“You startled me.”
“I’m sorry.” Vivian’s lips felt stiff. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“Sure.” Mildred Harney seemed nervous. She pulled at the doorknob behind her and then strode into Vivian’s room.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you, too,” she said. “I’m sorry about what happened tonight, kid.”
“Are you?”
“Sure.”
“You could have stopped him from burning that money. He would have listened to you.”
The blonde girl smiled and shook her head. “It would have cost me too much, kid. He’d figure that I was more interested in his money than in him.”
Vivian’s eyes came up level. “Weren’t you?”
“Did I act like it? It’s gone, isn’t it?”
Vivian blinked. There didn’t seem to be any answer to that, but the blonde girl was too flip, too casual and too sure of herself. And she was friendly after a fashion tonight, when she had always been aloof. There was an air of triumphant excitement about her that did not seem natural in a girl who had merely won an old man while losing his money. Vivian stared at her thoughtfully. The blonde girl looked away.
“You were a very good sport about it,” Vivian said.
“So were you. Swell.” The blonde girl patted her shoulder with an impulsive gesture. She was nervous, however, and seemed anxious to get away. She looked several times toward the connecting door. “I’ve got to get the beauty sleep,” she said.
Vivian let her go. There were many things that she wanted to ask, but she couldn’t ask them. The conversation was pitched on too unreal a note. There was no bond of contact between herself and this girl. The friendliness was all on the surface.
For ten or fifteen minutes after the door had closed between them, Vivian sat and stared at the wall. She hadn’t been able to mention Greg’s name at all. She got up slowly and slipped her shoulder straps. As she stepped out of the red evening gown, she heard the soft sound of subdued voices. Her body stiffened.
There was a man in Mildred Harney’s room.
The house seemed unnaturally still except for that subdued, cautious murmur. Vivian took a swift step toward the bathroom, then stopped with her face flushing. It wasn’t any of her business if someone was in there. She didn’t want to know about it.
She moved as far away from the connecting bathroom as she could and took off her other garments. She wanted to take a shower, but she hesitated. Finally she decided that she had a perfect right to take a shower and moved noisily toward the bathroom.
“I’ll give them plenty of warning. I’ll let them know that I’m not spying on them.”
She could hear nothing when she entered the bathroom. She snapped the catch which locked the door against Mildred Harney and turned on the shower. It made a lot of noise and she was glad of that. Her face still felt flushed.
“It was probably Uncle Brad... I don’t care... It isn’t any of my business.”
She scrubbed herself vigorously and argued with herself as she scrubbed. Then, suddenly, she stopped all movement and stood stiffly under the shower. Suppose that was Greg in there?
The thought chilled her. She tried weakly to tell herself that she didn’t care but she was shaken and she hurried with her toweling. When she turned off the shower, she listened deliberately at the door. There were no voices at all now and she flipped the catch off the lock. She went into her own room and locked the bathroom door from her side. Haste drove her and she slipped swiftly into a pink nightgown and a filmy negligee.
The hall was quiet and lighted by only one dim bulb. She moved along it like a ghost and halted outside of her uncle’s room. Her heart was thudding painfully but she felt that she had to know if he were in his own room or not. She stretched her hand out to the knob, then halted the gesture.
There was a tinkling sound from inside the room like the breaking of glass.
Vivian backed away from the door, then turned and almost ran. “He is in there. It wasn’t Uncle Brad.”
She reached her own door and stopped. She looked toward Greg Cooper’s door down the hall. She wanted to listen there, too, but she felt embarrassed at the mere thought of doing it. She lifted her chin high. “I don’t care what he does.”
The quiet of her own room smothered her but she threw herself down on the bed and listened to the ticking of her small clock. Each tick was like a hammer stroke beating the foundations of her life away. Tears welled into her eyes, but after a while she slept.
She woke with a jerk. As though one part of her mind had never been asleep, she knew that someone had passed her door and that she had heard him pass. She sat bolt upright in the bed and the murmur of voices came to her from the other room; not continued conversation but merely occasional words — as though two cautious people were trying to converse with a minimum of words.
Vivian rose slowly. For several minutes she sat on the side of her bed and she could no longer hear the voices. She looked at the small clock and saw that it was twenty-five minutes to three. She had been awake for perhaps six or seven minutes. “I’m being foolish.”
She smoothed out her pillow and was about to lie down once more when she heard a faint sound down the hall like the creaking of a door hinge. She held her breath and in a few seconds she heard the sound again. She got up and moved to her door.
A man walked cautiously down the hall toward her uncle’s room — or toward the stairs; she didn’t know which since she lost the sound of his footsteps after he passed her door.
“It’s like a bad dream, with frightening things happening and nothing that one can do about them.”
Vivian went back to her bed, looked at it and looked at the clock. It was nineteen minutes to three. She could no longer hear voices in the next room and the hall seemed quiet but she knew that she couldn’t sleep with that feeling of dread and uncertainty hanging over her.
It was a quarter of three. She reached for the negligee. She put it on and slipped out into the hall. She heard no one and saw no one. There was no light under any of the doors. She moved down the hall, hesitated a moment before her uncle’s door; then took a deep breath and turned the knob. She stepped into the room.
Chapter VII
The Senator’s Safe
Greg Cooper dozed during his long vigil. Waiting for three o’clock in the morning when there is nothing else to do but wait is a grueling test of a man’s ability to keep awake. For a half hour, Cooper nodded. He came out of his doze with a quick jerk.
He fumbled sleepily for his watch. He had a panicky feeling that he might be late, and a vague sense that some sound had awakened him.
“Two thirty-two — and everything quiet as a tomb.”
He reassured himself on both counts and stretched his muscles. His eyes still felt heavy and he decided that he could not afford to risk another period of inaction. It was close enough to three o’clock to justify going downstairs. His watch had a luminous dial and he had not needed a light. He did not chance disturbing anyone in the household with a light now. He made his way cautiously across the room and opened the door gently. His watch said two thirty-five.
He didn’t like the sound that the hinge made and he waited in the doorway, listening. Due to the peculiar construction of the stair well, sound did not penetrate the upper floor from the first floor unless it was an unusually sharp or loud sound; but he was not worried unduly about the possibility of people being downstairs. The chief hazard, as he saw it, lay in restless sleepers.
No sound came to him from any of the rooms and he stepped out, drawing the door after him. The hinge creaked again but not as loudly as before. He balanced his weight on the balls of his feet and moved down the hall to the stairs.