Call After Midnight by Mignon G. Eberhart

bedside table but Fiora said, “No. Maybe some hot milk.”
    “All right.”
    Fiora put out her hand. “Wait a minute. I asked you another question and you didn’t answer. Are you still in love with Peter?”
    Jenny put down the Thermos slowly. She was now thoroughly awake. Fair was fair; she had an impulse to say yes, and I’m going to get him back if I can. But Fiora said, with that unnerving fluctuation between excitation and drowsiness from sedation, “Of course you must be. You wouldn’t have come when he wanted you to come, if you’re not. And I was glad Peter phoned to you. I knew I could trust you. Besides, there’s something I want to ask you. Have you been seeing Peter?”
    “No!”
    Fiora’s eyes were hazy yet something very shrewd peered from them. “Then why has he been phoning to you? Don’t deny it. I saw the phone bills and hunted up your number and it’s the same number on the bills, the toll calls.”
    “I’ll not deny it. You know then how seldom he has phoned.”
    “Well, that’s true. But why does he phone at all?”
    “Because he wants to, I suppose,” Jenny said.
    Fiora waited a moment, brooding. Then she said, “I didn’t think you and Peter were such good friends. You certainly weren’t friendly at the time of the divorce.”
    “We didn’t see each other. But the divorce was—” She hunted for a word and Fiora supplied it.
    “Friendly! Don’t tell me that. Yet six weeks afterward Peter was phoning to you.”
    “Yes, I remember that. He wanted to know something about the household—oh, yes, the name of the employment agency I had used.”
    “And after that everything was cozy, between you and Peter.”
    “Cozy is not the word,” Jenny said tartly. “We were perfectly polite and friendly, that was all.”
    “Polite and friendly,” Fiora said and thought it over. “Well, I suppose that’s possible. How often do you see him?”
    “I told you! I haven’t seen him at all. I’ll get the milk.”
    “No, wait a minute, I want to tell you something. Don’t try to get Peter back again. I warn you. I’d never be the fool you were. I’d never give him a divorce. I’d refuse it to the last and Peter knows it. And if I finally did give in, as I never will, I’d stick him for such an alimony that he’d never pay it. Not Peter.”
    “Peter was very generous with me.”
    “Generous!” Fiora gave a drowsy giggle. “You call that miserable little settlement of fifty thousand dollars generous! I don’t.” She was still laughing when Jenny went out and closed the door behind her.
    One half of the double door across the corridor was open and a light shone from the end of the hall above the stairs. It was so dark in the half-dusk of the long corridor that she could barely see the blank panels of the closed door to Peter’s room opposite. She went through the double doors toward the light and the crossing corridor.
    The door to Blanche’s room, opposite her own, was open as Blanche had promised. The door to the room beside her room, Cal’s room, was open, too; Cal had said, I’ll be next door.
    The house was breathlessly quiet, yet there was a curious sense of watchfulness which plucked at Jenny’s nerves so she paused at the top of the stairs and looked around her. There were the two open doors showing only blackness, silence, nothing else; she went downstairs and felt her way through the half-lighted dining room and into the pantry. The door squeaked as always.
    She turned on lights. Just there, beside the refrigerator and the back stairway they must have found Fiora.
    The pantry had been done over, too; it was all chromium steel and glitter. She went on into the kitchen, which was also a glittering expanse of chromium. She got milk out of the huge, new refrigerator, found a pan, and eventually found the right button to turn on a burner of a fine new range which looked so efficient that she almost expected it to speak to her. She stood, shaking the pan a little so