Bina was wide awake now. Her throat was dry and tight, her heart pounded crazily. Desperately, she chided herself. Was she losing her mind? How did she know Jerry hadn’t looked at her? He’d told her so, hadn’t he? That he’d been hooked the first time he saw her. So what if he hadn’t shown it. He was a gentleman. He wouldn’t.
She had never in all her life had nightmares, or been afraid of the dark. But now she was afraid. Really afraid. She thought of crawling in with Jerry, whose breathing was so peaceful, so regular.
And then the feeling of terror abruptly increased. She seemed to feel his eyes open, burning into her in the darkness.
Bina woke to flooding sunlight. From the bathroom Jerry’s baritone rose in joyous song above the hissing shower.
In another minute, he was coming in, toweling his hair, looking enormous in his white terry cloth robe and slippers.
“Top of the morning, Chipmunk!” He came over to sit on her bed, and pull her onto his lap. “I love you! Love me?”
She wound slim arms around his neck and nestled her cheek against the rough cloth of his shoulder. “Check with me later,” she yawned.
“Do it now.” He kissed her until she laughed and gasped under the exuberant pressure of his lips and arms. All the happiness of their lives together flooded back to her. Like a drink of potent wine, heady, stimulating.
He brought her a glass of orange juice. “If you feel like breakfasting up,” he said, “I had Toto set us up on the balcony so we could count cars.”
“Be ready in three minutes.”
She washed, twisted up her hair in one smooth movement, and slid into one of the new housecoats Jerry had bought her in the little shop in Palm Springs. She laughed as she caught herself humming Jerry’s crazy bathroom tune. She felt buoyant with love and eagerness. There didn’t seem to be a middle way, she thought. Life was forlorn, filled with nightmares and misgivings. Or it was crazy, wonderful adventure. How could she choose anything but Jerry?
The whir of the electric toaster, the bowl of red roses on the patch of linen-covered table were small, domestic anachronisms on the smart, iron-grilled balcony. Below them, colored cars raced the curving boulevard.
Jerry tossed aside the morning paper as Toto pulled back her chair. “We’re having scrambled eggs and kidneys,” he told her. “I think you ran off a couple of pounds yesterday.”
“You scared them off shouting at me in the dark,” Bina retorted.
He reached over for her hand. “I’m sorry.” His grin was apologetic and boyish. “I guess I was kind of half scared you’d left me. You’re such a half pint, I pretend I’m taking care of you. But I’m not fooling anyone, am I? You’re the stalwart of the family. I lean on you. I knew that last night in the midst of my fuming.”
“You’re just lucky you’re cute,” Bina chortled.
“Eat your grapefruit.” He released her hand. “Think how soon it’ll be hot cereal.” He mimicked, “Of course Mommy eats her cereal. Good, hot cereal!”
Breakfast was over too soon, and she was taking him to the door laughing with him, holding him with senseless banter, dreading to see him ago.
His eye was on the mantle clock. “I’ll just have time now to give Lorraine a couple of letters that have to go out today before my lunch appointment,” he said.
“Be home early tonight?”
“You bet. Have Toto whomp us up a banquet and lock you in.”
“I’ll be in,” she laughed.
When he was gone, she hurried back to the kitchen. She relayed to Toto Jerry’s order of a banquet for two tonight, adding, “I’ll be gone for lunch. I’m going to look through more houses.”
This, she told herself with guilty humor, was not too far from the truth. And, if Jerry called, he would chalk up the impulse of house-hunting to the cereal discussion at breakfast.
The doorbell broke into her thoughts. “I’m out,” she instructed Toto hastily. She dare not run the chance of a long interruption until she had the job done she’d set herself today. Time was too precious. Tomorrow was Wednesday.
She escaped into the bedroom and listened through the door to Toto’s mumbled explanations. Then, to her sharp dismay, she heard Marge Norris’ good-natured, sharp voice in the hall.
“Nonsense. She’s not out. Why Jerry just left as I came in. She wants to see me.”
Bina stepped back into the hall. “Of course I do,” she said.
“Darling!” Marge advanced upon her, crackling with radiant energy from her crisp, dark hair to the rapid tapping of her high heels, and looking as she always did, in spite of the full schedule of her days, immaculately and expensively groomed.
Even when she had been one of Clarissa’s close friends and Bina, the secretary, she had called her darling. But now she added a hug. “It’s monstrous, breaking in on a honeymoon,” she cried, “but you know Meddlesome Marge. Toto, bring us a pot of coffee, that’s my boy. We can chat in the bedroom.”
Bina proceeded her in, smiling helplessly. Marge was so used to making herself at home at the Crevellin house, she was only proceeding according to habit. After all, as she had so often reminded Clarissa, she had really introduced Jerry to her younger crowd, fixing him up in business as well as society, keeping him content to stay out here. And when you carried all that to its logical conclusion it really meant that she had kept him content out here for Bina. In simple justice it was only right she should have the same privileges here as at Clarissa’s, and the same responsibilities.
“I had to come over,” Marge was saying as she closed the door behind her. “I’ve been frantic about you two ever since I read the paper.”
Her concern was so abrupt, Bina stared at her. “Paper?” she echoed blankly.
It was Marge’s turn to stare pityingly. “You mean you and Jerry didn’t see it?”
“No. What?”
Marge opened her commodious pocketbook and whipped out a small, clipped newspaper article, explaining it even as she handed it to Bina. “That fool police department — I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’d forgotten your father — has found some new evidence of some kind that apparently throws a monkey wrench into the coroner’s verdict of accidental death.”
Bina held the clipping in cold fingers. One paragraph slashed out at her, “...Captain Murray, who was back at his desk last night for the first time since his vacation...” So he’d come home early. He’d be sending someone for her today. This morning. Before—
Marge’s voice stopped her as she was halfway to her closet. “Do you have any idea what this evidence could be?”
“No — yes. Yes, I do. A piece of Mexican jade that matches the one found in Clarissa’s room. My father found it — on our front walk.” Bina slid the zipper of her housecoat and stepped out of the garment.
“Oh, darling!”
Vaguely, Bina felt relief at the single note of sympathy in Marge’s moan, “How ghastly for you! Do they have any idea who put it there?”
“No.” With frantic haste, Bina moved down the line of her clothes. A dark suit, she thought. Something quiet she could get into quickly.
“Mexican jade, was it?” Marge’s voice was clipping along at its usual swift pace. “I don’t know a man who’d be caught dead with it. God, what a ghoulish thing to say! But it must have been a woman. Bina, I want you to listen to me.”
“Yes, Marge.” Bina buttoned the coat of her suit, snapped ear rings onto her ears and then pulled them off. She mustn’t wear anything she could lose.