“When was the last time you heard from Helen?” he said.
“Right after Mama died — when she heard about the will. She was going to try to break it, but a Topeka lawyer advised her against it, and then she wrote me, and called me a lot of names, and said she never wanted to hear from me again. So — she didn’t.”
“She never wrote you after we moved out here?”
“I didn’t even know you had.”
“Then how did you know where we lived? You seem to have headed for this house like a homing pigeon.”
“Well, really,” she said with some exasperation, “with your name and picture and address in every paper in town, that wasn’t awfully difficult.”
“Oh.” He felt a little foolish at his inept effort to trap her. “Just what kind of help did you expect to be to me?”
“Why, cook and keep house, and keep people from bothering you. Being a writer, I’m sure you wouldn’t be very good at those things yourself. Of course, that’s one of the things about you that always appealed to me — being a writer, I mean. There’s something sort of glamorous about a writer.”
A sardonic glint came into his eyes. “Your sister didn’t think—” He stopped himself just in time. “Helen didn’t tell me you were like this,” he substituted rather lamely.
That’s her plan, he thought. To trap him in the course of casual conversation; to lead him on until he revealed his true feeling about Helen. He believed now that Helen had not written her, but he knew also that she had some suspicion which she was determined to confirm. She was beguiling, easy to talk to, and it was inevitable that if he did talk to her, he would betray himself: he would make that one slip which would be the first, and fatal, flaw in his armor. He had to get her out of the house: whatever Bauer might learn from her was less dangerous than what she could learn from him.