He consulted the back of an envelope, with a list of names jotted down it perpendicularly, each with an accompanying address. They were all approximations of one another, although in two different languages. All but the last two had been lined out. They ran something like this:
Madge Payton, millinery (and address)
Marge Payton, millinery (and address)
Margaret Peyton, hats (and address)
Madame Magdax, chapeaux (and address)
Madame Margot, chapeaux (and address)
He crossed the tracks to a filling station, asked the grease monkey, “Know of anyone around here makes hats and calls herself Marguerite?”
“There’s a boarder down at old Mrs. Hascom’s got some sort of sign in the window. I don’t know if it’s hats or dresses, I never noticed it very closely. It’s the end house, on this side of the road. Just keep going straight down.”
It was an unlovely looking frame building, with a pitiful hand-printed placard in a corner of one of the lower windows. “Marguerite, hats.” A trade name, for a whistle stop like this. Even in an out of the way place like this, he reflected curiously, they still had to be French. Peculiar convention.
He went up under the gloomy porch shed and knocked. The girl who came out was she herself, if Kettisha’s description was to be trusted. Plain and timid-looking. Lawn shirtwaist and dark-blue skirt. He caught sight of a little metal cap topping one of her fingers; a thimble.
She thought he wanted the person who owned the house, told him unasked, “Mrs. Hascom’s gone down to the store. She ought to be back in—”
He said, “Miss Peyton. I had quite a time finding you.”
Instantly she was frightened, tried to withdraw and close the door. He blocked it with his foot. “I don’t think you have the right person.”
“I do think I have.” Her fright alone was proof enough of that, although he couldn’t understand the reason for it. She kept shaking her head. “All right, then I’ll tell you. You used to work for Kettisha, in their sewing room.”
She got white as a sheet, so she had. He reached down and caught her by the wrist, to keep her from running in and closing the door, as he saw she was about to do.
“A woman approached you and induced you to copy a hat that had been made for Mendoza, the actress.”
She kept swinging her head faster and faster; that was all she seemed capable of doing. She was straining terrifiedly away from him, at an acute backward slant. His grip on her wrist was all that was holding her there in the door opening. Panic can be as stubborn as courage, its opposite.
“I just want that woman’s name, that’s all.”
She was beyond reasoning with. He’d never seen anyone plunged head-long into such depths of terror. Her face was gray. Her cheeks were visibly pulsing, as though her heart were in truth in her mouth, as the expression went. It couldn’t be the design theft that was doing this to her. Cause and effect were too unrelated. A major apprehension for a minor infraction. He could sense, vaguely, that he’d stumbled on some other story, some other story entirely, lying across the path of this quest of his. That was the most he was able to make out of it.
“Just the name of the woman—” He could tell by her fear-blurred eves that she didn’t even hear the words. “You’re in no danger of being prosecuted. You must know who it was.”
She found her voice at last. A strangled distortion of one, anyhow. “I’ll get it for you. It’s inside. Let me go a minute—”
He held the door so that she couldn’t close it. He opened the hand that had been choking her wrist, and instantly he was alone. She’d gone like something windswept, blown from sight.
He stood there waiting for just a moment, and then something that he was unable to account for, some tension that she’d left behind her in the air, made him spurt forward, rush down the gloomy central hallway, fling open the door to one side she had just closed behind her.
She hadn’t locked it, fortunately. He swept it back just in time to see the shears flash in air, a little over her head. He never knew how he got over in time, but he did. He managed to deflect the blow with an outward fling of his arm, slashing his sleeve and drawing a fleshy cut for his pains. He pulled them away from her and threw them over in the corner with a tinkle. They probably would have gone in deep enough to get her heart, at that, if she’d hit the right place.
“What was that for?” he winced, stuffing a handkerchief down his sleeve.
She caved in like a stepped-on ice cream cone. She dissolved into a welter of tears and incoherence, “I haven’t seen him since, I don’t know what to do with it. I was afraid of him, afraid to refuse him. He told me just a few days and now it’s been months— I’ve been afraid to come forward and tell anyone, he said he’d kill me—”
He clamped his hand across her mouth, held it there a minute. This was that other story, the one he didn’t want. Not his. “Shut up, you frightened little fool, I only want the name, the name of the woman for whom you made a plagiarized hat at Kettisha’s. Can’t you get that through your head?”
The reversal was too sudden, the prospect of renewed security too tantalizing for her to be able to believe in it fully at once. “You’re just saying that, you’re just trying to trick me—”
A muted wailing, almost unnoticeable it was so thin, had started in somewhere near by. Everything seemed to have power to frighten her. He saw her cheeks get white all over again at that, although it was scarcely loud enough to penetrate the eardrum.
“What faith are you?” he asked.
“I was a Catholic.” The tense she gave it held home kernel of tragedy, he could tell.
“Have you a rosary? Bring it out.” He saw he’d have to convince her emotionally, since he couldn’t through reasoning.
She offered it to him resting in her hand. He placed his own two over and under it, without removing it. “Now. I swear that all I want of you is what I’ve told you. Nothing else. That I won’t harm you in any other matter. That Tm not here on any other matter. Is that enough?”
She’d grown a little calmer, as though the contact of the object was a steadying influence in itself. “Pierrette Douglas, Six Riverside Drive,” she said unhesitatingly.
The wailing was beginning to grow louder little by little. She gave him one last look of dubious apprehension. Then she stepped into a small curtained alcove to one side of the room. The wailing stopped short. She came back as far as the entrance, holding a long white garment or garments trailing from her enfolded arms. There was a small pink face topping it, looking trustfully up at her. She was still frightened, vastly so, when she looked at Lombard. But when she looked downward at that face under her own, there was unmistakable love in the look. Guilty, furtive, but stubborn: the love of the lonely, that grows steadily stronger, more unbreakable, day by day and week by week.
“Pierrette Douglas, Six Riverside Drive.” He was shuffling out money. “How much did she give you?”
“Fifty dollars,” she said absently, as if speaking of a long-forgotten thing.
He dropped it contemptuously into a reversed hat-shape she’d been working on. “And next time,” he said from the doorway, “try to use a little more self-control. You’re only laying yourself wide open this way.”
She didn’t hear him. She wasn’t listening. She was smiling, looking downward at an answering little toothless smile that met her own.
It didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to hers, that other little face directly under her own. But it was hers, hers from now on; hers to have and hers to keep and hers to banish loneliness with.