Mary Martha answered the door herself, first opening it only as far as the chain would allow. Then, recognizing Ellen, she unfastened the chain and opened the door wide. In spite of the earliness of the hour she was dressed as if for a visit to town in pink embroidered cotton and newly whitened sandals. Her pony-tail was neat and so tightly fastened it raised her eyebrows slightly. She looked a little surprised to see Ellen, as though she might have been expecting someone else.
She said, “If you want my mother, she’s in the kitchen making breakfast.”
“I prefer to talk to you alone, Mary Martha.”
“I’d better get my mother’s permission. She’s kind of nervous this morning, I don’t know why. But I have to be careful.”
“She hasn’t told you anything?”
“Just that Mac was coming over with a soldier and we were all going to have a chat.”
“A soldier?”
“He’s a lieutenant. I’m supposed to remember to call him that so I’ll make a good impression.” Mary Martha looked down at her dress as if to reassure herself that it was still clean enough to make a good impression. “Do you want to come in?”
“Yes.”
“I guess it’ll be all right.”
She was just closing the door when Kate Oakley’s voice called out from the kitchen, “Mary Martha, tell Mac I’ll be there in a minute.”
“It’s not Mac,” the child said. “It’s Jessie’s mother.”
“Jessie’s—?” Kate Oakley appeared at the far end of the hall. She began walking toward them very rapidly, her high heels ticking on the linoleum like clocks working on different time schedules, each trying to catch up with the other. Her face was heavily made up to look pink and white but the gray of trouble showed through. She placed one arm protectively around Mary Martha’s shoulders. “You’d better go and put the bacon in the warming oven, dear.”
“I don’t care if it gets cold,” Mary Martha said. “It tastes the same.”
“You mustn’t be rude in front of company, lamb. That’s understood between us, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Off you go.”
Mary Martha started down the hall.
“But I want to talk to her,” Ellen said desperately. “I’ve got to. She might know something.”
“She knows nothing. She’s only a child.”
“Jessie’s only a child, too.”
“I’m sorry. I really am sorry, Mrs. Brant. But Mary Martha isn’t supposed to talk to anyone until our lawyer arrives.”
“You haven’t even told her about Jessie, have you?”
“I didn’t want to upset her.”
“She’s got to be told. She may be able to help. She might have seen someone, heard something. How can we know unless we ask her?”
“Mac will ask her. He can handle these... these situations better than you or I could.”
“Is that all it is to you, a situation to be handled?”
Kate shook her head helplessly. “No matter what I said to you now, it would seem wrong because you’re distraught. Further conversation is pointless. I must ask you to leave.” She opened the heavy oak door. “I’m truly sorry, Mrs. Brant, but I think I’m doing the right thing. Mac will talk to Mary Martha. She feels freer with him than she would with you or me.”
“Even though he has a policeman with him?”
“Did she tell you that?”
“I figured it out.”
“Well, it won’t make any difference. Mary Martha adores Mac and she’s not afraid of policemen.”
But the last word curled upward into a question mark, and when Ellen looked back from the bottom of the porch steps, Kate was hanging on to the oak door as if for support.
When breakfast was over, Mary Martha sat on the window seat in the front room with the cat, Pudding, on her lap. She wasn’t supposed to get her hands dirty or her dress wrinkled but she needed the comfort of the cat, his warm body and soft fur, his bright eyes that seemed to be aware of so many things and not to care about any of them very much.
In a little while she saw Mac and the lieutenant emerge from the fog and come up the front steps. She heard her mother talking to them in the hall, at first in the low, careful voice she used when meeting strangers, later in a higher, less restrained and more natural voice. She sounded as if she was protesting, then arguing, and finally, losing. After a time the two men came into the front room alone, and Mac closed the door.
“Hello, Mary Martha,” Mac said. “This is Lieutenant Gallantyne.”
Still holding the cat, Mary Martha got up and executed a brief, formal curtsy.
Gallantyne bowed gravely in return. “That’s a pretty cat you have there, Mary Martha. What’s his name?”
“Pudding. He has other names too, though.”
“Really? Such as?”
“Geronimo, sometimes. Also King Arthur. But when he’s bad and catches a bird, I call him Sheridan.” She switched the cat from her left shoulder to her right. It stopped purring and made a swift jab at her ponytail. “Do you have any medals?”
Gallantyne raised his bushy eyebrows. “Well now, I believe I won a few swimming races when I was a kid.”
“I mean real medals like for killing a hundred enemies.”
The men exchanged glances. It was as if they were both thinking the same thing, that it seemed a long and insane time ago that men were given medals for killing.
“Lieutenant Gallantyne is not in the army,” Mac said. “He’s a policeman. He’s also a good friend of mine, so you needn’t be afraid of him.”
“I’m not. But why does he want to see me instead of my mother?”
“He’ll talk to your mother later. Right now you’re more important.”
She seemed pleased but at the same time suspicious. “Why am I?”
“We hope,” Gallantyne said, “that you’ll be able to help us find your friend, Jessie.”
“Is she hiding?”
“We’re not sure.”
“She’s an awfully good hider. Being so skinny she can squeeze behind things and under things and between.”
“You and Jessie play together a lot, do you?”
“All the time except when one of us is being punished.”
“And you tell each other secrets, I suppose?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you promise each other never to reveal these secrets to anyone else?”
Mary Martha nodded and said firmly, “And I’m not going to, either, because I crossed my heart and hoped to die.”
“Oh, I’m sure you can keep a secret very well,” Gallantyne said. “But I want you to imagine something now. Suppose you, Mary Martha, were in a dangerous situation in a place nobody knew about except you and Jessie. You’re frightened and hungry and in pain and you want desperately to be rescued. Under those circumstances, wouldn’t you release Jessie from her promise to keep the name of that place a secret?”
“I guess so, only there isn’t any place like that.”
“But you have other secrets.”
“Yes.”
Gallantyne was watching her gravely. “I believe that if Jessie could communicate with you right now, she’d release you from all your promises.”
“Why can’t she comm... communicate?”
“Nobody’s seen her since last night at ten o’clock. We don’t know where she is or why she left or if she left by herself or with someone else.”
In a spasm of fear Mary Martha clutched the cat too tightly. He let out a yowl, unsheathed his claws and fought his way out of her grasp, onto the floor. She stood, very pale and still, one hand pressed to her scratched shoulder. “He hurt me,” she said in a shocked voice. “Sheridan hurt me.”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean to.”
“He always means to. I hate him.”