The Iron Cobweb by Ursula Curtiss

Author:Ursula Curtiss [Curtiss, Ursula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-06-16T04:00:00+00:00

Twelve

ROSEMARY TEALE, silhouetted in navy blue against the icy blinding world of snow, was like a symbol of safety.

She was a short sturdy girl, perhaps a year or two older than Elizabeth, with an alert squarish face. Her hair was brief and brown and shiny, her voice had a pleasant little-boy hoarseness. She introduced herself crisply when Elizabeth opened the door in answer to the knocker at ten o’clock that morning.

“You’re Mrs. March, aren’t you? You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Noreen Delaney’s—Rosemary Teale. I wonder if I could—”

She stopped, smiling. Elizabeth turned instinctively and saw Maire peering through the banisters as pink and naked as an infant in arms. She said hastily, “Come in, and excuse me a minute, will you, while I get some clothes on my daughter?”

She carried her sense of reassurance upstairs, and held on to it while she struggled Maire into a dress, located a missing shoe, and separated Jeep from a quiet study of the electric clock in her bedroom. When they were established with old magazines in their own room and she went downstairs again, the reassurance was torn away without preamble. Rosemary Teale, solid and ski-suited in front of the white brick fireplace, said, “I’m worried about Noreen, Mrs. March. I could have phoned, I suppose, but you always feel better if you see people. Have you heard from her at all?”

“No. In fact,” said Elizabeth, “I was on the brink of coming to see you. Sit down, won’t you. Miss Teale?”

Rosemary Teale sat down. She lighted a cigarette with a concentration of straight dark brows and said in that low, likeably rough voice, “The thing is this. Jill and I—the three of us used to room together—were giving a party on Christmas afternoon. Noreen doesn’t drink, but I know she was looking forward to coming—she’d had a dress of Jill’s altered to fit her and she said she’d certainly be there. We missed her at the party, and then when I called here and found she hadn’t come back, I began to worry,”

Constance must have taken the call, and forgotten to tell her. Elizabeth looked at the girl in the wing chair and wondered for the first time how much Rosemary Teale had been told about the March household. The silences, the hostilities, the small inexplicable happenings. She felt her way, cautiously. “It’s seemed to me lately that Noreen’s been rather worried herself.”

“I’m sure of it,” said Rosemary Teale with an instant air of relief. “Funny you should say that, because only the other night I said to Jill—”

What she had said to Jill boiled down disappointingly to what Elizabeth had observed for herself: a vague depression on Noreen’s part, a haunted air, a thorough retreat into silence. “Except about Maire,” said Rosemary Teale. “She’s very fond of your little boy—Jeep, is it?—but she worships Maire.”

Elizabeth listened and felt herself grow tighter. She said suddenly, interrupting, “Have you her aunt’s address in Arlington? If I can get away I’ll go there this afternoon.

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