“I knew someone had.” Loesser had been successful too. No photograph or snapshot of either Lily Margolis or her children had appeared in any newspaper, and very few facts about her personal life had been mentioned. It was possible, though, that there were very few facts to mention, that Lily Margolis was one of those dull and virtuous women who had no interests outside of her children and the mechanical operations of her home. Meecham had met a great many such women, and sometimes their dullness, and often their virtue, was a surface covering, a thin sheet of ice over a running river, dangerous to cross.
“My own feeling about the matter,” Loesser said, “is that it would be better to forget it. In fact, I’m phoning you now under protest. I didn’t want to, and I don’t think anything will be gained by mulling over the sordid details. But Lily wants it that way. If you come and talk to her you’ll be reimbursed for your time, of course.”
“You realize that the case is settled.”
“Of course. Since the young man killed himself this morning...”
“How did you find that out?”
“Strangely enough, Lily was in the Sheriff’s office when the message was phoned in. She couldn’t help overhearing.” Loesser coughed, but it was more of a nervous mannerism than a real cough. “I understand you were a friend of the young man?”
“I knew him.”
“It’s a sad affair all around, but especially for Lily and the two children. Fortunately, they’re well provided for. One of the few sensible things Margolis did in his lifetime was to take out enough insurance.”
“Double indemnity has healed a lot of broken hearts.”
“It helps, and why not?” Loesser said defensively.
“Why not, indeed.” Meecham looked at the clock on his desk: 5:10. “I’ll be glad to see Mrs. Margolis. When?”
“How about tonight after dinner? Or right away, if you’d prefer.”
“That would be better.”
“I’m at Lily’s house now. Do you know where Lancaster Drive is, near the golf course?”
“Yes.”
“It’s 1206, a white-and-green colonial house. You can’t miss it. The kids have spent all afternoon building a couple of snowmen at the driveway entrance.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
The floodlight was on at the entrance gate, and the snow figures stood like sepulchers, one on each side. Loesser had made a mistake about them, though. They weren’t snowmen. One of them was a lady, with a pink ruffled apron tied around her lumpy waist and a bandana covering her head to hide its baldness. One of her charcoal eyes had fallen out of its melting socket. She had a witch’s nose made out of a carrot and a moist beet-mouth, and stuck in her chest was a long dripping icicle that gleamed in the light like a stiletto with a jeweled handle. The snow lady seemed to be aware of the wound: her blurred beet-mouth was anguished, and her single eye stared helplessly into the night.
Meecham pressed hard on the accelerator and the wheels of the car spun for a moment in the slush and then took hold. The driveway was on a steep grade and it hadn’t been shoveled. Neither had the steps of the house, or the wide pillared veranda. There were sounds of dripping everywhere, as in a greenhouse.
Nearly every window was lighted and wide open, as if the rooms were being aired after a period of disease.
Loesser answered the door himself. In contrast to his thin nervous voice over the phone, he was a heavy-set moon-faced man in his forties, with a smile that flashed off and on with the precision of a traffic signal. He had courtroom manners and a way of talking to a person without looking at him, as if he was really aiming his words at an unseen and very critical jury.
“Good of you to come, Meecham.” The two men shook hands. “Let me take your coat. The maid’s upstairs with the kids.”
He took Meecham’s coat and hung it in a small closet that opened off the foyer. Meecham noticed that the closet was empty except for a pair of child’s rubber boots.
“Lily hasn’t had time to unpack or get organized,” Loesser said. “I’m her cousin, by the way, in case you were wondering how I come in on all this.”
“I wasn’t wondering very hard.”
“No? Well, I thought you might. The fact is” — he tugged at his tie — “the fact of the matter is that I’ve stood by Lily all during this unfortunate marriage of hers.”
It was the sort of remark that demanded an answer of some kind: Oh? How interesting. Is that a fact? Good for you, old boy. Stout fellow. Meecham merely made an indeterminate noise.
“Well, Lily’s waiting in the den,” Loesser said. “It’s the only room in the house that doesn’t smell of moth crystals. The place has been closed up, you know.”
The den wasn’t what Meecham expected from its name, a book-and-pipe sanctuary for a man. It turned out to be a small room on the southeast corner of the house, equipped for activity, not rest. There was a sewing machine, a drawing board, a small hand-loom, a dressmaker’s dummy, and a long unpainted wooden table filled with children’s toys. The pine walls were covered with children’s art, sketches and watercolors and fingerpaintings, some of them hanging from the molding in frames, and some of them fastened loosely to the wall with thumbtacks. The pictures were all signed, most of them right across the middle, Ann M. or Georgie.
Activity had given the room an air of pleasant untidiness. But there was nothing untidy about Lily Margolis. She was a slim muscular young woman in a tweed suit with flecks of blue in it that exactly matched the color of her eyes. Her brown hair was clipped short in rows of curls, and the curls were so uniform that it seemed as though she had weighed and measured each of them before letting herself be seen in public. Her face was deeply sunburned, so that her eyes looked very bright and clear in contrast, and her teeth very white. Her features were plain, but the carefully chosen tweed suit, and the carefully acquired sunburn, gave her quite a striking appearance.
She repeated the words Loesser had used, but her New England accent was stronger than his, as if she had retained it deliberately to show her contempt for the Middle West.
“It was very good of you to come, Mr. Meecham. Please sit down, won’t you? And George, would you mind awfully bringing us a drink?”
Loesser got up obediently, but he looked slightly pained and he turned at the doorway to give Mrs. Margolis a don’t-say-anything-interesting-while-I’m-gone glance.
Lily Margolis returned to the wooden bench by the drawing board where she’d been sitting before she rose to greet Meecham. She sat, stiff and erect, her feet planted squarely on the floor, her large competent-looking hands crossed on her knees. “You see, Mr. Meecham, I don’t know quite what happened, or why. Everything is fuzzy and confused. It’s like trying to understand someone else’s nightmare.”
Someone else’s, Meecham noted, not her own. The statement fitted in with his previous conception of her; she seemed to have the occupational schizophrenia of the perfect secretary, a self-effacing manner combined with a positive knowledge of her own superiority. Yes, boss on the one hand, and silly boy on the other. Perhaps not exactly the perfect wife.
She leaned forward slightly toward Meecham, but without bending her back. “I had taken the children down to Lima to spend Christmas with my sister — her husband is a mining engineer. I was only there two weeks when the message came that Claude had had an accident. Rather delicate wording, don’t you think, for what really happened.”