parents being friends. There were not many of the old things left, Maria’s taste running more to museum pieces than anything manufactured in Campbell’s Cove. She could remember the horsehair sofa and chairs where she had looked for pennies and hairpins every time she came. A colonial rocker was the only piece she remembered from her childhood, and the mirror over the fireplace. Beside it still hung the long silk bell cord that had not worked then and probably did not work now. It was one of Maria’s mother’s notions of elegance that a servant should be summoned by the touch of a bell cord, but having it installed, she could not bring herself to use it. Hannah had played with the cord as a child, pretending she was a streetcar conductor until Maria spoiled it. “Hannah’s pulling the chain,” she would sing out every time Hannah gave it a tug. “Hannah’s pulling the chain.”

She got up and moved about the room again, avoiding the people in it, even those making a place for her. It was strange, she thought; seldom had she come to this house without high anticipation of pleasure, and seldom had she left it without disappointment.

The supper guests departed, going in twos and threes. She was about to offer a ride to anyone needing it when it occurred to her that Katherine Shane would be the only one to take her up on it, and right now Katherine Shane could walk home on her elbows for all of Hannah. She went upstairs and dabbled about, powdering her nose, fixing her hair, stalling until she heard the last guest leave and the tinkle of china as Annie cleared up.

“Oh, my, is everyone gone?” she said from the stairs.

Maria glanced up at her and went on, asking over her shoulder, “Want to see the jewels while I have them out?”

“I’d like that.”

They were the lump of Maria’s French inheritance after all the years of litigation. Maria had them laid out on the library table in the study. This accounted for the traffic between there and the living-room, and now being conducted on a private showing, Hannah was pleased.

“They’ve just arrived?” she asked at the door.

“Last week. A cloak-and-dagger man brought them over.”

“How exciting,” Hannah said.

Maria snorted smoke. “I’m pulling your leg. They came by bonded messenger.”

“You’ll put them in the bank vault, Maria?”

“I will not. I shall wear whatever of them suits the occasion and show them to anyone interested in what was more important than human life to one of my in-laws’ forebears.”

Hannah gazed down at the array of ruby and diamond. She could not help but think that her poor acquaintance with such things left her as likely to be impressed with a tray of dime-store trinkets.

“How can you tell their worth?” she asked.

Maria picked up a deep-red brooch set in a braid of gold, and held it between them and the light. “See the lightnings in it?”

Hannah stared and saw the lines streaking through it as Maria turned it. “How marvelous.”

Maria dropped the piece contemptuously on the satin cloth. “I read the evaluation on the insurance papers,” she said. “I know as much about it as you do.”

“You’re poking fun at me, Maria.”

“I’m poking fun at the stone. What mortal worth is it? No more than the time it takes us to look at it. For that, the Verlaines boast, one of their seventeenth-century kinswomen sent a lover to his death to rescue it from a brigand. The fool, he!”

“How ironic it should come at last to you, Maria.”

“Isn’t it? The most irreligious of their marriages. They outbred too late. Do you know what it cost me in court fees to get that stone?”

“No,” Hannah said, going over in her mind for any large transfers in Maria’s account. The fees must have been paid from one hearing to the next. Typical of the French—cash on the line. “How much?”

“Roughly, thirty thousand dollars.”

“Are they worth that much?”

“Only in blood,” Maria said, rolling the jewels up with no more attention than she might give to her everyday silver.

The maid, emptying ash trays, tittered. Hannah turned to look at her. She was even getting to look like Maria, for all her Irish origins. They were too close for servant and employer.

“Annie knows,” Maria said. “They’ve paid for a lot of things in blood where she comes from—buying jewels for their fair Kathleen. Isn’t that right, Annie?”

“The only jewels she ever had was the stars in her eyes,” Annie said, the brogue still thick on her tongue.

“Kathleen is the word for Ireland,” Maria explained.

“I’m not altogether ignorant,” Hannah said. “Even of the Irish.” She waited until the woman had left the room. “Sometimes I don’t understand you at all, Maria.”

Maria laughed. “You try too hard, I’m just a simple country girl.”

“Now you’re describing me,” Hannah said. “If ever there was a woman of the world, it’s yourself.”

Maria shrugged and looked about for a cigarette. “I find that a small compliment, Hannah.”

“I meant it for a large one. What was your first really bold move, Maria?”

Maria paused in her search. “Damn it, Annie,” she called out, “didn’t anyone bring his own cigarettes tonight?” To Hannah she said, “Probably at Vassar. A week-end in New York.”

Hannah smiled. “Perhaps my mother was right,” she said. “That’s where she wanted me to go.”

Annie brought Mrs. Verlaine a package of cigarettes, taking one from it herself as she came. Hannah wondered that the servant didn’t light it up in front of them, also.

“I’ll have my sherry with Miss Blake tonight,” Maria said.

Without Miss Blake’s consent, Hannah thought, yet following her into the living-room like a puppy invited to a treat.

“There was many a time your mother was right,” Verlaine said, “but small good it did her in your father’s house.”

“My father was not a tyrant.”

“Perhaps not, but he had in common with tyrants that he was never wrong. He was about you, you know.”

It was the first time in her recollection that Maria had ever taken the initiative in talking about Hannah Blake to Hannah. Sykes must be coming soon, Hannah thought, for her to be so magnanimous.

“In what way, Maria?”

“He thought you were emotionally self-sufficient—as he pretended himself to be—and perhaps was. But no one ever reared a hungrier child.”

God knows, there’s some truth in that, Hannah thought. She had spent a lifetime trying to conceal it, but she was hungry still.

“What happened in New York?” she asked.

Maria sent a stream of smoke between them. “What are you ashamed of, Hannah? Look at you—bursting to talk about yourself, but you can’t get a word of it out until I bare my secrets first.”

Hannah lifted her chin. “I am not as proud of my sins as you are of yours, Maria.”

“Hannah—what sins?”

“I do not have an Andrew Sykes, if that’s what you mean.”

Without another word, Maria set down the wineglass and walked to the door. “Good night, Hannah.”

She followed but a few steps. “We aren’t children, to quarrel like this.”

“Together we are,” Maria Verlaine said. “Somehow I invariably become a crawling, scratching brat in your presence.”

“It always was that way,” Hannah said. “You always hurt me and I fought back the only way I knew.”

“And presently we’re both hurting the one person—yourself.”

“Have I never hurt you, Maria?”

“Shall I answer that truthfully?”

“Truth or consequences,” she said foolishly, as she so often spoke in Maria’s presence.

“I don’t believe you ever have.” Hannah smiled a little. There was some remote pleasure in the pain. She would have to take it home with her to dig it out thoroughly.

“Good night, Maria. I am often in debt for your hospitality. Tonight is no exception.”

8

IT WAS SURPRISING HOW much the meeting had taken out of her, Hannah thought, coming down in the morning. She should not have counted so much on it. Supposing Verlaine had carried the night and the contest had been turned down? Foolish.

In the living-room she stopped before the mantel mirror. There were smudges beneath her eyes, but her complexion was good. She had always looked healthy. She could remember as a girl wishing fervently that she looked more delicate. In fact, she would have been most pleased to look downright emaciated. Now it was satisfying to look healthy, and to feel it.

The statuary on the mantel was all askew, and a perfect half moon of dust trailed over the edge of black marble. Sophie was in the doldrums, apparently. Even the sounds from the kitchen were listless. Hannah went to the window. She had awakened to the sound of the power mower. At eight o’clock Dennis had almost finished the acre of lawn. Nothing listless about him.

Whatever weariness she had felt on awakening quite vanished at breakfast. She watched Sophie drift between the kitchen and the table, an expression on her face that would curdle the cream. Certainly something was off between her and Dennis. For a moment, Hannah entertained the idea of a direct approach with sympathy—all the nice farm boys in the neighborhood, more of her age and tastes than Dennis. She decided against it and brought the matter up in a discussion of the household chores.

“You clean Dennis’s room for him, don’t you, Sophie?”

The girl looked at her, down to the floor and back at her again. “Please don’t ask me to do it no more, Miss Blake.”

“Well, I was not aware of having ever asked you to do it, Sophie. But I have no objections, so long as you don’t neglect your duties to me.”

“I won’t do it. I won’t ever do it again.”

“Oh, my. You and Dennis have quarreled?”

“No, ma’am.”

“He’s such a nice boy. You and he spend a lot of time together, don’t you?”

“Some.”

“I believe I saw you as I was driving by the wharves the other night. You looked—very nice together.”

The color was rising in Sophie’s face and the flesh seemed ready to burst with it. Not very attractive, Hannah thought. But there was no accounting for tastes. “Sit down a moment, Sophie.”

The girl pulled a chair far away from the table and sat on the edge of it.

“Did he make love to you?” Hannah asked quietly.

Sophie lifted her chin as though, not being allowed to escape, she had determined on the boldest face possible.

“Yes’m.”

Hannah tried to hold her eyes with her own, thinking in that way to best ferret out the truth. But Sophie could not meet them, except to fly from them at every try. She was no doubt exaggerating. “Put his arm around you and all that, I dare say,” she encouraged. “Yes’m.”

Hannah had to find out. “Was he ever in his room with you, Sophie?”

The girl’s eyes widened with alarm. “No!”

“All right, all right. He might have come on you there by chance, you know. I don’t mean that he took advantage of you.”

“No, ma’am.”

Suddenly Hannah was weary of it. “What’s all the trouble about, then?”

Sophie began to cry. Before the first tear had rolled off her bulging cheek she was letting out great, wailing sobs. Hannah got up and patted her shoulder. It was hard to be sorry for the girl, much less affectionate toward her, when she had no more control over herself than this. But affection seemed the only likely thing to calm her. Hannah gave her a tentative hug, pulling the girl’s shoulder against her own hipbone. What a ridiculous position to have got herself into, Hannah thought. What a way to start the day.

“There,” she said, pushing Sophie upright. “It’s all over. Go and wash your face.”

Amazing, for her having said so, it did seem to be all over. Sophie got up and reached the kitchen door.

“What did happen?” Hannah called.

The girl turned, grimacing against more tears. “He told me to stop spying on him.”

“Well, were you spying?”

Sophie nodded that she was.

“What did you see?”

“Nothing. I didn’t see nothing, Miss Blake.”

“Hurry up and wash your face, child. I want to be in the office sometime this morning.”

She had done a lot of foolishness in her life, Hannah thought, and this had not been the least of it. On her way for the car, she looked about to see where the boy was. He was trimming the hedge at the front drive.

On impulse then, she went to the tool shed and looked in the bottom drawer of the bench. The notebook was gone. Driving out, she paused where he was working and motioned him to the side of the car.

“Dennis, I should like to talk to you. If it’s convenient, will you come up to the house after dinner tonight?”

“Yes, Miss Blake.”

He betrayed no curiosity at all. Watching in the rearview mirror, she saw that he returned to work without even a glance after her. Here indeed would be a hard nut to crack.

9

SHE WATCHED FROM THE study window as the twilight deepened. Sophie went down the driveway, dragging her heels except when she kicked at a stone like the child she really was. When she was gone there was no movement in the garden, not a bird flying, nor, that she could see, any leaves stirring. A desolation seemed to have spread, suspending life there with the child’s going, and Hannah wished that she might spring into view again, waving that wild farewell of hers which she had forgotten tonight. But only a blue-white mist seeped in from the lake and settled like a silken shroud. She watched, fascinated, for the instant that the illusion would be broken.

When Dennis Keogh strode through it, his appearance startled her for all her expectancy of him. He was a stranger, more in place there surely than in her house. Indeed a part of the mist seemed to trail after him, trying to retard him, as he came toward her.

Hannah retreated from the window and lighted one lamp after another. What monstrous folly to have summoned him here! For all she knew of him, she might as well have summoned Daniel O’Gorman, the “mayor” of Front Street! Who was he? What to her? She heard his knock on the kitchen door. He was a boy she had hired on no recommendation except his own presence, and she realized now that, for all her satisfaction with his work, she had accepted him on that first interview because to do it was to be as bold as himself, and to deny him the job would have left her at the mercy of his opinion. She had squandered a lifetime in the pursuit of good opinions. He knocked again, louder, with his fist clenched, she thought, as though it would be no more trouble to drive it through the door.

A shiver ran through her as she moved toward him with stark determination. To send him away quickly would be wisdom now. Pay him a pretty compliment on his garden and dispatch him. Tell him he earned a raise. Try that on him for a smile! Opinion be damned! What right had he to an opinion of Hannah Blake?

And you, Hannah Blake, settle down—with your sulphur baths and your new old books, to the adulation of the Katherine Shanes, the creepers-up from Front Street, yours for a nickel’s worth of attention and a cup of tea; to the reverence of toothless farmers and the tribute of their moth-holed mortgages; to the Blake tradition and the company of Blakes, twenty-odd of them, simpering yellow faces awaiting your presence among them on the walls. Then let the fog trail in.

Send him away. Drive him away if needs be, and bolt the door.

“I’m sorry, Dennis. I thought Sophie was here to let you in.”

“I thought maybe you’d forgotten, Miss Blake.”

“I rarely forget an appointment. You may come with me into the study.”

He followed after her, his strides long and easy over the polished floor. No bumpkin. He wore, she noticed, a checkered shirt, the garb affected by the fishermen of the Cove. And jealous they were of it, too. He would not go among them wearing it without their approval. At home in shanty or manor!

“I see you’ve joined a fraternity,” she said in the study. She motioned him into a chair before her desk, and pulled her desk chair around. But while they talked, she gradually rolled herself to behind the desk.

“I don’t understand, Miss Blake.”

“The shirt.”

“Oh. It was a present.”

“A warm one,” Hannah said.

“And warmer when a heart accompanies it,” he said, smiling a little. As bold as the shirt.

“Indeed,” she murmured. “Dennis, may I ask how old you are?”

“Twenty-four, Miss Blake.”

“As I remember it, I did not ask you for references when I hired you.”

“I couldn’t have given you any as a gardener, Miss Blake. If I concealed that, I didn’t mean to.”

“It was not very well concealed,” she said, “though your work here has covered it nicely. But I should have asked for a personal reference. You could have given it?” He had certainly not volunteered it, she recalled.

“I think I’d have managed if I had to. Why?”

His directness angered her when she had to be so devious. “Because I’m not sure your conduct has justified my confidence.”

He watched her, his eyes narrowing a little.

If only she could stop there, she thought, but having made that start, she had no stopping place. “Sophie is in a state of hysterics these days. She confessed to me this morning that you are responsible.”

His eyes never wavered. “What did she confess?”

He was driving her to the wall with his insolent ease. “That you have been taking advantage of her.”

What would he understand by that? The instant the words were out she quailed at them herself. Only his hands tightened over the arms of the chair.

“It may be, of course, that the girl exaggerates.” She tried to qualify. “But if this sort of thing gets about town, well, it might make for a nasty situation.”

She waited as long as she could endure his silence. “Well?”

“It might,” he said.

“I must say, you’re an arrogant young man.”

“If I denied it, Miss Blake, would you believe me?”

By which he meant “would you want to believe me?” she thought.

“I should certainly listen to your account of it,” she said.

“And I don’t want to give any account of it.”

“Then you leave me to believe Sophie’s story.” And he was thinking that it was Sophie’s story she wanted to believe, she decided. “Apparently you’ve had similar experiences before, Dennis.”

“I had one reminiscent of it, Miss Blake. It will do me a lifetime.”

“I see,” she said, wild to see, but determined that he should not have that insight into her. “In which case Sophie was fabricating. Young girls often do. Certainly having escaped one situation, you would not invite another. She’s only a child, you know, at least here.” She lifted a finger to her head. “Otherwise, she’s quite developed. Which may be the trouble. I should suggest, Dennis, that you discourage her more actively.” She studied the letter folder on her desk.

“Would you suggest that I drown her, Miss Blake?”

Hannah glanced up, startled, and caught a flicker of mirth at the corners of his mouth. The impulse to laugh rose inside her, a tingling provocative urge responding to what she took to be his sly exposure of the hoax in the situation. It was as though he had said, “You faker, let’s come to the heart of the matter.”

She threw back her head and burst the high, rich music of her laughter to the walls. The young man laughed also with a fine heartiness. When the spasm left her, its relaxation lingered, a lazy, delicious ease rolling out the constrictions. “Oh, Dennis, I haven’t laughed like that in such a long time.”

“An eggcup full of it is worth a bucketful of tears,” he said.

“That’s a lot of wisdom to pick up at twenty-four,” she said. “When I was young I much preferred the tears.”

“So did I,” he said, “when I was young.”

“Right now you’re very young to say that. Or to think I’d be in sympathy with it. What have you been through to get that sober look you wear all the time?”

“I was born with a caul,” he said.

“You were born with a fine, glib tongue at any rate,” she said, aware of the evasion but not hurt by it, finding an easy retort herself. “They say it’s part of an Irish inheritance, and you do have an affinity for them here, don’t you?”

“I’m at home down there, Miss Blake.”

“And you a minister’s son?”

“My father would not be at home there,” he said, “though he’d go through all the motions of being comfortable.”

Whatever they might be, Hannah thought. She got up from her desk and sat in an upholstered chair, turning the lamp to where it would not shine in her face. “That is an element of the Cove which I have never understood. Sometimes I’d like to. I just can’t make it. It puts me in awe of people like yourself who can break away from their inheritance.”

“If you can just get far enough away to take a good look at it, Miss Blake—that’s all it takes.”

She smiled. He had said it in such an earnest, boyish manner, much as though he were trying to teach her how to ice-skate.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all if you want to. You have to want to. I don’t know what happens if you’re afraid to do it. It’s probably like quitting church. You have to dare yourself not to go once, twice. Then suddenly it’s easy.”

“Is that how you quit church?”

“No. I quit in one fell stroke. I didn’t have any trouble, but some people do.”

“Sometimes it’s easier to quit than it is to stay,” she murmured.

“It was for me,” he said bluntly.

She watched him for a few seconds. “Dennis, I know something of you that I have no right to know.” She had to move away then from the intentness of his eyes. She went to the window, her back to him. “I’m a snooper, an idle snooper,” she began, and even as she spoke she found that the truth she had not intended to tell seemed almost a fable as she admitted it. “I must say in my own defense, I didn’t intend to snoop. I was plowing through that exquisite order in which you keep the tool shed. I think I was looking for a trowel and I was annoyed to find the bench drawers locked. I was going to leave them open. Then I found your notebook. I read only a few lines the first time. But I could not resist the temptation to go back and finish them. Actually, that’s what I wanted to tell you tonight.”

She waited at the window, honestly not wanting to see his reaction.

“May I smoke?” he asked after a few seconds.

“Of course.”

“Is that why you were afraid for Sophie?” he asked, the cigarette lighted. “Because of what you read there?”

She was glad then that her back was to him. He had not seen the hoax at all. His laughter with her had been no more than contagion. How little she knew really of the estimate others put on her, how frightfully small it was in her calculations.

“Perhaps it was,” she said, falling back on the lie helplessly.

“You shouldn’t have been. But then I guess it was natural when you didn’t know me very well.”

“Natural?” she murmured, trying to concentrate on what he was saying.

“I mean that you shouldn’t understand it. You see, the things I put down on paper aren’t meant to be taken literally.”

“You don’t need to explain that to me, Dennis. I’m not without some adequacy to poetry.”

“Excuse me. I didn’t mean that either,” he said. “All I’m trying to tell you now is that sometimes I write the things when I can’t have the experience.”

“You write of the dream,” she said away from him that he might not see the color his frankness had brought to her face.

“Exactly.”

“I believe they call it sublimation,” she murmured.

“Call it whatever they like, it’s my own business what I do with it.”

She returned to the armchair, “Dennis, I’m not criticizing you. My own life has been filled with dreams, sublimations, and I’ve rarely managed to do anything with them—as you have.”

Again he apologized, this time for his belligerency. How young he was, really. And now, sitting at ease in his discomfort, she felt a maturity beyond what she thought she deserved from her experience.

“Are you afraid of the truth?” she asked, more to her own thoughts than his.

“I don’t think so, but I guess I am sometimes. I suppose everybody is. Are you?”

“Mortally.”

He grinned a little, studying the ash on the end of his cigarette. “I’d never have guessed it.”

How she would have liked to pursue that, to ask him what he had thought of her, with that beginning. But not yet, not until she had managed to communicate something of her hopes for him, of her own dreams of giving.

“Use the vase there as an ash tray,” she said.

“It’s too nice for that,” he said, looking about for something else.

“It’s as ugly as sin and you know it.”

He glanced at her and away in some confusion. “I thought maybe it was an heirloom.”

“What mortal worth if it’s put to no use?” she said, feeling some familiarity in the conversation, as though she had been over the self-same words before. Recognition of them burst upon her—Maria Verlaine commenting on her inheritance. She thrust it from her mind. “Am I to be pardoned for my snooping?”

“Did you like what you read?”

“I found it—very exciting.”

He smiled, his eyes alive with glee. “Funny, I’d have thought it would shock hell out of you—Excuse me, Miss Blake.”

She lifted her head. “It did shock hell out of me. All my Presbyterian qualms—qualmed. I have no doubt you will find the same response in other provincials, and some of them may not care for excitement. Personally, I love it. And as long as I live, I shall take it where I find it.” The words escaped rather more melodramatic than she intended. “You will give something to the library contest?” she added quickly.

“I don’t know, Miss Blake.”

It had not occurred to her that he might hesitate. Well it was that she had brought on this occasion. “You have heard about it?”

“Yes. Miss Merritt told me.”

“And encouraged you to enter something?”

“Yes.”

“Did you show them to Miss Merritt?”

“I haven’t shown them to anyone,” he said.

“If they were mine,” said Hannah, “I should soon make the world aware of them. This should be a good start. Nor, I dare say, would you object to a thousand dollars?”

“No. But then I might not win it.”

She got up and went over to him, putting her hand lightly on his shoulder. “Do you believe that, Dennis?”

“No.”

“Good. There are enough things to be timid about, but not your heart’s work. I’m going to make a pot of coffee. Will you have some with me?”

“Thank you,” he said.

“There are books enough here to distract you, I think. I won’t be long.”

What a difference to her this walk from the study to the kitchen from that which she had taken when he was at the door! Oh, that it should not again be a tunnel of clacking heels and the sound of her own fears—that a stranger at the door might indeed be a stranger, and a friend someone to whom she might say, “Welcome home.”

When she returned with the coffee tray, he was sitting on the arm of a chair beneath the book shelves near her father’s desk. He brought a book with him, coming to help her. Her pleasure in that little gesture, his bringing the book and speaking of it presently, was consummate.

“Yeats,” he said. “There’s something here I love, this image: ‘How love fled, and paced upon the mountains overhead, and hid his face amid a crowd of stars.’”

“Lovely,” she murmured.

“May I read you the whole poem?”

“I should like that,” she said. She sat quite still and very erect and tried to listen. Certain of the words did break through her own heart’s song. When he was done, she said, “Thank you,” and poured the coffee, feeling a measure of dignity about her in this little work of hospitality.

He was watching her, she knew, the book now closed in his hand. Finally he said, “Thank you,” the emphasis on “you,” and fled with the book to its place on the shelf.

And glad she was to have the moment, for she could not have met his eyes without tears in her own. It was too much, she thought, to place on him the burden of her need, the knowledge of her hunger. Nor did she want to place them, having a quick courage sufficient to their containment. And she was desperately grateful now that he had not understood the ruse she had made of Sophie’s dotage on him. God was sometimes good in His limiting of one man’s knowledge of another’s mind and heart.

“The tea cakes are Sophie’s,” she said when he returned. It was the best of retribution she could make at the moment. “She cooks and bakes so well. What a little housekeeper she will make one day.”

He took the cup she handed him, and sipped. “The coffee, I presume, is yours. It’s delicious.”

“You’re very kind,” she said.

He told her then of why he had come to Campbell’s Cove, his love of boats, especially sailing boats and why he was most content among the rough and hardy Irish fishermen. “I know the feeling about them in the rest of the town, Miss Blake, that if they’d bring themselves up to date, they’d have a going business, a good living. But what’s a good living? A fancy car? A television set?”

“To some people.”

“Did you ever hear them talk?”

“Sometimes. They’re not an island down there. They come into the bank now and then.”

“I mean really talk—of where they came from, of storms, catches of fish, heroes. They’ve a language of their own and it’s like singing.”

And telling of it, his was like singing, she thought.

“And I don’t blame them at all for sticking with their old-fashioned boats and shaking their fists at the hot rods on water. Everybody seems to have a hot rod inside of him today. I say to hell with them. Let them go and shoot up the world and to hell with them.”

“And if a part of the world shows every intention of shooting them up, what then, Dennis?”

He looked at her. “I say you can’t die any faster at home.”

She studied the residue in her cup, a dark crescent. “I’m afraid that’s more poetry than truth.”

“So many people have died for truth. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if they could live for poetry?”

“You are a pacifist,” she mused.

“I guess I am now.”

“Interesting for an Irishman.”

“The Irish is far back in me,” he said. “It’s just—you called it an affinity, I think. I’ve got an affinity for a lot of things, Miss Blake.” He set his cup on the tray and leaned back in the chair, his legs stretched the length of the coffee table. He told her then of the boats he had sailed, of one which he had rescued from the bottom of a sound in Florida, of his travels and his hopes as a poet, but nothing of himself before she had known him. And she did not really care about that now.

“I’m staying too long,” he said finally.

“You are always welcome,” she said, getting up with him, wishing that he would stay on, but content, too, in his going that she might contemplate all that had passed between them. She led the way to the side door. “This is an old house and it has many charms—but none equal of its guests. Next time you will come as such, Dennis.”

“Thank you, Miss Blake.”

She extended her hand as was her custom on the departure of guests. He took it and lifted it briefly to his lips.

10

THESE WERE SINGING DAYS. No amount of work was too much for Hannah, and no amount of leisure more than she could bear of it. Dennis had not come again, and when she passed him in the garden, he was as remote as ever, perhaps even a bit more formal. But that was shyness, she knew, self-consciousness that might have come over him on rereading his poetry with a view to what she had taken from it—from his tortured dreams of a woman whom, he had said in effect, he had never known that intimately.

At home evenings, Hannah kept a sort of vigil, pleasant enough in itself, for she had found, much to her satisfaction, that she did indeed like poetry, whether it was Keogh or Yeats, Byron, or even the early works of Andrew Sykes. And she had made a fine selection considering the random way she had gone about it in Chicago. Even the arrangement on the shelves pleased her. She had crowded her father’s bird books with the poets she thought he might have liked—Burns and Donnie, Blake, and too much of Tennyson. She herself had had enough of him with the first Idyl in high school, and yet there was a phrase of his she had memorized to some purpose once, and which often since had run through her mind: His honor rooted in dishonor stood, and faith unfaithful kept him falsely true. Learned, no doubt in the throes of self-recrimination over a deception practiced on some love of the moment. She had had many loves in those days, many heartaches, which, as she thought back on the mood of them now, seemed to have had deeper pleasure in the ache than in the promise.

She had observed, sitting evenings in the study, that Dennis took his supper early and returned to his room by six-thirty most nights. He would be working, she decided, for as the twilight deepened, his light went on, and sometimes, watching from a darkened window, she could see him move about, pacing in thought. At nine or thereabouts, his light would go out, and he would stride down the path, often whistling a tune. At other times, his muse faring poorly, he walked slowly, silent, his head thrust ahead of him. She was a well of sympathy if he would not stop at it. But he was sufficient to his own distress, as she thought great minds must be.

Within an hour he would return, and his light would burn until well after midnight. That he would come to her with this new work was a hope she tried not to cherish, having no defense against its failure. Only the actual did she now permit herself to dwell upon. She tried to remember how his room looked. She had been frugal in furnishing it, bed, table, two chairs and a dresser, with one floor lamp. He should have a desk lamp. How she would do that room were she given the chance now! That kind of favor she must not try to bestow! She thumped her hand on the table in determination against the constant, nagging impulse. Never again was she to try the purchase of affection. Her life was strewn with such purchases. She could see them lying about, abandoned, a shattered nursery in the wake of spoiled children.

She paged the volume of Andrew Sykes in her hand and read an occasional passage. His early things, she had to admit, were heroic, with a fine sweep and a rich sense of pageantry. But of late, he had taken to belittling as though he were ashamed of his first bold songs. No one sang bold songs any more, she thought. Poets were constricted with introspection, self-fears, disillusion. A whole section of the book in her hand was devoted to a hymnist Sykes had discovered to have been a slave trader. What earthly matter, Hannah thought, two hundred years later? Were his hymns less of a prayer as sung today? What possessed such men that they must bedevil legendary heroes? Fear to bedevil the leaders of their own time? Sykes had no right to that fear, his fame secure, his pocketbook ample. And Dennis Keogh had no authority.

One day she would like to take issue with the excellent Mr. Sykes and she could do it, too, she thought, if Dennis were beside her. And it was not beyond propriety for Hannah Blake to invite the master poet to her house—in the company perhaps of Mrs. Verlaine. Nor could Maria refuse, with Sykes coming. And this is Dennis Keogh, Mr. Sykes. Some day he will wear your crown—She got a pencil and composed a tentative invitation to dinner.

In the morning, on the way to the bank, she stopped at the library. Elizabeth Merritt was at the desk, the sun shining down on her from the domed skylight.

“You’re wearing a halo,” Hannah said aloud, seeing no one in the reading rooms. “The sunlight.” She nodded upward.

“And carrying a pitchfork,” said Elizabeth. “I’ve got Mr. Sykes in the study room.”

Hannah leaned across the desk. “I have the distinct impression that he mistakes himself for George Bernard Shaw.”

Elizabeth smiled. “He gets more devastating every year. That’s certain. I have a new mystery for you, Miss Blake.”

“I’m not sure I’ll have time for it. Did he consent to judge the contest?”

“He did. I wrote you last night on it.”

“What did he say?”

“That he expected sooner or later to be kicked out of the Cove, and that this year was as good as the next.”

“I was just thinking last night, someone should take him down a notch. That’s going to happen, you know. He’s not the only poet in the country.”

“He might surprise us and be very generous. He enjoys his own venom, perhaps for want of criticism.”

“Obviously,” Hannah said. “Has anything come in?”

“A couple of things.”

“Did you read them?”

“I don’t feel that I should read the entries, Miss Blake.”

“You’re right, of course. I still feel that you would be the better judge, Andrew Sykes or no.”

“I’d get all wrapped up emotionally,” Elizabeth said. “Besides, librarians aren’t supposed to read books—just titles and jacket blurbs.”

“Why emotionally?” Hannah demanded.

Elizabeth looked at her. “I know most everyone in the Cove.”

“Oh,” Hannah said. “I must get on to work. I hope—” Her sentence was lost in the appearance of Sykes, his white hair tossing like scud, as he charged into the room. She retreated to the rack of new books.

“A monkey couldn’t find a louse by the light in that room, Miss Merritt.”

“Miss Blake, there’s a complaint for the next board meeting,” Elizabeth said, throwing the words at Hannah. “You know Miss Blake, Mr. Sykes?”

Oh, what a piece of mischief, Hannah thought, and yet she was pleased.

“We met at the Christians’ festival last year,” Sykes said after a moment’s scrutiny so intense that Hannah squared her shoulders should there be insult in it. “You wore a silvery cloud thing, several of them in fact.” He gestured grotesquely with his hands as though he were describing an explosion. “I think you remarked that you felt like Brunhilde.”

“I said I felt that I looked like Brunhilde,” Hannah said, proving to herself by the amendment that she would not be cowed by the old wasp.

“Mmm,” he agreed. “How terrible to feel like her among the Christians. Nice to see you, Miss Blake.” He returned to Elizabeth. “Am I to hold a candle in there until the next board meeting?”

“No, but you can hold the ladder for me while I go up with a larger bulb, if you want it now.”

“Under those circumstances, I certainly want it now.” He winked at Hannah as she departed.

The old reprobate, Hannah thought. No wonder he had a way with Maria. For all her wish to do it, however, she could not bring herself by word or letter to extend the invitation. She would just have to wait on the contest, that was all. She was forever overrunning the goal.

The unfortunate thing was that having permitted herself the distraction of the plan to entertain Andrew Sykes, she was no longer content in leisure. She turned her energies toward civil defense work, which, in the Cove, lagged or accelerated with her interest. John Copithorne, as president of the town council, was nominal head of it, but Hannah the working power. During the school year, she had not failed once a week to inspect the preparedness drills. Now she studied the map of the town, but even as she ran her fingers over the designated shelters, she knew that the map was only a ritual, a pretense in fact. A hitherto neglected area of the Cove was about to get her attention: Front Street.

11

HANNAH WATCHED THE PREPARATIONS on the dock, the rolling of barrels, each to an appointed mooring, the names or initials lettered on them in black paint: Mulroy, O’G., Fitz, Shean. The hands waiting here for the fishermen’s return were for the most part old men no longer equal to the long day’s work or boys who might stray from their fathers’ trade in the daytime, so long as they were on the docks at night to make fast the boats, to weigh in the catch with the commissionmen, to stretch and repair the nets, to clean the boats.

