Palm for Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman

impelled to search and to identify. She did not care to explore the reasons behind his logic because if he discovered her, then she discovered him as well. She did not believe he would accept such mutuality.
    She must not be found here
.
    Quietly she backed to the door by which she had entered the room. She opened it and assessed the distance across the lobby to the staircase. Impossible, in such a bright light he would clearly see her before she gained the stairs. She turned back and pointed her flashlight at the door across the room, waiting for him to enter. A very small idea had occurred to her.
    Slowly the knob began to turn. Matching her movement to his she left as he entered, fleeing into the hall—but not to the stairs, she rushed headlong to the utility room around the corner and flung herself inside. There she ran her flashlight over the fuseboxes: they were labeled in French, in English, and by number. She tugged at the circuit-breakers for the ground floor and a second later saw the light under the closed door vanish.
    The silence was frightening. A door closed. Footsteps moved across the lobby to the foot of the stairs, and for that moment the two of them were separated only by thewall of the closet. She held her breath. He would be holding his breath, too, she thought, scarcely daring to expel it lest he miss some small, stifled sound. He was going to begin stalking her now like prey in an attempt to rush her out of hiding. And while they both waited, their thoughts screaming in the emptiness, he moved again.
    He walked past the closet and down the hall toward the gymnasium, giving her just one fragile unguarded moment of hope. When she heard the doors to Hydrotherapies swing open she slipped out of the closet and raced to the stairs, snatching up the scintillator counter from the floor where she had left it.
    When she reached the Reception floor level her heart was thudding ominously and her throat ached from dryness. She felt almost sick with horror. She stopped to catch her breath and saw the elevator still idle; on impulse she entered it. For a second she hesitated over the panel and then she punched the button for the floor above her own.
He must not learn which floor was hers
.
    But he had heard the sound of the elevator in motion, for as she ascended with frustrating slowness she recognized the sound of feet pounding up the stairs below her. She realized he was racing up to cut her off, and his determination to find and identify her was terrifying. Slowly the elevator rose toward the fourth floor and slowly the doors opened. She stepped out. Another moment and she would be trapped unless—
    Robin
, she thought. Robin had said he was in the room exactly above hers. She ran down the hall, found room 213, discovered the door unlocked and stumbled inside.
    Robin was sitting up in bed with a book on his knees. He looked at her in astonishment. “My dear Mrs. Pollifax,” he said, and then seeing her face he gasped, “My God, what on earth?”
    She shook her head, placed a finger to her lips and retreated into the darkness of his bathroom. There were advantagesin appealing to a cat burglar, Robin responded at once by reaching for his bedside lamp and plunging the room into darkness. In silence they listened to footsteps walking down the hall toward the solarium. Softly the footsteps returned. After a short interval the elevator doors slid closed and the elevator hummed as it descended.
    Slowly Mrs. Pollifax expelled her caught breath.
    Robin went to the door and opened it, looked up and down the corridor and then closed and locked the door and walked across the room to draw the curtains of the window. Turning on a light he said pleasantly, “We’re having a party in my room tonight?”
    She left the darkness of his bathroom and found him rummaging in his wardrobe closet. “There’s a bottle of Napoleon brandy here somewhere,” he said. “Ah, here we are. Beautiful. I have never felt that cocoa measures