Just before she got to the Priam driveway she turned off into the woods. Here she stopped to put a handkerchief over the lens of her flash. Then, directing the feeble beam to the ground, she made her way toward the Priam house.
Laurel was not feeling adventurous. She was feeling sick. It was the sickness not of fear but of self-appraisal. How did the heroines of fiction do it? The answer was, she decided, that they were heroines of fiction. In real life when a girl had to let a man make love to her in order to steal a key from him she was nothing but a tramp. Less than a tramp, because a tramp got something out of her trampery ― money, or an apartment, a few drinks, or even, although less likely, fun. It was a fairly forthright transaction. But she... she had had to pretend, all the while searching desperately for the key. The worst part of it was trying to dislike it. That damned Macgowan was so purely without guile and he made love so cheerfully ― and he was such a darling ― that the effort to hate him, it, and herself came off poorly. What a bitchy thing to do, Laurel moaned as her fingers tightened about the key in her pocket.
She stopped behind a French lilac bush. The house was dark. No light anywhere. She moved along the strip of lawn below the terrace.
Even then it wouldn’t have been so nasty if it hadn’t concerned his mother. How could Mac have lived with Delia all these years and remained blind to what she was? Why did Delia have to be his mother?
Laurel tried the front door carefully. It was locked, sure enough. She unlocked it with the key, silently thankful that the Priams kept no dogs. She closed the door just as carefully behind her. Wielding the handkerchief-covered flashlight for a moment, she oriented herself; then she snapped it off.
She crept upstairs close to the banisters.
On the landing she used the flash again. It was almost three o’clock.
The four bedroom doors were closed. There was no sound either from this floor or the floor above, where the chauffeur slept. Mrs. Guittierez and Muggs occupied two servants’ rooms off the kitchen downstairs.
Laurel tiptoed across the hall and put her ear against a door. Then, quickly and noiselessly, she opened the door and went into Delia Priam’s bedroom. How co-operative of Delia to go up to Santa Barbara, where she was visiting “some old Montecito friends” for the weekend. The cloth-of-gold tree of life spread over the bed immaculately. In whose bed was she sleeping tonight?
Laurel hooked the flash to the belt of her coat and began to open dresser drawers. It was the weirdest thing, rummaging through Delia’s things in the dead of night by the light of a sort of dark lantern. It didn’t matter that you weren’t there to take anything. What chiefly made a sneak thief was the technique. If Delia’s father, or the unspeakable Alfred, were to surprise her now... Laurel held on to the thought of the leaden, blue-lipped face of Leander Hill.