There was poetry here, she thought, watching the curls of smoke from the old men’s pipes, as they sat hunched and almost immobile, their faces to the sun, their eyes trained to it near to blindness, the poetry of a way of life that was dying slowly. Strange that so few people in the Cove saw it that way. But, she realized, it had taken a poet’s association to bring it home to her.

“O’Gorman, ho!” the cry went up.

Looking to the mouth of the Cove, she saw one and then another of the laden boats humping slowly across the gold-rippled water. Even the sound of their motors was like phlegm in an old man’s throat. A flight of gulls pursued them, whooping and scolding.

O’Gorman was first out in the morning, and signaled the time of return. Nicknamed “the mayor” of Front Street, he was the arbitrator of disputes, the judge of weather, and the father of eleven children, one of whom was on the dock to catch the rope which the big man flung to him.

O’Gorman climbed from the boat and rocked a moment on his feet as though he were steadier on water. His greeting to his son, the boy his height if not his bulk, was a sound thump on the forearm with his doubled fist. Hannah thrilled to the show of strength in it and to something more that she no doubt brought to it in her romantic fashion—a defiance of a new order which dared to say men like him were obsolete. She left the car where she had parked it next to a refrigerated truck and waited for O’Gorman at the end of the dock.

He frowned when he first saw her, knowing her from the bank where last year for the first time in his life he had been obliged to go for a loan. His greeting was friendly, but without enthusiasm.

“I won’t detain you now, Mr. O’Gorman. But later tonight I should like to visit you. It’s on civil defense work.”

“You can come now and neither of us will be detained,” he said, the frown disappearing. He touched his fingers to her elbow to turn her around with him and guide her down the wharf. There was more strength in his fingers, she thought, than some men had in their backs. Another strong thing about him was the smell of fish. His face crinkled in a smile, the lines as deep as the smile itself. “Civil defense. I’m the boy for you, with two lads in the army and one graduated in the last war—and one lost to it.”

To it, she thought, not in it; a peculiar phrasing. “Mrs. O’Gorman might prefer that I come later,” she said, seeing that he was leading her toward the houses.

“Her preference is always in what she gets. She’s a marvelous woman that way.”

If she would rather have seen her husband alone, Hannah saw no sign of it, for Mrs. O’Gorman’s face lighted up on recognition of her, and Hannah was greeted like an old friend or like the lady of the manor being welcomed to the house of an Irish tenant.

“Bring us a pot of tea, Norah,” the woman said to a girl of fourteen or so.

Hannah, taking the one upholstered chair in the room when it was nudged up for her, watched the girl go into the kitchen, where more time was spent by the family than in here, obviously. Her father gave her a slap on the buttocks from where he was pulling off his boots at the kitchen door. The whole house seemed full of the smell of fish and bread and laundry.

“Dan likes a cup of tea at his ease before his supper,” Mrs. O’Gorman explained. “In that he’s unusual. Most of them coming off the water are looking for a nip out of the bottle, and they’ve no patience if you haven’t the supper on the table. Isn’t it a lovely summer, Miss Blake?”

“Lovely,” Hannah agreed.

A noise like thunder rolled overhead.

“That’s the little ones up over us. I’ve been going to take the casters off the bed, but I haven’t the heart for it. It gives them such pleasure—they’re playing streetcar like they saw in Jefferson City last week.”

“They’ll have tracks through the ceiling if you don’t take them off,” O’Gorman said, coming in in his slippers. “They’ll have the bed down on our heads.”

“Children are the same forever,” Hannah said. “When I was a child I played at the same game. In a friend’s house there was a bell on a cord for the maid. Like a streetcar conductor’s.”

“Childer’ have the devil’s own imagination,” Mrs. O’Gorman said.

“Miss Blake wants to see me on civil defense,” O’Gorman said. “She’s the head of it.”

“Sometimes I think I’m only the tail of it,” Hannah said, and they laughed. “All I really want to do tonight is speak with you on a good place for an air-raid shelter in the area.” She described the needs.

“The only place I know of that depth is the basement of the church,” O’Gorman said. He went to the hall and bellowed up to the children to be quiet upstairs or come down and sit in the parlor.

“Would the priest consent to it?” Hannah asked.

“He’d consent easier if there was a compensation,” O’Gorman said.

“Father Daley would give it for nothing,” said his wife. “He’s not out to make money on the country.”

“Only on his parishioners, and he could always pass the corn for a game of bingle during the practice.”

“Dan!” Mrs. O’Gorman turned to Hannah and explained. “It’s a poor parish.”

“I know,” Hannah said. The children of the convent school were forever on the street with chance books. “All the same, I think it would be advisable to offer it without charge. It’s all volunteer work, you know.”

“Dan was just talking, Miss Blake. He never misses a chance to rib the clergy.”

“And damn little chance they miss of returning the favor,” he said. “What would you have me do, Miss Blake?”

“If you can get Father Daley’s consent, that would be helpful, and then when we arrange a meeting in the neighborhood, if you will speak at it. Your support, I think, would get us off to a good start.”

“Aye, it would in this neighborhood. I’m with you.”

“Thank you,” Hannah said. She decided to test an idea. “Do you think it would be possible on Campbell’s Cove Day to stage a mock invasion of the town?”

O’Gorman took an empty pipe from his shirt pocket and sucked on it noisily. “Who’d do the invading and who the defending?”

He was a canny man, Hannah thought, foreseeing the natural setup—those who could man the boats attacking, and the town defending itself. Front Street against the Cove.

She revised her own thinking quickly. “I should think the attack might come from the air, and we might have a portion of the town evacuated by water.”

O’Gorman nodded, apparently going along with her on that. His daughter brought the tea and his wife poured it.

“Maybe fifty boats we could muster, and with luck, fifty pilots—” he mused aloud.

There was a job for Dennis, Hannah thought, if it didn’t offend his pacifism. She could even see him in the lead boat, herself beside him perhaps. “I should think there’s an odd pilot here and there about the town not working at it,” she said. “I have one working for me in fact, Dennis Keogh.”

Mrs. O’Gorman was bringing her tea. “What a lovely boy. He was courting my neighbor’s niece and we saw him. Do you take sugar, Miss Blake?”

Hannah looked at the tea. She could not see the bottom of the cup. “Please,” she said.

“You’ve the queer notion of courting,” O’Gorman said, stirring his tea with a racket. He had been served first, guest or none.

“Calling on a girl is courting,” his wife said.

“All right, all right, you’re interrupting our thinking.”

Indeed she was, Hannah thought. To claim he had written about a woman he had not known, Dennis certainly made a practice of knowing enough women to write about. “Anyway, I should think he could manage a boat,” she said.

O’Gorman’s eyes met hers. “Aye, he knows more about boats than he does about women.”

A strange remark for him to make to her, Hannah thought. She kept her eyes on his and strove for the words to distract him. She felt certain that he was on the verge, if not over it, of discovering why she was here, and almost before she admitted it to herself. “How many people in a boat?” she demanded.

“It depends on the size of the people, and the accouterments they’re bringing with them.”

The house was close and the tea bitter.

“All these things are for discussion at headquarters,” she said. “I don’t need to keep you from your supper. But you do think it can be managed?”

“If there was an air raid, it would have to be managed, mightn’t it?” He thrust the words home at her as though to test her sincerity.

“Of course. That’s what we’re working on—a plan for survival.” She took a long swallow of the bitter tea and set the cup on the table, getting up. “I’ll see that you’re notified of the next meeting, Mr. O’Gorman. Will you come?”

“I will if it’s not past my bedtime,” he said, rising from the chair wearily.

“Air raids, they say, are most frequent in the night.”

“Aye, and rescues in the dawn,” he said ignoring her sarcasm. “We’ll put on a fine show for you, Miss Blake.”

“I’m not looking for a fine show,” she said.

He cocked his head insolently. “Then what are you looking for, ma’am?”

Even the “ma’am” didn’t take the sting from it.

“I told you—a plan for survival.”

“An elegant phrase, Miss Blake,” he said, the words rolling off his tongue. “But those of us engaged in it for so long aren’t as apt to be stirred by it.”

“Then you will manage something to stir them?”

“Aye, if there’s stir left in them.”

It was Mrs. O’Gorman who took her to the door. “And I’ll see that he goes tonight to Father Daley, Miss Blake. They’re good friends, you know, for all the ribbing. There’s a lovely dress you’re wearing tonight.”

Coddling and cooing, Hannah thought, lest she go away with a worse opinion than that with which she came.

“Thank you. Good night.”

Glancing at the window from the half-dark street, Hannah saw the children, a horde of them it seemed, charging into the room and mauling their father. They were unleashed at her departure. Front Street itself was deserted, but its houses were all a-glitter, full of noise and laughter. Beyond it, lakeward, the docks were busy, and to the north and south, the dunes were still except for the slow sifting of sand, as though the lake itself swelled and thickened there beneath the rocky crags, and turned the color of taffy. Walking down to where she had parked the car, she passed one of the few Negroes in the Cove. He was pulling a child’s wagon up the hill, a basin of fish in it, humming a deep-throated song, one phrase of it over and over in accent to his long, slow strides. Hannah put the words to it, “Got no home … I got no home.”

12

WITHIN THE WEEK DENNIS had finished or put away the work. At least he no longer worked in his room. Hannah decided that he might have been polishing up a poem for the contest, and, finishing it, had taken again to his old haunts along the water front—to old courtships, perhaps. And much of his diffidence was gone now when she accosted him in the garden. There was something in his attitude that was almost patronizing. This, too, she took into the house with her and thought about. These days she thought of little except Dennis Keogh. She managed the routine of her bank work, her church activities, and she had contacted the armed service commands, getting their promise of every co-operation for Campbell’s Cove Day. The job of selling it to the town council was still before her. It should have been a challenge, she told herself, and it would be, if she were not a coward.

It occurred to her, watching for the light to come on in Dennis’s room one night, that she had no right to expect him to come to the door and announce himself as a visitor. Her invitation had been sincere and specific only in her own knowledge of herself. To him, an employee, and so young, it must have seemed casual, a nice way of dismissing him for the evening. Without her following up on it, he must have been confirmed in that suspicion. Had he not waited, night after night, in his room? Had he not announced his presence, coming and going, with the whistled tune he sent before him? It was the most she could have done, in his place, certainly. Small wonder he could no longer endure the four walls of his room, waiting for an invitation that never came.

Of this she convinced herself. Still, she must take precautions in case it were not so. Asking him to come again, she must have something real with which to intrigue him. No more sham. No gifts. No offer of a purchase price. Something to give them an honest affinity. The one thing that laid the greatest hold on her imagination was to try her own hand at writing verse.

In the fervor of the idea, she was sure that this in itself was something to which she had long apprenticed. But the words as she put them down were leaden blocks; the ink was tar. Poets, she decided then, leaned on other poets. Dennis turned no doubt to Yeats. She tried to find a woman whose spirit was akin to her own, and in the end she turned to Sappho, her old friend from ancient Lesbos. She borrowed a collection from the library, and carrying it out, smiled up at the strong woman in the panel. The very fact of the translations being only fragments appealed to her, who was equal to no more than fragmentary endeavor herself. Poor Sappho. For all that artists and encyclopedists chronicled her among the great, her little part of the thumb-smudged collection was virgin print. It was a kindness to her, Hannah thought, aware of more than a little sentimentality about it, to recall her songs of passion. Nor would the splendid, generous-mouthed poet begrudge the use of one of her long disused lyrics to someone who so revered her.

With careful deliberation she selected one and then another of the fragments, copying them in the long delicate slope of her hand. She had always thought her handwriting became her personality more than any physical attribute, and now the writing became the poems, and the poems became Hannah Blake very well indeed.

“I’m afraid this is something of an imposition, Dennis,” she said when he came the next night.

“Not at all, Miss Blake,” he murmured.

He was standing in the kitchen, his feet spread, and she was afraid, somehow, to venture the further invitation into the study. Everything was out of joint. She was miserable within herself, having hoped to lead him through the house with ease, to pick up from their last instant in the house together when his lips had brushed her hand. No star had seemed distant that night. Now, she thought, she could not kindle a match.

“I wanted to show you some poor things I’ve written. Just to get an opinion.”

“I’m not much of a critic,” he said.

“But you do know what you like?”

“Yes. I know that.”

“I’m not compelling you to like them. Your job doesn’t hang on it, if that concerns you.”

“But you are compelling me to read them,” he said.

She lilted her head. “By that you assume that I have no talent?”

“I think you have a great deal of talent,” he said. “I think it’s a crying shame—”

“What is a crying shame?” she demanded while he groped for the words.

“That so much of it gets wasted,” he blurted out.

“Dennis, I don’t want your pity.”

“I don’t pity you, Miss Blake,” he said desperately. “I pity the loss to someone else, somewhere.”

“Oh,” Hannah said, a knot of pain pulling cords of it tight in her throat, her eyes, her nose. “You are a very dear person, Dennis.” She leaned on the kitchen table and eased herself down on a chair. “I’m keeping you from—something.”

“I’d like to see what you were going to show me,” he said.

“No. I’ve changed my mind. I suppose—I guess I was a little lonesome. That’s all.”

“I didn’t mean that you were compelling me to read them—not the way it sounded, Miss Blake. It was you who used the word first. Oh, hell, I don’t know what I mean. I didn’t intend to hurt you.”

“I hurt myself,” she said. “I always do. I have the most beautiful visions, but I always have to examine the back side of them.”

“May I see the poems?” The words were spoken gently, but there was command in them. There was no retreat, no refuge in the truth now. The lie must be exalted.

“I’ll bring them,” she said, thinking there was less shame in it were it done at the kitchen table.

She watched his face while he read one piece and then another. If only he had read Sappho, she thought, if only he would snatch the grotesque mask from her, and throw the word “fraud” in her teeth. And all this was a repetition of something that had happened before. She was going around again, and she would keep on going around, and around and around—

“I don’t know,” he said at last, shuffling the pages together in the order she had given them to him. “Honest to God, I don’t know.” He clenched his fist. “I just don’t seem to get anything whole. It’s remote.” He shook his head. It’s me, I’m sure it’s me. I’m not the right person to show this to, Miss Blake.”

“They were written a very long time ago,” she said, and the irony of that confused her more. And she was confused, all sorts of things seeming to come loose inside her, streaking off in all directions, bursting now and then into the familiar—her father throwing back his head to look skyward, Elizabeth Merritt coming to ask a recommendation, the pleading eyes of the little pug-face—It’s a crying shame—If she could but hang onto one of them, one image, with nothing before it and nothing since, and this very moment itself vanished.

She fastened her eyes on him, seeking an anchorage. “You’ve been at work, too, haven’t you, Dennis?” The sound of her own voice steadied her. “I’ve watched the light in your room.”

“I’ve had wonderful encouragement,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Do you know Andrew Sykes?”

“Indeed I do. Now isn’t that a coincidence?” She plunged on. “I’ve just this evening written him an invitation to dinner here—he and others.” It would be done, she told herself. It was half-done now. “I think it would be very nice if you would join us, also.”

“Thank you,” he murmured.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I interrupted you.”

“It isn’t so much. Mr. Sykes read my work. He’s kind of excited about it.”

“Kind of excited!” Hannah said. “I should think he would be. He’s been to his own pump so many times, the well’s dry and he doesn’t know it. He’s bringing up muck these days, and he can’t tell it from the pure waters.” As she spoke, she felt the heat rising in her, bursting, and the words were none she contemplated, just the loose sparks of her mind flying out in all directions. She fought to stem the panic. “I’m jealous of someone else’s discovery of you, someone like him.” The truth was cooling. She leaned across the table and caught at the boy’s hand, hard, rough, and strong. “You can understand that, Dennis?”

He squeezed her hand fiercely and then sprang his fingers open as though he had burst a trap. “Sure. I just thought you’d like to know, that’s all.”

“I do. And I’m pleased you came to tell me. He was a great poet. He should be able to recognize another one. You have met him?”

He nodded. “At dinner—at Mrs. Verlaine’s the other night.”

“How nice,” Hannah said. She shivered, turning as cold then as the porcelain-topped table beneath her spread hands. She pushed down on the table, expecting to rise, but her legs would not respond. “Well. He’s the judge of the contest, you know.”

Dennis nodded, his eyes on her hands. They seemed to fascinate him.

She spoke his name and paused. Still he did not look at her. He apparently could not bear the sight of her face.

“A thousand dollars—” she said, almost pleading.

“He advised me against entering the contest, Miss Blake. I feel that I must be guided by him.”

“Oh, you must, by all means. What is God without a worshiper?”

“He’s a great poet, Miss Blake.”

“Of course he’s a great poet. So was Sappho. Good night, Dennis. Thank you for coming.”

13

HANNAH FELT THAT SHE was going to be ill. She thought that she had a high fever and yet she was cold. She pulled herself up from the table presently, and wondered, the room seeming a little off balance to her, if she were about to die. If that were so, she thought, it was as good a time as any. Still there were a good many things to be put in order, although at the moment she could not think of what they were.

She reached the sink, putting one foot carefully after the other, and turned on the water. For once she was not displeased that Sophie had left a cup in the sink. She filled it with water and drank a mouthful. Then she studied the cup in her hand—solid, hard, pure, pure white. As she tightened her fingers about it, it slipped from them and clattered into the sink where it broke into two pieces, one of them rocking beneath the drip from the faucet. When there was no other sound, the water’s dripping plucked at the silence—a hollow music. “Requiem on a broken cup,” she said aloud.

There was really a great deal to do, Hannah thought, if there were not much time left to her. In a way, it was like going on a trip. For one thing, there was a library book to return. She glanced at the kitchen clock. Ten minutes to nine. How fortunate.

With her having a purpose, all her numbed faculties responded as suddenly as they had failed her. She got her jacket, the keys to the car, and the book, and going out the side door, she knew that the worst was over—that the weakness with which she had been inflicted had passed. Death was not to be like this. Death was some way off yet for Hannah Blake.

Once behind the wheel of the car, the motor racing to the pressure of her foot, she felt that she had escaped from a bad dream. Nor would she let it overtake her. She was almost happy. So Mr. Sykes, the eminent Mr. Sykes, was sabotaging the contest. There was the thing to be nailed down. He came, a stranger, to Campbell’s Cove, year after year, welcomed and hurrahed by all the simple folk, as he described them. He lampooned their festivals and scoffed at their religion, and the only council he held with them was in the company of a harpy. There would be no contest, she decided, no ditties from the simple folk for him and Maria to set the tune to.

She trod harder on the accelerator. She should have called Elizabeth before leaving the house and told her to wait. Elizabeth would understand. She, too, had encouraged Dennis Keogh—

Something seemed to slip inside her again with that thought, only for an instant, but, as though it might be safer, too, she slowed the car down to a cruise. Well it was that she had done it. Had she spun into the library parking lot at that clip, she would have missed the departure of the librarian in the company of Dennis Keogh.

Hannah did not want to follow them, but her will was not strong enough to break the trance the sight of them cast upon her. She dimmed her lights and kept a block’s distance between herself and their hurrying silhouettes. She could have driven directly to the water front and waited for them, so sure she was of where they were going. She parked within sight of the wharves. Taking the flashlight from the glove compartment of the car, she followed them on foot as they passed the Cove diner and set out across the sand. No boats, moored beneath the glare of the dock lights, for them. The dunes, the rolling dunes. Image after image of Keogh’s poetry wove through her mind as she trudged over the long slopes of sand in the wake of their shadows. How he must crave Elizabeth Merritt!

Hannah stopped, having moved on them too quickly. For an instant Elizabeth was a black vision as she climbed the crest of the next dune, a lovely, clear, dark shape against the screen of sand. The boy, it seemed, was before her—waiting, his arms open to her; for she leaped, and the cry of their merging tore through the stillness, searing Hannah’s mind, scalding her heart. She stood where she was for a long time. Then she moved upon them slowly, the sand sifting in and out of her toeless shoes, leadening her feet. The wash of water on the shore broke rhythm with the surging of her heartbeat and made a whorl of sound in her head that had no beginning and no end. She must go slowly until some sound outside herself might break it, for it spoiled her sense of space as well as her sense of time. The sound came, rippling laughter and the boy’s crooning voice.

“Oh, my darling, darling, darling—”

Hannah stopped. She emptied the sand from one shoe and then the other. She scanned the ridges she had followed, but there was no outline of them for some dis-stance, the shadow of the rising bluff cloaking them, even as it would cloak her retreat. She moved on, and, holding the flashlight arm’s length ahead of her, shot its blinding glare upon them.

Elizabeth lay crescent-shaped as though she were nested in a womb of the sand. The boy’s body trailed from her, his head pillowed between her breasts. Hannah saw it all in the instant before they spun away, Elizabeth’s face a grimace. She released the button, returning them to darkness, and fled herself toward its greatest reaches.

Behind her she heard Elizabeth’s voice. “Tom?”

Tom, she thought, Tom Merritt.

“Come back! Tom!”

“God damn your prying soul!”

And that was from Dennis, she thought, dear gentle, kindly Dennis.

“Let him go, Dennis! Come back and let him go.”

Let him go, Hannah thought, let him go, do not tarry, let him go.

14

OF ALL THE THROBBING, mesmeric emotions, shame was uppermost, thrusting constantly to the surface; shame in the dream she had cherished, in the moments the boy had spent with her, in giving her hand to him for the final derision of his kiss upon it. And Elizabeth Merritt, queen of the jest! Where but in a queen’s court was the fool so much at home!

She lunged through the darkness, tearing her dress and hose on the wild berry bramble that matted the ridges beneath the bluff. She had come inland too directly. Time and again she pounded her way into a graveled cavern from which there was no escape except as she came in, and no guide out except her groping hands. This was hell, she thought, one circle of it—part of the torture the delusion that lightning bugs were stars, so that she was surrounded by sky, and the sky full of jagged rocks.

The dock lights saved her. Catching her first sight of them all in a row, she stopped and counted, and counting distinguished them as light bulbs. Then only did she see the Cove diner, Molly’s Diner, the lights said, and cars were parked beyond it, and men lounging on the fender of one of them. Hers she remembered was some distance above them. Without care except to reach it quickly, she turned on her flashlight, and played it along the sand until it found a path for her.

There was nothing left in this experience to be endured alone, she knew, and nothing could hurt her now, not enough. Pulsing with pain, she wanted only more of it. Even as she crashed the car door behind her and drove her foot down on the starter and then on the accelerator, it seemed that to plunge the car through the trees and rock until it smashed in over her would be a satisfaction. But she swung it around, grinding the gears, and let it seem to find its own way.

She was not aware of planning to go to Maria Verlaine’s; but stopping there and leaving the key in the ignition, she sensed that she was fulfilling a routine almost as old as herself.

From the sidewalk she could see Maria in the living-room, reading, the perpetual cigarette in her mouth. Hannah crossed the lawn and lingered at the window. How many times she had done this very thing! Since first she was able to drive a car, she had parked it just beyond the driveway, and crossed the lawn, pausing at this window to see what was going on inside before she called out. Once she had surprised Maria and John Copithorne. She had not thought of that for years. He might have married Maria if she had not gone off to France. Maria got up from the chair and poured herself some wine from a cruet—the measure of her allowance for the night, no doubt. She always needed to measure things beforehand so that she would not go too far.

“Maria! It’s Hannah. May I come in?”

The question was no more than gesture. She was already inside the door.

“It’s past your bedtime, isn’t it?” Maria said over her shoulder. Hannah’s penchant for sleep always amused her.

“But early for yours,” she said, “and I wanted terribly to talk to someone.”

Maria was slowing down. She got up slowly, but the small sharp eyes were quick. They took in everything in one dart and returned to a fresh cigarette which she lighted. “Sit down, Hannah. Make an exception tonight. Take some wine.”

“No, thank you. I don’t need stimulants.” Hannah lowered herself into a chair, by habit testing its strength by her weight on the arms. She looked about the room. It seemed a long time since she had been in it. “I feel almost at home here.”

“You should. You came here first in diapers.”

Hannah stretched her feet out ahead of her. She must have turned her ankle. It was beginning to swell. A little spot of blood shone in the round hole in her hose. “I’m disheveled, aren’t I?”

“Somewhat.”

“Well, I always looked that way—here.”

Maria shot a spiral of smoke between them. “Out with it. What happened?”

“I fell from a high mountain,” she said, feeling infinitely, unearthly calm now.

“You were never good at allegory, Hannah, and you look as though you’d fallen into a cement mixer.”

Hannah smiled. “The cement mixer becomes me better in your mind’s eye than the high mountain, doesn’t it, Maria?”

Maria watched her over the film of smoke that lay between them like a sheet out of which their heads were poking. “Hannah, I don’t know what sort of thing you’ve gotten yourself into now. But if you’ve come here to belittle yourself again, maybe we can both have a try at it. There’s just a chance we can straighten you out.”

“I’ve been straightened out, but it’s very kind of you,” she said. In her mind she thought she had made a discovery. Maria Verlaine was not so wise as she had always thought her. She wore her scorn for the commonplace to cover something very commonplace in herself. She courted poets because she had no song of her own. Why else should she have spent a lifetime in Campbell’s Cove, having tasted the wonders of the world? “How did they keep you down on the farm after you’d seen Paree?”

“What?”

“Do you know what I was thinking of outside there? The night I looked in on you and Johnny Copithorne. I could see the two of you just as clear tonight. This is where the old horsehair sofa was.”

“I never knew a more uncomfortable piece of furniture,” Maria said.

Hannah giggled. “It didn’t look uncomfortable that night.”

“It was. There’s nothing so unpleasant as to have to scratch when someone’s making love to you.”

Hannah’s mind slid away from the picture. “It feels good to scratch when you’re itchy,” she mused.

“And to drink when you’re thirsty and eat when you’re hungry. What did you come to tell me?”

What went ye out to see? asked Jesus, Hannah thought. “It’s been a long time, Maria, since you came to church, the church we were reared in.”

“My God,” Maria said, throwing her head back in a laugh. “Don’t tell me you’ve been to a revival meeting! Are the Presbyterians in such straits these days?”

“Shut up,” Hannah cried. “Just shut up!”

Maria squashed out the cigarette she had just started. “I shall do what I damned well please, Hannah. And if you would take a look at yourself, you might get a laugh out of it, too. The best thing in the world for you would be to have a good laugh at your own expense.”

Hannah lumbered out of the chair. Her weight on the sore ankle shot a pain through her that fanned the quieted flames. “You had a good laugh the other night with your Andrew Sykes and his new protégé, didn’t you? The house must have rocked with it. Was Elizabeth Merritt here, too?”

“So that’s it,” Maria said.

“Yes, that’s it! That boy was mine until you and your wretched poet made love to him. I planned the world for him, and he was the world to me.”

“Hannah, sit down a moment,” Maria said.

“I will not sit down. You told me to look at myself and I’m going to do it.” She stood where she was, however, enjoying the surge of pain with every pressure on her foot.

“You’re misunderstanding purposely, Hannah. You’re trying to hurt yourself again.”

“Ha! There’s nothing can hurt me. Nothing can hurt Hannah Blake. There’s nothing there to hurt.”

“Hannah—have you any idea what some of us have gone through not to hurt you?”

“What?”

“Your poetry contest—it’s all set up and working, isn’t it?”

“So she told you. I didn’t think Elizabeth could be that deceitful, that dishonest.”

“She told no one. Not once that night when she and Keogh were here to meet Andy, was your name mentioned.”

“I can believe that.”

“You can believe whatever you want to, which is what you’ve always done anyway. But I can assure you, Hannah, that although not one word of it was mentioned, I, for one member of the library board, was never in doubt of the contest’s origin.”

That was a lie, she thought, part of Maria’s cruel game. But Hannah had trouble trying to focus on its many implications—that night here after the meeting, Katherine Shane’s “I must says,” Ed Baker’s snide “You’re kind of keen on this contest, Hannah.” Were they playing the game all the time? Pin the tail on the donkey, the poor blindfolded donkey?

“Elizabeth could have told me,” Hannah said, forgetting for the moment the scene she had seen on the beach.

Maria lit another cigarette. “Not to tell you was the greatest kindness. Besides, I think Elizabeth is in love with Keogh. A thousand dollars is a lot of money when you’re in love, and that was before Andy had seen his poetry.”

Hannah heard only the words of love. “Oh, she’s in love with him, all right,” she cried. “They’re rolling in it down on the beach right now.”

Maria’s mouth hung open, the smoke dribbling out of it. “You followed them?” she said finally.

“Do you know he carried on like that first with my Sophie—my servant?”

“Hannah, I don’t care. I shouldn’t even care if he slept with you.”

Hannah squared her shoulders and trod stiff-legged toward the mantel. The very sight of Maria was offensive. Her kind was a plague on a decent world.

“You are a witch, Maria, an evil-minded witch, and I shall not think about what you have just said.”

The sight of Maria was not to be escaped. Maria’s eyes followed her in the mirror, the small, ferreting eyes of a preying animal.

“Do think about it, Hannah. On your life, think about it. What would you do with the boy? Make a eunuch of him?”

Everything to this moment had been planned, Hannah realized, everything in her life built toward it from Maria’s childish taunt, “Hannah’s pulling the chain” to their last meeting here. So, she thought, Maria Verlaine has never been hurt by Hannah Blake—never, never hurt!

With one great swipe she tore the bell cord from where it had hung for a generation beside the mantel, and to no use except in Hannah’s fantasy. Maria sat quite still, half-smiling as though she were enchanted, as though the cord were something alive in the big woman’s hand. Nor could she pull away as Hannah came toward her except at the last moment when it was too late. She twisted in the chair like a child hiding its face in the cushion, but the cord was looped there before her and it caught her beneath the chin. Only a gurgle of sound came from her as it sawed her throat.

Hannah thought the cord was very strong to be so old. Silk. The Adamses always bought the best.

When there was no movement beneath her, Hannah got up. She could not even remember having flung herself on Maria. It had not been necessary, Maria had so little fight. On the floor at the side of the chair the cigarette was still burning. She ground it out beneath her toe.

Without looking at the chair again, she got her purse and left the house almost as she had found it.

15

A NEAR PARALYSIS OVERTOOK Hannah when she was once more behind the wheel of the car. She had thought that could she get that far she would be all right. But sitting there, her hands numb on the wheel, she seemed to have forgotten how to drive, to have lost the reflexes responsive to that old habit. Her chin bumped on the wheel. She stared into the empty street, musing on how dimly lit it was, the glow from the converted gas lamps too weak to raise a shadow. A great truck surged out of the gloom its headlights flashing dim to bright, to dim to bright. She groped over the dashboard and plucked on her own lights as it passed.

She was able then to start the motor, but she sawed at the gear shift, unable to decide whether to turn around or to drive through the town. In the end she drove forward, the task of reversing the car too difficult. She drove very slowly, her knees beginning to tremble as soon as the numbness left them. Soon she was shaking all over, even her teeth jarring together as she parted them that she might breathe more deeply. Her lungs ached for more air, the car was stifling hot to her; but she dared not take her hand from the wheel to roll the window down. By the time she turned into her own driveway, her clothes were soaked with sweat, and she was aware of a sour, acrid smell about herself.

She saw no light but the fan of her own headlights, narrowing at last into two moons on the wall of the garage. Darkness then. She sat, the car door open, listening. Nothing but the spasmodic creak of the car settling, its motor cooling. Dennis had not returned. How long ago it was that she had first seen him that night, or last seen him for that matter. What was the use of clocks when time had no dimension beyond experience? What a kindness on the part of time it would be if she could climb the garage stairs now and find no trace of Dennis, if she could discover that he was part of something that happened here long ago, that he was a boy her father had hired, one of the many he always had to discharge because of her mother’s apprehensions. “I don’t trust him around with Hannah—”

She got out of the car and rolled the garage door closed, and then limped across the lawn to the back door of the house.

In the kitchen, she remembered the cup in the sink, and carefully gathered the two pieces. I should keep these, she thought, a remembrance. No. No remembrance. No requiem. She flung the pieces in the trash box. I shall go up and down, up and down, forward, but not back.

She paused at the study door on her way through the house. She went in then and looked about the room. The temple. The pages of her careful plagiarism lay, fan-shaped on the desk. She caught them up and took them to the fireplace where the logs and kindling were laid for a chilly night. And this was a chilly night, she thought, touching a match to them. I shall never know a colder one. When the blaze was high she fired one and then another of Sappho’s lyrics.

She sat a long time, numbly rubbing the swollen ankle, and watching the flakes of paper ash rise in the draft, quiver an instant, and then vanish like gulls in a stormy sky.

Presently she replaced the screen before the log embers and went to the windows overlooking the garden. She opened them all and left them that way. Before she turned away, the light appeared in the room over the garage.

Turn it out, Dennis, she thought. The night should be all darkness now. Nor did she light her own way up the stairs.

16

HANNAH WAKENED IN THE morning from a sleep so profound it seemed that she had been in it a long time; and then it seemed that the waking was the sleep, the dreams a dear reality; she had been laboring with an aching weariness in a great, golden wheatfield. The field, rolling from one hillock to the next, had no beginning and no end except morning and night, and she was binding shock after shock of the quick-fallen grain, always weary, always on the point of exhaustion, yet always equal to one more bundle. Her hands were stiff and blistered with the cord—in the dream.

Tentatively, she brought her hands before her to examine them. There was indeed a blister on the outside of her left forefinger.

“You awake, Miss Blake?”

