No mail but a swatch of ads drenched in the season's gladness, and the janitor would never provide a wastebasket in the entry. She dumped the mess in the studio trash-box, glancing at the cameras, screens, props, at the dim end of the studio. A fantastic way to earn a living, close to the mainstream of human vanity. But at this end, with the north light, wall-shelves, drawing table, work could be done after survival was taken care of. Callista's work for a year, and Edith's own. The bread-and-butter end of the studio was already dusty. Edith had canceled portrait engagements for the duration of the trial, disinclined to hire a temporary helper: why knock oneself out immortalizing the fish-faced?
She touched the table, symbolic touching of a hardness-without-coldness that was one element of Callista Blake. Stop it, Red! She's not here. She took down a folder of Callista's drawings—some careful, some swift, all begotten of a mind that could see, laugh, pity, understand. Also in that folder was a letter Callista had written after Edith's last visit to the detention cell, Saturday, three days ago. Edith knew the drawings. She would find nothing new in them now, when she was out of temper and moved by a wish to start some work of her own. Glance at that abandoned wagon in long grass? Or the supermarket clerk, homely day's end weariness caught in a dozen lines with that compassion of Callista's (at nineteen!) which she could almost never convey in spoken words? Not now. Edith glanced at a watercolor on the wall, one she had taken from Cal's apartment for safety with Herb Chalmers' distracted consent and after the police had given leave. A mountain slope, a wind-ravished pine, shouting deep color against a storm sky intense with the power of two worlds, the world of life and growth and dying before Callista's eyes, and the world of Callista's most observing self.
Off in her living-room the telephone rang. Edith ran for it. The voice was slurred, uncertain. "Miss Nolan—Edith—all evening trying to get you. Jim Doherty—now please don't hang up."
"Of course I won't." She tried not to snap. "What is it?"
"Had to ask you something." He was rather drunk. "May seem unreason'ble, guess you hate me anyhow, but—"
"I won't hang up. I don't hate you. What is it, Jim?"
"Maybe wouldn't blame you. You feel I let her down. Feel I'm an enemy or something—sorry—not what I'm trying to say—" She waited, watching her thin white fingers play with a pencil from the telephone table, a pinpoint of perception somehow important, as if it kept her distressed and startled mind from swirling away down the telephone mouthpiece like water down the hole of a handbasin. She heard a beat of mechanical music; Jim would be in a bar, the booth shut against a squalling of radio or television. The large-boned, dark-Irish face would be pale with alcohol, filmed with sweat, black hair disordered, wide mouth talking against its own unwillingness. Dark eyes rigid, unfocused, behind them Jim's own image of a crackpot redhead who was Callista's friend. He was a tall man; the stingy crannies of the booth would bother his legs. An impressive young stallion: any woman felt that much, and one could (sometimes) see why Callista—"Edith, what happened there, before adjournment? I've got to know. I sort of lost track, then they were taking her away. What—"
"You didn't hear what she said?"
"No, that's it, I didn't. I was praying—well, for her, though I suppose that doesn't mean anything to you, no offense, anyway I—"