Abruptly Bina became conscious of Jerry’s “hello”. He laughed at her startled gasp. “Do you, or don’t you want to speak to your husband?” he said.
“I’m just dying to, darling.”
“Bless you. As long as we both shall live.”
“How’s the Hanlon deal coming?”
“About to explode. I’m having dinner with the son and his lawyer. How’s that for a rotten way to spend our first real evening at home? If it wasn’t so important I’d get out of it somehow.”
Bina allowed herself a small moan of disappointment, but then said cheerfully, “Well, it’ll give me a chance to get your pipe and slippers located. She had promised herself she would never try to monitor Jerry’s plans, as Clarissa had.”
But when she left the phone, she had a sudden sympathy for Clarissa. Her day suddenly flattened out. Jerry was such a vibrant person. He could fill your life so full that when he was gone, you felt lost.
Toto served her lunch at one end of the long dining table, as he’d always served Clarissa. She exclaimed over his flakey rolls and crisp salad. She sounded, she thought in a kind of detached dismalness, a great deal like Clarissa. Pouncing with such bright restlessness on each detail of her household.
“The cleaner come thees morning,” Toto reported. “He say he return thees afternoon, so if you have the clothes to send.”
“Oh. Oh yes!” Clarissa, of course. She must unpack her clothes. Go through the closets. She had literally thrown them at the hangers when she and Jerry brought them from her house last week. She had drawers to fix. Relief welled up in her. She had so many things to fill in the day. Things she could think about, things to keep her mind from going off into unpremeditated, dark paths of the past.
Toto followed her into the living room with his tray of dishes. “Velly nice place here, Missa Crevellin.”
With a slight shock, Bina realized she hardly knew what this place of Jerry’s looked like. Last week when she brought her clothes, and last night when they arrived, she had been too full of her own uncertainties and decisions to see it. Now she followed the Oriental’s admiring gaze to the tropical plants against gleaming glass walls, the deep cushioned, modern-hued furniture, the recessed fireplace.
“It is beautiful,” she said.
“You build a house soon?”
“We hope to.”
“Velly nice.”
There was only the glow of friendly joy on Toto’s face, yet for an instant, Bina had the uncomfortable feeling he was seeing the lucky working girl who had played her cards right and was now reveling in her good fortune.
She hurried on into the bedroom, half amused, half irritated at her sudden sensitivity. So what if people did think she had married Jerry for his money? She hadn’t. So it didn’t make any difference what they thought.
She had sorted through her suits, laying aside two for the cleaner, when another and colder thought struck her. Jerry, she must face it, had no money at all except the income from his young brokerage business. It was Clarissa’s fortune that made him a wealthy man. If people thought she was after Clarissa’s fortune, or Jerry was after her fortune, it might make a very grave difference.
Desperately she slid back the doors of Jerry’s closet and sorted through his suits. Three of them could stand pressing. She was deciding what drawers to start straightening as she checked through his pockets, depositing the small accumulation on the lowboy.
There were plenty of drawers. She’d have to mark the ones she chose, she thought humorously, or she’d lose her lingerie.
A snapshot of a girl standing before a boat was in the pocket of a light-weight summer suit. The pretty face was familiar. Bina bent closer. The girl was laughing, her hair windblown. But it was the same slender nose with the delicately flaring nostrils, the same wide eyes, and full, curving lips... it was Mrs. Dennis Moresby.
With fingers suddenly trembling, Bina stared at the picture. Her mind desperately sought balance. So what! The Moresbys were friends of Jerry’s. Dennis Moresby probably liked this snap and had given it to Jerry. Was that anything to break out in a cold sweat over? Maybe he had used it to scribble something on the other side. But the opposite side was blank.
Deliberately she dropped the picture and went on with her sorting. It lay on the top of the pile of odds and ends smirking at her. Belligerently, Bina faced herself in the mirror.
“So Lefty did get through to you,” she accused her reflection bitterly. “You’re thinking there could just possibly be something to Clarissa’s suspicions of the Moresbys. All right. Then ask Jerry about it. You don’t need to tell him Lefty was talking to you today. He knows Clarissa pointed their pictures in the paper out to you, that you saw them once or twice briefly at those parties. Just ask him.”
Lefty’s voice was loud in the room. “Call the shots straight.”
Toto knocked on the door. “Missa Crevellin say you like paper to see ad for house maybe.”
“Thanks, Toto.” It was like Jerry’s comforting presence in the room telling her to calm down, keep her mind on their new life. She kicked off her shoes and curled up in the chair by the window with the paper.
But she didn’t reach the ad section. Leafing toward it, she passed the sport page, and turned back to it for something her eye had caught in passing. A sailboat. And before the wheel, Dennis and Terry Moresby. Readying their boat, Jennifer, the caption read, for a year’s cruise to the Galapagos, Papeete and other heavenly spots.
The doorbell rang, sending an electric shock through her. Lefty?
But Toto came in hidden behind a mass of roses arranged in a bowl of glazed pottery, shaped and painted to resemble a chubby dog. The note read: “Pogo, our watchdog. Now all we need is the house. Pogo loves Bina. Jerry loves Bina.”
Bina chuckled, then shuddered. Watchdog. Lefty had said Clarissa had used her for a watchdog. Carefully, she set the vase on the small table, rearranged the roses. She couldn’t evade the thought any longer. To save her happiness and Jerry’s, she was going too have to play watchdog once more. The plan had been evolving relentlessly in her mind, patterned after the stories she had coaxed out of Lefty all her life and remembered so vividly.
She looked up Dennis Moresby’s number and called it. Told the maid she would like to speak to Mr. or Mrs. Moresby.
Terry Moresby’s high, hoarse voice came on, tinged with a trace of sulkiness. “This is Mrs. Moresby.”
“I’m Jan Criler, of the Times,” Bina said rapidly. “We want to do a feature article in connection with your trip.” She tried to make it sound as if this was a break for the paper, and a bigger break for the Moresbys.
Terry Moresby said, “But Mr. Moresby gave an interview to the Times last week.”
“I know that,” Bina dissembled quickly. “But this one will feature you and Mr. Moresby, how you happened to buy the boat, consider the trip — how it has affected your lives.”
“That I could tell you!” The sulky voice sounded away from the phone, repeating this joke.
Presently a man’s voice came on. “Hello. You still there?”
“Yes.”
“This is Dennis Moresby. We’ll be glad to give you an interview. Maybe you’d like to see the boat.”
“Well... I... uh—” Before Bina could come up with the right excuse, Dennis Moresby’s voice boomed graciously, “We’ll pick you up at the main Times entrance at three-thirty. Okay?”
“Okay, And — thank you.”
Not quite two hours. Bina stuffed the mound of odds and ends back into Jerry’s suits and hung them back in his closet. She slid back the door of her own wardrobe and ran a nervous hand along her dresses. Luckily, her clothes were suitable. She chose a dark skirt, blouse and jacket. Tucked her horn-rimmed reading glasses ostentatiously in her jacket pocket, and rummaged through her suitcase for one of her old notebooks and pencils.