Bennis went to her gabled window and looked out. She’d thought she’d heard a car coming up the drive, but there was nothing out there but trees. She went back to the narrow bed and sat down on it. She wanted a cigarette, but she wasn’t allowed to smoke in the house. It was time to quit smoking, it really was, but somehow she didn’t want to do it right this second.
She got up off the bed and went back to the window. She left the window and went back to the bed. She was feeling frustrated and she was beginning to feel angry. She got her cigarettes out of the side pocket of her tote bag and stuck them in the pocket of her robe.
Out in the hallway, the lights were all turned off, except that there was a stream coming from under the door of Margaret Anson’s bedroom. Bennis stopped there and listened, but Margaret seemed to be doing no more than she herself had been doing only a few moments before: pacing, and getting no joy out of it. Bennis went on down the hall and came to the stairs that led to the front entry. She went down those and ended up in a long, high-ceilinged hall. This part of the house had been built later than the part where she had her bedroom. Very early New Englanders always seemed to need wombs more than they needed rooms.
Bennis went out the front door and looked around. There was nothing to see, and it was very cold. She should have put something on her legs and feet, but she hadn’t thought of it, because she never wore anything on her legs and feet when she was padding around her apartment in her nightgown. She came back inside and closed the door behind her. Then she headed through the living room and the rooms beyond. If this had been somebody else’s house, she would have gone into the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea, but she wasn’t going to take anything here unless she had Margaret Anson’s permission for it.
She got to the kitchen and walked straight through it, into the pantry. She looked at the open shelves of canned corn and flour sacks and rose hip preserved in glass jars. One wall was free of shelves and had pegs on it instead. Hanging from each of the pegs but one were jackets that looked as if they belonged to a man. Underneath them were shoes that looked as if they belonged to a man, too. Robert Anson’s shoes.
Bennis went out the other side of the pantry and onto the back porch. There was a security light here, turned on and pointing to the yard. Bennis could see the raked gravel of the driveway’s turnaround and the outline of the long four-car garage. The garage had been a barn once. The shape was unmistakable. The last bay of it was standing open.
Bennis got her cigarettes out and lit one up. She took a deep lungful of smoke and let it out slowly, as if she were smoking marijuana instead of tobacco. Then she started to cough again, but she held it in. She could do that sometimes. It was really cold out here—freezing, in fact The least she should do was to put on a pair of Robert’s shoes, so that her toes didn’t freeze to the wooden floor of the porch. She didn’t want to do that any more than she wanted to get herself a cup of tea in the kitchen, though, because Margaret was always hovering in the background, looking for something discreditable to report.
Bennis went down into the drive. The gravel hurt her feet. She moved to the grass and shivered. There was enough frost on the grass to make it stiff. She had to be out of her mind, wandering around like this. She walked over to the barn and looked at the side of it. Its paint was peeling and its wood was gray and dry. It wasn’t really being taken care of. She wasn’t taking care of herself, either. She seemed to be willing herself into a bout with pneumonia.
Bennis’s cigarette was out. She knelt down and ground the butt against the grass, making the frost melt. Then she put the cold butt into her pocket and got another cigarette out. The problem wasn’t that she went on smoking, but that she went on chain smoking. She had to keep reminding herself that there was nothing romantic about dying young.
She walked around the side of the barn, back onto the gravel drive. She walked past the three closed bays and stopped at the open one. All the bays were full of cars. There were too many of them for the people who lived in the house. Bennis supposed that at least one of them had been Robert’s own, like the boots and the jackets in the pantry. Probate was supposed to take care of all that, but maybe it hadn’t been a very thorough probate. Maybe Robert Anson had had so many things that it was easy to forget about a car parked in a garage at a house in the country.
The car in the bay in front of her was a Mercedes four-door sedan, painted a murky brown. It looked like it belonged to Margaret Anson. The car in the bay farthest from where she was standing was a Jaguar. She could tell that just by the shape of it. It was the one she thought was most likely to belong to the dead man. Margaret would say that that was just one more proof that Robert Anson had been flashy and superficial, and the flashy part was probably true enough.