She turned her eyes toward the voice. Sophie was shaking out the clothes she had heaped on the floor in the darkness. She wanted to drive the girl from the room, for a sickening recollection had come over her while she was trying to understand the blister. Instead, she startled the girl with her calmness.

“What are you doing, Sophie?”

“Just picking up, Miss Blake.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s after eight. I didn’t know if I should wake you—”

“You may get breakfast. I’ll pick up.”

“Yes ma’am.” The girl dropped the slip on the floor.

“I must have knocked them off the chair,” Hannah said. “I was up in the night. Sophie, is there something you wanted to say to me?”

The girl turned at the door. “No, ma’am. Just what time it was.”

“Thank you. I’ll be down in ten minutes.”

There was an enchanted sameness about everything as she arose and got her robe from the closet. Beneath her window the lawn had been freshly mowed. Dennis was bending over the power mower with an oil can near the main road. He looked up and waved as someone drove by and touched a car horn in greeting to him. The Carson boy bicycled up the drive, halloing to Dennis, and flung the county daily on the porch. She heard the thud of it. Sophie evidently was in sight of the boy, for he whistled, and then, going away, grinned at her over his shoulder and waved.

Her breakfast, too, was as usual, the bacon limp—characteristic of Sophie, either brittle or limp, and today was limp day. She looked at her ankle beneath the table. With an elastic bandage she could walk almost normally.

There was nothing out of the ordinary in the Odenah County Journal: baseball and taxes—Senator Cravens demanding an investigation of the United States consulships—the grass roots of our foreign relations. She had voted for Cravens, the need of a change in the Senate being obvious, but there had always been something about him which did not sit well with her ideals of good government. It was not, she told herself, that he had risen from the slums of an industrial town, but rather that he had done it too quickly, and coming from where he did, aligned himself with the wrong party. She found it disconcerting, too, that he had taken the whole of the Campbell’s Cove vote, including Front Street. A split ballot on Front Street!

Strange, she mused, turning the paper to the local news, that she could sit here at a normal breakfast, thinking about politics. But from the moment of rising, she had felt the power to go on and on, even as she had done in the dream. She would meet each exigency as it arose, and go on from it. She would tell what the moment demanded telling, no more, no less.

The name Merritt was in the social column. She had almost missed it in her distractions. Thomas Merritt was to be married that week to Miss Phyllis Sorenson of Jefferson City at the bride’s home. A sudden decision, certainly, and not at church. Sorenson, an unlikely name to be of the Merritt’s faith. Things were happening in that house surely. It had been a long time, she thought, since she had called on Mrs. Merritt. It was time for a visit—if the day went well.

She stopped the car beside Dennis on her way to work, and spoke to him from the window.

“Is it too late to prune the currant bushes, Dennis?”

Such easy words. So easy an answer while he wiped the sweat from his face, the clean sweat of sunlight. “I’ll find out, Miss Blake.”

“Do. The berries are very small this year.”

“They are all over.”

“Are they? You were working again last night.” She added the words as though they were an afterthought. “I woke up toward midnight. Your light was still on.”

He merely nodded, a little smile at the corners of his mouth. “God damn your prying soul,” she remembered. She laughed mirthlessly and drove on.

The book she had intended to return last night was on the seat beside her. One mission had been completed. Why not another? A test of strength, and just time to test it, for she was not in the habit of being late to the office, and this was no day to break routines.

She had not expected to see Elizabeth Merritt at the charge desk when she had worked until nine the night before. But fresh and pert she looked, the Happy Girl. She was doing her hair differently these days, a silly lock flapping down on her forehead. Presumed to be youthful, no doubt.

Hannah laid the anthology of women poets before her. “Congratulations, Elizabeth.”

“Hello, Miss Blake. Congratulations?”

Shrewd she was. “On Tom’s betrothal. It’s in the paper today.”

“Thank you,” Elizabeth murmured, her eyes on the card she was stamping.

“I must call on your mother and congratulate her,” Hannah said. “She must have been waiting a long time for this day.”

Elizabeth looked at her, and Hannah searched her eyes for what there might be behind them—some pain? Some secret pain, Elizabeth?

“Mother will appreciate your calling on her.”

The words were frank, honest, Hannah thought, and the girl was beautiful, as fair as morning. Who would dare call her a hypocrite? Hannah tried a smile, picked up her card, and retreated. It was she herself who had been the hypocrite. The truth had been implicit in every move Elizabeth had made, her strained exactitude on the contest, her silencing of Tom that night at Verlaine’s supper. Hannah’s own infatuation with the boy had blinded her.

She tried to concentrate on the day’s work ahead of her as she parked the car. The bank guard’s greeting was the same as always as he tipped his hat and held the door for her. How marvelously normal everything seemed, too normal. That thought struck her when Franklin Wilks passed her in the aisle, his eyes never lifting from the report in his hand, and his greeting the usual command: “Good day, Hannah.” There was in his manner of saying it something which conveyed the meaning: This will be a good day if you make it so. See that you do.

It would be ironic, she thought, removing her hat before the mirror in the washroom—it would be quite ironic if she were to be trapped by normalcy. Her finger trembled as she moistened it and dipped it in her compact to smooth a bit of make-up over a scratch on her face. She could not remember getting it. Bramble, no doubt.

“What happened to your ankle, Miss Blake?” the inside guard asked as she passed on her way to her office.

“Twisted it getting out of the car.”

“That’s a shame.”

That’s a shame, she thought, a shame that a man with a wife and three children didn’t miss the ankles of a woman who came into the bank, clerk or customer.

“Hi, Miss Blake.”

“Hi yourself, Nancy.”

Her secretary placed a sheaf of correspondence before her, finished too late for her approval the day before. She had put her logic, her style, her experience into those letters, and the signature, as was the rule he had initiated, was to be Franklin Wilks. The practice had long irked her. Now it was intolerable. She returned them to her secretary.

“Nancy, please retype these—with my name instead of Mr. Wilks’s. You will sign it ‘cashier,’ of course.”

“Yes, Miss Blake.”

Shackled or free, Hannah thought, but until shackled, entirely free.

17

IT WAS A SLOW morning at the bank, with almost all the traffic to the tellers’ cages.

Hannah had before her the applications for loans to be submitted to the next directors’ meeting. No one, it seemed, could afford the cash for the necessities or the luxuries to which his income entitled him. Her approval was no more than a credit rating, she thought—the poor man’s Dun and Bradstreet. Nine-tenths of the applications would be approved, from the money to calk three fishing boats to the purchase price of a television set for the Grundys. Sam Grundy came to the bank as the fisherman in the fairy tale went to the enchanted fish, bidden by his wife on each mission to ask a larger favor. And every month, Grundy added a few more hours’ overtime at the box factory. In Hannah’s father’s time, Grundy would have been told long since to tell his wife that she had gone too far, for Nathan Blake had compassion on the Grundys of the Cove.

Hannah initialed the applications. Ten o’clock. Ten-ten. The wall clock marked vigil with her. The sun rose higher, one awning after another coming down on High Street.

Where was Maria’s maid, the faithful Irish biddy to whom Maria was so devoted? The milkman? The paper boy? The mailman? Had none of them eyes? Had none of them tongues? She laid her hand on the telephone, so strong was her urge to know if there were anyone stirring at all in the house on Cherry Street. But instead of Maria’s number she gave the operator John Copithorne’s, prompted by a subconscious that apparently took over from her mind and will at such moments. Doctor Copithorne had a patient in the chair. He would call her back.

It then occurred to her that Maria might not be dead at all, and, in her mind’s view, she saw the scrawny little woman untwisting herself from the grotesque position in which Hannah had left her. She saw it happening, even to Maria’s lifting her hand to her throat, and her eyes to Hannah’s face in the same naïve stare as when last their eyes met. Hannah clamped her lips over a moan, and looked desperately for something to distract herself. Ten-fifteen.

At ten-fifteen Jeremiah Tobin had an appointment with her. Where was he? Small wonder his business was on the rocks. What were a few minutes to him? So what a few dollars?

Her phone rang. She clenched her fist against catching it up until it had rung again. It was John Copithorne.

“How are you, Hannah?”

“Very fit, John, thank you. John, our civil defense efforts are gone to seed. We need something special, something dramatic.”

“M-m-m,” he said, and she could imagine him rubbing the back of his neck. “Any ideas, Hannah?”

“A good one, and I’ve already explored it, a mock invasion here for Campbell’s Cove Day.”

There was only silence at the other end of the phone. He was thinking of the work involved.

“Really, John, it’s more timely than our pageants. There hasn’t been anything new for years. Other towns have tried it. We could make a success of it. And we can involve the whole town, the state in fact, from the governor to the block warden.”

He made a noise in the phone she took to be indicative of small favor. He was a slow-thinking man with the best of his imagination at work on matching a false tooth to a real one.

“Think of the boats, John. There’s a whole fleet of them in the Cove.”

“Fishing boats, Hannah?”

“Fishing boats, gunboats. The navy will co-operate.”

“Fishing boats are kind of obsolete,” he said stubbornly.

“We can evacuate the town in them, can’t we? Shouldn’t we have to if there were an air raid?”

“That’s right,” he said, his literal mind finally catching something to hold onto.

“Think of Dunkirk,” she said to nail the picture before him.

“Uh-huh.”

While Copithorne was mulling it, Jeremiah Tobin arrived. Hannah noted the time. He was ten minutes late. She bade her secretary have him wait beyond the rail.

“You’d take charge of it, Hannah?”

“If I were given the authority,” she said. “Complete authority.”

“Naturally. Are you free tonight?”

Hannah lifted her head. “I expect to be.”

“Come up to the chamber and put it before the council meeting. I’ll support you.”

“Thank you, John.”

There was a day’s work started, she thought, hanging up the phone, well started even if it were never done. The things she could start now and, given a chance, the things she could bring to a fine conclusion. When Tobin had waited the ten minutes she had waited for him, she beckoned her secretary to bring him in. Measure for measure.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Tobin.”

“I was late,” he apologized. “My clerk didn’t show up this morning.”

“The telephone?” she suggested.

“There was orders coming in,” he murmured. “And it just didn’t seem right to come to the bank for a loan when there was business on the phone. Business isn’t bad, you see, Miss Blake. It’s just that I’ve got to get more of it. Now if you’ll let me tell you the way I figure to do that—”

Hannah’s mind slid away from his dubious economics as he expounded them at length, driving them into her desk with a black-bordered fingernail. Twenty minutes to eleven, a quarter to eleven.

“You see, Miss Blake, the chain stores make it tough for the likes of me. The margin of profit they buy on, they can afford to cut prices.”

She was not aware of any sound merchandiser buying on a margin of profit. “And you can’t cut prices under any circumstances?” she interrupted.

“That’s right,” he said. “I got a conscience, you see. I got to do right by myself.”

“I see,” Hannah murmured, and a second later when she did see she smiled. “That’s a marvelous conscience, Mr. Tobin.”

But Tobin by then was off and winging over the fine store he intended to build. She rocked in her chair, half-listening, waiting. Her awareness of the change in the street, among the patrons and employees, came on Hannah as the sun might pass behind a cloud, casting a ponderous shadow. She stiffened, sensing it, and then watched fascinated, as with the quick lightnings tokening an imminent storm.

Across the street, Jim Hendricks came out of his barbershop. He elbowed a customer out of the way as he locked the door. His hand went to his pocket, touching the gun there. He glimpsed the inside pocket of his coat—his auxiliary police badge there. The whole street had seen the badge and gun the day he got them. He crossed the street, spoke to the bank guard, and then ran to his car. The guard moved to the police call box. Hendricks’s customer had stopped two women, their arms full of groceries—It was the last specific incident Hannah observed, for inside the bank the customers had broken their rank at the teller’s window, the clerks had abandoned their files, the accountants their ledgers—and Jeremiah Tobin talked on.

“‘Let him on the housetop not come down to take anything out of his house,’” Hannah said.

“Beg pardon?”

“‘Neither let him in the field turn back for his coat.’”

Tobin looked at her, his mouth sagging. Hannah was tempted to laugh in his long, silly face. “Excuse me,” she said. She pushed the desk buzzer for her secretary. In long demanding rings she drove her finger down on it.

Tobin finally looked around. “Hey, what’s going on?”

Nancy yielded her attention—a quick, annoyed glance from where she was crowding a huddle of clerks. Hannah waved her in. She came to the door.

“It’s Mrs. Verlaine. She was murdered. They say she was hanged. Isn’t it terrible?”

“That’s a mistake,” Hannah said, but the remark was inaudible under Tobin’s epithet.

“Holy Christ in the foothills!”

18

HANNAH WAS RELIGIOUS IN her pursuit of normalcy, and she decided, should someone comment on her indifference, she would explain that she was merely setting a good example. That one needed setting was obvious, whole batches of employees taking off at once as though to the polls on election. Hannah stayed at her desk until twelve-thirty. She wrote notes on her plans for the celebration of Campbell’s Cove Day.

At twelve-thirty she walked down the street to lunch at the tearoom as was her custom, and while she had her choice of tables, the restaurant gradually received more patrons. The idle and the curious were returning to High Street. Her usual waitress was back in time to take her order for dessert.

“You should of seen the sheriff clean us out. Was he mad, Miss Blake!”

“You were in the house?” Hannah said.

“Not me. A lot of people were, though. Isn’t it awful what some people’ll do? And her lying in there. You should of heard the sheriff blaming Chief Matheson. Poor Matt.”

“Really,” Hannah said.

“Don’t take the custard, Miss Blake. It’s got lumps. A jackass he called him right in front of all them people.”

“I’ve never thought Matheson stupid,” she said. In fact, she had never really thought about the Cove police chief at all.

“What could he do—shoot people? There was swarms of them all over the place. That’s the sheriff blowing his own horn. Elections this fall.” She nudged Hannah’s arm.

“And Mrs. Verlaine is dead,” Hannah said.

“Yeah. Strangled. She was a queer duck. All right in her own way I guess. But I’ll tell you, Miss Blake, if anybody was ever to say to me—before this happened even—if they’d of asked me to name one person in the Cove who was the kind to get themselves murdered, I’d of said right off—Mrs. Verlaine. Now isn’t that a coincidence?”

“Yes,” Hannah said. “That’s a coincidence.”

“Something about her, you know, and living alone like that in a big house—”

“I live alone—and in a big house,” Hannah said.

The girl giggled, a silly, intimate ha-ha. “Sure, but you know how to take care of yourself.”

I’ve got a conscience, Hannah thought. I can do right by myself.

19

“YOU’RE MISS BLAKE?” SHE met the eyes of the young man at her desk. All afternoon she had waited for his coming, him or someone like him. He stood before her, his hands on her desk, but behind them a cartridge belt shone with the nubbed heads of bullets.

“I’m George Schenk, deputy sheriff. I’ve got a warrant—” He straightened up and put his hand in his blouse pocket.

And she had even anticipated his first words, and steeled herself to the easy manner with which she would accept them, take her hat and purse, and walk from the bank in his custody.

“It’s to open Mrs. Verlaine’s safety box,” he explained when he had the paper in hand.

Hannah controlled her mouth, making a shape out of her lipstick, one lip smoothing the other. She spread the paper on her desk, free of her trembling hand. What it said beyond Odenah County she would never know.

“Come with me, Mr. Schenk,” She walked before him in stiff dignity, and at the vault bade the custodian bring him Maria’s box. She herself selected the key from the tray of duplicates and gave it to the deputy. “You will return it to my desk.”

She waited then, again alone in her office with the clock. Nothing in the way of direct clues had appeared, by the indication of this visit. Or was this the routine of duty? Of investigation? It was forty minutes later that the deputy brought the key, a notebook in his hand which he pocketed at her desk. Apparently, he had noted and described everything in the box, from securities to will, if Maria had left one. He looked very sour, she thought.

“Tedious,” she murmured solicitously.

“Not a damned thing in it except paper. Thank you, ma’am.”

She realized what he had been sent to look for. “You were looking for her jewels?”

“Yes’m.”

“They belonged here certainly,” she said.

What a fantastic turn! Her mind leaped to the implications of it—the pursuit of robbers, the delays, the questioning of all sorts of people. But the jewels should be in the house—right there before their eyes, in a place so simple they were blind to it in their search of dark corners.

“More than once, I recommended it,” she added.

“It seems like half the people in Campbell’s Cove recommended it, Miss Blake. Too bad she didn’t take some advice.”

Hannah looked at him. “And this, you think, cost her her life?”

“I couldn’t say that, ma’am, but it could be.”

“Doesn’t the sheriff want to see me, Mr. Schenk? I was a friend of Mrs. Verlaine’s.”

He smiled patronizingly. “I’ll tell him that, Miss Blake. He’s real busy now, but I’ll mention it. Thanks for your co-operation.”

Hannah rose from her desk as he started off. “Do tell him,” she called after him from the office door. “It might be important.”

It would not have been out of character for Maria to have shipped the jewels back to where they came from, she mused, returning to her desk. Having won them, she was quite capable of flinging them in the faces of her French in-laws. It was very much in character. That, too, would come out in time if it were so, and people would say: “Just like Maria.”

And what was like Hannah, she wondered then; who knew her well enough to say of anything she did: “Just like Hannah.” Half the town thought they did. The clerks beyond her office had confided in their glances a smug understanding of her when she had called after the sheriff’s deputy. Not in a hundred years would they suspect her of so profound an accomplishment as—murder. There was the word, the word for the deed, the deed done. Only Hannah knew Hannah. But the deed undone, not in a hundred years, would she suspect Hannah either.

20

HANNAH TOUCHED THE DOORBELL and waited. Through the screen door she saw the big yellow-and-black cat raise his head from where he was sleeping on the hall bench. He looked at her and then tucked his head again into his stomach. She heard slow footsteps overhead, and Mrs. Merritt called down from the top of the stairs, “What is it?”

Her voice was dull; sleep, perhaps, Hannah thought. Asleep on the day her son’s engagement was announced.

“It’s Hannah Blake, Mrs. Merritt,” she called out. “If you’re resting I’ll call another time.”

“I’m not resting, Miss Blake. Make yourself at home. I’ll be right down.”

It was a cold, or tears, not weariness in her voice, Hannah thought. She went in, playing her fingers over the sleeping cat as she passed on her way to the living-room. There was no joy here, she decided, no frenzy of preparation for the marriage feast. The room was as neat as a star, but Elizabeth and Tom, smiling, from their confirmation pictures, were the brightest things in it. It had always been a house she envied, despite its poverty. She had rarely visited here, whether to bring charity or to have a dress fitted, when half the neighborhood wasn’t crowding it. And among the warmest moments she recollected was Mrs. Merritt’s greeting. It always seemed to tell a newcomer that he was the most welcome of all. Now she heard her on the stairs, one footfall following another in heavy measure. Whatever it was oppressing this woman should not have been allowed, she thought. She moved back to the doorway and held both her hands out.

“How nice to see you, Miss Hannah.” Mrs. Merritt gave her the one hand free, and then the other when she let go of the railing.

Her legs couldn’t keep pace with her spirit, Hannah thought. But her smile still told its marvelous welcome, drawing every line in her face into it.

“I came to wish you joy,” Hannah said, choosing the best of words she could find. “I saw the notice in the paper this morning.”

“The marriage notice?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Merritt said. “Please sit down. I’ll put on the kettle.”

“No, don’t trouble, Mrs. Merritt. I can’t stay. Too much has happened.”

“Yes. That was a terrible thing.” She went to the window and raised the blinds. “The sun fades the carpet and it hurts my eyes a little.” She rubbed them, as though to prove it. “Elizabeth says I don’t have enough light to sew by. Maybe it’s time I listened to her. How are you, Miss Hannah?” The woman was slow in choosing her words, slow in her movements.

“I’m well, thank you.”

“Land’s sakes, sit down a minute at least.”

Hannah obeyed her, but waited until Mrs. Merritt herself had chosen a chair away from the light. Then she sat beside her.

“There’s so much to be done, but I just don’t seem to be able to get at it, and now this terrible business.”

“Has the sheriff been to see Elizabeth?”

“Yes. He was to see her at the library, and he was here.”

“Why here?”

Mrs. Merritt stroked the arm of the chair already worn smooth. “He wanted to know where she was last night. He wanted to see her jewelry box. Elizabeth doesn’t have a jewelry box, except the one the pearls Tom gave her came in.”

The fool, Hannah thought, the stupid fool, with a sheriff’s badge and a politician’s arrogance.

“I don’t know where Elizabeth was last night,” the old woman continued listlessly. “Tom drove me up to Jefferson City. Elizabeth wouldn’t come with us.”

“She was working,” Hannah said.

“Yes. And then she came home. Tom called her from the drugstore in Jefferson City.”

That was a lie, Hannah realized, and anyone could guess it from the way the old woman had said it by rote.

“Where is Tom?” she asked.

“I think he’s with Elizabeth now. They were going for a drive.”

Hannah felt the anger rising in her. What right had they to leave the old woman alone like this at such a time?

“It’s a fine time for a drive,” she said.

“I’m glad they’re together,” Mrs. Merritt said, unaware of Hannah’s implied criticism. “They were always very close. Too close, maybe. I just don’t know. When I was a girl down on Front Street, we used to have evening prayers together, around the kitchen stove. Then we could go out till bedtime. Or when we got older we could have the parlor. But my father and mother sat in the kitchen till we all went to bed. It’s no good, a woman sitting there alone.”

Hannah was not sure of her meaning, except that perhaps she waited for children who did not come to her.

“Where will Tom and his bride live?” she asked.

“Here. That’s why I should be so busy. I just don’t know where to start.”

Why here? Hannah wondered. The house was small, adequate to three people, but not to four when two of them were just married. Nor was it poverty. Elizabeth could support herself and her mother. Tom could afford a home of his own.

“A few weeks ago I suggested to Tom that he start his own business,” Hannah said. “I told him—maybe not in so many words, but in effect—that I thought the financing of it could be done through the bank. I wish you would remind him of that.”

Mrs. Merritt smiled, her face alive again. “That would be very nice. Tom is a good boy, Miss Blake, and he’s marrying a real nice girl.”

“Has he known her for long?”

“She’s a demonstrator in the Worthy Stores. He’s known her a long time.”

Nothing special in the way of a match, Hannah thought. She pondered a question and then decided to risk it. “What’s Elizabeth’s objection?”

Mrs. Merritt shook her head. “I don’t know. She’s been at him to marry Phyllis for a long time. I was the one who didn’t want it very much. I wanted him to marry a Catholic girl, but she’s turning. I just don’t understand Elizabeth. And now this awful business.”

Hannah leaned back. Tom Merritt had always had the reputation of having an easy way with the girls. It accounted for his long bachelorhood. No doubt Miss Phyllis was one of the easy ones, and Elizabeth, so highly moral, had tried to prod him into marriage with her. It was simple. Now it was quite and horribly simple; there was no end to which Tom Merritt would not go to prevent his sister from her association with Dennis Koegh. He was marrying to that purpose, and bringing his wife here where their presence might be a constant reprimand to Elizabeth. But what was the source of his deep antagonism to Dennis? That he was a poet? A laborer? His youth? The answer was not here, not with Mrs. Merritt.

“Don’t you worry about it, Mrs. Merritt. The sheriff and his deputies are talking to everybody who knew Maria. One of them came to see me this afternoon.”

“Did they want to see your jewelry box, too?” she asked bitterly.

“Not yet, but I expect it.” Hannah got up stiffly. “Sit and rest yourself, Mrs. Merritt.”

“Will you come again, Miss Hannah? We used to have such nice visits together.”

“I’ll try,” she whispered, leaning close to the old woman and brushing her forehead with her lips. “God bless you.”

21

HANNAH KNEW, THE INSTANT she turned into her own driveway, that she had not been neglected by the sheriff. Two county cars were parked there, and at the garage door Deputy Schenk was talking to Dennis. He tipped his hat as she drove up.

“The sheriff’s waiting for you inside, ma’am,” he said.

Dennis, his expression darker than she had ever seen it, looked as though he wanted to speak to her as their eyes met. Schenk, however, insinuated himself between them, making an elaborate business of opening the car door for her and closing it behind her.

“Dennis—”

The deputy interrupted. “Sheriff Walker’s been waiting quite a while, Miss Blake.”

She looked at him boldly. “Then a moment more won’t vex him.” He would have had to forcibly detain her as she brushed by him. “Dennis, at your convenience, and at the deputy’s, please put the car in the garage.” To Schenk she gave the explanation meant for Dennis. “I rarely go out evenings.”

“Yes, Miss Blake,” the boy said.

She turned toward the house and put one foot before the other in a rhythm calculated to avoid limping. What, she wondered, would Dennis take from the explanation? Twice—on her way from the house that morning and now—she had implied that she was home all evening and that she assumed he had been. That should fall in nicely with his needs also, if he intended to keep his meeting with Elizabeth a secret. The why of that was something else again, of course, and something she could not afford to think about at the moment. Still, it was a cozy arrangement, her accounting for Dennis, and Tom Merritt accounting for Elizabeth. But let it be so.

She closed her mind on it. Behind her, as she turned her head, she saw the deputy walking at his ease about her car, noticing her license number, perhaps. It might have been that the truck driver had observed it last night—a simple combination. No. In that case the state license bureau could have provided her name instantly. It would not wait the lazy observation of a sheriff’s deputy. Nursing such fears she was enemy to herself. No one had seen the car. The Wilkses lived across the street from Maria. They had not seen it. She could not even remember if there had been a light in their house.

Meanwhile, the sheriff was watching from the study window. What crassness, entering her house, and demanding of Sophie the run of it, and getting it. Precious little rein Sophie put upon them. Nor did Sophie have much rein on herself, Hannah observed at first glimpse. The child’s face was working, tear-streaked, and in that second Hannah felt a great compassion for her; there had not been much pleasure in this house for Sophie either, and she had been faithful to Hannah through her own misery over Dennis. Her worship of the boy was not to be made little of because Sophie was a “country girl.”

Lord God, what a torment of crosscuts was her own mind now, Hannah thought. Striking at malefaction, she had herself been stricken with a hundred wounds.

“I tried, Miss Blake,” was all the girl could say as she attempted to follow Hannah through the hall to the study. No one could keep the pace Hannah set, grinding her sore foot on the floor with every step.

“Of course you tried, Sophie,” she said without pausing. “Don’t let them make you cry.”

The sheriff met her at the door. “We don’t aim to make people cry, Miss Blake. We just like ’em to talk.”

“Then you and I shall talk,” Hannah said, feeling more calm in meeting this challenge than she knew to be her right.

“Good. I’ve been waiting quite a while.”

“Not without the hospitality of my house,” Hannah said. That he had been uninhibited in his exploration of it was obvious to her at a glance. A table drawer was not quite closed, the letter folder on her desk, when she put her hand to it, was backward. “I assume you have a search warrant, Sheriff Walker?”

The sheriff smiled, watching her scan the room for the changes in it. There was little of the county sheriff about him. Rather, he looked like an ambitious lawyer, well-groomed, the cut of his clothes almost dapper. And his smile was handy—to be used instead of words at the propitious moment. Altogether, there was more precision about him than the half-closed drawer and the folder indicated. They were a calculated ruse, she decided, intended for her intimidation.

“May we sit down, Miss Blake?”

“I should like to sit down, yes. It’s been a strenuous day.”

“For you, too?” he said, waiting for her to choose their seats. “No, I don’t have a warrant. Let’s just say I’m a bad-mannered guest. My deputy tells me you were a friend of Mrs. Verlaine’s.”

“I was.”

“Too bad—what happened to her.”

Hannah’s nerves responded badly to his ease. “For whom?”

“For somebody—in good time. I don’t suppose you have any idea where she kept those fancy jewels of hers?”

“None.”

“You saw them?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

Hannah described the occasion and, on his query, the jewels themselves.

He drew a notebook from his pocket, selected the page, and handed it to her. It was Deputy Schenck’s notations from the safety box, that page devoted to a description of the jewels taken apparently from insurance papers. “Did you see all of these pieces that night?”

She scanned the page. “I couldn’t honestly say, sheriff. I didn’t count them.”

He grunted and returned the book to his pocket. It was almost a game, sitting here in her own study, detailing the inconsequential, a dangerous game, should she reveal her awareness of its unimportance. “I was the last one to see them that night,” she added. “And I remember thinking at the time, she took better care of her everyday silver than she did of them.”

“Let’s go over this carefully,” he said. “She had them laid out on a cloth—”

“A satin cloth,” Hannah prompted. “And as she was about to go to the door with me, she flung the surplus of it over them as if it were a dish cloth.”

“You’re certain, Miss Blake, she didn’t put them away while you were waiting?”

“Quite certain.”

“Was the maid there?”

Hannah remembered quite distinctly the woman Annie’s presence and titter over Maria’s debunking. But at the moment, she had no desire to involve poor Annie. “I don’t recall that she was.”

The sheriff got up. “It’s damned queer if she was so easygoing about them, nobody ever saw her put ’em away or get ’em out. Nobody admits seeing that.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised if she kept them in a buffet drawer,” Hannah said.

The sheriff turned on her. “Can you show me the buffet drawer?”

She did not answer.

He was looking at her, but his mind was on something else. “I’d just like to be dead certain somebody didn’t walk out with them this morning—for a souvenir. Matheson might as well’ve sold tickets, he had such a crowd.”

“Matheson is handicapped by a small force,” Hannah said.

“That isn’t the smallest thing he’s handicapped by. My boys had to take over.”

“So I’ve heard,” Hannah murmured. My boys, she thought, her contempt for him rising the more he concentrated on the jewels. She would not have put it past his boys to have gathered souvenirs.

“Now it’s funny you should mention that silver, Miss Blake. There was a silverware chest on the buffet, and when we got to it, there was one tray empty. Interesting?”

“Perhaps someone helped himself to a handful of silver, too,” she said.

The corners of Walker’s mouth quivered with wry amusement. “Like Judas, huh?”

Hannah held her eyes on his, but for an instant he seemed to shimmer before them.

“Ever see a silk cord in her house—like a cord from a bathrobe, only longer, ten feet maybe, one tassel?”

“No.”

Walker straightened up. “Nobody saw a thing. A home for the blind, she kept!”

What went ye out to see? Hannah thought, her mind spinning back with the phrase to another time when it had come to her, talking to Maria last night. No, not last night—long ago as a child home there for cookies and milk after Sunday school, white-frocked and white-minded.

“Yes?” Walker said.

He had been watching her. She relaxed her hands where they had grown taut on the arms of the chair.

“I was remembering,” Hannah said. “Remembering my childhood with Maria.”

“You were old friends,” the sheriff said. “Old friends aren’t always good ones. Tell me, did you like Mrs. Verlaine?”

Hannah tried to think about it. “I loved her,” she said, and the words, prompted from beyond her expectancy, moved her first to surprise and then to a sense of pain which burst within her like a blister, starting tears.

The sheriff touched her shoulder, passing. He walked to the window and back. “Understand, Miss Blake, this is my job. I’ve got to ask you all these questions.”

“Of course.” Hannah went to her desk for tissue, and returned with the box of it.

“When did you last see Mrs. Verlaine?”

“I called on her a few days ago, Monday, I think. I only stayed a few minutes. It was a trivial matter.” On Monday she had met Maria on the post office steps, but the fear that she might have left some sign of her presence in the house last night prompted the lie.

“What trivial matter?”

“Church, which is not trivial, but Maria took it rather lightly.”

“Who else was in the house, Miss Blake?”

Why this, why this? she wondered. “No one that I noticed.”

“No maid to let you in?”

“I don’t remember Annie’s being about. I was there but a minute.” Dangerous, dangerous, she thought. Annie might swear she had not been there.

“Where did you sit?”

“I’m not even sure I sat down,” she said; “I don’t understand—”

“Never mind. She was pretty thick with this Sykes fellow, wasn’t she?”

“I believe they were intimate.”

“Intimate?”

“By which I mean they were friends. How should I know the extent of their intimacy?”

“Your loyalty isn’t going to pin your friend’s murderer to the wall, Miss Blake. I know Sykes has a wife in the East. They’ve been in and out of the courts for years over his—indiscretions.”

“Really,” Hannah murmured. “You’ve been marvelously quick in your work, sheriff.”

“No, I’m slow, in fact. I had a summons to serve on him once. But he has a lot of friends. I didn’t serve it.”

“So frank,” Hannah murmured.

“Realistic, that’s all, Miss Blake. I’m a politician and I admit it.”

“Don’t you think such information could be dangerous in the hands of your opponents?”

He smiled and sat on the arm of a chair. “In the hands of my opponents—possibly.”

I am naïve, Hannah thought. I’ve never known the extent of my naïveté. “Police officers shouldn’t be in politics,” she said.

“On the contrary. In most instances, that’s how they get to be police officers. It’s the way of the world, inheritance or politics. Whatever name is put on them, they’re its twin rulers. Where did you go last night, Miss Blake?”

What a delicate snare! “I was home last night,” she said evenly. “I was reading, and I went to bed early.”

“Any witnesses?”

“I live alone, Mr. Walker.”

“Excuse me,” he said with more than a little sarcasm. “But witnesses sometimes come in handy, even embarrassing ones.”

“I have none—either to help or to embarrass me.”

“Your girl lives out?”

“Yes.”

