awkward silence. I saw the corners of her red lips tremble. She looked up at me.
“I told Aunt Caroline you were here,” she said quietly. There was still the warm soft note in her voice that Southern women have if their voices aren’t high-pitched the way most of them are. “She would like you to come out to see her.”
For a moment our eyes met . . . hers clear and young, and . . . not so much resentful, I thought, as challenging. Then her mother broke in.
“My aunt doesn’t receive many people. She’s quite old . . . she was eighty in December. She’s almost blind on account of a cataract she stubbornly refuses to have operated on. But her mind is as clear as it ever was.”
She said it rapidly, almost like a cataract herself.
“And that’s very clear,” Jennifer said coolly, still looking at me.
“Of course it is, Jennifer,” her mother said hastily. “I didn’t mean to imply it wasn’t. I’m sure Mrs. Baker didn’t think I did.”
I looked at Jennifer. I had the uneasy feeling that I knew perfectly what she meant, even if her mother didn’t. Had what Brad Porter said about my being Phyllis’s front when there was dirty work at the crossroad meant more to her than any one had thought the night before?
“You will go out and see her, won’t you, my dear?” Mrs. Atwell Reid said nervously.
I saw the shutters go down in Jennifer’s eyes again, and I made up my mind permanently this time. This was one of Phyllis Lattimer’s chestnuts that I was going to let religiously alone. I turned to Mrs. Atwell Reid.
“I’m so sorry! I’d have loved to.” I said. “I’m awfully afraid I’m taking the afternoon plane home. I really just flew down to have a look at the Antique Show at St. Philip’s, and I have to be back almost immediately.”
The very mention of antiques was an awful mistake. Jennifer’s face shut like a steel trap. She didn’t look at her mother. So, I thought; she knows exactly what Phyllis Lattimer wants, and probably why she sent for me to come down. Knowing Phyllis, and hearing Brad the night before, even if he hadn’t said anything to her later, she could easily have put two and two together. She obviously had, I thought . . . and had got a lot more than the traditional four.
She got up quickly. Her manner had changed abruptly to an easy rather than uneasy aloofness.
“Perhaps when you come again . . .”
But her mother hadn’t risen. She was sitting erect and graceful, her face suddenly worn and tired as her daughter’s freshened. She got up then, slowly, not looking—oh, definitely not looking—at Jennifer.
“Couldn’t you take the late plane, Mrs. Baker? My aunt is really very anxious indeed to see you,” she said, with a kind of gentle persistence that was very embarrassing. “You see, some one told her you might be down this winter. She’s set her heart on seeing you.”
“But, mother! If Mrs. Baker has to go home, it’s unkind of you to put her in this position.”
Jennifer Reid’s voice was still warm velvet, but under it was something else. It wasn’t just determination, either. It was fear, just plain paralyzing fear. I sensed it with the kind of intuitive clarity that makes rational processes slow and plodding. And I didn’t look at her. I didn’t want to. It was her mother I was concerned with. Why was she so insistent that I go to see old Miss Caroline at Strawberry Hill . . . so insistent in the face of her daughter’s desperate—it seemed to me now—determination that I should not that she was allowing a formal morning call on a complete stranger to become practically an emotional scene?
Just then a girl I didn’t know wandered into the card room.
“Jennifer Reid! How perfectly swell! I was going to look you up . . . I’ve got a husband, I want you to see him! Jim!!—Where has he got to?”
And in the gay confusion I felt Mrs. Atwell Reid’s hand on my arm, and heard her voice entreating me hurriedly:
“My dear . . . please go out to see my aunt! It will mean so much to her! Phyllis Lattimer said you were just the person we needed. It would be an act of great kindness. You will, won’t you?”
I don’t remember much about the chemistry I learned in school. I do remember there were certain things they called precipitates that miraculously sent all solids to the bottom of the test tube, leaving nothing but clear water on top. And that’s precisely what Phyllis Lattimer’s name thrown into the emotional cauldron did for me. Only it wasn’t clear water on the top. It was pure concentrated venom. I glanced through the wide doors at Jennifer Reid’s slim staunch little figure and the proud dark curly head being glad about somebody else’s husband, knowing as she must that her mother was getting in a few well-timed licks while her back was turned. I knew instantly that the solids precipitated in the bottom of the cauldron were on her side, and that if Phyllis Lattimer was going to be circumvented I was the person who could do it. I knew too that whether Jennifer liked it or not, I had to go to Strawberry Hill. I turned to Mrs. Reid.
“Of course, if you really would like me to . . . I’d be delighted.”
Mrs. Reid smiled charmingly, not with relief at all, which surprised me somehow, but with the poised satisfaction of a woman who’d finally got her way. She held out her gloved hand.
“Thank you, my dear. Jennifer will come for you at half past four. It’s been such a pleasure!”
I looked up. Jennifer had come back into the side doorway. Her face was pale, her blue eyes were liquid black. She wasn’t far from tears, but they were tears of anger and defeat. She shook hands with me briefly and followed her mother out. I stepped back to the long open French windows and watched them from behind the gold curtains crossing the empty piazza. I heard Jennifer’s voice, low and hot, say, “Mother! You don’t know what you’ve done!” and saw her mother raise her brows without answering audibly. In another moment she’d stopped to talk to an old colored woman with a basket of jonquils and white narcissi (butter and eggs, they call them) balanced gracefully on her turbaned head, an old pipe in her mouth.
I picked up the four cards Mrs. Reid had left on the table. The first two were:
MISS CAROLINE COLLETON REID
MISS JENNIFER CAROLINE REID
Each of them had “Strawberry Hill Plantation” engraved on the lower left-hand corner. The other two were:
MRS. ATWELL COLLETON REID
MR. ATWELL COLLETON REID
Each of them had “24 Landgrave Street” in its corner.
I put them in my pocket. If the number of Reids was confusing, it was no more confusing, I thought, than the names like it in Charleston. One thing they did was to indicate the clear and definite cleavage of the two households—mother and son, great-aunt and daughter. I hadn’t, somehow, realized they were so clearly divided before.
I heard the fountain playing in the pool, knew thereby that lunch was being served, and strolled out. I had the uneasy conviction that Phyllis Lattimer was being less than frank with me . . . and that she was playing with a stacked deck. Just why I hadn’t thought of that before I don’t know. Life had stacked the cards for Phyllis the day her grandfather discovered it was more profitable to make and
