From the interior of the barn Aaron’s querulous voice issued cautiously.
"Miss, want I should ask the mechanic to come out here?"
"Oh, Aaron, that would be wonderful! I’d be glad to pay him—and you—well. Tell him I just can't get those tires off by myself."
THAT would do it, she told herself. Once the mechanic was there, she would bring down her suitcase and manage to get into town and have him send someone to bring out her car when the tires were repaired. She would manage to leave before night. While Aaron was away, she would work on the loom that she was convinced had been Cora Kent’s property. That might disarm Mrs. Renner's suspicions.
She walked slowly back to the house. She was thankful that Mrs. Renner was upstairs tidying the bedroom; Lucy could hear her steps as she walked from one side to the other of the big bed. Lucy sat down at the loom and began to experiment with a colored thread, to see if she would make an ornamental border like that of the antimacassar she had sent to Stan’s mother. It was not as difficult as she had thought it might be and went faster than she believed possible; it was almost as if other fingers laid the threads in place for her. She began to build up the border emblems with growing excitement. The corner inserts looked for all the world like curving serpents standing upright on their tails and the center one was like a snake with its tail in its mouth. Time passed. The weaving grew under what she felt were guided fingers.
"Why," she said aloud, amazed at what she had woven in so short a time. "It looks like S-O-S!”
"So?” hissed Mrs. Renner significantly. She was standing directly behind Lucy, staring at the woven symbols with narrowed eyes and grim mouth. She picked up the scissors lying on the table and slashed across the weaving with deliberate intent. In a moment it had been utterly destroyed.
"So!” she said with dark finality.
Lucy's hands had flown to her mouth to shut off horrified protest. She could not for a moment utter a word. The significance of that action was all too clear. She knew suddenly who had woven the antimacassar. She knew why the adaptable serpents had been chosen for decor. She looked at Mrs. Renner, all this knowledge clear on her startled face and met the grim determination with all the opposing courage and strength of purpose she could muster.
"What happened to Cora Kent?" she demanded point blank, her head high, her eyes wide with horror. "She was here. I know she was here. What did you do to her?” As if the words had been thrust upon her, she continued: "Did you take the honeysuckle from her room?”
AMAZINGLY, Mrs. Renner seemed to be breaking down. She began to wring her hands with futile gestures of despair. Her air of indomintable determination dissipated as she bent her body from one side to the other like an automaton.
"She didn’t last long, did she?” Lucy pursued with cruel relentlessness, as the recollection of that overheard conversation pushed to the foreground of her thoughts.
Mrs. Renner stumbled backward and fell crumpled shaplessly into a chair.
"How did you know that?” she whispered hoarsely. And then, "I didn’t know she was sick. I had to feed Kathy, didn’t I? I thought—”
"You thought she’d last longer, missus, didn’t you? You didn’t really mean to let Kathy kill her, did you?”
Aaron was standing in the kitchen doorway. One gnarled hand held a stout stick, whittled into a sharp point at one end. A heavy wooden mallet weighed down his other hand.
Mrs. Renner’s eyes fastened on the pointed stick. She cried out weakly.
Aaron shuffled back into the kitchen and Lucy heard his footsteps going up the stairs.
Mrs. Renner was sobbing and crying frantically: "No! No!”
She seemed entirely bereft of physical stamina, unable to lift herself from the chair into which her body had sunk weakly. She only continued to cry out pitifully in protest against something which Lucy’s dizzy surmises could not shape into tangibility.
A door opened upstairs. Aaron’s footstep