“What about the kid over the garage?”

“I should think he would be able to tell you whether or not I took the car out.”

“Are you able to tell me that he didn’t go out?”

“I’m not in the habit of checking up on the people who work for me. I noticed the light in his room. I presumed he was there.”

“It’s too bad I can’t go on presumptions, too,” the sheriff said. “Did you know that he was at Verlaine’s three nights ago?”

“Yes. He told me.”

Walker grunted. “Democratic, wasn’t she?”

Hannah did not answer. But safe from him, she would destroy him if she got the chance, she thought. He was corrupt and cynical, but her best friend of the moment.

“Don’t you ever go out without the car?” he asked then.

“Not often. It’s some distance to the Cove.” It occurred to her then that she might turn one of her worries to an advantage. “And last night especially I wasn’t likely to.” She extended her foot. “I sprained my ankle yesterday.”

He made a noise of commiseration. “Did you see a doctor?”

“No. It’s happened before. I have weak ankles.”

His eyes took in the good one. “What were you reading?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said you were reading last night. What?”

“Poetry,” she said, fearful that if she were asked the title of a book, none would come to mind.

He showed his teeth in a smile, but there was little mirth in it. “It looks like the town is infested with it.”

“We are having a contest for Campbell’s Cove Day.”

“That’s nice. You’re entering it, too, are you?”

She tried to think what might have prompted the question. “No. I decided against it.”

Walker stood up. “Is that what you burned in the fireplace?”

“I was cold,” she said. “It was a chilly night.”

He moved quickly to her desk and opened the folder. Something had been left there, to surprise her should she have turned the cover. He picked up a piece of half-burned paper, and read aloud:

“‘Love has unbound my limbs, and set me shaking. A monster bitter-sweet and my unmaking.’”

He let the paper drop to the desk. “With that sort of stuff you had to light a fire to keep warm? Ha!”

Hannah folded her hands very tightly. “I shall not answer another of your questions until I see the warrant whereby you searched my house.”

“Searched is not the word, Miss Blake. I observed. If I’d searched you’d have known it. What have you got here you don’t want me to see?”

“Not Maria’s jewels certainly.”

“What?”

“Some things are very private.”

He jerked his head toward the desk. “That stuff I just read?”

She lifted her chin. “That stuff.”

“Autobiography?”

She did not answer.

He smiled broadly. “You wouldn’t be sweet on this Sykes fellow yourself?”

“I haven’t now, I never had, and I never will have enough sweetness for that.”

“Well, I had to ask. There’s no accounting for tastes.” The sheriff picked up his hat. “That’s all for now. I want you to go down to the station house tonight and let them fingerprint you.”

“I expect to be very busy tonight,” Hannah said.

“If I were you, I’d make time for that, Miss Blake.”

22

AS HE HAD NO doubt opened the door and walked in, so he let himself out, and Hannah saw him presently as he crossed the lawn to where his deputy still stood with Dennis. He went to work on the boy with a barrage of questions then. She could tell by the snapping of his head, quick-fire, before Dennis had a chance to dodge them. Sophie came to the study door.

“Is he gone, Miss Blake?”

“Temporarily at least,” she said without turning from the window. “Come in, Sophie. It must have been very difficult for you.”

“He wanted to know all about Dennis.”

Strange, Hannah thought. He had asked her nothing at all about the boy. She realized then that if the jewels were the issue on which the sheriff chose to concentrate, Dennis was a very likely suspect. He had been to Maria’s house three nights before, he might be presumed to have seen them and to have known her attitude toward them, and he was, in effect, a vagrant upon the town. Why then had the sheriff not asked her about him, where he had come from, why she hired him?

“And did you tell him all about Dennis?” she asked over her shoulder.

“I told him how I used to go out with him—I mean, how I used to sit in the boats, and how he used to recite to me.”

“You didn’t tell me that he recited to you, Sophie.”

“No, ma’am.”

Hannah looked around at the girl and smiled.

“I thought you’d think it was silly,” Sophie added, her eyes on the floor.

“I think it’s very touching,” Hannah murmured, returning to her vigil. “Did the sheriff want to know what he recited to you?”

“Uh-huh. Like in school was all I could tell him, like in ‘this is the forest primeval—’”

“What is primeval?” Hannah mused aloud, playing on the word.

“I don’t know, Miss Blake.”

“Of course you don’t. I wonder who in this world does.” She stretched the words tortuously, twisting the drapes in her fingers with the same deliberateness. She let them go. “What else did the officer ask?”

Sophie hesitated. “He wanted to know if Dennis was ever in the house, this part of the house, and I said no. But I invited him in the kitchen sometimes and I told him. Not very often, Miss Blake, just a couple of times—”

Hannah interrupted. “Why should you not invite him into the kitchen? Have I ever forbidden it?”

“No, ma’am. And then he wanted to know if Dennis spent much money on me, and I said all he ever bought me was a Coke and once a bandanna for my hair.”

“Was the officer upstairs?”

“Here?”

“Of course.”

“No, but he was all over Dennis’s room.”

“I see.” Hannah looked at her watch. “I shall want dinner at six-thirty. And, Sophie, don’t worry. I’m sure Dennis will be all right.”

As soon as the sheriff and his deputy departed, their sirens screaming as they turned toward town, Hannah went to the porch. Dennis was closing the garage door, having put her car away. She called to him and waved him to the house. He followed her into the study without speaking.

“Well, Dennis, we seem to have been involved in something.”

He slumped into a chair. “It’s a mess,” he said.

“I suppose they asked you all sorts of questions?”

He nodded.

“Did you tell the truth?”

“Why not?” he said, which she assumed to be an evasion of her question.

“I told them I believed you were in your room all last night,” she said. “I did see a light there.”

“Thank you very much, Miss Blake.”

“You were, weren’t you?” She turned the question on him as though he himself had cast a sudden doubt on the issue.

“Yes. Of course.”

He was by no means calm, she realized, for all that he had seemed to relax into the chair. He was taut in the position he had taken there, and the muscles of his face were tight, even to making his skin pale in splotches beneath the sunburn.

The lie might have been contrived to protect Elizabeth from something, to conceal their rendezvous of last night, for he and Elizabeth had been locked together in an—alibi. Why? And why did Mrs. Merritt apparently know nothing of their association, of the real issue between Elizabeth and her brother?

“I doubt if they’ll do much of anything until they find the jewels,” Hannah said.

“I never stole anything in my life, Miss Blake.”

“I’m sure you haven’t,” she murmured. “And Mrs. Verlaine was very nice to you.”

Dennis fumbled for a cigarette. “That’s an open question.”

Hannah looked at him and repeated, “An open question?”

He lit the cigarette and took a deep pull at it. “Damn my nerves. They go to pieces at a time like this,” he said, watching the tremble of his own hands.

“In what way was Maria unkind?” Hannah persisted.

“She wasn’t unkind. But she thinks I’m a phony, and she said so right out.”

“Did she?” Hannah said. “That’s like Maria.” But there was something wrong, she thought, something completely out of joint. “And I’d say it was very unkind of her.”

“She was entitled to her opinion,” Dennis said, almost roughly.

“But Mr. Sykes didn’t share it,” Hannah prompted.

“I don’t know if it affected him or not, and I don’t really give a damn.” He pulled himself up in the chair and sat with his hands between his knees, the smoke from the cigarette rising into his face and not seeming to bother him. “That’s a silly thing to say. I do care. A great deal. Not only for myself. Elizabeth Merritt asked him to read my things.”

“And you’re fond of Elizabeth?”

He was on guard for that, she thought. She should not have asked it. “She’s been very nice to me,” he said coldly.

Hannah got up from the chair. She had to know, she thought. She had to know about this boy whom Maria called a phony. She stood above him looking down on the fair, ruffled hair. He always had the smell, the essence of the outdoors about him. For all that he was writhing now, he always seemed to ooze the fine, clean life virgin dreams thrived on, and he wrote with a wild and naked boldness which compelled unfortunates like herself to one of two alternatives: to strip before him and try to become his poem, or—to put more clothes on.

She forced a smile and put her hand to his chin, lifting it. “What does it matter now, what Maria thought?”

He leaned back in the chair escaping her hand. And from the words he flung at her, his mouth half twisted in a smile, she took insult.

“How do you know she wasn’t right?”

She left him without a word and went upstairs.

23

THIS WAS TO BE no ordinary council meeting, Hannah realized as soon as she was within sight of the municipal building. The lawns and doorway were crowded with townspeople, most of whom she knew by sight at least. She spoke a word here and there, pushing through, but scarcely got a nod, so involved were they, each little group, in their exchange of hearsay.

The stairs to the council chamber over the offices were lined with people demanding admission. They grumbled behind her as the great doors at the top were opened to her and closed against them. The chamber itself, a high-ceilinged room the length of the building, was filled with straining, restless people. There was nasty tempers among them, mostly in the Front Street crowd, headed by Dan O’Gorman. She greeted him and then moved quickly to where she was more at home.

Ed Baker was propounding a theory. He was full of them, she thought. Maria’s maid, it seemed, was off for a couple of days, visiting her nephew in Jefferson City. “A convenience,” Baker said. “A real convenience.” He jerked his head toward the Front Streeters. “What do you think’s got them riled up?”

Hannah began to sense something of the trouble. Annie Tullie herself came up from Front Street. She had a legion of friends and relatives there.

“But I’ll tell you this,” Baker said to anyone who would listen, “from what I know of Maria, she wasn’t the kind to sit in the chair and wait for somebody to walk in and strangle her. Somebody held a gun on her.”

“Then why the devil didn’t they use the gun?”

A logical question, Hannah thought.

“Too much noise. Besides, they can trace bullets to guns and guns to people,” Baker said profoundly.

From the group behind her, Hannah learned that the coroner had ordered an autopsy, and that it was now in progress.

“What’s that going to prove?” someone asked.

“It’s going to prove the sheriffs right.”

She turned to see who was speaking. The voice was familiar and bitter. It was Matheson, the police chief of Campbell’s Cove. He looked as though he were trying to find a place to spit. “No matter what comes out of it, that’s what it’s going to prove—that Walker was right. When the sheriff itches, the coroner scratches, and when the coroner scratches, the county prosecutor runs the bath. I ain’t saying he takes a bath, mind you. I’m just saying he lets the water run.”

There was a murmur of laughter. “Better watch your self with talk like that, Matt,” someone suggested.

“I’ve been talking like that for ten years,” the policeman said. “Nobody can hear me for that goddam water running and running and running.” He emphasized his point with the downward swing of his long arm. Everybody laughed. “It ain’t funny no more!” Matheson shouted.

Hannah moved on.

“The thing that beats me, nobody hearing anything at her place. The Wilkses live in plain view, right across the street.”

Hannah could not remember even a glance toward their house. The only light she recalled was the truck’s headlights.

“And they were home,” John Copithorne said. “Playing bridge in the living-room, the windows open.” He shook his head—as profound as Baker. “An inside job.”

At that moment Franklin Wilks was trying to push by toward the meeting table. “Are you calling the meeting or not, John?”

“No hurry,” Copithorne said. “Let ’em thin out. They’ll get tired waiting. You play a tight game of bridge, Frank.”

“I’m getting a little sick of remarks like that. I think we should adjourn—” Someone ended the sentence, jarring against him. “Who the devil let all these people in?”

Copithorne cocked his head like an old gossip, Hannah thought. “Nothing, Frank? You didn’t hear a thing?”

Small grief here for Maria, and John an old love. He would bow his head at the memorial—and notice that his shoelace was untied.

“As a matter of fact, we did hear something, the grinding of car gears. It’s not the sort of thing you think much about. I believe I made a joke about it—a woman driver, or something like that.”

Not much of a joke, Hannah thought, but par for Franklin Wilks.

“Now that’s real queer, Mr. Wilks.” Hannah did not recognize the speaker. “I was standing outside Molly’s Diner. I work down there. Me and another fellow was standing there jawing about something, and we heard the most god-awful grinding of gears.”

“All the way from her place?” Copithorne asked.

There were times when he was quite stupid, Hannah thought. Without Ruth, he was nothing. With her, he was a leader in the Cove.

“No later than nine-thirty,” the restaurant worker said. “I’m in bed by ten. I get up at four.”

Then hurry home, Hannah thought, hurry home.

Matheson turned to Wilks. “What time did you hear it?”

“After ten. I’m sure of that. Is Jim Travers here?”

Travers, principal of the high school, was haled into the group, and confirmed Wilks’s calculation of the time. They had begun their last rubber at ten minutes after ten and they had heard it not long afterward.

“It indicates a line of travel,” Matheson said.

“And perhaps someone else heard the gears grinding when he returned to the water front,” Hannah said, and wished immediately that she had kept her silence.

Matheson looked at her. “Well, there’s enough deputies down there right now.”

“What sent them down there?” Copithorne asked.

“Can’t you guess that?”

Annie Tully, Hannah thought, allowing herself to be jostled back. They were seeking the jewels, the trail of the thief.

“Pounding hell out of our people, that’s what they’re doing down there right now, turning our houses in on us.” O’Gorman had found an audience. The big Irishman pounded his fist on the back of a bench, and, Hannah thought, he could cleave it in two. Around him were gathered twenty or more of his kind, fishermen or the descendants of fishermen, their eyes as blue and deep as the water they plumbed for a living. A clannish sort by trade and origin, by the hours they kept and the church they supported, they were first suspect in every trouble in the Cove, and suspect now. She was infected with O’Gorman’s wrath, knowing it to be righteous. The whole chamber was rocking with unrest, and there was not a hand raised to steady it.

“We’ve the rights of citizens,” O’Gorman cried, “and it’s time we proclaimed them.”

“And time they were heard,” Hannah called, loud and clear.

The O’Gorman group parted like waves, opening a way for her. She moved through it, awed at the effect among them of her words on their behalf. She raised her voice again, louder still. “Councilmen, will you call the meeting?”

“Aye, call the meeting!” the fishermen echoed. Beyond them, another group picked up the demand. Soon the whole chamber was reverberating with the chant: “Call the meeting! Call the meeting!”

Hannah thrilled to the sound and the echo of it. She strained on tiptoe to see its effect on the Bakers, the Copithornes, the Wilkses. Their faces seemed collapsed in the shock. A hand beneath her elbow propelled her to the side a few steps and then hoisted her up on a bench. The quick strength of O’Gorman ran through her, doubling the beat of her heart. She laid her hand on his shoulder to steady herself and felt the rough wool of his shirt and beneath it the taut-muscled power.

One by one the council members were recovering, disentangling themselves from the crowd, working forward. Copithorne caught up the gavel and pounded it on the table, soundless in the chant. He was striking rhythm with the chant, wood meeting wood on the word “call,” accelerating the cry, not breaking through it. Wilks plucked the gavel from him and made an ack-ack of sound.

Seven men took their places at the table. The eighth chair, where one woman had previously sat with them, was unclaimed.

The noise would not be stilled. Hannah pounded down from the bench and lunged through the dissidents. When she reached the railing, she flung herself through the gate and faced the townspeople. Raising her arms like an evangelist, she started to sing the “Star Spangled Banner,” and summoned everyone to join her, her hands demanding a conductor’s response.

The chant was stilled and halfway through the anthem, everyone was at attention. She glanced at the council. They were hunched behind their chairs, holding onto the backs of them for dear life. John Copithorne wiped the sweat from his face. She left the song to its own command and moved to his side. He motioned her toward the vacant chair.

No, Hannah thought. I shall have this seat, but not at an invitation from you, John, nor by your referment, Franklin Wilks. She ignored the gesture, and pulled him down to where she could speak into his ear.

“Start the meeting at once. Don’t lose a minute.”

“With this mob?”

“Just start it!” Hannah shouted.

“We’ll adjourn out of respect to Maria!” Again he indicated the empty chair. “That’ll fix their carts for ’em.”

“Let Frank take it over.”

Wilks was watching them. He had caught the gist of it and reached for the gavel. Copithorne nodded assent. Hannah retreated beyond the gates and the crowd accepted her. She finished the anthem, a spectator, in their forefront. Wilks called the meeting to order.

“I’m going to suggest that you sit down,” he called out, “on the benches or on the floor. Sit down! We’ve got a good janitor. Sit down!”

Like a field of grain before the wind, the Cove citizens settled low, and whispered their anticipation.

“We shall not adjourn—I say we won’t adjourn, but we should—out of respect. Mrs. Verlaine served on this council. She deserved more from us than a near riot in its chamber.” He let the reproach sink in while he polished his glasses. “Doctor Copithorne has asked me to chairman the meeting. He is here in spite of his indisposition over the loss of his friend.”

Indisposed, Hannah thought, but by his own inadequacy, his failure of understanding, of imagination. Everything was “now” to him, and without precedent, he could not foresee consequence—the day’s experience lost in the night’s surprise. He slumped in his chair responding to the false solicitude of Franklin Wilks. Hollow, hollow men.

“Mrs. Verlaine, I feel sure, would have us carry on as usual.”

How Maria would have responded to a situation like this! There would not have been a disturbance. She would have brooked no delay—“To what purpose, gentlemen?” Doctor Johnson, a council member, moved that the minutes of the last meeting as published in the Cove Gazette be approved. Seconded and carried. The crowd watched in some awe as the machinery of the meeting ground into progress. A marvelous thing, Hannah mused, the response of human beings to ritual, to a show of patriotism, to an authoritative voice. One word from her when she stood with her hand on O’Gorman’s shoulder would have been sufficient to stampede the meeting.

“Chief of Police Matheson is with us tonight,” Wilks said presently. “He’s taken time out from his investigation of this tragic affair to give us a report. Mr. Matheson, will you come up?”

As the policeman wove forward among them, the crowd gave him encouragement. “Let’s have the truth, Matt” …“No soft soap” …“What gives?”

Matheson had been police chief since Hannah was a young woman. He had been promoted to the post, in fact, the year she went into the bank from college. A steady and affable man, he had never been brilliant, but brilliance, she thought, could make a policeman suspect.

Matheson, before the council, brushed his nose with the back of his hand. “I want to correct something you said if you don’t mind, Mr. Wilks. The way it’s going now, this isn’t my investigation.”

“’Atta boy!” O’Gorman shouted.

Wilks used his gavel.

“I think just about the lowest trick in the book,” Matheson continued, “is to use a murder investigation for some tinhorn politician’s own ends.”

Again the crowd responded. Hannah watched Wilks’s mouth straighten into a taut line. He was a national committeeman of the party in power. It shepherded him and Walker and Senator Cravens—quite a trio!

“It’s been given out,” Matheson started again, choosing his words slowly, “that me and the Campbell’s Cove force was making a mess of the investigation. We didn’t even get started on an investigation.” He took a notebook from his pocket and moistened his thumb to turn the pages. “At twenty minutes to eleven this morning, I got a call from Jim Nolan, deliveryman for Railway Express. He was delivering a package to 327 Cherry Street and didn’t get any answer back door or front door. Going round the house, he noticed a light burning inside and he looked in the window. He saw a woman lying in a chair and went across the street and called me.” Matheson turned a page. “I left the station with Officer Tom McKay at seventeen minutes to eleven after I gave the day sergeant instructions to alert the deputy police in case we needed them.”

Hannah recalled the scene with a nauseating vividness, as he told of his arrival and first exploration. Was this his intended effect on someone in the room, she wondered? Now and then his eyes shifted abruptly to the onlookers, fastening on someone, she thought, and never on the same face twice. He was doing more than defending himself.

“The important thing is,” Matheson pounded his fist on the table, “nobody except McKay and me was in that house as long as I was in charge. It’s true there was people all over the lawn. They came down on us from the highway and down the street like locusts, but they didn’t get in the house.

“Now it’s the practice in this county, as you gentlemen know, that in towns having a police force, that force is in charge of every criminal offense that isn’t federal. You notify the sheriff’s office, but they don’t step in unless there’s a complaint of incompetence. I called Walker, and I swear to you here now, he says to me, ‘Just let us know if you need us,’ and I said I would, and then I called the state police for their laboratory equipment.”

Matheson put the notebook away. “I went back to her place and waited. Before the noon siren sounded, the sheriff and two carloads of deputies drove up. The deputies started pushing people back. Now them people shouldn’t of been there. But as far as I could see, once they was there, nothing was going to be saved by pushing them away.

“Now the funny thing, gentlemen, the sheriff didn’t come in that house when he got there. No, sir. He just waited in the car till the state police lab truck got there. He gave them orders before they come into the house, and from then on they reported to him. That’s about all, Mr. Wilks, except when him and his deputies came inside, he told Officer McKay he was relieved. The trouble was he didn’t put anybody in McKay’s place, and for about five minutes after that people came pushing in like it was a prizefight ring.”

Wilks fingered the head of the gavel. “Doesn’t McKay take orders from you?”

“Yes, sir. But if he was going to follow my orders this morning he’d of had to keep the sheriff out, too, because I said everybody. And I can’t blame him none for not taking that on himself.”

“Just what happened when you and Walker met inside?”

“He says to me, ‘I’m going to take over here, Matheson.’ Sure, I was sore, but the way I figured it, an awful lot of criminals have gone scot-free in this state because the authorities bogged down in their authority—who has the jurisdiction over who. Remember the fellow writing a new kind of bible? The one who got an ax in his head, and got his whole family massacred? Remember?”

Hannah shuddered as did everyone in the room.

“The state police, the county, and the metropolitan police had a fine go-round about it, and somebody’s still got that ax, and he’s still got his own head on his shoulders, and God Almighty knows what he’s using it for these days.”

The frightful image brought a moan from the crowd. Matheson looked over them coldly, one face at a time again. Hannah lifted her chin and met his eyes boldly. When they left her she could feel a moisture oozing out of her pores.

There was a conference among the members, after which Wilks appointed a committee to study Matheson’s complaint and bring in a report to the next council meeting. “In the meantime, I should suggest for the records,” Wilks concluded, “that you withdraw your remark on—I believe you said ‘tinhorn politician.’ It’s prejudicial.”

Matheson shook his head. “No sir. If Duff there”—he pointed to the town clerk, “wants to erase the word ‘tinhorn,’ that’s okay with me. I’m not a kid, Mr. Wilks. I don’t pick up my toys and go home if I don’t get my way. I’m telling you, half them deputies right now are giving Front Street a going-over. That’s not a sheriff’s posse down there. That’s a gang of strong-arm boys from the back rooms of the county machine. They’re getting in their licks against the only block of votes they didn’t line up last election.”

A roar went up from Dan O’Gorman’s followers. Wilks banged his gavel, but it was Matheson waved them into silence.

“That’s conjecture!” Wilks said, his wrath shaking his voice. “You have no right to use this occasion for politics.”

“And they’ve got no right using it to abuse innocent people.”

When he had gaveled the audience into silence, Wilks said coldly, “We may assume from that, Matheson, you know the guilty party?”

Matheson saw his mistake, but too late. “No, sir.”

“And as a police officer, wouldn’t you say that it’s much too early to conjecture on the outcome of the investigation?”

“Lord Almighty, I’d be the first one to say that, Mr. Wilks. There can’t be an autopsy report yet.”

Wilks was in command now. That he felt it himself, Hannah knew from long observation. He was tapping his pencil on the table, a staccato measure of the time it would take him to make the kill. As it turned out, the killing was done with kindness.

“You know, Matt, if things are the way you say they are, you and the Campbell’s Cove force are the only insurance we have of justice.”

Matheson colored, and Wilks raised his head and his voice. “Justice for everybody, uptown and down. Now, so that we won’t keep you from your job any longer, I’ll entertain a motion that your report be accepted with the board’s thanks and confidence.”

The motion was made, seconded, and carried, the crowd joining in the “ayes.” Glancing back, Hannah saw the O’Gorman coterie joining the chorus. They stood up and cheered when the parade went by, and they didn’t mark the difference between a wedding and a funeral.

But Matheson stood where he was, his head a bit lower. “What about the Front Street business?”

Wilks smiled. His smile was rare, Hannah thought, and those on whom he bestowed it, small beneficiaries.

“Matt, do you remember what you said a few minutes ago about the crowd outside Mrs. Verlaine’s?”

Matheson nodded.

“Don’t you see how much this situation is like it? It’s too bad what’s happened on Front Street—if it’s as you say it is. But even while we’ve been talking about it, they’ve probably done their worst. We are all agreed that it must not happen again.”

What a fine little lecture, Hannah thought, what art elegant twist! Wilks, the lion tamer!

As Matheson pushed the gates apart and made his way through the Covites, she watched their faces—sympathy on all of them, sympathy and the mild rebuke of the contagious Mr. Wilks; tolerance, also after his example, the long patience with a policeman who had to be forgiven his petulance and reminded of his own worth. And the Front Streeters—she watched them edge toward the door. How long would it take until they realized they had been duped? The time between now and their reaching a water-front pub. They’d wash down their grievances with malt and grumble all the way to bed. And from now until their next uprising, they would strain still farther from the community.

At the council table Wilks was thumbing through the notes Copithorne had turned over to him. She heard him question, “Civil Defense Invasion, what’s this?” And she heard the word “Postpone.”

No, Hannah thought, it cannot be postponed, not even a moment. She was at the table before the whispered conference reached a decision.

“May I have a moment before the council, gentlemen?”

They had little choice in the matter. Wilks frowned, but Copithorne nodded assent.

She turned to the restive townspeople and called out, “Mr. O’Gorman, will you stay, please?”

She saw him throw back his head at the sound of his name in the chamber. He would stay. If Wilks could dismiss him, she could restore him. She could raise him up, and climb herself on his shoulders. She addressed the council, but she talked to Dan O’Gorman. Forgotten tonight was her awkwardness that one day in his house. Well forgotten. She would never be awkward there again.

“Gentlemen, we were divided tonight, and then we were admirably reunited by Mr. Wilks.” That to her boss, let him take it as toast or tactic. “Nobody ever worked harder for unity in the Cove than Maria Adams Verlaine. Therefore I don’t feel that I’m lacking in respect to her memory when I want to speak to you tonight on Campbell’s Cove Day. Gentlemen, we live in an age of violence. We must meet it in whatever shape it comes upon us, with prepared force. We must meet it united. And this town never needed unity as much before. On our anniversary this year, I propose that we give ourselves to dedication, not to nostalgia. I propose that from Front Street to High Street we demonstrate our will to survive an enemy’s attack upon the town. For the purposes of demonstration, we shall assume that the attack is military, atomic. But we shall be showing our strength of spirit as well as our ability to defend ourselves.

“The civil defense corps proposes to evacuate the town under the simulated conditions of an air attack. The army and air force will give us every co-operation. Mr. O’Gorman will organize a fleet of fishing craft to meet the emergency, as he would do in our actual need. I submit the plan, gentlemen, for your approval.”

For once in her life, Hannah thought, moving back from the table, she had said what she intended to say, she had articulated her thoughts. Were she given command of a legion of angels, it would not be half so satisfying as the marshaling of her own thoughts.

There was no general acclaim for her plan, no outburst of support. Nor had she wanted it. That would have smacked of demagogy, and she felt very humble. A stir of conversation swept the audience instead, as though she had given them something to think about, rather than something to cheer. Good. It was long past time they did some thinking. In the end, the council promised an answer within the week, and in the meantime assurances that the project would have approval.

Quite enough, Hannah thought. Before she had reached her place among the ordinary citizens, the meeting was adjourned, and moving on then, toward the great doors, she was given a word of commendation here and there, at which she demurred. At the door, Matheson laid his hand on her arm. There was nothing of authority in his grip and yet she sensed a chilling restraint.

“You know what I was thinking when you were talking there, Miss Blake?” He waited for her encouragement. She said nothing. “I was thinking: shades of Mrs. Verlaine.”

She dared to meet his eyes. Praise or irony, she could not tell. “Thank you, Matt.”

24

HANNAH WAS AT HER desk but a few minutes in the morning, when Franklin Wilks came to the door of her office. “Do you have a moment, Hannah?”

Rarely had he approached her in this manner. She had often thought he begrudged her a moment even on bank business. “Of course.”

He came in and sat down at her desk. “That was a remarkable performance last night, Hannah. I shouldn’t be surprised if you saved the night there. It had the makings of an ugly business.”

“It doesn’t take much to turn a brawl into a rally,” she said.

“It works the other way, too,” Wilks said. “I talked with the county people this morning, by the way. Walker was not grinding a political ax—though I wouldn’t put that past him myself. But he had good reason to give the Front Streeters a going-over.”

“Oh?”

“They turned up one of Maria’s pieces, an old-fashioned tie pin. The maid, of course, swears that Maria gave it to her. And she gave it to her nephew.”

“Annie was with Maria a long time,” Hannah said.

“She’s not necessarily under suspicion. You can’t blame her for lying to save the nephew either if that’s the case. But there’s no doubt she carried tales about the jewelry down there. And no doubt they got the full picture of Maria’s carelessness. It’s a terrible thing to say, but Maria asked for this. You can’t expect people who have very little to take your attitude toward valuables.”

“Scarcely,” Hannah murmured.

“Maria was one of those strange souls to whom possession means very little. I’m executor of her estate, you know.”

“Are you?”

“It’s less than ten thousand dollars, except for the house and the jewels, or insurance on them.”

“Who’s the beneficiary?”

“Annie Tully in the matter of cash. The Christians get the house for a museum.”

“Oh, my, that’s too bad,” Hannah said.

“Why?”

Hannah lifted her head. “Annie’s getting the cash, I mean. That makes her more suspect than ever, doesn’t it?”

“Mmm,” Wilks said. “And there’s no disposition of the jewels. The will was made out before she acquired them.”

“Did Annie know of her inheritance before this happened?” Hannah asked.

“Yes. She admits that frankly. Maria had promised to leave her well provided for.”

“It would seem, then,” Hannah said, “that if Annie contemplated anything like—murder, the time to have done it was before Maria spent thirty thousand dollars in the French courts.”

“So.” Wilks nodded. “And then there’s this view of it—with her inheritance spent on them, she might have felt she was entitled to them.”

Hannah shook her head. “That’s not like Annie. She was content with her lot in this world from the day she was born into it.”

Wilks permitted himself to smile. “Are you taking over the championship of Front Street?”

“In time I might,” she said, “when they’re in need of it.”

“And when you’re in need of them?”

“Perhaps. One hand washes another.”

“And one hand shakes another,” Wilks said. “For your Cove Day celebration, you’d like a few dignitaries?”

“With enough of them, I think we can arrange a coast-to-coast broadcast. It should be worth their time, too.”

“I hadn’t realized you were cynical, Hannah. But then, there’s quite a bit about you, I discovered last night. It was a revelation. Copithorne went to pieces, didn’t he?”

“I’m not cynical, Mr. Wilks. And for my little part, I’m determined the cynics won’t inherit the earth.”

“A nice phrase, and I know who’d like it—Tom Michaels.”

“The governor?”

Wilks nodded. “I think he’d come on a proper invitation. We won’t be able to keep Cravens away, of course. But the country might find it interesting to have them in the same reviewing stand.”

Hannah’s visions kept pace with his. She measured his power as national committeeman. “Will you invite them?”

“If you compose the letter, I’ll sign it,” Wilks said.

Hannah felt the color rise to her face. To her brief relief the telephone rang. She excused herself, watching Wilks strum a tune on her desk with his finger tips. The call was from the sheriff’s office. Walker wanted to see her.

Her first panic was stemmed by the realization that if it were a dire call for her it would not come over the telephone. “Where shall I see him?” she asked.

“At 327 Cherry Street.”

“At Mrs. Verlaine’s house?”

“Right.”

Hannah put the receiver in the cradle carefully, the care symbolic of her self-shepherding.

“Let me give you a mite of advice on Walker, Hannah. Keep him in his place. Use him, or he’ll use you. There’s only one thing more ruthless than a man on the way up. That’s the fellow on the way down trying for a comeback.”

“I’ll remember that, Mr. Wilks,” she murmured. “Thank you.”

He got up then and started to the door. He paused and turned back, his mouth set in wry amusement. He took a letter from his pocket and put it on her desk. “This is a small bank, Hannah—and I’d be very happy to be one of your constituents.”

He left abruptly and she opened the letter. It was one of the several she had signed her name to the morning before.

25

EVERY DECISION TO BE made seemed an impossible one as she prepared to meet Walker. She thought at first to put the car in the garage for repair and take a cab to Cherry Street. Fearing that might pique the sheriff’s curiosity, she drove, but the act of driving to Maria’s house once more set her nerves on edge. A good driver, she had never ground the gears in her life except that night, but now every time she put her hand to the shift, she was as leery of it as she would have been of a molten rod. She feared also that the car, parked where it was that night, might prod a laggard memory. She could even imagine someone, seeing it, in the very act of recollection—Wilks, for example—“By God, I remember seeing Hannah’s car there the other night. That was the night—”

“No. No,” she said aloud, turning into Cherry Street. She picked up speed that she might not have to shift the gears in front of the house, and coasted the last hundred yards. She parked where she had always parked, visiting Maria—beyond the driveway. Having forced her courage to that decision, she restored a measure of inward calm. She even lingered, crossing the lawn, to survey the damage wreaked on Maria’s lovely yard by the curious and their dispatchers. The shrubbery was almost stripped of leaves, the leaves half-withered mingling in small whirlwinds with gum and cigarette wrappers. The grass was beaten down and matted into the soil.

