“Tell me what?” Louisa, bundled in a lavender bathrobe, stood smiling in the doorway. “Oh, tea! Splendid!”
Alban brought her another cup, and she poured tea for herself. “Now what is this all about?” she demanded.
“I’m afraid it’s bad news, Mother.”
“Well-are you going to tell me or not?”
They told her, in rambling and what they believed to be diplomatic terms. Louisa, however, immediately pressed for details.
“Who do you suppose did it?” asked Louisa with lively interest. “Are the migrant workers here yet?”
“Mother!”
“Well, who else could it have been? That nervous young man she’s engaged to? I don’t see why he’d do it. It wasn’t as if she had been unfaithful to him, like-”
“Mother, the sheriff will take care of the investigation!” said Alban sharply. “I think we should worry about what we can do to help Uncle Robert, don’t you?”
“Yes, Alban,” said Louisa in a more subdued tone. “It’s such a shame. Eileen did so want to be happy. I don’t think she would have been with that young man of hers, but I wish she had been given the chance anyway.” She walked to the desk and began to rearrange the roses in a crystal vase. “Why is it that every time Amanda and I plan a wedding, something terrible happens? How is Amanda, by the way?”
“She went up to her room and we haven’t seen her since,” said Elizabeth.
“Just like her. Oh dear, Alban, do you think the white roses are past their prime? Or should we just go with the red?”
Elizabeth stood up. “I’d really better be getting back,” she whispered to Alban.
“All right. I’ll walk you to the door,” said Alban, following her into the hall.
“Just to the door?”
“I’d better stay with Mother. Why? Are you so afraid?” Then he smiled and patted her shoulder. “Oh, you’ll be safe, Cousin Elizabeth. As long as you stay off of boats. Now, do you want me to walk you back?”
“No,” murmured Elizabeth. “I guess I don’t.”
With a hasty good night, she let herself out the front door, and hurried across the dark road.
By the time she remembered to worry about lurking murderers she had arrived at the front door of the Chandler house. The porch light had been left on for her, and the door was unlocked. She closed the front door as quietly as possible and tiptoed down the hall.
“Is that you, Elizabeth?” called a voice from the kitchen.
She peeped around the corner and saw that the kitchen light was on. “Geoffrey?” she called out in a stage whisper.
“No. It’s me. Charles. I found some cookies. Want some?”
He was sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk.
“Well, maybe just one,” said Elizabeth, taking the other chair. “Thank you for waiting up for me.”
“Nah. Had to get up to answer the phone anyway. Your brother’s roommate called. He said Bill wasn’t back yet, and since it was getting so late, he’d have him call first thing in the morning. Want a glass of milk?”
“I guess so,” sighed Elizabeth. If people keep comforting me with liquids, she thought, I’ll have to carry a bedpan around with me.
He took a plastic milk jug from the refrigerator and filled another glass. “There you are.”
“I guess everybody else has gone to bed.”
“Yep.”
“Couldn’t you sleep?”
“No.”
As conversations go, this one wasn’t going far. Elizabeth cast about for a new topic.
“So Charles, what do you know about anthropology?”
Charles peered at her over the rim of his glass, which he had been about to drink from. “Anthropology?”
“Yes. Well, really, archeology. You know: digging for lost cities and all.”
“Elizabeth, I’m a physicist.”
“Well, of course, I know that.” She coughed. “I-er-just thought that since it was science, you might know something about it.”
Charles was puzzled. “But why would you think that?”
“I don’t know. I just…”
His face lit up with mistaken comprehension. “I see! You mean because of the dating process!”
Elizabeth blushed. “Well, actually I haven’t even met him-”
“Carbon-fourteen dating! Of course! It’s practically indispensable in archeology. They use it to determine the age of their finds. Wonderful trick, really. Here, I’ll explain how it works.”
“But, Charles, I-”
“-heavy radioactive isotope of carbon, mass number fourteen, and-”
Elizabeth nodded politely through the explanation of half-life and radioactive traces. She reasoned that if she admitted her real interest in archeology-a misty image of herself and Milo discovering Atlantis together-she would sound much more foolish than she cared to. Sitting through Charles’s lecture seemed to be the easiest way out. After several minutes of animated explanation, Charles wound down. Noticing a glass coffee pot on the stove, Elizabeth asked: “Were you planning to make coffee? The water’s not on.”
“Good Lord! I’d forgotten all about it. Thanks for reminding me! I’d better move it before somebody tries to make tea with it.”
He moved the beaker of water from the stove to the countertop, in slow cautious movements.
Elizabeth watched him wide-eyed. “It won’t explode, will it?”
“What, this? It’s just salt and water.”
“It looks clear to me,” said Elizabeth. Like nitroglycerin.
“I supersaturated the water with salt while it was boiling. That’s why you can’t see it. That was hours ago. While we were waiting for the sheriff to call, and I didn’t have anything to do.”
“What is it?”
“Oh… just an experiment. Or maybe a statement. I dunno. Here, I’ll show you. I boiled water in this glass container, and I dumped salt into the boiling water-lots of it. More than it would hold if it were room temperature. Got that?”
“Yeah. You wasted a box of salt. So?”
“Then I left it covered and waited a few hours for it to cool.”
“Okay. And you want to see what will happen?”
Charles looked pained. “I know what will happen. Don’t you?”
Elizabeth shook her head. “No.”
He shook a few grains of salt into his hand. Carefully extracting a few grains from his palm, he blew the rest away. “Now. I have between my fingers a grain or so of salt. Watch.”
He walked over to the glass pot on the countertop and lifted the lid. Elizabeth followed him, peering closely at the clear liquid inside. With a dramatic flourish, Charles dropped the salt grains into the liquid. As Elizabeth watched, the solution around the new grains began to thicken into a bog of oatmeal consistency, the reaction spreading outward from the grains second by second until the entire liquid had become a mass of soggy salt.
“Hey! I didn’t even see any salt before!”
“I know. You want to know why I did this?”
Still watching the beaker, Elizabeth nodded.
“This wasn’t an experiment. It was a prediction. I think that solution was like our family. There were a lot of things floating around, so to speak, but you couldn’t see them. And Eileen’s death is that little grain of salt I dropped into the pot, which makes everything crystallize.”
He dumped the contents of the beaker into the sink and rinsed the pot. “Good night, Elizabeth,” said Charles, strolling off toward the stairs.
Elizabeth stared after him, wondering for the first time if Charles might also be a poet.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ELIZABETH SLEPT BADLY that night. Even though she locked her door and got up twice to make sure the bedroom window was fastened, she half waked at every creak the house made. A fitful early-morning dream about looking for an Indian village in the stacks of the university library abruptly changed into a funeral scene in which Aunt Amanda was nailing Eileen into a pine box. In her dream, Elizabeth suddenly became the one in the box, and she could feel the blows of the hammer vibrating against her upturned face. When she finally struggled to consciousness, she found that the pounding was coming from the bedroom door.