This Everly, Mrs. Daughterty suspected, had two faces.
“My goodness, Mr. Everly, you gave me a start! Aren’t you feeling well?”
“Certainly, I’m well! We have a tight schedule today. So do what you have to and get through your chores quickly.”
With raised brows, Mrs. Daughterty watched him wheel and leave the room. She heard small noises of his passage and a heavy silence as he retreated to the privacy of his quarters.
Lips thinned, Mrs. Daugherty set her handbag beside the nearest living room chair. She was a spare sallow figure with a sharply featured face and thin graying hair bunned at the nape.
She murmured an opinion of Everly under her breath. Clearly, he didn’t want her around today, whatever the reason. And nuts to him, too. Mrs. Daugherty had no intention of skimping her work. “I always say,” she remarked to no one, “that a thing is worth doing right, if it’s worth doing at all.”
Might as well start with the master bedroom. Mrs. Daugherty marched down the hallway, opened the linen closet and took out sheets, pillow cases, bedspread, towels and wash cloths.
Carrying the linens in a neat stack on her right forearm, she entered the bedroom. She placed the linens carefully on the bureau and went around the room, checking for dust with fingertips, picking up a pair of stockings, inserting a book marker and closing a book on the bedside table.
The brisk efficiency of her movements faltered, came to a halt. She stood at the foot of the bed, her hand idly resting against a post. Something not entirely ordinary had caught her eye and she couldn’t decide what it was.
Her quick, gimlet eyes probed all about the room with their insatiable curiosity. Everything seemed the same, no tilted pictures that needed straightening, no spills from a late-night glass of warm milk.
“Aha!” Mrs. Daughterty said. She moved from the bed a short distance and examined the way the light was striking the thick carpet. Two parallel lines had been impressed in the plush surface. They were about fifteen inches apart. They were exactly the kind of marking that would have been left if someone had tilted a heavy chair and dragged it across the room.
The maid’s portion of her mind decided that she’d have to brush up the nap. Couldn’t leave it like that. But that other portion of her thinking processes wanted an explanation. Nothing had been dragged from the room. Instead, the markings in the carpet pile ran away from the door. Around the bed. They ran right to that old hope chest.
“Now what in the world...” Mrs. Daugherty murmured. She stopped beside the hope chest, her eyes once more searching out the markings. They were almost invisible, the way the light was striking them now.
She knew the chest was empty, an old relic, a cherished part of her employer’s youth. Therefore, something large and rather heavy had been dragged to the chest and put inside. Mrs. Daugherty couldn’t imagine for the life of her what it could be.
So she lifted the lid.
She chocked back her scream, thinking suddenly of Everly’s strangeness today. Now she knew the meaning of the impressions in the carpet pile... the little old lady’s heel marks, imprinted when her body was hoisted by the shoulders and dragged to the hope chest.
Commanding herself not to faint, Mrs. Daugherty tiptoed to the phone.
Four hours later. Dr. William Wilford and his assistant, Dr. Elizabeth Crown, came out of emergency surgery together, stripping off surgical gloves and dropping white masks to dangle at their necks.
Neither spoke for a moment, feeling the first pull of exhaustion from what they had just been through.
Dr. Crown lifted a hand to peel off her cap, revealing a lustrous feathery cut of rich brown hair touched with skeins of gray.
“Nice job, Bill. Beautiful job! I think she’ll make it.”
“I know she will,” Dr. Wilford said. “I’ve got that certain feeling. She’s one of those spindly old sparrows with the constitution of a mule. And after all, we’ve patched up heads in worse condition than that one.”
“A few. Not many. She certainly looked dead when she was brought in. If the maid hadn’t found her when she did, we couldn’t have saved her.”
“But the maid did, Lizzy. And we did.”
The old lady remained in intensive care for eight days. Then she was moved to a private room and there were four weeks of returning strength, of solid food, of therapy in whirlpool baths, of rising from a wheelchair, of longer walks and exercises.
She learned that Everly and the girl had escaped from Florida. She read of their capture in New Orleans where, desperate for money, Carol had egged Everly into an abortive liquor store stickup.
An excellent agency, jealous of its prime reputation, at last sent over three applicants for the old lady to interview. She chose Mrs. Hardesty to take Everly’s place. She was middle aged, with a strong frame of central European heritage somewhere in her genes. She was quietly pleasant company, dependable, the kind the old lady decided she could get on well with. She had been in domestic service for fifteen years, since the death of her husband. Her previous employers had moved to the cold of Canada, offering Mrs. Hardesty the chance to continue with them.
“I’m glad you preferred the warmth of Florida,” the little old lady said the day she and Mrs. Hardesty returned to the condominium.
She showed Mrs. Hardesty through the apartment, and within the hour they were smoothly settled in, Mrs. Hardesty back in her own quarters, the old lady sitting stiffly on the edge of a chair in the living room, as if aware of-the silence and sudden emptiness of this place where it had all happened.
She got up slowly and slipped without a whisper of a sound into her own bedroom. She stood very still, holding the edge of the door. Then she closed and moved with gossamer lightness across the room.
She sank to her knees beside the hope chest. A breath trembled on her lips. She moved her hand to stroke the ornate carving of the lid lovingly. Once it had fitted snugly. Now, like herself, it was warped and old, a relic of the past. Lucky that the warpage in the lid let a little air in. Otherwise, she might have smothered.
She lifted the lid and looked at the cedar-lined depths of the chest. A smile stole across her lips. A thrill of anticipation raced through her.
In a series of graceful movements, the little old lady rose, stepped inside the chest, sank down, arranged herself like an infant wriggling to comfort in its crib. Then she slowly lowered the lid on herself with her extended arm, watching while the light disappeared. The darkness inside the chest touched her nostrils with the faint fragrance of old cedar.
She closed her eyes and waited, eager hope pulsing through her. Would it work? Could the lovely miracle happen a second time? Did she have to have a break in the head for it to happen?
Then it began happening. A rosy light spilled from the further horizon. The light grew in strength until it was all about her. She was nineteen, the center of attention at a gay party. An orchestra was playing a Straus Waltz, and there he was, hurrying toward, her as if none of the other vital and happy people existed. He was standing beside her, dark-haired, craggy-faced, broad in the shoulders. His eyes were worshipping her, and her whole being felt like a flower. Life was flawless, just beginning, without end.
He was taking her hand. The strength of his arm encircled her waist. He led her into the Waltz, and she closed her eyes, surrendering to the joy of it all.