Schenk, most favored of the sheriff’s henchmen, she thought, tipped his hat and opened the door for her. Inside, the damage was even greater, and she could see two deputies going over the woodwork with chisel and hammer, the woodwork, the marble fireplace, the bookshelves, all the books piled on the floor. Walker apparently did not have his announced confidence in the theft of the jewels. At least, he was taking no chances.

“You can wait in the living-room, Miss Blake,” Schenk said. “I’ll tell the sheriff you’re here.”

She merely nodded and picked her way through the stacked furniture and books. The deputy working there left without a word on her arrival. She was glad of the moment alone, and glad of the disorder. To have entered the room and found it as she had last seen it would have been an ordeal, and to have done it under the sheriff’s eye, a greater one. Among her imaginings of the sheriff’s preparations for her, had even been a dummy image of Maria as they found her. Hannah’s face worked at the thought, a twitch she sought to control. She looked in the mantel mirror. There was no facial evidence of the contorting nerve. She remembered Maria’s telling her to look in the mirror, and turned from it now.

Walker might be watching, she realized. He was a great one for setting a scene. She turned a chair upright and sat down. There were footsteps overhead, hammering in the kitchen, noise all over, except in the room where she waited. At every lull of the hammer, she could hear a clock’s ticking within the room. She could not find the clock with her eyes. A calculated torture? She looked at her watch. How long was he to keep her waiting? What did he except her to do in this room where her friend had died? What his right to his slow play upon her nerves, her memories, her heart’s pain?

A minute, only one minute had passed when she looked at her watch again, unless she had been wrong when first she looked at it. She began to count. If he were to keep her waiting, victim to her own distraction, he would not see her look at her watch for five minutes. Not until she had counted slowly to three hundred. From seventy she was suddenly at twenty-seven. From twenty-nine she went to ninety-three. Better to read.

She got up and read the titles on the nearest stack of books. Mostly Dickens. The best of Dickens to her was Tale of Two Cities. The least to Maria. They had argued it in high school; and another argument, this one in class debate: Did Othello kill his wife in jealousy, or was his anger righteous and his act of murder a pure man’s intolerance of defilement? How she had fought for that interpretation! There was something of Iago in Walker, she thought—the charm, the dangerous, ingratiating charm. Catlike. Swift. She much preferred the dogged Matheson.

Matheson. At odds with the sheriff, he was dangerous, and the sheriff at odds with him was more dangerous, but Matheson was an honest man—So are they all honorable men.

I will not wait, she thought. I will not be kept waiting. I shall go back to the office and he can come to me, for me—

She returned to the books, another stack of them, taken by the armful from the shelf. One at the bottom caught her attention: an elegant, gilt-edged volume, red leather, gold embossed—L’Opera Grand v. 4. A title in French, one Maria had not turned over to the Verlaine collection. Volume four. She leaned farther to see the rest of the set. Not in sight. She stared at the one book, her heartbeat quickening. It was large enough, quite large enough—to be a dummy. She dared not touch it. They had taken the books out in clumps. They might put them back that way, if at all. She took the nearest book within reach, just to have something in hand. Thomas Mann. She held it before her, should the sheriff walk in without warning.

The Magic Mountain. She tried then to concentrate on that, but her mind slipped away—I fell from a high mountain … how love fled and paced the mountains overhead—She flung the book from her, tumbling the pile from which it had come. She must not be alone like this; she must not be idle.

“Forgive me, Miss Blake. I didn’t think you’d get here so soon.”

“Nor did I expect to be kept waiting, Mr. Walker. I was getting into a nasty temper.”

“So I noticed. Are you always that violent?”

“Only under circumstances such as these. You’re doing a fine job on the house.”

The sheriff lit a cigarette. “Considering the job that was done on her, I don’t think the heirs should object. That empty silver tray turned out a bust, by the way. All spoons. They’re in the factory getting replated.”

Why, she wondered, did he tell her that? Expecting her to offer suggestions on other places to look? She said nothing.

He tossed the match into the grate. “Quite a shindig you had at the town hall last night. I hear you saved the night.” He blew smoke into the reflection of his own face in the mirror. “Quite a trick.”

“It was not a trick.”

“I could show you a lot of them,” he said over her words. He blew dust from the mantel, dust or ashes. “Come here.”

Despite her resentment, she obeyed.

He tapped the mantelpiece. “Here’s one. You can’t see it with the naked eye, but the boys picked up a beautiful set of fingerprints, right here.” He indicated the place, wiggling his forefinger over it.

“Mine?”

He nodded.

“I remember,” she said. “I remember on Monday standing right here. I was examining this scratch in the mirror.” She put her finger to her face and away quickly that the tremble of it might be concealed. “You can hardly see it now.”

“I can see it,” he said. He brushed her away and strode between her and the mantel. “And here’s where the bell cord hung. For twenty-five years. Fifty maybe, and nobody ever laid eyes on it except Annie Tully.”

“Forty years is closer,” Hannah said. “I remember when it was installed. Of course, I remember it.”

“That’s better. It isn’t always smart to say no to everything.”

“You described it as the cord from a bathrobe,” she said.

“And you’ve got no imagination at all.”

“Are you implying that I murdered Maria?”

“When it comes to murder, I don’t imply. I charge. I want to drive home something to you, Miss Blake. Don’t pick and choose what you tell me. You tell me, and let me do the picking and the choosing. There’s something very pretty about this case, from the point of view of the police; take away the jewels, and it’s very interesting.”

“Indeed,” she murmured.

“Indeed. Sit down and I’ll tell you about it.”

“I don’t mind standing.”

“Isn’t it hard on that ankle of yours?”

“You’re very solicitous,” she said, wanting to match his sarcasm.

He righted a chair and slammed it on the floor beside her as though his next move would be to force her into it. It was foolish to anger him over so slight an issue. Obviously he liked to stand above his victims, to look down on them, and when they were both on their feet he was no taller than Hannah. To show a measure of independence, however, she sat in the chair she had previously taken out of the heap. Walker dragged the other chair beside her and put his foot on it. He was a policeman, after all.

He tossed the cigarette into the grate. “You and Mrs. Verlaine were lifelong friends, right?”

“Not as close as some people, but friends,” Hannah said.

“On occasion, you took her to task—say for smoking too much, ah, for neglecting church—things of that sort?”

“On occasion.” God knew, she had tried, she thought.

“And Mrs. Verlaine felt free to return the favor?”

“Yes, I suppose she did.” Only once had she taken that trouble, Hannah thought, that interest.

“All right,” the sheriff said casually. “Do you know I’ve got a very nice case against a kid named Dennis Keogh?”

“Have you?”

“I could make a better one with your co-operation.”

Hannah was startled in spite of herself.

The sheriff smiled. “What I mean is—if you’d been cooperating up to the night she was killed. This is theory, you understand. Let’s say you were giving him money. Don’t interrupt. I said it’s theory, and money’s the easiest terms to talk theory in. Let’s say you were about to give him—a couple of thousand dollars, say for a sailboat. He likes to sail. Maybe you do, too. Or, let’s say it’s to go to college. You’re a champion of education. Anyway, Mrs. Verlaine discovers he’s a charlatan. This is interesting, huh? Because she actually did call him a faker a couple of nights before she died. But to get on with my theory, say she was about to expose him, to you, her friend. Doesn’t that make a nice picture—for murder?”

“It’s the frame,” Hannah said. “Nothing more than the framework.”

Walker smiled. “You aren’t using the word in its slang sense, are you? And then why not?” He shrugged. “It could work that way.”

“You know that I’m the donor of a thousand dollars for the poetry contest?”

He nodded, working another cigarette out of the package.

“Then you must know that Dennis Keogh refused to submit his poetry.”

“And that’s supposed to prove?”

“I should think it pokes a large hole in your theory.”

“No-o-o. Small potatoes, a thousand dollars. In such an operation—we call it the confidence game—the operator would make that gesture, waiting for the big kill.”

More than anything else, his casualness, hiss patronizing intimacy was wearing on her nerves.

“I never gave the boy a thing except his salary; never.”

“And a room on your premises.”

“That was an economy on my part.”

“Of course, and a convenience on his.”

Hannah stared at him. “Do you believe this is what happened?”

“Much more important right now, do you think so? You’ve said no. But isn’t there some doubt in your mind? I said this had to take co-operation on your part. Cooperation means a lot of things, a guy leaving a window open co-operates with a thief. See what I mean? You’ve got a nice job in a bank, you’re practical, your mind runs to figures, to politics, to church work. How long have you been interested in poetry?”

“All my life.”

“All right, let’s take it that way. I wouldn’t think you’d know a poem from a pomegranate any more than I would, but let’s take it that way. You’ve spent a lifetime with shopkeepers, clerks, fishermen. And here he is, the most beautiful thing that ever happened to you: six feet of it in his socks. He’s been around. The world’s his oyster, but he’s already looking for pearls, the pearl, and, lady, all of a sudden, you’re it! The pearl of pearls.”

Hannah dug her teeth into her lip. She couldn’t help it. Nothing mattered except that she keep inside of her the churning bile.

He pulled her chin up with his forefinger and let the finger slide off, jarring her head.

“And you take to writing poetry yourself,” he said derisively. “Like taking to drink. Did it go to your head? Love has parted my limbs—is that how it goes?”

Hannah tried to shut her ears to the slur of his voice. Her head bobbed down and she turned her fingers in her hair to keep her head from bouncing with the sobs she could not control.

“That’s quite a picture—for a spinster, Miss Blake—love has parted my limbs.” His face was close to hers.

She flung her hand at it wildly. He danced back nimbly. “That could get you in trouble.”

“‘Unbound my limbs,’” she cried. “Filthy scum.”

The sheriff whistled softly. “Excuse me. There is a difference. I’ve got a filthy mind, but yours is as pure as the snow. Then listen to this, my friend. When you were doing your best to alibi him for the time of the murder, he didn’t need it. He had one. He was keeping a rendezvous with another girl, a pretty girl, the librarian—a friend of yours, too.”

He waited for the effect of the news to sink in, and the relief came over Hannah in hot waves. He was quivering before her eyes in its flood. She was going to be hysterical, she thought. She had to say something, to loosen the congealment about her tongue.

“How could he kill Maria, then?” she managed.

Walker smiled; almost wistfully. “He couldn’t. This is not a case. Until that payoff, it was a swell theory.”

Hannah tried to think, to prepare herself for the next deluge; something was unfinished, there was but one question more. If Dennis did not need her alibi, she needed his. And where were you, Miss Blake? She heard the question in her own head, and the answer, the truth was thick in her throat, there to be spurted out. And yet he stood, his elbow on the mantel, his face smiling, his eyes full of the leer telling his satisfaction in her humiliation.

“Rough, huh?”

Hannah drew one deep breath and another, gaining strength, sanity, with each of them.

Walker lit the cigarette he had used as a pointer. “Close to home, wasn’t it?”

She said nothing.

“I’ll take bets on that kid’s record with women. I’ll bet he’s got ’em spotted from here to Pensacola, the latches off a dozen doors for him.”

Hannah rocked in the chair, hugging herself, digging her fingernails into the fat of her arms.

“You aren’t going to forget this day, Miss Blake.” He walked over to her and steadied her with his hand on her shoulder. “Did you hear me?”

She nodded.

“Just remember I did you a good turn.”

26

SHE LEFT THE CAR in the driveway and half-ran, half-stumbled across the lawn fighting the lightness in her head, the illusion of floating, the expectancy that any instant she would depart from reason. Sophie, broom in hand, watched her first steps from the car, openmouthed, and then leaped toward her and caught her arm at the portico steps.

Hannah stood a moment, gasping for more of the air, of which there did not seem to be enough to fill her lungs.

“You’re sick, Miss Blake. You’re awful sick.”

Hannah nodded, feeling green, feeling that everything inside her and about her was the color of bile.

The girl hitched Hannah’s arm over her shoulder, and with the strength of a small, stout ox, took half the big woman’s weight upon herself, and bore her into the house and up the stairs that creaked under the strain. This healthy child, Hannah thought, this honey-faced, innocent, strong-backed child.

She eased Hannah into a chair, a straight chair she must have selected in her mind as they entered the bedroom, for she led the way to it unhesitatingly, and kicked it into position. Her breath hissed through her teeth with the effort.

Don’t be frightened, Hannah thought, but she could not get any words out at all. Her eyes pleaded the message, but Sophie had no time to look for it. The girl snatched the spread from the bed. She glanced at Hannah, saw her shivering and got a wool blanket from the cedar chest. Without question or consultation, she began to undress the big woman, making all the time consoling, mothering noises, and the dress removed she draped the blanket around Hannah’s shoulders. She unfastened her hose and thrust her hand beneath the foundation garment, the quicker to open it. Hannah moaned at the rough touch of her hand.

“I’m sorry, Miss Blake. I’m not very good at this. I never done it before.”

“Wonderful. You’re wonderful,” Hannah managed.

The child smiled, her whole face vivid with it. She wrapped the blanket around Hannah and hugged her in it, a quick, rough hug against her full soft breast. “I was afraid you was having a stroke.”

She pulled Hannah to the bed and rolled her, blanket-clad, into it. Hannah caught her hand and held it. The girl withdrew it gently, and smoothed the hair back from Hannah’s forehead. Hannah turned to the wall and began to sob. She wanted to hold the tears back, but they would not be stemmed. The torment poured out of her in racking, shuddering waves. Sophie flung herself on the bed beside her and tried to hold her, patting awkwardly at her arm, her back, the girl’s head bowed against her in sympathy.

“Don’t cry, Miss Blake,” she crooned. “Don’t cry—It’s going to be all right.”

When Hannah was still at last the girl got up and pulled the blinds. She brought a box of tissue from the dresser and put it on the pillow.

“Miss Blake, should I call Doctor Johnson?”

“No. I’ll be all right,” Hannah said.

“I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

“No. I’ll be all right. Just leave me alone.”

Hannah could hear her move about the room, putting away her clothes, and then go to the door. Hannah turned in the bed.

“Sophie.”

The girl brushed at her cheek quickly and turned. She, too, was crying.

“Come here a minute, Sophie.”

The girl came but with laggard steps, completely awkward now that the emergency was over.

“Why are you crying?”

“I don’t know. I just never seen you like that. It hurt. That’s all.”

“Nobody’s ever seen me like that. Thank you, dear.”

It made the child cry more, and she fled from the room.

Hannah stared at the door as it closed behind her. Presently shadows seemed to stir across it, sometimes writhing, the play of the wind on the window shade and beyond it the sun behind the trees, shapes against the sun, Hannah thought, dancing to the tune of a demoniac fiddler, a player upon nerves, upon heart-strings … the contagion of dancing, the contagion of the power to whirl men into a dance … Hi-ho, Elizabeth, step lively and you’ll see the tune I’m whipping up for your lover—(an excellent fiddler, Mr. Walker)—look at him dance! Here he is and here he isn’t. There he was and there he wasn’t the night that she was killed. Making poetry. Don’t make me laugh. Making love and I’ll believe it. Bold love or secret? Secret? Good! Twice-over I’ll believe you. But what will it do to the buxom witch he works for? What a tale to tell, and I’m the boy to tell her. Spin around, Hannah Blake, and I’ll play it again all for you. You’re a fool, and women are fools and men their masters. I’ll bet he’s got ’em spotted from here to Pensacola, the latches off a dozen doors for him.

The shadows writhed again. Oh, sweet Dennis … all love and poetry. Women you didn’t know for knowing them so well. An art of both, he made, his kiss on the hand at first, a dozen hands and a dozen mouths … and breasts … your breasts are pale moons stung each with a kiss. …

She grew nauseous with loathing, her flesh seeming to shrivel as though something leprous were creeping over it. She groaned and turned again to the wall. Her head was fevered. She humped to the edge of the bed and rolled her forehead against the cold, hard plaster. It was the hard coldness of the dead. Only once had she felt it, her lips to her father’s forehead, bidden by the command of a weeping mother to whom all there was of the man lay stonelike. Was the flesh all to those who had known the flesh? The spirit nothing without it?

Oh, yes! How soon forgot the spirit, the body once removed. … A woman dead—a tight game of bridge, Frank. What a charity death when the living are dead. I was kinder to you than I knew, Maria. You knew. That’s why you waited. No protest. She put her fingers to the wall. The stone, the cold, cold stone. It has no pain. My head is heavy on the pillow, a little while, heavier, stonelike. My arms I can scarcely lift, leaden, my legs are weighted. Love has unbound my limbs! Love has fettered them, mired them, chained them to the earth …and no more dreaming. Heavy, heavy, night-bound, a black and shapeless pit. Utter darkness. Sleep.

27

WHEN HANNAH AWAKENED IT was to the first song of the birds beyond her window, the room itself blue-purple in the predawn light except for a night lamp on her dresser. Sophie had turned it on and left in its filmy glow a tray, a lovely composite for a still-life, Hannah thought—the slender pewter jug, the cup and saucer, and an orange. It was Sophie’s measure of the needs of a sick stomach.

Hannah got up, the weariness, the illness gone. What a healer, sleep! She drew the blinds. The garden was shimmering with dew, and in the sky, the last stars clung beyond the reach of dawn. And who could despair of the dawn itself, she wondered, going to the eastern window, its gleaming shield tipping back the night.

She hastened to the bathroom and washed, the warm water and then the cold, a stinging pleasure, and the rough towel pricking up the life-lust in her. In her robe she went downstairs and put on the kettle. Returning to dress, she paused at the open door of one of the guest rooms. Sophie asleep there. She went in on tiptoe and looked down on the ball-like shape, the girl’s hair wild on the pillow, but her face smooth and as soft as cream. She wore faded polka-dot pajamas for which she had gone home and returned for the night to be within Hannah’s call.

This is goodness, Hannah thought. She picked up the clock from the table at the child’s bedside. The alarm was set for six-thirty. Hannah shut it off. She went to her own room and returned with the tray, leaving it on the table with the clock next to the jug. She felt almost gleeful herself then, retreating and dressing quickly. She made a quick pot of coffee and boiled two eggs. The taste of them was good, but the fresh, clean air of morning better as she stepped outdoors and filled her lungs with it. Dawn, and Hannah Blake born of the morning at the age of forty-seven. The birthday of her life.

She took the car from the garage and drove through the still-sleeping town, startling a rabbit on High Street. A rabbit on High Street, she mused. It was as though the brick and mortar were gone, or not yet built, and the street a rutted path, the car a horse. What a way she would have had with a horse, she thought, the reins easy in her hands—a great dappled steed, snorting, charging at her command, rearing up to match her will with his, and merging then their two wills to conquer the wind and space.

She turned off High Street and down the ravine lane. The docks were awake, alive with the scurry of the fishermen’s preparations. She left the car and pulled her coat tighter against the damp wind. The sun was behind the town, the docks in shadow, but far out beyond where the silver mist turned golden, the peninsula at the mouth of the Cove was a knob of sunlight, the windows of the lighthouse there a burst of gold, and the water a molten streak pouring into the shadow.

The fishermen hauled in their ropes and revved their choking motors, their collars buttoned against the wind. Here and there, one caught sight of her and lifted his hand in salute. She hailed them back, her hands in her pockets for warmth. She watched for O’Gorman to come down the hill. His son was there before him, the boat ready. The man came then in long strides, his pipe shooting smoke like a whistle.

“O’Gorman, ho!” she called out in their manner as he approached her.

He took the pipe from his mouth and touched a finger to the peak of his checkered cap. “You’re up at the shriek of dawn, Miss Blake. How are you, ma’am?”

“I’m fine, Dan, and you?” His name came as easy as butter.

“As fit as a man can be torn from his bed in the middle of the night. A cursed way to earn a living.” He called out then to the boy: “Warm her up, Michael! She’ll be spitting carbon that’d bounce from the lake’s bottom.” He grinned down at Hannah. “When we’re doing the evacuation, will you get the town down here at this hour? I think not.”

“Would it be an imposition, Dan, to ask you to take me out in the boat with you as far as the lighthouse? I want to see where we’ll be landing during the evacuation.”

“It would not and if it was, I’d do it. But it’s a mile walk back.”

Hannah smiled. “By land or water?”

He stuck his pipe back in his mouth. “’Tis a mite closer by water,” he said slyly—“and only knee-deep to a giant like you.”

She kept pace with him down the dock. “It’s Saturday,” she said. “I’ve time enough.”

“Aye, and tomorrow’s Sunday, God be praised.”

He went into the boat ahead of her and bade his son hand her down. Hannah moved from one of their hands to the other, and the boat shifted under her step. “I’ll sink it,” she said.

“Not under twenty your weight, but she’ll balk like a mule with a woman astride her.”

Hannah sat on the bench opposite him at the helm of the boat, beyond the great box shape at the rear into which the boy emptied a barrel of ice.

O’Gorman revved the motor, waiting. “She’ll spit diamonds instead of carbon this morning.” He cupped his hands over his mouth then, and shouted down the docks. “Take us out, you, McGovern! I’m setting the lady down at the point!”

The boy flung the line down to his father. “Christ and Peter,” he said.

“Christ, Peter, and John,” the father said, as though it were a litany.

Along the docks, one boat and then another put off, the smell of gas fumes spoiling the air. O’Gorman pulled in last a few yards behind the next in the fleet. Hannah watched the shore line, scrub pines and dunes beneath the cliff, mile after mile of them, until sight failed.

She leaned toward O’Gorman. “Has the sheriff called off his dogs?”

The big man frowned. “Aye, off all but poor Annie. They’ve flattened her.”

“Did he arrest her?”

“Arrest or no, they’ve got her in the county jail.”

“He’ll call it a costly arrest one day,” Hannah said.

“Then he’ll call it in hell,” O’Gorman said. “Thank God there’s a place like it for the likes of him.”

“Is that the most you have to say in her defense?” said Hannah.

“I can say from now till sundown and it won’t release her. And as for him, I could vote twice in the same day and not defeat him. He’s the power of the state behind him, and till he gets better than her, he’ll hold poor Annie.”

“Ignorance makes a fine conniver,” Hannah said. “We’ll see if he’s still holding Annie by sunset.”

O’Gorman squinted into the sun watching her. “We’d never forget it, could you get her off, Miss Blake. I’ll stake my life on her innocence.”

And I mine if needs be, Hannah thought. “Do you believe in signs, Dan? There’s a white bird flying up.”

O’Gorman scarcely glanced at it. “It’s a carrion.”

28

BY THE TIME HANNAH reached the county seat that morning, Annie Tully was not in need of her services nor of those of a lawyer. She had been held overnight on suspicion of complicity in the murder of her employer, and since the evidence was insufficient, and his persuasions ineffective, Walker had to release her. Still, Hannah thought, she was glad she had come—not only to receive Annie, but to encounter Walker in his own den.

“We’ve had our little talks in many places, haven’t we?” Walker said. He was half-sitting on his desk. “Sit down, Miss Blake. I suppose you’d like to take the little lady home?”

“I should think it would be a kindness,” Hannah said.

“Well I had a chauffeur myself ready for the drive. But small thanks I’d get in Campbell’s Cove, anyway. So you’re welcome to the credit of rescue.”

“Don’t you think anything is ever done out of charity, Mr. Walker?”

“Many things. For example, my wife is brewing a strong cup of tea for Annie right now, and they’ll have it right in the living-room. We have our share of the jail for living-quarters. That’s charity, wouldn’t you say? The tea, not the living-quarters.”

“From the heart,” Hannah said.

Walker lit a cigarette. “You don’t like me very much, do you, Miss Blake?”

“Is it important to a policeman that he be liked?”

“Only that he be trusted,” Walker said.

Hannah glanced up at him.

He smiled. “That’s what I thought. And next to trust, there’s reliability. What else can I do for you, Miss Blake?”

Hannah studied the buckle on her purse. “The theory you propounded yesterday—how much of it was based on fact?”

“Aren’t you in a better position to answer that?”

“I mean the part about the other women—from here to Pensacola you said.”

“If you mean does he have a record for extortion, no. But victims in a racket like that don’t make complaints easily. Take yourself, for example; would you make a complaint?”

“I have nothing of which to complain.” He grinned. “Here we go again.”

“Where did you get Pensacola? Or is that a pet town of yours?”

“No. I asked the kid where he came from last. Pensacola. I checked with the authorities there. He spent the winter sailing a boat for a woman there. He was the crew, she was the passenger. I don’t want to draw the inferences for you. You told me I had a dirty mind.”

Hannah swallowed her revulsion. “What else?” He shrugged. “That was enough for me. If you care so much about it—you’ve got money—why don’t you put an investigator on it? I can recommend one.”

“I don’t care that much. Personally. I’m thinking of Elizabeth Merritt.”

The sheriff cocked his head. “More charity?”

“I’m a friend of the family’s.”

The sheriff threw back his head. “Ha! Are you telling me that, or are you trying to tell it to yourself, Miss Blake? I know spite when I see it. Look, I don’t give a damn. I like to see young cocks get their spurs clipped. A lot of people have tried to take a nip out of mine, and if some of them hadn’t had a good bite, I wouldn’t be sitting in a crummy sheriff’s office today. Eight years ago I was set for state commissioner of police. And don’t underestimate my qualifications.” He dropped the cigarette on the floor and put his foot on it. “That hatchet massacre Matheson told you about at your town meeting—he gave you word for word what I gave him when I took over, by the way. He didn’t say it came from me, of course. But the devil can quote scripture without crediting the Almighty as they say. I got caught in that hatchet case. I went in with a record as clean as a baby’s soul and I came out smeared from the bottom of the barrel of every muckraking politician in the state. Now I play ball. Do you understand? I play ball with every bastard that’ll bounce it back to me.

“There’s something I want to tell you out of this. I’m not just sounding off. When you’re going to do a dirty job, do it. But when you’re talking it over with yourself, call it a dirty job. That way you can live with yourself.”

“If you want to,” Hannah added.

“Suicide’s not as common as you might think. We wouldn’t take the gaff from somebody else we take from ourselves, not for a day, we wouldn’t.”

“In somebody else it’s a sin,” Hannah mused. “In ourselves, expediency. I could go to school to you, Mr. Walker.”

Walker smiled. “What do you want to do about the boy—get rid of him or crucify him? Or both?”

“Nothing drastic,” she said. “I should think getting rid of him would be adequate. Out of the town, I mean.”

Walker removed the cellophane from another package of cigarettes. “Firing him wouldn’t do the trick?”

“I doubt it. He might find another job if he wanted to stay badly enough.”

He ran the cellophane between his front teeth. “How old is he?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Do you know his draft status?”

“No. And he’s a pacifist.”

“By that do you mean a conscientious objector?”

“I suppose. I don’t know.”

“It doesn’t matter. God knows, he looks fit enough to me,” Walker said. “I can put in a good word for him if you like.”

“With his draft board?”

“That’s the idea. I presume he’s registered. If he’s not, so much the better.”

“Let me think it over,” Hannah said.

“Okay. But if you happen to be thinking of it out loud, Miss Blake, I wouldn’t mention my name. I wouldn’t use yours, even doing you the favor.”

Hannah nodded. Something inside of her was jumping. Not nerves. They had never been steadier; but something that sickened her and made her giddy with stimuli almost simultaneously as though the two responses were friction upon each other. “Do you think Annie is finished with her tea by now?”

Walker picked up the phone and gave his house extension. “Is Mrs. Tully ready, dear?”

“Ready and eager,” he said, putting down the phone.

“I have no delicacy in these things, Mr. Walker. What would you expect in return for your influence?”

Walker smiled and touched his fingers to her elbow, guiding her out of the office. “You’re quite charming, Miss Blake. Just remember me in paradise.”

Annie Tully wept softly half the way back to Campbell’s Cove. Hannah feared to offer a word of consolation, lest it start the weeping into a wail. The morning had been spoiled for her, conniving with a conniver. But the deed had to be done by whatever means so long as it was quick. The thought of the boy revolted her now. Serpentlike, he lay in wait for innocence and fouled it with his show of tenderness. He drew out to himself cupidity from the pure as surely as though he sucked it through the flesh.

She shuddered and glanced at Annie. Weeping as though she had that for which to weep. Finally, with short patience, she said, “It’s all over now. You’ll go to your brother’s, you’ll rest, and you’ll forget all about it.”

“I’ll forget or remember, small odds,” Annie said. “I’m wondering what’s happened to poor Mrs. Verlaine.”

“There was an autopsy,” Hannah said. “The funeral’s this afternoon.”

“And who laid her out?” Annie demanded, the tears turned off like a faucet.

“Hutchins.”

“And who chose her dress and told them how to fix her hair, who did all that?”

Well. This was small thanks for her mission, Hannah thought. “I presume Hutchins, and what difference? The memorial’s going to be brief. They may not even open the casket.”

“The heathens,” Annie said. “The bloody heathens. They’ll open it and take a look if I’ve anything to say on it. And I’ll say whether I have or no. She was a fine woman, and they won’t see her like for a while again. I’ll not stand idle while they bundle her off to the grave and put her down quick to be quick forgotten. She didn’t die in bed, you know.”

“I’ve nothing to do with the arrangements,” Hannah said. “I’ve had my fill of the sheriff, too.”

“He was doing no more than his duty,” Annie said flatly.

A fine turn, thought Hannah, the night’s affront forgot in the morning’s flattery. A cup of tea with his wife and the sheriff was forgiven his trespasses. The depth and logic of the Irish!

“If I hadn’t thought he was doing considerably more than his duty,” she said, “I should not have taken the time and trouble to come up and speak to him on your release.”

“Your heart was in the right place, Miss Blake, and I thank you deeply. But the sheriff has to find out what isn’t so before he can find out what is.”

Well, that was a small parcel of thanks! Commiseration on her misguided charity! Lead, kindly light. “I did it for Maria,” she said. “She was my friend.”

“She was friend to many,” Annie crooned, “and never a bit of sugar trailing on the spoon after her cup of kindness. She was charity beyond charity, for whenever you turned to thank her, she made out it was you done her the good turn. Charity is not puffed up, as the good book says.”

Hannah kept her eyes on the road, wondering if Annie were delivering her a sermon for the day. “I don’t think Mr. O’Gorman shares your appreciation for the sheriff, Annie.”

“And what has O’Gorman to do with it?”

What indeed, Hannah thought. “Isn’t he a friend of yours?”

“One thing has nothing to do with the other. I’d be grateful to you, would you set me down on Cherry Street, Miss Blake.”

“Isn’t the house impounded?”

“It is, but I’m permitted to get something. The sheriff’s instructing his deputies.”

They passed the town limits of Campbell’s Cove. Here and there along the way, a head turned after Annie. The townspeople were well aware of where she had spent the night. The woman had started to cry again, but she sat erect, and let the tears fall where they would, her only acknowledgment of them an occasional deep sniff, the slobbery sound of which grated on Hannah’s nerves. “For heaven’s sake, Annie, use your handkerchief,” she said when she could stand it no longer.

“And have them take me for showing it like the white flag? Never.”

Hannah drove up to the Verlaine house, no grinding gears, no hesitation. “I’ll wait if you won’t be long, Annie, and drive you down to your brother’s.”

“Thank you kindly, ma’am, but I don’t know where it is—what I’m hunting—and I wouldn’t detain you.”

So that was it, Hannah thought. The hunter and his hound. She watched Annie up the steps. Walker had reasoned, and reasoned rightly, that if the jewels were still in the house, no one was better equipped than Annie to trace them. And asking her for her help, he had more than righted himself with her.

Had the books been put back on the shelves, she wondered, or was that chore left to Annie? So many curious and idle had trammeled the lawn, her step on it should not seem extraordinary. Hannah Blake was not above idle curiosity. She left the car and walked boldly across to the hedges at the window. The living-room was almost in order, the books replaced. She could not see the red leather binding … opera …Lavalle … volume four … but if it weren’t among them, and if it was a dummy, she was sure Annie wouldn’t be there now. … Annie wouldn’t live there any more. …

“Hello, Miss Blake.”

In the instant before he spoke she had caught Matheson’s reflection in the window, just time enough to take the edge off her nervous response.

“Good morning, Matt—or is it afternoon, now?”

“Depending on your lunchtime,” he said, taking his watch from his pocket. “It’s ten minutes to one.”

She had not asked him the time. It was almost as though he were giving her time to compose herself. Having no need of it, she resented it. “I’ve just brought Annie down from the county jail.”

“I know,” he said. He pointed to the window she had been peering through. “Are you through there?”

“Quite. I’m not above curiosity, you see.”

“Few of us are. That’s why I’m here myself, you might say. I’m curious about the curious.”

“Have there been others?” Hannah murmured as he walked back to the car in stride with her.

“An occasional one. They walk round at a distance for the most part. Can we sit and talk for a while, Miss Blake?”

“If you like, Matt. I offered to wait for Annie and drive her to her brother’s.”

Matheson got into the front seat beside her. “She’s kind of broke up, is she, everything coming to an end for her all of a sudden?”

“Not altogether broken up. I got small thanks for my solicitude. She said the sheriff was doing his duty in holding her.”

“Well,” Matheson said, “she’s awful keen on seeing Mrs. Verlaine’s murderer turned up.”

“Who isn’t?” Hannah demanded.

