Through the Window(5)

“She left you no note?” I asked and my voice echoed up the stairwell, bouncing back from the white plastered walls. “Don’t you think she would have done that if she’d run away?”

“She left nothing,” he said. “No clue as to where she had gone.”

“But she left food for you in the larder,” I said. “I saw the butcher make a delivery yesterday.”

“The butcher? A delivery?” He sounded surprised. “We have nothing delivered. My wife is an able-bodied young woman. Exercise and fresh air are good for her. There is no need for extravagances.”

I frowned, thinking, trying to remember. I had seen the butcher boy’s bicycle on our street early yesterday and I was fairly certain the delivery had been to the Emory’s.

He walked ahead of me into the kitchen. “I can check the meat safe,” he said, going through to the scullery, “but I think you’ll find you are mistaken. Ah yes, you see. The remains of Sunday’s roast. That’s all.”

“Then I was wrong,” I said. “I can’t see our own side of the street clearly from my window.”

He nodded curtly as if accepting my apology. “If you’d be good enough to follow me upstairs.” He went up at a great pace. I came more slowly, my legs weak from lack of exercise. In fact I felt a little dizzy by the time I reached the top.

“In here, if you please,” he called. He took a match and lit the gas bracket on the wall. It hissed into life, illuminating the room with soft yellow light as I entered. It was a front bedroom that, in contrast to the austere feel of the rest of the house, was in a certain amount of disarray. A lady’s dress and stockings lay over the back of a chair. A hairbrush on the seat of the vanity stool beside a hat. I felt horribly uncomfortable—an intruder in this intimate setting.

“Surely you can tell better than I if any of your wife’s clothes are missing?” I said.

He shook his head. “What she wore was of no interest to me, Mrs. Sullivan. I tried to break her from her frivolous past but she refused to dress as befits a married woman of dignity.”

There was a heavy dark wood wardrobe against one wall. Its door hung half-open. I opened it fully and looked inside. A couple of hangers had no garments on them. I couldn’t see the pretty blue dress that she had worn when we first met.

“Do you remember if your wife was wearing her blue gown yesterday?” I asked. “It had little flowers embroidered around the neckline.”

He frowned. “I don’t think so. In fact I instructed her to wear something suitable to visit our pastor. Not one of those New Orleans fripperies, I told her. Not that she had many suitable clothes. She had never bothered to make up the material I bought her. I don’t even know where it is. She never thanked me for it.”

After the wardrobe, I opened drawers, one by one. Some items did appear to be missing, but I found myself feeling increasingly uneasy. There was no rhyme or reason to what had been taken. If the blue dress was gone, then why not the matching underslip with the same embroidered flowers? It was chilly outside so why not her good winter coat and stout shoes? And underwear—wouldn’t she have needed all her underwear and nightclothes? Yet those two drawers were almost undisturbed.

I prowled around the room, stopped short, went to say something and then held my tongue. Did he think I wouldn’t notice? Because something was not right. I began to think that Mrs. Emory had not run away after all.





Three


I tried to betray no emotion as I bade Mr. Emory good-bye and promised to send over my husband as soon as he returned. He thanked me profusely for my effort and my concern.

“So it appears she did take some of her things,” he said as he accompanied me to the front door. “More than she would have needed for one night.”

“It does appear that way,” I said guardedly.

My heart was beating rather fast as I left. I answered my mother-in-law’s questions in an offhand fashion, but my brain tried to process what I had just seen while I ate the stew she put in front of me for my dinner. “You might as well have your meal down here, since you’re determined to wait up for Daniel,” she had said, giving me a critical frown.

I tried to remember exactly what I had seen on the street the day before. The butcher boy making a delivery. And another delivery later…the laundry cart. Again that could have been to the Emory’s. The rest of the traffic had been the usual daily run—old Mrs. Konigsberg walking her dachshund at precisely eleven o’clock as always. The wives doing their morning marketing. And then Mrs. Konigsberg going out again, just as twilight was falling—without her dog. That was not part of her normal routine, but not in any way suspicious. The one person I hadn’t seen at all was Mrs. Emory, and I certainly hadn’t seen her leaving with a valise.