Matheson pursed his lips. “The murderer. I’ve been going over in my mind all morning what could of happened that night. I get the feeling that just about everybody who was ever in that house has the notion that if he was given the chance, he could find the jewels in ten minutes.”

“Strange,” Hannah said. “I had that very feeling myself.”

“Mmm. That’s why you was interested in getting Annie out of trouble?”

“I don’t understand you, Matt.”

“Annie was arrested on account of the jewels. She was caught—in the sheriff’s way of figuring—with one of them. But if you think you could find the jewels, that means you don’t think that was why Mrs. Verlaine was killed at all. So naturally you’d try and help Annie.”

He had wrapped a lot of words around a small neat trap, Hannah realized. He had prompted her to the admission that she believed the jewels still in the house. That belief was not shared by all Maria’s friends at all. The whole tenor of the town meeting that night was predicated on the theft as the motive. Wilks, the morning before, had indicated his acceptance of it. She tried to ward off his next natural question.

“No, Matt. I want every co-operation on Campbell’s Cove Day from the Front Streeters. When I saw O’Gorman this morning, he repeated his bitterness against the sheriff. He said that they wouldn’t forget it if I could help Annie.”

“I see,” Matheson said. “What’s your notion on why she was killed?”

The one-track mind. He had not even heard her in his concentration on that question. “I don’t have any notion on it. And now that I think about it, the only reason I have for that feeling that I might be able to find the jewels is that I’ve always believed Annie’s story. I’m sure Mrs. Verlaine did give her the stickpin. That was quite like Maria.”

Matheson was making shapes in the dust on the dashboard with his finger. “In other words you’re saying now that you think she might of been killed on account of them, after all.”

“I have no opinion on the matter, and no right to an opinion.”

“Everybody’s got an opinion, and the right to keep it to themselves. She was sitting in the chair reading when somebody came to the door. Personally, I don’t think she ever got up from the chair. If she did, she went back to the same one she was sitting in—”

Oh, God, Hannah thought, how many times through this deadly ordeal? And to have it come on so casually, when she was so sure of herself, so well recovered from the last, and then to be tipped again into the maelstrom of near fact.

“The book she was reading was right there beside her where she let it slide when the visitor came. It was somebody she wasn’t surprised to see, then. It could of been Annie, but it wasn’t. It could of been Sykes and maybe it was. It could of been two people, like Elizabeth Merritt and her boy friend, and maybe it was. It could of been you.”

“And maybe it was?” Hannah finished. “My fingerprints were on the mantel there, Matt, not far from the cord with which she was strangled.”

“And you had the run of her house if anyone had. You were kids together. Family friends.”

“I did not have the run of her house, Matt. We were not nearly so close as people thought. There were many things about Maria of which I did not approve—her lack of religion, in fact, her scorn of it—Andrew Sykes. I have no use for him.”

Matheson grunted. “And she had no use for this Keogh boy.”

“I haven’t so much regard for him either, except as a gardener.”

“Interesting. It turns out he hasn’t got a friend in the town except Elizabeth Merritt. I wonder why.”

“He has friends on Front Street,” Hannah said.

“And you’re trying to make friends there.”

“For my own purposes. One thing has nothing to do with the other.” Her voice cracked with intensity. She must not be persuaded into talk of Dennis.

“Of course,” he said easily. “They’re going to evacuate the town for you.”

“Not for me. For civil defense. You’ve been well informed on our progress.”

“I came up from Front Street myself a long time ago. You know, Miss Blake, I’m sorry you got that attitude. I thought maybe you were going to take over where Mrs. Verlaine left off. They need somebody uptown on their side.”

“You’re twisting everything I say out of shape, Matt. What’s the matter with you?”

He glanced at her. “It’s a twisting, torturous business I’m in, and maybe I get a little extra-warped from the competition.”

He was glum and bitter over the sheriff’s taking over, and aggravated, not mollified by the behavior of the town council that night.

“Don’t brood over it, Matt. In the end it’s going to hurt you, not the sheriff.”

“Not the sheriff,” he repeated, “and not the murderer.”

“Isn’t it too soon to say that? Walker has had a great deal of criminal experience.”

Matheson grunted. “He sure has. Did you see the county paper this morning?”

“No.”

“It’s in there plain as day why he stepped in here that morning. Yesterday the special grand jury investigating gambling in Odenah County was adjourned. And I’ll tell you something—” He tapped on the steering-wheel with his finger. “They adjourned without calling George Walker, county sheriff. Why? He was busy. And who’s going to say gambling is more important than murder?”

“Oh, my,” Hannah said.

“Sometime when you’re talking to Franklin Wilks and the rest of the big shots, you can tell ’em how important their vote of confidence was that night. But maybe they know it already.”

“Don’t be bitter, Matt.”

“I am bitter. I’m as bitter as gall.” He pulled himself up. “I won’t detain you, Miss Blake. You’ll be wanting to get ready for the funeral.”

29

HANNAH DRESSED SLOWLY, THE ordeal of the funeral ahead of her. Downstairs, Sophie was singing at her work, her joy of finding Miss Blake well recovered irrepressible. The song of innocence, Hannah thought. Even at Sophie’s age, she had not had it. She seemed to remember a sense of guilt clouding every bright day of her life, petty guilt for petty sins, and yet always beyond her the vision of holy innocence. Had she been born a Catholic, Hannah thought, she might have known some joy, confession and the firm belief that one went forth from it with a scrubbed soul.

How high that morning to have fallen so low in the afternoon. She was prepared to grieve, surely, but for the living, not the dead.

The last heat of summer beat down upon the town as she drove through it. Farmers’ wives were marketing, their husbands standing on the curbs curling the sweat from their foreheads and marking every car that passed if its passengers were well-dressed, as a funeral car, and they exchanged, no doubt, all there was to tell of murder—here or in the Sunday paper supplement.

What a bounty of flowers, Hannah thought, approaching the parlor, the wreaths spilling out onto the lawn. Flowers were easier than tears. And a great deal prettier. She started as though she had heard those words. Maria might have said them, and for the instant, standing on the sidewalk, her car driven off by an attendant, she had an illusion of disembodiment—as though Maria Verlaine were there and she herself, in body, lying inside. The casket would be black marble, the bands steel, not the customary bronze. She moved into the parlor, speaking to no one until she was within view of the coffin. Gray, deep gray. She shuddered in relief at the break of the illusion. Her imagination—all in her mind. Someone took her arm and held it tight to bring a measure of comfort to her.

She glanced up. It was John Copithorne, his eyes filling as she looked at him, as though what he took to be her show of grief had primed his own. The dead can’t see, John, she thought, and fortunate, should the seeing dead see more than the living.

Copithorne led her gently forward to a final homage to their once beloved. How apt they should go up together. Hannah did not gaze directly upon the face, only upon the stockpile lace that built up and around it, and then upon the whiteness beyond until the time for turning away should come. She would not stay less than John. A murmur and flow of conversation and weeping behind and about her—the weeping from Annie, she saw at a glimpse, Annie and Mrs. O’Gorman, and other women bade up from Front Street by their menfolk to bring the tribute of family mourning, and Katherine Shane at home with them now in the keening.

Copithorne blew his nose, and as though that were a signal to end their grief, they moved back.

“Lovely, isn’t she?” he said.

Hannah merely nodded.

“Wonderful what they can do—and after an autopsy.”

“Wonderful. Where’s Ruth?”

“She’ll be at the cemetery. Can’t stand these places in the summer. I don’t blame her. The smell of flowers—It’s like getting perfume sprayed in your face. Want to sign the book?”

“I think not.”

They had come abreast of Andrew Sykes. He was gnarled and wild-looking, as though he hated everyone in the room, Hannah thought. She stood beside him, with neither of them acknowledging one another’s presence. Every few seconds, he made a noise through his nose that she took to be token of his disgust. He would go now, and not come back to Campbell’s Cove. He might be content with his discontented wife, with no more warrants and no more wanderings.

Copithorne was talking with Wilks and Mrs. Wilks, and they were joined by their bridge partners of the evening when Maria died. They would go over again their wonder at how they came to miss it all. And Sykes, hearing it, would snort disdain.

And two others were here together, she knew. She had sensed their presence from the moment she had turned from the coffin, but she would try not to look upon them until she could see one and then the other, separate, not side by side. They were bold now, made bold by desperation. Even as Hannah thought about them, Elizabeth came across the room. She’s coming to Sykes, not to me, Hannah thought. And the girl did put her hand on the old man’s arm, but she spoke to Hannah, though merely a greeting.

“Where’s your mother, Elizabeth?” she asked, wanting to detain the girl if for only a moment, to keep her that long from him at least.

“Tom is being married today.”

And you prefer a funeral, Hannah thought. Between friends, between brother and sister he had insinuated himself. She looked across the room then to where Dennis stood, a head above most people in the room, bowed and hunted-looking without Elizabeth. The day off without a may-I or a by-your-leave. What was he here to mourn? Not Maria surely. Better for him had she died sooner.

Elizabeth had caught Sykes up and led him across the room, and Dennis extended his hand to pull him in. No, she thought, it was Elizabeth pulled in. Blinded by her own dreams of the beautiful and pulled into the mire by the two of them.

Hutchins and an assistant approached the casket and began moving the floral pieces away. In that instant Annie Tully broke from the row of keeners, and Hannah remembered her threats in the car that morning.

“You’ll not close it yet,” she said, her tear-swollen face turned up into his.

Hutchins tried to maneuver her gently away. Annie pulled free of him. A strand of gray hair had strayed from beneath her hat and swept over her eyes unnoticed. Was she drunk, Hannah wondered. She had always suspected Maria and her of tippling together.

“You’re in a hurry to put her away to be soon forgot, aren’t you?”

“Sh-sh.”

“I will not shush,” Annie cried. “You’re all nodding and purring how nice she looks as though she went off in her sleep. They’ve cut her to ribbons and put her back together again, and nobody the wiser as to what she died for. A parcel of jewels? She’d of flung them in the street to any beggar—”

This Hannah thought, was what came of Walker’s scheme, sending Annie to do his work for him. She might not have found the precious cache, but she found suspicion, and the tongue to loosen it on all of them.

“Annie, Annie, Annie.” Mrs. O’Gorman thumped across the room and tried to pull the distraught woman away. Annie would not be moved.

Elizabeth Merritt went to her and put her arm around her gently. “Mrs. Tully, don’t—” she started.

Annie flung her arm away. “Mrs. Tully, don’t!” she mimicked. “Oh, you’re the one to tell me don’t, Elizabeth. Bringing him here as bold as brass.” She jerked her head at Dennis. “Like you brought him there till she told you. Like your own brother told you, but you wouldn’t be told. Have you no shame?”

“I am not ashamed,” Elizabeth said, standing very still, and pale as the white flowers, Hannah thought.

“That’s enough of your abuse, Mrs. Tully.” It was Sykes who spoke up, his voice shaking.

She turned on him. “Enough from you is more than enough—”

“I’m telling you enough and I intend to be heard. Maria was many things, but she was not infallible. And as you know, she worshiped me.”

Annie made a noise between her teeth.

“You’re entitled to your opinion of me,” Sykes said coldly. “So are you all, as I am to mine of you. But you will not persecute this girl and boy because of the prejudices of a woman against him.”

“She didn’t have prejudices.”

Sykes showed his teeth. Almost a snarl, Hannah thought. “She had them where I was concerned. As God made man, in her eyes I made poetry, and woe to the creature who would say he was my equal. In her abuse of this boy, her words were not well meaning.”

“So that’s your story,” Annie said, swinging her face near his. “She worshiped you—oh, she did that all right—the poor, blind woman, and God forgive her for it. Twenty-five years of it, a lifetime making a whore of herself for you. A decent woman like her!”

“Stop it,” Sykes hissed.

“I’ll not till I’m heard. You’d not leave her alone with your promising and craving when you were away. And she’d live the long, lone winters waiting for a bit of sun with your coming, trying to warm herself on your poems. And you nesting home with a wife in season. She was caught, trapped like in a harem, and she knew it the last years of her life.” She flung around on Elizabeth. “Could you doubt the warning she put out to you? A life philandered away from her? Have you the promise of more from that one than she had of him?” She jerked her head at Sykes.

“See it, Elizabeth! See it!” Hannah called out. The words flew from her, pleading, while she scarcely knew herself to be speaking.

Heads bowed in the room as though shame as well as grief covered the mourners.

Hutchins, the funeral director, pushed among them and parted one and another of the people crowding to the front. He put one hand on Sykes and the other on Annie as though to spread them. His words he directed at Annie.

“This is a memorial, not a wake. Go back to your place.”

It was Elizabeth who first caught the slur in his words. The tears came to her eyes, but still she stood, her head high, her mouth a taut line. The cur, Hannah thought, making Elizabeth hate him and the town and friends and now at the moment she needed them most.

Annie Tully was no more than an instant behind Elizabeth in catching the insult. “It isn’t a wake, isn’t it? A wake’d be out of place in your marble palace here. Honest grief’s a disgrace in the eyes of hypocrites.”

They were all to be aired now, all the old hates and prejudices, Hannah thought, her work with O’Gorman undone, and Maria’s work, the best work of her life.

“This town is alive with hypocrisy,” Sykes joined the hate chant, “and you don’t know your enemies from your friends, Mrs. Tully, any more than Maria did.”

Adding fuel, Hannah thought, the cauldron belching fire.

“We’ll know them when you’re gone, Mr. Sykes,” Hannah said aloud. “If there’s any kindness left in you, you’ll leave us alone. Maria worked for peace in the Cove. We should be able to bury her in peace.”

“We should, we should,” Annie sobbed.

“Nothing said here in love or hate will bring Maria back,” Hannah finished.

“Nothing, nothing,” Annie moaned.

Hannah drew a long breath, watching Hutchins line people up for their last look on the departed. She aged, she thought of herself, every time she met a crisis, and what she had always thought would give her youth and life, that special power to confront the world with Hannah Blake, took something away instead, and left her a little sadder, a little emptier. Now she joined the line and paused her moment before the coffin. She looked at Maria’s face. How could they say that this was lovely? They hadn’t known Maria to say that. The lines were smoothed out, the character removed as surely as the soul. And I did not do that, she thought.

Almost as though she were reassuring her of her right to that belief, Annie Tully came up to her and put her hand to Hannah’s, a hard, rough hand worn in years of service to Maria.

“Poor Miss Blake,” the woman said hoarsely. “You’ve been hurted, too.”

They wept together.

30

DENNIS RETURNED AS HANNAH was about to sit down to dinner. She saw him from the window changing the sprinklers in the garden. Cherishing the job, she thought, and well he might. He was not likely to find another these days in Campbell’s Cove. She wondered if, jobless, he would take flight. Not soon enough. There were those on Front Street who would give him shelter in spite of Annie. In fact, there were some who would do it to spite her. That was their nature, perverse and quarrelsome, with no restraint on their emotions, and no power of reason to guide them. She had tried to understand them, and she would still try—and make a show of succeeding at it—for Maria’s sake.

She finished her tomato juice, and Sophie brought the lamb chops. Never had the child prepared them so well—broiled just to where the pink had faded, the fat crisp. She sighed thinking of training another girl when Sophie left her, and that day would come soon. Sophie had no doubt forgotten Dennis already and found herself another young man. She had reached that age, that season. She was ready and she would marry soon, getting a few acres of land from her father if the boy had none, a cow perhaps from a brother, dishes and pots and pans, sheets and blankets—a shower of them. They would be married in the church and there would be a wedding feast in the field next to the house they would build through the years, one room of it up for the start. And for every room there would be a child, and every child would be brought on a Sunday afternoon to see Miss Blake and go home with a bank account started. And one of them might be called Hannah. She turned the cut-glass goblet and saw her face in its many facets. There were already three Hannahs, the children of three “country girls,” aged—she tried to remember—five, three, and eleven.

She took her coffee to the veranda, and saw Sophie leave presently, and with Dennis. They walked down the drive in easy company of each other. Sophie was well over her crush when she was with him. She turned and waved her familiar wild, jerky farewell. She carried a paper bag, and in it, no doubt, the faded polka-dot pajamas.

Hannah bowed her head, feeling profoundly sad. Dennis was off to a rendezvous with Elizabeth, likely, to get his own wounds healed. Quick-healing, especially if there were sand rubbed in them.

What a world of quiet. The last birds’ song. She had heard the first that morning. The stars were coming out again, exactly where she had seen them fade. The whirr of night wings, the thud of June bugs, June bugs in September. The distant cry of the train whistle of the eight-fifty out of Campbell’s Cove. It would be at least nine-ten by now. What a lorn cry it was, as though it were carrying farther and farther away a burden of grief. And it might, she thought. Andrew Sykes might well be on it, for he had announced his intention of leaving the Cove and not returning. No more ferreting among the yellow pages for yellow purposes. No more saints of witches and heroes scratched from their graves for mockery. No more “affair” in Campbell’s Cove. Dennis and Elizabeth had seen him off, no doubt, Dennis catching from him the bundle of dry sticks he called wisdom.

When her own thoughts were dry, she got the car out and drove into the town. Saturday night and full of laughter, juke boxes, and the Sunday comics, a dance at the Legion hall, confessions at St. Cecilia’s, the Salvation Army at the corner of High Street and Orchard, Canasta on the Bakers’ front porch, horseshoes under a spotlight in the Watts’ back yard, and a barbecue and a barrel of beer, television at the Shanes’, and at the Merritts’ one low light in the living-room behind drawn blinds, the door open but the screen door locked, no doubt. The wedding feast might be at Jefferson City, but the love-making was in Campbell’s Cove. On Cherry Street the Wilkses had guests again, but the only company in the house across the street was one sheriff’s deputy.

She picked up all the Sunday papers and drove home.

In the study, she tried to read them. There was an item in the county journal which held her for a moment—a release on the simulated air raid to be staged at Campbell’s Cove—word for word as she had given it. Everything was easy now for Hannah Blake. Word for word. The papers were full of lust and crime, dope addiction in the cities, arson in the villages, volunteer firemen starting the flames they returned to quell—and Americans still making fools of themselves over royalty.

She read occasionally, but her eyes were as often on the window as they were on the paper, and her mind when she permitted it to leave the explicit before her eyes, conjured up a scene at the Merritt house—the faded couch where she had sat with Mrs. Merritt, to what fine purpose now? She went to the telephone finally, and dialed Elizabeth’s number. She could imagine them starting at the sound of the bell, uncoiling from an embrace. One ring, two, three, four—She could see everything that might be happening in the Merritt house vivid against the wall of her own mind. Elizabeth answered then, a timorous, ashamed “hello.” Hannah hung up without answering and returned to her chair. Something inside her responded violently, and she rocked with the pain and the pleasure of it. She waited fifteen minutes, measuring the time by the columns she meted out for herself to read—words, a jumble of words, but each of them to be articulated, a measure of time and heartbeat, the surge and swell of her lifeblood. Once more then she dialed the number. The “hello” came faster, and with an edge on it. Hannah pulled her lips tight across her teeth, and waited. Elizabeth, too, waited. Then: “Who is this?” Hannah hung up.

Next time it would be Dennis who came, she thought, with another of his “God damn your prying soul”—if he had the courage to take the phone in his hand.

Her measure of time was more difficult, and she paced the room marking each cold minute by her watch. On the third call, the phone was caught up almost before the bell rang, and the voice jarred against her expectation, a breezy, male “hello” and a medley of laughter behind and about it. Tom Merritt was home with his bride. Hannah could not suppress a giggle. She clamped the phone down on it. What right had he to such gaiety? To be so pleased with a wife he had taken so unlovingly?

She stood a long time at the desk, limp and exhausted. Gradually a sickness came over her in the contemplation of what she had been doing. She lumbered to the window then, and one hip on the wide sill, sat for some moments breathing the damp coolness, deeply, deeply that she might be relieved of the reek of her own mind.

Dennis’s footsteps scuffed up the driveway presently. She had never known hatred before, she thought. He had destroyed all decency in her.

31

SHE AWAKENED TO THE sound of church bells, and in the first few seconds of consciousness remembered what a time there had been in the Cove when St. Cecilia church had installed their first large bell. One benefit and another had been held to raise the funds for it, every merchant contributed, and said halleluiah when the sum was sufficient. Then the bell was hung. Its first sounding was to toll a six-o’clock Mass. No one within the town limits had slept through it. Those who slept after it were roused at the seven-o’clock Mass. Very few were still in bed at nine. The priest then, a reasonable man, agreed to silence the big bell until eleven. But what a ringing it got at that hour, booming out over every other church bell in town. Protestants, at regular worship, bowed their heads and waited until eleven-five, and the children giggled. When the Catholics were called, the Protestants might worship.

All the bells, including St. Cecilia, had been muted since; and it was soothing, Hannah thought, to lie in bed and hear the first of them on Sunday morning. Bells were for resurrection. Bells were for joy; and this day past, she might expect her share of it. She must guard against a sense of elation, she thought, getting up. There was solemn prayer and resolve to be made, a devil to be cast out.

She made her own breakfast Sundays that Sophie might go to church with her family. She had need of a good breakfast, and ate well. How many good cooks there were in the farmhouses in the neighborhood of the Cove, trained by Hannah Blake. She herself had learned the art from a farm woman, not her mother, surely. Her father had always said that she could manage to burn water. But then he cared so little about food. He took no meat to speak of. No wonder he had never had a son. What a strange thought, she mused, gathering the dishes into the sink—that meat-eating was a male characteristic. It came, no doubt, from men’s needing meat to do the hard day’s labor. In a time of divided labor, equal rights, a woman was no less a woman, sharing the tastes of men.

She dressed, a pleasant lethargy her state of mind. It was as though a full portion of gladness was within her reach, and her only decision the moment at which she should choose to enjoy it. I’ll put it off, she thought, till I come home from church, and then if needs be, I’ll put it off again.

The subject of the sermon was most appropriate, she thought, reading the announcements in the glass-framed plaque on the church lawn. Fear not to walk alone.

She greeted the Copithornes on the church steps, and nodded to the Wilkses across the aisle from her as she settled in the Blake seat, a seat worn pale by the restlessness of many generations. Sitting quite still, she would leave no mark on it herself, another peculiar thought. The organ music was pleasant. Bach and Mozart, and the sunlight through the amber-tinted windows spun a haze between her and the other worshipers.

“Fear not to walk alone in righteousness,” the reverend doctor commenced. Which, she thought, was not quite what he had announced outside. But then righteousness had come to have a formidable meaning. Righteousness had no place in a world of expediency. It admitted no compromise. There was indeed a message here for her, but not in the words he intoned. The message was in her own heart, in the summoning of the savage strength she must have to be at last truly righteous. To this burning purpose everything must be sacrificed if Maria’s death was to have any meaning. And it had meaning, if she had the courage to prove it. Elizabeth must not be spared either, however much she suffer, and Hannah Blake suffer with her. To be exorcised must be to suffer, but to be possessed, damnation.

She gathered strength in the very act of forcing herself to listen through the sermon, without moving even a hand to her face to brush away a fly. She gave a quarter to the collection plate, pulling down on herself the scorn of the usher, who expected a dollar at least. And that added a mite to her strength, to defy opinion. She did not sing although the hymn was to her liking and her voice among the best in the congregation. And the services over, she mingled among people for whom she had small affection. Mrs. Wilks got the compliment she expected on her hat, and Ruth Copithorne an account of the disgraceful scene at the funeral home she wanted because, she said, John could never tell anything straight.

She drove home then, and leaving her purse, hat, and gloves on the car seat went to the foot of the garage stairs and called up them. Dennis answered her, but before he could come down, she climbed up to his room.

32

“IT SEEMS A LONG time since you and I had a talk, Dennis.”

That he viewed with alarm her coming to his room was obvious. He had stood before her at the top of the stairs as though he would bar her way at first, and then retreated in haste making the place as tidy as he could with the sweep of his hand. No papers, no books, she noticed. Whatever he had been doing in his room lately had been in his mind only. The disorder was his clothes, the contents of his pockets.

“May I sit down?” she asked.

He motioned to the chair at his table. The one arm chair in the room was draped with his work clothes. He sat on the edge of the bed, and ran his hand through his hair as though it were not disheveled enough.

“You’re nervous,” Hannah said. “I’ve been to church myself. It’s a wonderfully calming influence.”

“I’ve tried it,” he said. “It doesn’t work for me.”

“So you intimated to me once. Perhaps the only influence to which you respond is—feminine. Have you ever thought of marriage, Dennis?”

“Are you proposing Sophie again, Miss Blake?”

“Don’t berate Sophie to me, young man. She’s a fine child, and innocent in spite of you.”

The veins rose on his forehead.

“I’m not proposing Sophie, and you know it. In fact, I’m not proposing anyone. But I think it’s time we considered your position in Campbell’s Cove.”

“We?”

“Yes. You and I. Where you want now to tell me it’s none of my business, I’d hesitate if I were you, Dennis, because I’m in a position to do something about it.” She drew her finger through the dust on the table, and changed her tone. “Tom Merritt is home with his bride, I hear. I wonder was he setting an example? Not to you, of course. He doesn’t like you very well, does he, Dennis? Perhaps he’s jealous, too, because you’re a poet. Everybody it seems is jealous of you. Flattering, isn’t it?”

He clenched his hands between his knees, and sat, his eyes intense on her.

“I should like to explode the myth of Dennis Keogh. I think it’s time. Apparently Maria tried it, and got small thanks. I’m not afraid to try it—and get no thanks. Does Elizabeth know of your experience in Florida last winter, sailing out of Pensacola, was it?”

He started violently, little beads of sweat bubbling to his forehead.

“I take it you haven’t proposed marriage to Elizabeth either—just your company, and your poetry, of course.”

“It’s the jungle,” Dennis murmured, getting up. “It’s slogging through the bloody jungle again—”

The beast in the jungle, Hannah thought. “Or am I wrong?” she pursued flamboyantly, sure now that she was right. “Tell me you’ve offered marriage to her and I’ll go down from here. I’ll apologize and go down.”

He lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. “You aren’t wrong. I haven’t said the word to her. I’m not sure. I thought I was till Mrs. Verlaine let me have it. I don’t want to hurt Elizabeth. She loves me. I know that—and, Christ, it’s good to be loved.”

Hannah shut her mind against the appeal in his words. “You say you don’t want to hurt her. What do you think you have done to her in the last week? What has this marriage of Tom’s done to her? And you have credit coming for that. What of that scene there in the funeral parlor—what did that do to her?”

“I can’t help that,” he said. “I can’t help any of this, and maybe Tom Merritt did right. Maybe his conscience was bothering him, and he just needed something to push him into the decision. You can do good not meaning it, you know.”

“Dennis,” she said very quietly, “you can do bad not meaning it, too.” This was an easier way, she thought. “There are people in this world who are the instruments of evil. There are people who are the devil’s advocates without knowing it.”

“I don’t believe in the devil.”

“Nor in hell?”

“No. Only the human mind is diabolical enough to conceive of it. When heaven’s too tame, he makes hell for himself.”

“A lesson from Mr. Sykes, no doubt.”

“No. A lesson from my own father. He was a minister of God, and when I was sixteen years old, he was convinced—as you are, Miss Blake—that I was the devil’s advocate. He had a Sophie all ready for me to marry because he couldn’t believe that I wasn’t responsible for her. I ran out on him.” He jerked his head back as though he would break a pain that had knotted behind his neck. “I think I’ve been running ever since.”

“Have you told this to Elizabeth?”

“Yes. I’ve told Elizabeth everything that has ever happened to me, every sordid patch of it. She’s tried to make me see that it’s not sordid.” He said it as though he were trying still to believe it. “She’s so lovely, Miss Blake—”

Hannah could not meet his eyes. She was not without pity, she thought, even for the damned. “Go away, Dennis. The greatest kindness you could do her would be not see her again. She deserves someone clean, someone who hasn’t been handed from one woman to another—”

“Don’t say that to me,” he shouted, but the words were lost to Hannah for his hand flew with them. He tried to draw away, unable to hold back the impulse to strike her, but the tips of his fingers slashed like claws across her cheek.

She felt the sting burning into her face but sat where she was, quite straight and oddly comforted by the pain.

Dennis clenched his hands in horror, opened them and examined them as though he realized them suddenly to be indeed the devil’s instrument. He slumped down on the edge of the bed and covered his face.

Hannah got up slowly. His cigarette was lying on the floor, still burning. What a strange coincidence, she thought, putting her foot on it. It was a dream, a recurring nightmare, from which she might awake in bed, and discover that no such person as Dennis Keogh had ever come to Campbell’s Cove.

33

THE CORONER’S PRELIMINARY FINDINGS were reported in the County Journal the next morning. There were tests, not as yet complete, but there was every indication that the sheriff’s reconstruction of the crime would be confirmed medically. It was George Walker’s theory that Mrs. Verlaine, having taken some wine that evening, mistook her assailants for friends at first, and raised no cry. In the house, they made their demands for the jewels, and the woman had surrendered them so willingly the burglars suspected a trap. She might even have made a gesture of sounding an alarm to someone in the house by pulling the ancient bell cord. When it didn’t work they had at hand an instrument for quick and silent murder.

How ingenious a deduction, Hannah thought, setting the paper down and pouring another cup of coffee. How characteristic of Walker, with just enough of Maria’s habits to make it shine, the implicit and natural glow of truth! What a genius he had for the half-truth, and what a way of suggesting that the other half was quite within his reach should he wish to pull it out. A sleight-of-hand artist!

She glanced at the rest of the article. A full description taken from the insurance papers had been put out on all police communications. It was thought likely that the murderers would try to dispose of some of the smaller pieces before long.

It read like a lullaby, she thought.

She looked at her watch. It was time to leave for the office. A new week. She liked to be well rested on Monday morning, and she had not felt more fit for a long time.

The kitchen door banged, and before she had risen from the table, Sophie burst into the dining-room. The first sight of the child sent a cold chill through her. “Denny’s gone, Miss Blake.”

She sank down into the chair again in relief. “Gone?”

“He’s not in his room. His clothes—everything’s gone.”

“Well,” she said as though there should be comfort in the words, “he was a vagrant, you know, a wanderer. He’s just wandered off again.”

“He didn’t even say good-by,” Sophie said, hurt. “Goodbyes are difficult,” she tried to explain. “It’s much better to go without them. Some day, child, you’ll realize that.”

“I just can’t believe it,” Sophie said.

“Don’t think about it. Just go about your work.”

Before she went to work herself, however, she climbed the stairs to the boy’s room. The blankets and linen were folded, and the room quite bare. Not even a scrap of paper in the wastebasket. Going out, she turned the key and put it in her pocket. She would not have it occupied again.

34

SHE WAS AT HER desk but a few moments when her secretary brought word that Tom Merritt wanted to see her. She looked up from the paper work before her, and he was standing beyond the glass partition waiting for her answer. He smiled and nodded. She liked appointments made in advance of all calls, business or social, but one quick glimpse of his affability and good cheer and he was welcome. She wondered if it were the salesman’s way, or if things were really as right with him as the impression he gave of it. She beckoned him in and shook hands across the desk.

“Congratulations, Tom.”

“Thank you, Miss Blake.”

“I hope you’ll be very happy.”

“We can’t be much happier than we are right now,” he said. “Phyllis is an awfully sweet kid.”

Well. That was a summary of a new wife! How aptly Dennis seemed to have called it. Tom put his hand in the grab bag and brought it out with a prize package.

“I’m sure,” she murmured. “Has Elizabeth gotten over her prejudice?”

He put his hat on a file cabinet and sat at her desk, pulling the chair away a bit that he might feel more her equal, she thought. “There’s one thing about Campbell’s Cove that always gets me down—no offense, Miss Blake. The town seems to know what’s going on in your house before you’re sure of it yourself.”

“Your mother and I are old friends, Tom.”

“That’s right,” he said, thinking about it. “She’s a canny old girl, by God. She can make out to be as dumb as that—” he rapped the desk with his knuckles, “and not miss a trick. We tried to keep her out of it—to save her feelings. We should’ve known better. Liz’s prejudice, as you called it. That was because she was sore at me. And that was because I was sore at her. I guess you know why.”

“Keogh, of course,” Hannah said.

“Yeah. Two or three times I was on the point of coming out to see you, but I kept telling myself to mind my own business. Then all of a sudden, Mrs. Verlaine’s death. And Elizabeth could have been in real trouble. I had to pull for Liz then no matter what happened.”

“She still needs all her friends,” Hannah said. “That was a nasty business at the funeral parlor.”

“I don’t take that too serious, Miss Blake. I don’t think anybody there did, the way I heard it. Just Mrs. Tully—and you, maybe.”

Hannah was startled. “Me?”

“You laced into Sykes, didn’t you?”

“I was disturbed by what he and Annie said about Maria,” Hannah said. “There was no need to proclaim that at her funeral.”

“That’s true,” Tom said. “Anyway, it’s over with, and that item in the county paper this morning should quiet things down for a while. Did you see it?”

“Yes. Very ingenious of Walker.”

“It made sense to me,” Tom said. “I felt awful good about it when I read it. The funniest darn things happen to us, Miss Blake. I hated that kid’s guts—Keogh. Now I just feel kind of sorry for him.” He smiled. “Maybe marriage mellows a guy. You told me once to come and see you if I wanted to start business in the Cove. I never expected to be here so soon.”

He was really very shallow, Hannah thought, and selfish beyond belief. Spoiled by mother and sister, he had a wife now to keep up the practice, an awfully sweet kid. How could a woman throw herself at a man on terms such as Merritt offered? Was she blind to them? Love-blind? A husband on any terms? Here he was before her now expecting another world to open up to him, another woman to prostrate herself before his charms. Here he sat, confident and smiling, his own affairs taking a miraculous turn for the good, Elizabeth’s trouble forgotten.

“Before we get to that, Tom, what’s changed your mind about the Keogh boy?”

“I haven’t changed my mind about him. I just woke up to the fact that I came darn close to really messing things up.”

A marvelous discovery, Hannah thought. In the wake of finding another woman’s affections.

“I see,” she murmured.

“To put it squarely, Miss Blake, the more I fought against him, the more Elizabeth was for him. She’s loyal. Blind. At the rate I was pushing things, she might have run off with him. Now all I can do is hope she’ll get over her infatuation.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

Merritt drew a long breath. “Miss Blake, I’m no tyrant. I tried my best at it. I even brought Phyllis home to live. Now we’ll get a place of our own. I’m just not cut out of that cloth. No big tragedies for me. I’m a simple guy. I like to make a decent living; I like a round of golf, but I like home better. I’d like to make up to my mother everything she’s done for me. That’s sentimental as hell, but that’s the way it is. I’ve always wanted to get married, to settle down. I never want to see a suitcase again except maybe for two weeks in the summer. But I was always looking for the right girl. I knew a lot of them. Elizabeth used to ride herd on me for that. So I thought I was really putting it up square to her marrying Phyllis like that.” He snapped his fingers. “I was going to make the big gesture, do right by the girl, that sort of thing. Then I was going to say, ‘Look what I did for you, Liz.’”

“I know,” Hannah said. “I’ve figured all this out myself.”

“But what happens? I’m in love with the girl. I couldn’t have gone through with it if I wasn’t. I just needed that push. And Phyllis knew it all the time. That’s the wonderful thing about it.” He spread his hands. “That’s it. You got my life story. Am I a dependable risk for the bank? I know my own mind in business.”

Copithorne, Wilks, Baker—the next generation of them before her, Hannah thought. Good, they must be good, or they would not so repeat themselves. Good for them, but not for her? Not for Hannah Blake? Oh, God, to be one of them. Not to be here alone waving a wand over their perpetuity, without a shred of her own. To hate them in the mornings and to yearn endlessly after their firesides at night. To despise their petty sins and envy the innocence they acquired by default. Marriages by default, and happy marriages! Lord God, to be so split asunder. To what end?

“I’m sure it’s a dependable risk for the bank,” she said. “Do you know Jeremiah Tobin?”

He nodded.

“He has a good location. He hasn’t much initiative, but he has a marvelous conscience, and I think I could persuade him to a partnership if that would interest you.”

“It might if it would interest Tobin. He’s been there a long time on his own, and he’s got kids—”

She interrupted. “Aren’t you confusing your position with mine, Tom?”

He flushed. “Excuse me, Miss Blake.”

“I think I can persuade him,” she said. She summoned her secretary to bring the file on Tobin’s application for a loan. “I take it, then, Tom, your only objections to Keogh were his occupation and youth?”

“He’s going to be a kid till he’s a grandfather. And a queer one. He won’t ever grow up.”

Hannah smiled. “Isn’t it strange—I had the notion he was born old. He’s gone from my place, you know.”

“No,” Tom said. “I didn’t know.”

“He was gone bag and baggage this morning. I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s left the Cove altogether.”

Tom’s face had lost its flush. He frowned. “May I use your phone, Miss Blake?”

She nodded, pushing it toward him. “Dial nine for an outside line.”

She watched him strike the number of the library. His face relaxed, Elizabeth herself answering. But the sweat had come to his forehead. “Hi, Liz. Just checking up on you,” he said. Too heartily, Hannah thought. He had more than casual objections to Dennis. He had been in mortal fear that Elizabeth was gone. A few words of banter and he hung up. “Do you mind if I smoke, Miss Blake?”

“I don’t mind.”

“So he’s gone. Without even a word to her. She doesn’t know it yet.” He lit the cigarette. “Sweet heaven, I’m glad—that he’s gone, I mean.”

“Let’s not count on it,” Hannah said, “until we’re sure. But if he is gone, this way might be kinder. I’m sorry now I ever gave him a job.”

Tom watched the smoke from his cigarette, glancing then at her and away again. “He made quite a play for you, too, didn’t he?”

“What?”

“Sorry. That’s none of my business.”

Hannah composed herself. “I’m interested. Where did you get that idea?”

He was more uncomfortable than she was. “The poetry contest—something like that, I guess. It just happened to run through my mind, and kept on running. I got no sense. I don’t know. I always thought he was a little off, up here.” He touched his forehead. Then the color flooded his face. “I don’t mean because of his attentions to you—”

“Isn’t it strange,” Hannah cut in, completely composed in his confusion, “I haven’t thought of the poetry contest for days.” She looked at the calendar. “It closed Saturday.”

“Saturday was quite a day,” Tom said.

35

SO, SHE THOUGHT, MARIA was right. There was never a moment’s doubt among the library board as to the sponsor of the poetry contest. And Dennis Keogh revealed as a poet, what a wagging of heads and wriggle of tongues there must have been. What a thing of pity she must have been to the town when his love tryst with Elizabeth came out to alibi him. Not Walker’s genius, but the gossip he picked up from the Bakers and the Shanes and all accounted for his horrible wisdom, his ruthless quiz that day. Thus was Dennis suddenly despised in the town and heads bowed in the funeral parlor when she chorused her plea with Annie’s warning to Elizabeth. He was despised and Hannah Blake was pitied. Pitied by one and all, of high and low degree, even to Annie Tully, Maria’s maid. “Poor Miss Blake—you’ve been hurted, too!”

Throughout the day the shame of it tore through her like a hot, jagged knife. No wonder they answered her call whatever she proposed these days! Civil defense! Let’s gather for civil defense. Let’s rally round Hannah Blake and cover her nakedness! To the honor of Campbell’s Cove. To the rescue of the old and venerable name of Blake.

And Elizabeth had known all along, more than the shame she knew, for she could go back to that first night—to remember the high witness Hannah called upon to share the honor of the contest. “I should like to do it as a memorial to my father … He was something of a poet.” And Elizabeth could remember her lustful account of Sophie and Dennis—

Hannah drove her knuckles down on the desk remembering as she could see Elizabeth remembering. She looked about her. How apt that the bank was divided by glass partitions! No place to hide. And no use of hiding, really. The worst to be known of her was known. There was nothing left to do but to walk proudly through the shame, and out of it. To be bold.

Before leaving the office she called Elizabeth about the contest.

“Mr. Sykes left me an envelope with the entries,” Elizabeth said.

“Did he judge them?”

“Yes.”

“An envelope,” Hannah said. “How many entries were there, Elizabeth?”

“Five, Miss Blake.”

“Five out of the whole of Campbell’s Cove? With a prize of a thousand dollars?”

“That’s all. They came within a week of the contest’s announcement. Nothing since.”

“We shall have a board meeting,” Hannah said. “I’ll call Ed Baker. I’ve something to say on this. A great deal to say. Can you attend at my house tomorrow night?”

“I’m sure I can attend,” Elizabeth said flatly. Miss Blake—”

“Yes,” Hannah said when she hesitated.

“Is Dennis Keogh still with you?”

“No. Apparently he went off in the night. Sophie discovered he was gone this morning.”

“I see,” Elizabeth said, and Hannah wondered what she saw.

“If you should hear from him, Elizabeth, I owe him a week’s salary. You might forward it. I don’t want his money.”

“I don’t expect to hear from him,” the girl said, and hung up without a good-by or a thank you.

Hannah went down to Front Street that night to call on O’Gorman. He had a fine militant organization behind him. Their plans were already set for the evacuation of the town, and done with a flare for the dramatic. He suggested capsizing a boat and a rescue of its occupants.

“It makes a good picture,” Hannah said, “but we may have accidents without staging them. I don’t want panic, Dan.”

“In the real thing you might have it,” he said.

“We’re rehearsing against it. Not for it.”

He shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

That I am, she thought. “Dan, I have an acre full of vegetables ready to harvest—onions, potatoes, carrots, eggplants—I don’t know what all is in it myself. You may send some of your people up. If they’ll put by a quarter of what they take for my use, they’re welcome to the rest.”

“That’s very decent of you, Miss Blake. I’m tempted to go digging myself. I’ve always thought I’d love to have a bit of land with something growing on it. ’Tis the dream of all sailors. I’ve a couple of lads could go through it in a day.”

“They’re not to go through it with a plow,” Hannah said. “I want it harvested, not devastated.”

“You’ve a bad opinion of us still,” he said.

“I’ve neither good nor bad. But what difference does opinion make, mine or anyone else’s?”

“None, unless it’s bad,” he said slyly. “We’ll go through your garden as gentle as the mist, and thank you for your generosity.”

About to turn up from Front Street a few minutes later, she passed a lonely figure walking in the semidarkness toward the docks. Elizabeth. The girl did not see her, but had she been driving a fire engine, Elizabeth would not have seen her, she thought. For a while Elizabeth would see no one except a phantom figure she conjured up out of a memory to meet her. The figure would fade with each recall and then, one day, be gone entirely. Well Hannah knew how ill-nurtured were those who fed on dreams. When Elizabeth’s was gone, she would be completely exorcized, and God willing, her demon thoughts of Hannah would be gone, too. But if they were not, it was Elizabeth’s loss, not hers. Really, she thought, she cared very little.

The lethargy in which she drove home, a sort of melancholy detachment wherein it would have been easy to cry should tears seem to comfort—this spell was broken as she approached her drive. A flashlight was playing over the garage. She had never been afraid in all the years she had lived alone. A thief, a burglar would not be so brazen as to use a light. Nor would he be at the garage. She drove on past the house, dark except for the night light she always left in the hall. She would almost welcome a thief, she thought. She parked off the highway and walked back across the lawn. The light was moving in the room over the garage now, but she had the key to it in her pocket. He would not come back, she told herself. He could not come back. And if it were he, she should go into the house and to bed with the quick hope that he would be gone again before she awakened.

She stopped in the added darkness of a tree’s shadow a few feet from the garage. She could see the play of the flashlight, but not its bearer. Nothing in the room escaped scrutiny from closet to dresser. There was nothing to be found or missed, she thought, although her search had not been this thorough. Her heartbeat seemed to make the noise of a frog as she grew aware of it in the still darkness. They were keeping company, her heart and a frog, beating time together, the fearsome throb of waiting. She remembered taking the heart from a frog in biology class—the living heart—

The light was gone from the room then. She strained for the sound of footsteps. Only the light was loud, streaking out from the open garage door into the treetop over her, then down within inches of her and narrowed to a circle as the searcher closed the door and tested it with his hand. The reflection of the light on the white door defined him. Matheson.

She waited until he was abreast of her on the drive. “Did you find what you were looking for, Matt?”

The light jerked in his hand, but his voice was easy. “No, I didn’t find anything, Miss Blake. I was looking for the boy, as a matter of fact.”

“Equipped with keys and flashlight?”

“I generally carry skeletons,” he said.

“And a warrant to use them?”

“No. But since it was his room I was visiting, I didn’t see much harm in using them. When did he take off, Miss Blake?”

“I have no idea. He was gone this morning.”

Matheson came over to where she was standing. “You aren’t holding a gun on me, are you?” he asked, playing the light up to her hands.

“I don’t own one.”

“It mightn’t be a bad idea, you living alone and all—and what happened to Mrs. Verlaine.”

“I have no such valuables,” Hannah said. “And you can be grateful I don’t own a gun. If I’d had one, standing here, I think I’d have used it.”

“Your feet’s going to get wet standing there in the grass. Did you think it was the kid come back?”

Testing, Hannah thought, in his own sly manner. To have asked what he wanted to know he would have said: “If it was the boy, would you have shot him?”

“No. I didn’t think it was he. I have the key to his room.”

“So,” Matheson said. “Any idea why he quit without giving you notice?”

“No. He was a tramp when he came and he probably went on the tramp again.” She put one word after another warily. It was Elizabeth, she thought, who put him onto it. From where else the sure information he had left without notice?

“But you was so sure he wasn’t coming back you took the key,” Matheson said.

“When someone takes his clothes, it’s a fair assumption that he will not return, isn’t it?”

“And when a door’s locked, that he won’t get in. Good night, Miss Blake. I’m sorry if I gave you a start.”

“Where’s your car, Matt?”

“Why, I left it over on Cherry Street, Miss Blake. It isn’t such a long walk through the fields. I wanted to see how long it took me.”

She could not take alarm at that, certainly. Dennis was his prey under those circumstances.

“It will be a longer one back that way. I’ll drive you if you like.”

“No, thanks. I’m going to walk it from a different angle going back.”

She returned to the highway for her car, and driving into the garage, sat there for a long time wondering if Matheson was watching her. Finally she got the key to Dennis’s room and went up to it. She followed what she believed to be Matheson’s footsteps, and by examining the windowframes and baseboards, she saw the markings of the policeman’s search. He had been prying for a loose board, a hiding-place where, according to his conjecture, the boy might have concealed the jewels until he took off with them.

36

THE MEMBERS OF THE library board not away on vacation convened at Hannah’s at nine o’clock. A sufficient number to the task, she thought. Without preliminaries, Baker turned the meeting over to her.

“I have learned,” she started, “that Campbell’s Cove is not the place to do something anonymously. I suppose you are all aware that I am the donor of the prize for the poetry contest.”

“I must say I’m not surprised,” Katherine Shane exclaimed.

Surprised or not, she must say, Hannah thought. Elizabeth was leaning back in the chair, her head resting. Tired and pale, she looked, and surely she was not surprised at the meeting or its disclosure. She had anticipated from hearing the plan that Hannah could not stand the strain of remaining anonymous.

“Elizabeth did a beautiful job of the presentation,” she continued. “It’s much too bad the response was not commensurate with her efforts. If it had been, I should not feel compelled to ask for this meeting. Friends, we have five entries to the contest. Five.”

No one seemed surprised at that, either. Baker, in fact, murmured his expectancy of it.

“Speak out, Ed,” Hannah said. “You’re satisfied with the response?”

“Well,” he hedged, “I can understand your disappointment—”

“My disappointment!” Her voice was shrill with the demand. Now was the time for him to say it out—for anyone there to ask the truth: “To what purpose the contest, Hannah, that we should share your disappointment?”

Baker merely squirmed in his chair. “It’s true the library sponsored it, and got up the ballyhoo. Getting nothing but this out of it is discouraging—”

While he groped for words Elizabeth looked up. She pointed to the Manila envelope she had laid on Hannah’s desk. “Miss Blake, how do you know you haven’t brought a poet out of hiding in Campbell’s Cove? Five of them perhaps. That, I recall, was your purpose? Five is a goodly number of poets, don’t you think?”

“Plenty,” Baker muttered.

But all the others in the room grew busy in their embarrassment.

“For every poet,” Hannah said evenly, “there are at least a hundred who think that they are poets. To make a contest we need contributions from all of them.”

The embarrassed ones wagged their heads in approval. They would run out any chute of escape, Hannah thought—and apparently Elizabeth after them, for she made no answer.

But Baker had to take it up, seeing nothing of the issue. “I just don’t see it as a calamity. I’ll tell you the truth, Hannah, after all that’s happened this last week, I can’t get into much of a froth over this.”

“I can,” Hannah said, “and I intend to. Do you remember the meeting last spring when Maria said our men were afraid of culture? They’re not afraid of it. They despise it. This contest was organized to add distinction to our celebration of Campbell’s Cove Day.” She glanced at Elizabeth. There was no protest in her face, nor in any face in the room. They were all on her side, eager to follow the easy way, the contest for the Cove’s Day now, not for poets at all.

“We shall have the governor here and Senator Cravens. There will be a nation-wide broadcast of what happens here. We are setting ourselves up as a model community.”

Gradually, calling on the depth of her resources, Hannah pumped enthusiasm into them. “Does a soldier lie down on the battlefield when his friend is killed?” she demanded. “He fights the harder for it. I refuse to believe that all of Campbell’s Cove is dead. And I refuse to have it proclaimed to the country. I want us to have a secret here among us of the library board.” She lowered her voice. “We shall pretend that we have a hundred entries, a hundred and five in fact. Call it priming the pump if you will, making a hundred others wish they, too, had given their talents, making them resolve to join the next contest, and I pledge you here another contest, an annual one. We shall have a dynamic community if we kindle the spark. What do you say? Ruth?” She turned to Mrs. Copithorne.

“Well, Joanne, our oldest girl, entered a poem, I think. Perhaps I shouldn’t say anything.”

“All the more reason to say something,” Hannah insisted.

“There’s nothing we’d have to do except keep still about it, I mean about the number of poems?”

“That is all.”

“I must say I don’t see any harm in that,” Katherine Shane said. “And I see what Hannah means. You can’t call it off now very well and we all want to hold our heads up on Cove Day.”

“Elizabeth?” Hannah challenged.

“There’s to be a sham invasion of the Cove, isn’t there?” the girl said after a moment, making a point of the word “sham.”

“That’s right. A simulated air attack.” Hannah addressed herself to all of them quickly. “You should see the preparations O’Gorman has made to evacuate the Cove. A fleet of fifty boats to take half the town out to the point. Those east of High Street will make a cavalcade into the hills.”

“I know,” Baker said. “The block captain’s lined up my family. It’s going to take a lot of doing, Hannah.”

“We’ll be working night and day on it. That’s why I want to get this contest business settled tonight. I suggest we put it to a vote—a silent vote for silence.” She risked a smile.

“Fair enough,” Ruth Copithorne said.

“It’s the democratic way,” Elizabeth said, rather airily.

“That’s right,” Hannah said.

Elizabeth looked from one of them to another. “Doesn’t it frighten you to do an undemocratic thing in a democratic way?”

“It frightens me much more,” Hannah said, “to admit that we are without hope, without confidence.”

“Another vote of confidence?” said Elizabeth. “Fred Matheson got one last week.”

“And he deserved it,” Hannah said, using the tactic she had learned from Wilks. “I don’t remember that you were there, Elizabeth, but if you had been, you would know what might have happened that night if I hadn’t made peace in the chamber.”

“That’s right,” Baker said. “You did a swell job.”

“It was an uneasy peace. That’s why I’m determined to weld it permanently on Campbell’s Cove Day.”

“All the talk of peace in the world,” Elizabeth said, “and there is no peace anywhere.”

Hannah plunged over the remark. “Katherine, will you make the motion for us to present the contest winner to the anniversary committee without reference to the number of entries?”

“I so move,” Mrs. Shane said proudly.

Ruth Copithorne seconded it, and Hannah called for a show of hands in favor. All but Elizabeth’s were raised. But she did not vote against it, and Hannah called it unanimous.

37

WHEN THEY WERE GONE and she had stacked the coffee things in the kitchen sink, Hannah returned to the study. Elizabeth had not stayed for coffee, and going she had stood a long moment in the drive as though she were trying to draw something to herself out of the very atmosphere. Hannah had watched from the vestibule, the simple ones chattering away inside. There was something pleasant about locking in combat with someone whom you cared about. But to have won was no great pleasure. Not to have raised and seen this issue through, however, was impossible. Katherine Shane would have gone giggling through the crowd on Cove’s Day, whispering on the five entries, on Hannah Blake’s contest for the boy who wasn’t there. Now she had forced them into a conspiracy of silence. She had dared to say “poetry contest” to them, and dared them in return to say “Dennis Keogh” to her. And they were silent, a loyal silence for which she vowed gratitude. She had inflicted a faith upon them. Really, she thought, to have doubted Hannah Blake at that moment they would have had to doubt themselves. None of them was capable of that.

Elizabeth, without a word of reference to it, had left the Manila envelope on her desk. She opened it now, the five sealed entries inside, plain white envelopes and one marked No. 1. A note from Andrew Sykes to Elizabeth was attached by a paper clip. Hannah read:

My dear Elizabeth:

A paltry lot. Here is one with less rhyme than reason. A poem still. What is a poem? I asked myself that consenting to be your judge. A poem is a little truth, or maybe a little love. And poetry is the most of it of which one is capable.

Adieu and thanks for many kindnesses and long patience. A virtue, patience. But do not believe for an instant that it is its own reward.

It was signed with Sykes’s initials, and its contents, Hannah thought, recalled something of him that he himself had forgotten. A little truth—a little love! From him the words were mockery. She took a piece of notepaper from her desk and wrote to Elizabeth: Since this is addressed to you, you may want to keep it, your only souvenir of the contest. Believe me, I understand your abhorrence of it. I wonder if you have any intimation of mine, Sincerely …

She got up and walked to the window and back. That was not the truth at all. She did not abhor the contest. Not now. It was purged clean, five or a hundred and five, the contestants were sincere and innocent. And so was she, the honest benefactress of the Cove. They were all with her tonight and Elizabeth was not against her. Their faith had made her whole again!

In truth, there was no mark left against her, Hannah thought in high elation, except perhaps Sykes’s word on the contest. And Elizabeth, too, was glad to be shed of him; otherwise she would have cherished that note from one so eminent—a note of commendation. False praise from a false prophet.

Thus reasoning, she took the note and her note to Elizabeth and put a match to them. False praise, false prophet, false judge, she thought. The contest entries were in plain white envelopes, a penny apiece in any dime store, a dozen of them in her desk drawer now. She took a paper knife to the entries and opened the five of them with clean, sharp strokes. She read first the one marked No. 1, and its opening line showed her judgment of Sykes accurate:

The winged horse of war vermined with greed.

A perverse joke he had almost perpetrated on the Cove—his parting venomous arrow. Here was a poem to read aloud on Campbell’s Cove Day, to celebrate preparedness, unity, a day for patriots! What a climax he had planned to their mock invasion.

And written by Kenneth Tobin. The conscientious son of a conscientious father!

She read the others. A paltry lot he had called them because each one sang a song of simple pleasure. What did he know of a little truth, a little love except as he perverted it to an epic distortion? One among the entries was quite suited to the occasion, extolling love and dove and Campbell’s Cove—childish, eager words, perhaps, but to be childlike and eager was a most wonderful thing. Certainly in this age of cynicism.

She sat a long time thinking about it, and in the end she decided that Mr. Sykes should bless love and dove and Campbell’s Cove in spite of himself. And coincidental to the happy irony, Doctor Copithorne should discover himself the father of a budding poet.

38

IT WAS A WEEK of high and glorious accomplishment for Hannah. The town had roused itself from its show of mourning, and under her direction, the citizens prepared themselves for the annual festival—a festival despite its serious overtones, she reminded them. Her enthusiasm was infectious, and there seemed to be no bottom to her store of it. In her own heart she was sure that she would take no more plunges down the dark morass from which sleep gave the only respite.

Night after night she went to bed in contented weariness. Morning after morning she awakened to see the laborers in her garden, two or three of them, different ones every morning sharing the harvest. Sometimes there were women among them, their calico aprons billowing up behind them as they stooped to pick up their diggings. The garden would soon be bare now. The grapes were full on the vines, the orchard heavy with fruit. They should share that, also, she thought, and perhaps the plowing, and spring planting, and next year’s harvest. Now and then, their laughter or a phrase of a song came up as a part of their blessings on her beneficence. There was an atmosphere of old-world about it, another time when people took their needs from the earth or the water, their pleasure from the songs they made and the company of one another, when the wise wrote books instead of keeping them, when wealth was measured in the granaries and not in the coupons of preferred stock. To perpetuate this scene, this show of mutuality, how happy she should be to convert all her fortune into land!

Idle speculation. And no time for it the last day before the festival. She took her coffee to the study where a map of the Cove had been hung on the wall, marked with pins of varicolored heads, the routes of escape by land and water. She had been over it so many times she could close her eyes and visualize every marking. Strange, to close her eyes and see the heads of pins, and not a face among them—and to find it so marvelously pleasant—to be concerned with people in the abstract. How right that she should be in politics. And to have discovered it so late. No, not late. Such discoveries came when the heart and mind were ready for them, equal to their demands.

The doorbell roused her. Sunday should be her own, with no callers, certainly not unannounced.

She saw Elizabeth through the window. Once she would have quickened to the sight. Now it added nothing to her pleasure, except in that she was pleased at this new self-sufficiency. She resolved not to be tempted back to old affections.

“How nice to see you, Elizabeth.”

“Forgive my intrusion, Miss Blake.”

She had intruded, certainly, but she could not be sent away. Hannah opened the screen door to her.

“Could we stay out here, Miss Blake? It’s so pleasant.”

And my house so grim to you, Hannah thought. “Of course,” she murmured. “How is your mother?”

“Quite well, and so are Tom and Phyllis. Miss Blake, I want to know why Dennis left. I am asking it very humbly of you, but I want to know.”

She was always humble where Dennis was concerned, Hannah thought. “Sit down, Elizabeth. You don’t need to attack me on it.”

The girl half sat on the railing. It always annoyed Hannah to see anyone do it. “I know he wouldn’t leave without giving you notice.”

“If you want to talk with me, Elizabeth, take a chair, I don’t like to see a person balancing like a pumpkin on a fence. You’re quite sure you know Dennis well enough to anticipate his behavior?”

“I think I do.”

“I should think if you were that well acquainted with him, you might have heard from him by now. He’s been gone a week.”

Elizabeth sat where she was, her face cold and hard. “Why did he leave?”

“I discharged him, Elizabeth. For the good of all of us, I thought it time he left the Cove.”

“What do you know of the good of all of us? What do you know of good?”

“Perhaps my values are different than yours,” she said, smiling.

“I don’t think you have any values, Miss Blake.”

Hannah could feel the languor vanishing like foam. “Elizabeth, why didn’t you fight me on the contest the other night?”

“What did you say to Dennis?”

“Are we to have nothing but questions?” Hannah said. “No answers?”

“I don’t give a damn about your contest, Miss Blake.”

“And I don’t give a damn about Dennis. He has ingratiated himself with more women than you or I could count. He has played on their loneliness and denied them—”

Elizabeth shook her head. “No, no, no.”

“Then you tell me.” Hannah folded her hands.

Elizabeth’s eyes bore down on her. “In their loneliness or whatever, they have preyed on him. Yes, you, and your likes, and God help me, even I. We’ve been starved for the spirit of a man as well as his body. We are the craven lot, not him! Hannah Blake, see it, admit it! Look at me. I was twenty-nine years old yesterday, and this spring for the first time in my life I met someone with whom I felt exalted, someone I wanted so desperately—”

No more, no more, Hannah thought. Not even for you, Elizabeth, will I be dragged through hope into the slime again. “Stop it, Elizabeth!”

Her hands were on the girl’s shoulders, shaking her, and she could not remember getting up or putting them there. Elizabeth wrenched free of her, and stood, her hand on a pillar to steady herself.

“Don’t you see what he’s done to you?” Hannah pleaded. “He’s brought out everything shameless. Didn’t Maria warn you?”

Elizabeth’s eyes were terrible, dry, cold, without tears to warm them. “Did she warn you, Miss Blake?”

“No. Nobody warned me. I didn’t need warning. Who in the name of God would warn Hannah Blake?”

“Did you say these things to Dennis? Did you tell him he defiled people?”

“Yes, I said them! And Maria said them before me—”

“Maria did not say them—not those things. Maria Verlaine chose her own life. It may not have been the best life, not even a good one. And maybe she hoped to save me the heartache she had gone through, because she believed that’s what I was headed for. But never—not for a minute—did she regret her love for Andrew Sykes.”

“And you, Elizabeth?” Hannah said, cold as the frosted earth at the word “love.” “You have no regrets?”

“None. If I never see Dennis again, I shall be glad for what I’ve had of him, of his love.”

“A dream,” Hannah said, feeling that she was giving all the wisdom her experience had won. “It will fade, crumble to dust with handling. You’ll learn that.”

“Then it was a good dream of a good person, and if I’m stuck with it—but I won’t be. I promise you that, Miss Blake.”

Hannah smiled. “Don’t promise me, Elizabeth. What is it to me?”

“Please God, it’s nothing,” Elizabeth said.

Nothing comes of nothing, Hannah thought, content in the distraction of words—speak again! But she said, “So you’ve forgiven Maria?”

“Yes! She tried to destroy my confidence in him. But you! You tried to destroy him, his faith in himself as a human being—”

“Maria was forgiven,” she interrupted, “but I’m not to be. Is that it, Elizabeth?”

“If you succeeded, until I die, I won’t forgive you.”

Oh, but you will, Elizabeth, she thought, watching the girl plunge down the steps and across to the driveway, stiff-backed and long-striding. With your head in the air like that, you will walk through your shame as I did, and out of it, and forgive me as I forgive you.

She was about to turn back into the house when a car on the highway slowed down approaching Elizabeth and stopped. For only a moment. It came on then, and even from the portico Hannah recognized it and its driver, Sheriff Walker.

39

“SO TOMORROW’S THE BIG day,” he said, tossing his hat on the chaise longue. “It’s going to be quite a thing, Governor Michaels and the senator. That takes a lot of influence—a big show.”

“I have a good deal of work to do, Mr. Walker.”

He nodded sympathetically. “And interruptions all morning.” His eyes indicated the way of Elizabeth’s departure. “I’m one of Cravens’ boys, you know.”

“I might have suspected it,” Hannah said. “You did go in on the strength of his vote, didn’t you?”

“It’s funny how the same guy can break and put you together again. He took his first big step after that case I got busted on. State’s attorney. He cleaned house. Then he went through the dust bin and there I was shining like a diamond, like a little, lost diamond. Poetic, isn’t it?”

“Very.”

“And I think he’s got another setting all picked out for me. Not while Michaels is governor, of course. But in the temper of the times, as they say, I think Cravens is the safe bet.” He took a cigarette out and tapped it on the railing. “That’s information I thought you might like to have, by the way.”

“What?”

“The safest bet. I’m sort of a recruiting officer for Cravens. After tomorrow you should be in a good position to join us. See the world, as they say in the posters. Plenty of room for advancement.”

“And my qualifications?” Hannah said.

Walker smiled. “You got ’em. From both sides of the track. Uptown, downtown. That’s a beautiful sight in your garden. The peasants at work, voting peasants, of course. And you’re a woman of property, an old and pious family—”

“They’re taking the surplus vegetables,” Hannah interrupted.

“Of course. Don’t you want to hear more of your recommendations?”

“There are more?”

“One important one. The word at headquarters is that you’ve got a good sponsor.”

She thought about it for a moment. “Franklin Wilks?”

He nodded. “A word from him goes a long way down-state. He’s a national committeeman.”

“I know,” Hannah said.

“Of course you know.” He lit the cigarette, flipping the match to her lawn. It was in need of mowing, she thought. That idea struck him also apparently. “You got rid of the boy?”

“I did.”

“And without any favors. That’s smart. It’s a good idea in politics not to take anything you can get along without. But I’m sorry not to have you in my debt. I can give you a few pointers on Cravens, by the way.”

“I think not, Mr. Walker. I don’t like machines.”

“Only if you can run them,” he said. “Don’t be naïve. You’ve got to learn how it works before you can run it. Remember in my office? You said you could go to school to me. How about it? I’m at your service. Look, it’s a sure bet for both of us. You haven’t even started, so you’ve got nothing to lose. And I’m betting you’ll go the whole way.”

“Obviously, you’re a gambler,” Hannah said. “And the friend of gamblers from what I’ve heard. But not of grand juries. I don’t want any part of your help, Mr. Walker.”

He clamped his lips on the cigarette, inhaling. Even his eyes were like leeches. He watched her through the smoke he funneled in her direction. “You can’t have it both ways, Miss Blake. If you don’t like mud, you should stay out of the gutter. We’ve got a pact, you and I, whether you know it or not. I think you do. Do you want to explain that grand-jury crack of yours?”

“No. I was repeating hearsay.”

He drove over her words. “Because I was on an important job at the time, and with no trouble at all, I can repeat a lot of hearsay without saying a word. It’s all in the testimony, Miss Blake. I’ve gathered it all up and filed it away. It could have been filed in the newspapers. They were begging for it.”

She had to dare as much as he did. “Then why didn’t you do it? I’m not afraid of it! The whole of Campbell’s Cove knows it. I have their sympathy, their confidence. No muckraking politician can destroy that.”

Walker smiled. “I wonder. Gossip is one thing—testimony, something else, especially coming out of a murder investigation. You haven’t forgotten that, have you? There was a murder. You and I can’t tell when the lid will pop off that, can we? As I say, gossip is one thing. You can live that down. In fact, you can use it. People can feel ashamed about gossip. If you’re big stuff in a community, you can use it to your advantage. Right?”

Right, Hannah thought, but she did not answer.

“Now let’s talk about testimony, especially when it gets sanctified in the headlines. That’s when you get specific, Miss Blake. That’s gospel. Take that little poem you wrote—how did it go? ‘Love has unbound my limbs’—can’t you see it? ‘Spinster’s love poems revealed.’”

“I didn’t write it,” Hannah said. “I copied it out of a book.”

“Poor dear,” Walker said solicitously.

Hannah fastened her hands on the arm of the chair. She must not let him drive her to fury, or beyond it. A little twist to her mind or temper, and without intending it at all, he could catapult himself into the office of police commissioner. One way or the other, she thought, he would ride in on her back. She was, in fact, his prisoner—and her own. She was jailor and prisoner to herself, and bribing him was in effect self-bribery. She shook her head. A labyrinth of her own making.

“Well?” Walker demanded.

“I’ll not make bargains with the devil,” she said.

Walker flipped his cigarette to the lawn. “You’ve already made it, Miss Blake. Beware the day of forfeiture.”

“Are you threatening me, Mr. Walker?”

“No more than you just tried on me,” he said, getting up. “Now I’ve got a little job to do—padlocks for the murder house.”

“Aren’t you late with them?”

“Am I?”

“I suppose you know your business,” she retreated.

“Mine and yours. By the way, Miss Blake, your visitor this morning wants me to find her boy friend.”

It was a mistake, Hannah realized, to have turned on him.

“You should not have much difficulty,” she said as quietly as possible.

“None if I set my mind to it.”

“Mr. Walker,” she said, trying to lift her head above the hypocrisy of her speech, “he’s not important enough for you to take that much trouble over.”

Walker grinned. “Funny, I thought we’d agree on that. Now I’m really going to have to work on Matheson. He’s like a hound dog.”

“I know. He was sniffing around my place last week.”

“Was he?” Walker said easily. “Well, I’ll see if I can find a kennel for him.”

40

WELL, IT’S DONE, HANNAH thought, walking through the house. The bargain’s made and it’s done. What had she bought, really? A little time, a little power? He had not known he was selling time. Fancy, selling a pig in a poke! And it was something less than power she wanted, or something more. She was no longer sure. Not power perhaps, but its complement, esteem. Thus had she come to so despise Walker. In what low esteem he held her, and holding her in such esteem, what monumental contempt for the people who elected him and whose support he expected to rally for her, or her to rally for him and the master machinist, Senator Cravens. He had approached her as an equal. He had quoted to her the recommendation—an old and pious family. He spat upon them, putting her up, and she going up at his bidding.

Oh, God, she thought, it cannot be that Walker and I are one, he the face and I the soul! No, no, no. She moaned aloud with the pain of it. I made a mistake, she tried to reason, one mistake, confiding in him the need to be rid of Dennis Keogh. I could not have used him to that purpose. Like Tom Merritt, I could contemplate doing a bad thing to a good end, but when it came to its accomplishment, my honor would not have permitted it. My honor rooted in dishonor … faith, unfaithful … falsely true—

A conundrum! Words, only words.

She returned to the map in the study. Heads without faces. So must Walker look upon all people, she thought, so many pins to be manipulated, up and down in the pattern of politics. She pulled the map and the board on which it was attached from the wall, and stepped back, steadying herself on the desk. She felt as though she were on the edge of something, not a great depth, a small sort of incline that required a step down, and yet, she felt, if she took it she would get a jolt, like coming to the bottom of the stairs expecting one more step. She felt the jolt without moving. This is in my mind, she thought. There’s something wrong. If it doesn’t pass, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

She eased herself down to the desk chair, and opened the letter folder for distraction. Bills and solicitations. Not a letter in it worth the reading—a little fleck of black ash. She turned the partitions and here was what was left of her love poems. A monster, bitter-sweet, and my unmaking …

“True prophetess, Sappho!” she said aloud.

She pushed away from the desk, got up, and went to the window. Still they labored in the garden. Surely there were not vegetables enough in all of Campbell’s Cove to take so long in the gathering; up and down, the rhythm of the bodies in endless labor, as in her dream of the wheatfield—toiling for the sake of toil, for the dread of waking, for the need of weariness, for the cry to sleep.

She went to the sofa and stretched out on it, the sleep she craved upon her almost before she reached it

41

WHEN SHE AWOKE, HANNAH hastened to Front Street, glad to have slept the day to where she need make haste. O’Gorman was waiting on the docks for her, and with him was Matheson. It was disconcerting to find the police chief there. She had somehow felt that in making her bargain with Walker, she had banished Matheson.

“A fleet of fifty!” O’Gorman said proudly, sweeping the Cove with the gesture of his big hand. “If the weather’s fair in the morning, they’ll be a grand sight going out.”

“Beautiful,” Hannah said. “You’ve done a wonderful job, Dan.”

“I’ll collect my thanks when it’s over. Are they as well organized on top?”

“They don’t have your spirit.”

“That I know. There’s no spirit like that bred of necessity. I’m pressing Matt, here, into the lead boat.” He clapped the policeman on the back.

Making up to him, Hannah thought, for his defense of the Front Streeters. Still, the explanation of his presence eased her.

“I didn’t know you were a sailor, Matt,” she said.

“I’m just directing traffic on water—which is about what I’m good for these days—in the estimation of some.”

So, she thought, Walker had already acted on his part of the bargain.

“Not in ours,” she said.

There was a moment’s silence in which should have been at least a word of thanks for the compliment, she thought. But the policeman stared grimly ahead of him.

“What happened to the pilot you promised me, Miss Blake?” O’Gorman said.

Hannah turned up the collar of her jacket, using the wind as an excuse against a quick answer. O’Gorman knew he was gone. He must know. Why else would she have given him and his the run of her gardens?

“Gone,” she murmured, and then for no reason except that she seemed not to have said enough: “Gone to the wars, I guess.”

O’Gorman shook his head. “Like all good pilots.”

“Not that one,” Matheson said. “I don’t think they’ll want that boy.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s got a plate in his head from the last one.”

Hannah jerked her head up, feeling as though she herself had met a blow. “He was too young,” she managed. She glanced up at O’Gorman. “Wasn’t he too young?”

Why turn to him for help, she thought. He had planned this. Surely such information was not casual talk.

O’Gorman shrugged to her question.

Matheson answered it. “He got it for a present for his eighteenth birthday.”

Much came clear to her now—the greatest of Tom’s objections to Dennis, the gesture to his forehead that morning in her office, and his words “a little bit off.”

“How do you know this, Matt?” she demanded.

“I don’t see as it’s any of your business, Miss Blake,” the policeman said with a boldness that shocked her. “But I got it from Elizabeth Merritt. She’s worried he’ll do something desperate.”

Hannah curled her lips in hurt scorn. Everyone was entitled to information except Hannah Blake. They parceled it out to her as though she were a small cup and would run over with too much of it.

“He’s run away,” she said. “I shouldn’t call that anything desperate.”

“Would you call it desperate if he was to come back, Miss Blake?”

“Meaning what, Matt?”

Matheson did not take his eyes from the water. “Meaning he might tell us why he run away.”

Oh, he and Elizabeth had been in fine communion, she thought. “The jewels,” she said. “Have you changed your mind since breaking and entering upon my property to search for where he might have hidden them?”

“No,” he said slowly, “but it wouldn’t take much now to change it.”

O’Gorman rubbed his hands together. “Well, I’m going up to my supper if you’ve no last-minute instructions, Miss Blake.”

“None,” Hannah said. “We’ll meet in the morning, gentlemen, God willing.”

“Aye,” Matheson said. “We’ll meet in the morning if the night’s long enough.”

42

THE JEWELS, HANNAH THOUGHT, driving up from the water front. She had mentioned them once too often. They were becoming a dagger to her mind. They must be plucked from it. Yet they must remain the distracting issue to everyone except herself. She must know where they are, and that they will stay there forever. They must remain the unproven motive for the murder.

Then the triumph of their absolute banishment occurred to her. If they were gone forever, she might free herself of Walker for as long. He had become a leprosy upon her soul. And she must be whole again!

With nightfall she drove past the house on Cherry Street. It was in darkness. Walker had padlocked its doors, and taken the last of his deputies back to the county seat.

She returned home and put the car in the garage. This was the effort that would take the greatest courage. No impulse. No improvisation. No fury to drive it home. It needed to be planned, and carried out with boldness. A plan for survival—her survival.

She put on a dark dress and a gray raincoat. Gray to match the moonlight. A small steel hammer, gloves, and a bag. How provident the circumstances of the day, her emergency first-aid kit with the draw strings. She could sleep with it at her bedside, and in the morning carry it with her and lose it in the deep waters of the Cove. And she thought Maria might have approved that end for the cursed French jewels.

Leaving her own house well lighted she went out and across the fields—even as Matheson had come that night. A short walk, really. She had been permitted to take it alone as a child. Too short, she thought, the Verlaine house before her eyes so soon. Lying black and ominous, the reflection of the moon catching different windows with every few steps she took, it was like a sleeping beast of many eyes that stirred and cast one and another of them open and closed again.

Let fancy desert me, she prayed. Let me not imagine anything alive there. Let me be strong enough only to face the dead. Her footsteps sounded on the brittle-dry grass. The dead march, she told herself, trying to make a rhythm of her step. A radio was loud somewhere. Good. Let that distract the living. The back gate swung open at her touch. Well-oiled still, she thought, but soon rusty now. She stopped at the kitchen door. Walker had indeed padlocked it. A bright new lock where the old one had scarcely been used. The kitchen window was fastened as she was sure all the windows were, and the shades drawn. She must not be afraid of sound, she thought. But she waited, hearing a truck approach, and at the height of its rumble past the front of the house, splintered the center pane with two sharp blows of the hammer. She waited a long moment. The sound of the truck diminished, the radio picking up. No other sound except her own breathing. She put her gloved hand to the window lock, unfastened it, raised the window, and maneuvered her big body into the house.

The house was already in decay, she thought, the musty smell, the feeling of compression. To be in it was to feel buried alive. She stood a long time in the kitchen waiting for the moonlight to cast a dim path when her eyes grew accustomed to the indoors. No need to hasten in a grave, she told herself. A board creaked beneath her, a scurrying sound beneath that—a mouse, or mortar crumbling.

She guided herself along beside the scrubbed and bone-white table. It was Annie’s pride, that table, and the pride of the old biddy Maria’s mother had before her. Hannah paused, remembering a tale from her childhood forgotten all these years. Norah, the maid, thick-tongued with the brogue, had remarked in Maria’s hearing that the table always reminded her of home, of the women dressing the dead and laying them out on the door taken from the house of the corpse. As children, Maria had told her the story in the dark one night, and dared her to come down to the kitchen and see what was laid out on the table. She had come, creeping with fear, and screamed at the sight there—something humped and covered with white. It was loaves of bread left to rise over night. She half-giggled now, sensing the hysteria, the giddy, wild relief.

She moved on. What a long way since then—from one hysteria to another. The halltree and its mirror, showing nothing now but her own dark movement before it. The living-room. The shades drawn as Maria had never remembered to draw them. Not one for privacy, Maria. Whatever she did was right, dogma. Sin or charity, it was right because Maria said it was right. The truly confident!

Hannah plucked the shade from the window just far enough to glimpse out—the unattended lawn like a scrubby field, the bushes like low-slung clouds in the moonlight and the lights on in the Wilkses’ house. Bridge?

She turned to the bookshelves, forbidding herself the sight of the mirror over the mantel. It doubled the dim light in the room. Her ally. Twice her ally. Or twice her foe? Enough self-torture. She groped along the books. No color now. Only light and dark covers. Lavalle, volume 4. Why four, she wondered. Its size made a friend of it. She found it on the bottom shelf and carried it close to the window. A flashlight would have made it easier. And more dangerous. Her hands were marvelously steady, but her nerves taut. A sound now could undo her. Or if this thing in her hand were indeed a book—what then? She shook it. No sound, and yet not a book in weight, not with the heavy gilt edges, the thick paper of the flyleaf. The leaves seemed merely stuck together. She held it up so that the pages should have fanned out. They did not. Nor was the back cover loose as was the front. She had been right. She tried to read the print on the flyleaf, and risked raising the window shade to its accomplishment. French. But that much French even she could translate—Libretto to the Jewels of the Madonna. How appropriate. The neat French touch! Maria Madonna? The words made a musical sound. Maria Madonna, she thought, ha!

But how to open it—how to bring from it the music? She ran her gloved finger, and the nail through it around the binding trying to pry the back cover loose. It would not yield. She shook it and worked at it frantically, the perspiration seeping out of her. She dared not leave until she was sure the book contained the jewels. The gloves. Curse gloves. But a lady always wore them.

She sucked in her breath. Her nerves were getting brittle. She could almost feel them breaking off inside her, raw-edged, jabbing her heart, her mind. So simple; a silken ribbon, a place mark of such almighty nuisance now, she tried to tear it from the book, and it sprang the volume in two. There in a dozen dainty partitions were the jewels anchored in satin ridges. She saw them, but she could not remember a one of them or their settings. No matter, remembering. They gleamed with evil in the moonlight, until she closed the book on them again. Madonnas should not have jewels, she thought. Jewels were the devil’s barter.

She left the house as she had entered it, with only a pane of glass, one small pane out of twelve in the frame, to show that it had been violated.

It occurred to her, crossing the fields again, that it was fortunate she had not discovered the thrill of housebreaking earlier in her life. She thought she understood then the stories of bank clerks varying their dull, moneyed routine with a little larceny. What a wondrously satisfying thing it was, just once, to be bold, to be bravely bold.

43

“WE GET ONE HOLIDAY in the year nobody else in the country gets, and here we are, opening up as usual. I don’t see why we can’t play blackjack or something till the sirens go off.”

“Sh, sh, sh—”

“Don’t shush on my account,” Hannah said, running her finger along the black marble of the teller’s cage. No customers had disturbed the dust that morning. “And why don’t you play blackjack? Mr. Wilks is at the station meeting celebrities. He won’t be in.”

“Do you mean it, Miss Blake? I mean playing blackjack?”

Hannah pointed her finger at the teller and smiled. “With your own money.”

That rolled him back on his heels, she thought. She had never felt more confident. At her desk she set the first-aid bag in an open drawer. She would as soon have given it to the guard to hold for her. She took her change purse, lipstick, and comb from her pocketbook and tucked them into the pocket of the light wool jacket she was wearing for the day. She would carry only the first-aid bag. A dollar’s worth of adhesive, iodine, cotton, and bandage—on the top. Underneath, a fortune in jewels and the splintered fragments of a false book.

She waited, watching the clerks cluster about together in conversation. To be fully effective, the mock air raid should take them entirely unaware. They should turn from their cages, as they would in the terror of reality, and the wily among them should perhaps grab a handful of currency—There was a limit to realism.

Wilks would take the governor directly to the water front. The senator would be driven there in a private car. In fact, she thought, looking up at the clock, they were both there by now. Getting acquainted with their constituents. The voting peasants, as Walker called them. He, too, was there, no doubt, confounding the simple O’Gormans, Fitzgeralds and all with his devotion to Senator Cravens. They might be confounded, but they would not be convinced that the association made Cravens less worthy of their devout vote. They could not believe a man blessed by their priesthood, confessed and shriven on a Saturday night, in the front pew on Sunday, could devote the rest of the week to hypocrisy. The senator was their champion, an American for Americans whatever their origin—so long as they stayed at home.

Strange, that she should be on his side. So often, it seemed, she had fought for the side she did not want to be on, and fought the harder for being on it.

The siren sounded—eerie, fearsome, despite their expectancy of it. In that first instant of its wail there was no one with so little imagination that he was not stung with terror at what such a sound might indeed signify.

Keys were turned in drawers, the vault eased closed, and one employee after another moved to the door as they had been rehearsed. Hannah led the procession down High Street, store clerks, barbers, watchmakers, brokers, and scrubwomen falling in line. Those rehearsed to take their cars, soon proved the theory of folly in it, jamming the alleys, honking out blasts of confusion into the steady, nerve-rending cry of the sirens. Those on the left of High Street followed Hannah down the ravine lane, those on the right turned to the country. Below the ravines, a pounding drum of sound came from the boat whistles. Along Front Street, women and children came from the houses, baskets and bundles, pets on leashes, which must be surrendered on the docks—and left tied, helpless to seek their own safety in a raid. People should not have pets, she thought. She had never had one in the house.

She caught sight of the governor and the senator, side by side in O’Gorman’s boat. She was to be in the pilot boat with Matheson, first to the point, to minister to the needs of the refugees. She lifted the first-aid kit and looked at it. She would carry it high and dangle it from her wrist. Its bottom was weighted with gravel to carry it soon and surely down.

An ambulance roared by them, its brakes shrieking at the docks. Hannah pointed ahead. “Look!” she shouted. From across the lake like a flight of wild geese the formation of planes came on.

She felt a surge of fear within her, a need to hurry, and behind her the infection caught with the fierce haste of wildfire, the townspeople pounding, pushing, crushing down the hill.

Don’t they know it’s make-believe? she thought. Can’t they tell? They were rehearsed. So were the planes. They would drop flares on the town, sulphurous, harmless flares. But the moans and screams were real. The closer the planes came, the wilder the panic.

God in heaven, she thought. They don’t trust their own air force! At the dock as she reached it, O’Gorman and young O’Gorman, and men whose faces she couldn’t see, and then the sheriff’s men had joined arms to hold back the surging crowd. Hannah beat her way to the sound truck, and threshed through the wires to the side of the radio network announcer. His eyes were bulging, his voice hoarse as he poured the hysteria of the town into the microphone.

An engineer thrust a megaphone in her hand. She turned her back to the announcer, and took a long breath. “No hurry at all,” she said very slowly. “We’ve got all day—all day.” She picked one name and another out of the pushers. “Stop pushing, Sam Macken. Mrs. Nolan, you dropped your pocketbook—You’re going to lose your mother-in-law, Gerry Pace—Or maybe that’s what you’re trying to do. Shame on you, Gertrude Petty. You pushed an old lady—”

The planes, tuned in to the broadcast by the good Lord’s grace, broke formation to the north, going away from the town and circling it, forming again in the east, almost out of sight. The panic was stemmed, O’Gorman and his lieutenants funneling people into the boat. Hannah cajoled them on, making bad jokes, she thought, but good jokes to a bad situation, anything, any words of calm. She gave the megaphone back to the engineer, and glanced at the announcer. His face was red, his eyes as moist as his forehead—

“… Ladies and gentlemen, the demonstration here at Campbell’s Cove … even to the panic that might take over in a real raid … I repeat … this is a simulated air raid … a mock invasion of a typical …”

Hannah could scarcely open her fingers. She had not realized it, but she had squeezed the leather thongs of the first-aid bag so deeply into her flesh they had almost drawn blood.

She made her way to the lead boat, but Matheson was not there. Like him, she thought, to be late at a time like this. She searched for his face among the crowd at the dock, and then gave the embarkation signal herself. As well, she thought, that he should not be at her side when it came time to drop the jewels.

Even as the loaded boats moved into the Cove, the planes soared out of the east, high, high up over the town and there, one by one broke from the formation and whistled down, dropping their flares, their fireworks, yellowing the air and going on then …over the heads of their make-believe refugees. A salute from their motors and they were gone. When everyone was watching the last plane’s departure, Hannah opened her fingers over the side of the boat and lost her first-aid kit.

When they had docked at the Point, Hannah met Cravens and Governor Michaels. Cravens, a short and hearty man, was effusive with his praise. Michaels was silent, except to nod and smile a bit. He was slow, awkward, given more, she thought, to watching and contemplation than volatility. On the whole, she felt more praise in his silence. They got into a police-driven car, the three of them and John Copithorne. As chairman of the town council, he was official host. He looked as grim as though it were the real thing. She noticed that at Front Street the sheriff was waiting in his car, and drove up the ravine lane behind them.

Michaels turned to her. “Did you plan it even to that detail, Miss Blake?”

“Not quite.” There was something about him that compelled honesty—of honest people, she thought. It was ridiculous to let herself be swayed by him. They were poles apart politically. She was a Cravens girl, as Walker would have put it.

“You just can’t predict what people are going to do, can you, Governor?” Cravens said.

Michaels smiled slowly. “You’ve done it pretty well.”

He didn’t predict, Hannah thought. He directed, as surely as if he did it with a whip. The senate whip. She could understand what it meant now, having seen his minion at work.

In the town as they drove through it, their siren open to make way for them, the fire trucks of the Cove, and neighboring towns were at work, putting out imaginary fires, mending broken water mains. Hannah caught sight of Katherine Shane, working furiously in her white nurse’s uniform. Nor was it a make-believe injury she was fixing. The blood from the man’s hand stained the bandage as fast as she unrolled it.

The last of the evacuees, taking to the countryside, had put a mile’s distance between them and the town. A whole line of them trailed up the hill.

“To think this is going on in earnest some place in the world,” Michaels said. “Night and day, it goes on.”

Cravens was looking out the other window. “You can bet they don’t have hot-dog stands on the way.”

Hannah glanced at the improvised shack, open for a good day’s business. She asked the driver to stop.

“Close that up,” she called out the window. “You can do business when the evacuation’s over.”

In so brief a time as the pause had taken, Walker was beside the car window. “I’ll close him up.”

“Do,” she said. Then she called Walker back for a moment. “Where’s Matheson?”

“He resigned,” Walker said. “Is that all, Miss Blake?”

She nodded, and he stepped back and saluted the car.

“A good man, Walker,” Cravens said.

Good for what? Hannah thought. She looked at Copithorne. “Is it true about Matheson?”

Copithorne hesitated as though it were something he could not remember. “I guess it is if Walker says so.”

“Why?”

Copithorne did not quite manage to conceal his irritation. “I just haven’t had time to read the letter.”

She settled back in the car and thought about Matheson’s word before their parting the night before. Apparently the night was not long enough for his purposes.

44

THE TOWNSPEOPLE GATHERED SLOWLY about the speakers’ platform for the climax of the day’s activity. How they had rallied to her support! They could be forgiven for lagging now. And yet she needed from them one more effort. Speeches without applause would tell nothing of Campbell’s Cove over the radio network. The announcer held his arm up to her and pointed to his wrist watch. She bounded down from the stand and bade the high school band strike up some music, martial, patriotic music.

And they came hurrying. She watched from the stand as the citizens quickened their steps. Cravens gave her a sharp nod of approval, and Michaels smiled a little—his compliment of the day.

“Senator!” The radio man waved to the roster. The cameras as well as the microphone awaited him. The band stopped playing halfway through a tune, but one trombone trailed off like the cry of a wounded moose. Everyone laughed. They hushed at the rising of the engineer’s hand.

“Fellow Americans,” Cravens started. The loud-speakers on the field twanged to the vibrancy of his voice and were adjusted.

Hannah heard little of the speech. At every pause, Walker and his men in the forefront of the crowd sparked the cheering. Small cheers, she thought, for words he used so often they became small words in his mouth. But cheers there were and a microphone could make a marvelous sound of them. The senator talked on, gorgeous rhetoric, and Hannah picked one familiar face and then another out of the audience: Sophie, the child’s face lit up with Hannah’s eyes upon it; Katherine Shane in her nurse’s uniform, nodding and smiling-proud in her acquaintance—she should be well rewarded for such loyalty; Franklin Wilks. He had put her up. Now he was watching her with a strange intensity, she thought—measuring her power to withstand his gaze, the eyes of the multitude. He always saw himself as the eyes of the world, a camera to himself. O’Gorman. Dour, he looked, dragged out from the day’s effort, his hands in his pockets. Give a cheer, man! Cravens is after your own heart! You broke your party allegiance to vote for him. A good church man! A patriot! Tobin, Jeremiah Tobin, happy doing right by himself—and his partner-to-be, the salvation of both of them, Tom Merritt; and beside Tom his newly beloved wife, with a pretty and loving face; and Mrs. Merritt, leaning on her son, with no daughter apparently to lean on. Where are you hiding, Elizabeth? Baker and wife, Ruth Copithorne and daughter—and a thousand dollars coming for a little rhyme on love and Campbell’s Cove. Father in the speakers’ stand making lots of money!

The senator was done. The applause fervent, perhaps because he was done, she thought. Copithorne was introducing Michaels, governor of the state—poor John on the microphone, as strange a thing to him as a shepherd’s crook. And Cravens checking his watch. Hannah glanced at Walker. He, too, was checking his. Should she check hers? Not if she were never to tell time on it again.

“Friends,” Michael began, his voice so high it almost cracked, a tax on the microphone after Cravens. “We are defending a way of life which we have found good. To it we must persuade our friends, and even our enemies …”

The better to persuade, Hannah thought, with a persuasive voice. Cravens could persuade the devil into paradise. What had happened to her? This was to be her day of days, and she was all hollow inside. She was to have no more darknesses and her mind was as somber as a mired pit. A little stir, the sound of wonder, surprise, drew hers and other eyes to the Merritts.

Mrs. Merritt had started moving, twisting through the crowd. Hannah’s eyes pursued her but an instant, darting ahead of the old woman to her objective. Elizabeth Merritt was standing at the edge of the crowd. Besides her was Dennis Keogh, and with him, Matheson.

Their presence should be frightening me, she thought. But I am secure. In what? God knows. The jewels’ disposal? Of course, of course, she tried to convince herself. But they were nothing. Nothing to Maria, therefore nothing to Hannah. No logic there. There was never any logic to her “therefores.”

She shuddered and fastened her eyes on Michaels. One person, at least should hear him.

“… Freedom is not something to be dispensed like charity …” How right, how right, she thought.

“It is something to be won—like innocence, like the grace of God!”

Words, words, words. She closed her ears to all sounds but her own thought for the instant. Words, and not for her. She was Cravens’s girl! Cheers then, the announcer cutting in to take them off the air at the height of it.

Copithorne had the microphone and only the air of Campbell’s Cove, as much of it as he could reach through the loud-speakers. “The last, but not the least honor of the day—” Cravens got up, saluted Copithorne from the edge of the stand. He saluted Hannah, also, and the audience, and got a personal cheer in return. Like a prize fighter leaving the ring, she thought. Copithorne described his departure on the microphone, as though it were not self-evident. But what could he say to hold the crowd? Michaels was on the edge of his chair, split with the desire to go and the impulse to stay. Knowing the final honor of the day, she wished fervently that he would go. Really, it was Cravens who should stay for it, and the poem would delight his heart. But Walker bore him off.

Copithorne wiped the sweat from his face. “Governor Michaels, friends, and neighbors,” he started again, holding a limp piece of paper in a trembling hand. “It is my honor to conclude the day’s celebration with the presentation of an award—”

Not your honor, you fool, Hannah thought. Yours is to introduce Franklin Wilks. Quickly that we may be done quickly. You can’t make an award to your own daughter! Hannah looked at Wilks. It had all been arranged. He carried the prize-winning poem in his pocket. Still he stood, rocking back on his heels, a grim smile on his mouth. He knew Copithorne’s inadequacy to a public appearance. Still he made no move to help him, to save him.

“This is to be an annual award for an annual poetry contest—” His voice quivered as much as his hand. “It will be sponsored by the Campbell’s Cove Library—” His voice seemed to fail entirely. Hannah saw Wilks raise his fist as though to stick courage into him. Her own heart was throbbing fearfully. Copithorne thrust his head upward. “It will be called the Nathan Blake Memorial. And this year’s winner is Kenneth Tobin. Congratulations, Kenneth!”

The last cheer of the day went up for Kenneth Tobin.

45

HANNAH ROCKED BACK AND forth on the chair, trying to find a position at which it might be steady. The whole sea of faces bobbed together before her and seemed to congeal in a mass of flesh. She drew one deep breath after another. The platform was empty, except for her. Below her the Shanes, the Bakers, and a few others were clamoring up their congratulations.

Hypocrites, she thought—no, they didn’t know. The conspiracy was not theirs, not yet. Copithorne, Wilks, and Elizabeth. Sykes, too, of course. But Elizabeth’s revenge on her, the full, fearful revenge, even to the witness of Nathan Blake.

She got up, helped by the hands extended to her, making no response to the congratulations, the commiserations on her weariness and her right to be weary. Passing among them, she tried to gain some composure, a moment’s estimate of what the disclosure meant. She could not measure it, not now. She stopped. She had done right! Doing it, she was sure she had one right, saving the town from Sykes’s scorn, his cynical abandon of it, his prank—

But where, then, were the friends to congratulate her on that? The friends who knew and would congratulate her for it? Copithorne and Wilks conspired with Elizabeth. Not they! They preferred his prank to hers. She searched for O’Gorman. Gone. And what did he know of poetry? She moved in frantic pursuit of the retreating crowd. Sophie, if she could find her, she thought. Sophie would take her home and comfort her.

“Miss Blake!”

She turned to see Tobin and his son. Tobin caught her hand and pumped it violently. “That award’s going to start Kenneth in college.”

“If the army doesn’t get me,” the boy said. “But I’m real grateful, Miss Blake.”

His young, freckled face was so earnest, so sincere she could have struck her fist at it. A town half-friend, half-foe—with smiles on foes and scowls on friends, a town of masks.

She caught at Tobin’s sleeve. “Will you take me home? I don’t feel well.”

“I’ll take you home, Miss Blake.”

Matheson put his hand beneath her elbow and guided her forward. At his car Elizabeth and Dennis were waiting. Hannah tried to focus her attention. Her mind was brittle, crumbling, the sounds in it like the sounds in Maria’s house.

Elizabeth looked away as she drew near, as though the very sight of her was more than the girl could stand.

“So, Dennis,” Hannah said, casually, she thought, “you’ve come back.”

“Chief Matheson brought me, Miss Blake. But I’m going to stay now.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “I hope you’ll be very happy here. Now, Matt, I should like to go home. It’s been a trying day. It must have been a difficult one for you, too. I understand you have resigned.”

“I don’t like to be told not to bring a man in,” Matheson said, “even if it’s to prove he’s the wrong one. At least, I did that.”

“I’m going to recommend to the council that you get your pension,” she said.

There was an involuntary exchange of glances between Elizabeth and the policeman. It was more than she could endure.

She thrust her head up. “Am I to be kept standing here like a store dummy?” she demanded. “I am Nathan Blake’s daughter, you know.” She turned on Elizabeth. “Didn’t you have revenge enough with the poetry prize? Now you’ve got your little Sykes. Soon you’ll have the whole town laughing—”

“Miss Blake,” Elizabeth interrupted. “Was it you who turned the flashlight on Dennis and me on the beach that night?”

“Yes, it was I!”

Elizabeth turned to Matheson. “There you have the beginning, and the proof that Dennis and I were together that night.”

“The beginning of what, my dear?” Hannah said.

Elizabeth answered, but spoke only to Matheson. “The beginning of her hatred for Dennis, the phone calls on the night Tom was married, the whole foul business. A kiss—God knows what it is to her. Fornication, maybe. I don’t know the words for it. And the end of it here—her changing the winner of the contest.” Finally, crying, the girl turned to Dennis. “Let’s go away from here quick. It’s like a disease and the air is full of contagion.”

“May I go, sir?”

“Go, and bless you,” Matheson said. “The sheriff doesn’t want you. I think he’s got it all set—who he wants … when he wants them.”

“But that wasn’t the end of it, Elizabeth,” Hannah called out. “I killed Maria that night.”

There was nothing but silence then, an incredulous, pitying silence. The parking lot was empty, and all that lay between them and the red sumac trees was a film of sun-tinted dust, glinted with cellophane and tinfoil debris.

“I’ll take you home now, Miss Blake,” Matheson said finally.

She got into the car as he held the door, and while he went around to the driver’s seat, she stared at the retreating shapes of Elizabeth and Dennis. They don’t believe it, she thought. They think I was making one last bid for their attention. And really, I might have been, she realized.

“Matt,” she said, when he was beside her, “I found Maria’s jewels, just last night. I broke into her house—I—” She realized then how small was the evidence of her presence there, one broken pane of glass. “I threw them into the bottom of the Cove this morning,” she ended flatly.

“Did you?” the policeman said, as though she had told him she had caught a cold.

He turned the car toward her house. “Aren’t you going to take me to the sheriff’s office?”

“No, Miss Blake. You tell him all about it. I’m not a policeman any more. I’m just doing you a kindness, taking you home.”

“That was never a kindness,” she murmured.

46

FROM THE MOMENT SHE entered her own door, she felt the presence of a doom that seemed as familiar as the house. It was a sense of death and after-death much as she had known it the day of Maria’s funeral. She sat down at her desk and wrote a description of the coffin as she remembered it. Then she wrote instructions for its purchase. She thought for a few moments, writing finally:

Some day if you drag the Cove in the area of where the lead boat was when the planes went overhead today, you will find the jewels weighted in the bottom of a first-aid kit.

Hannah Blake did kill Maria Verlaine. Her punishment is not the hanging, as you will find her, but that even that she had to do for herself.

About the Author

Dorothy Salisbury Davis is a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, and a recipient of lifetime achievement awards from Bouchercon and Malice Domestic. The author of seventeen crime novels, including the Mrs. Norris Series and the Julie Hayes Series; three historical novels; and numerous short stories; she has served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and is a founder of Sisters in Crime.

Born in Chicago in 1916, she grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Illinois and graduated from college into the Great Depression. She found employment as a magic-show promoter, which took her to small towns all over the country, and subsequently worked on the WPA Writers Project in advertising and industrial relations. During World War II, she directed the benefits program of a major meatpacking company for its more than eighty thousand employees in military service. She was married for forty-seven years to the late Harry Davis, an actor, with whom she traveled abroad extensively. She currently lives in Palisades, New York.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1952 by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

Cover design by Tracey Dunham

978-1-4804-6049-2

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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