Margaret Millar

Do Evil In Return

To Faith Baldwin

“Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.”

W. H. AUDEN

1

The afternoon was still hot but the wind carried a threat of fog to come in the night. It slid in through the open window and with curious, insinuating fingers it pried into the corner of the reception room and lifted the skirt of Miss Schiller’s white uniform and explored the dark hair of the girl sitting by the door. The girl held a magazine on her lap but she wasn’t reading it; she was pleating the corners of the pages one by one.

“I don’t know if Dr. Keating will be able to see you,” Miss Schiller said. “It’s quite late.”

The girl coughed nervously. “I couldn’t get here sooner. I... couldn’t find the office.”

“Oh. You’re a stranger in town?”

“Yes.”

“Were you referred to Dr. Keating by anyone?”

“Referred?”

“Did anyone send you?”

“I... no. I found her name in the phone book.” The girl rose suddenly and the magazine and her cheap brown handbag fell on the floor. “I’ve got to see her. It’s terrible important.”

“If you’ll let me have your name and address I’ll tell doctor you’re here.”

“Violet O’Gorman, 916 Olive Street.”

“Miss?”

“Mrs. Mrs. Violet O’Gorman.”

Miss Schiller gave her a sharp look before she turned and rustled starchily into Charlotte’s office.

Charlotte had already put on her street clothes but she was resigned to the idea of a change in plan. It had been years since she’d spent a day without one.

She was adjusting her hat in front of the wall mirror, a tall, slender woman just past thirty, with an air of calm efficiency.

“Now what?” she said, without turning.

“Someone just came in. She wasn’t referred, said she got your name from the phone book.”

“Oh.”

“She calls herself Mrs. O’Gorman.”

“If that’s what she calls herself that’s probably her name,” Charlotte said crisply. “And by the way, Miss Schiller, when you’re talking on the phone please say what is the name, not what was the name. It sounds as if you’re talking to a corpse.”

“I try to please.” Miss Schiller’s tone and her compressed lips implied that Dr. Keating was beyond pleasing anyway.

Charlotte took off her hat again and ran her hand expertly over her smooth brown hair. Miss Schiller frowned faintly in the direction of the hat. She disapproved of the way Dr. Keating dressed after office hours — in big pictures hats and sheer dresses and high-heeled pumps. A patient meeting her on the street might easily lose confidence in her, thinking she was on her way to a bridge or cocktail party instead of to the hospital to make her rounds. Miss Schiller herself had never had any confidence to lose. She went to a chiropractor for her lumbago and bought Chinese herbs at a little store downtown to build up her hemoglobin.

“Show Mrs. O’Gorman in, will you?”

“Very well, doctor.”

Miss Schiller went out, holding her hand against the small of her back, an indicating of performance of duty while in pain. Charlotte smiled. She knew about the chiropractor and the Chinese herbs, she knew practically all there was to know about Miss Schiller, and so she was tolerant. To know all is to forgive all, she’d quoted to Lewis once, and she believed it sincerely. Lewis had replied that she was a remarkable woman. She had agreed, without conceit. It was amazing in this day and age to be able to survive at all without nervous tensions or insomnia or any of the obscure psychosomatic symptoms that plagued half the people who came into her office.

Charlotte was both healthy and happy. She drove herself, but not to the point of exhaustion. She was competent at her work, which was general practice; she had a shrewd if not profound mind, and a nice sense of humor. Most of her male colleagues called her Charley and spoke of her behind her back in a friendly, rather sexless way. She wasn’t sexless, though. There was Lewis. And eventually — well, eventually something would have to be done about Lewis. They were passing irrevocably beyond the moonlight-and-roses phase. It was sun-and-dandelions now, stronger, earthier stuff. Lewis was becoming urgent, detachment difficult.

She made it a rule not to think about Lewis during office hours. She pushed him out of her mind and fixed all her attention on the girl Miss Schiller brought into the office. Miss Schiller had a firm grip on the girl’s arm like a prison matron escorting a possible runaway.

Her face was red and indignant. “Imagine. She wasn’t going to come in. Off she ran. Imagine, after all the trouble you’ve...”

“That will be all, thanks, Miss Schiller,” Charlotte said.

“I was so coming in,” the girl protested when the door had closed on Miss Schiller. “I only went out in the corridor to find a drink of water. I got this awful thirst.”

“Sit down, Mrs. O’Gorman.”

The girl sat down apprehensively on the edge of a chair. She was about twenty, dark-haired and quite plain except for the radiance of her eyes and the healthy flush in her cheeks. Though it was a humid day she wore a heavy tweed coat which she held tight over her stomach with both hands. Her forehead bore a long zigzagging scar. The scar had welted and Charlotte wondered if the girl had had any x-ray treatments to make it less noticeable.

“I just got an awful thirst. I guess I drink about two gallons of water every day.”

“That’s good for you,” Charlotte said, “in your condition.”

The girl let out a little cry. “Oh God. Oh God, does it show? Does it show?”

“I’m sorry I startled you. I thought naturally...”

“How could it show already?”

“It doesn’t.”

“It must! You said... you said...” She covered her face with her hands. Tears spilled out between her fingers and dripped off her wrists.

She wore a wedding ring. But then, they all did. They bought them at the dime store. Charlotte thought that for some that must be the worst period of all — even worse than labor — when they went to the dime store to buy their rings. There probably wasn’t one of them who hadn’t dreamed of being a June bride. Charlotte felt depressed.

She said finally, “Where is your home, Mrs. O’Gorman?”

“In Oregon. Ashley, Oregon.”

“Are you married?”

“Yes. Yes. Only I left him. He isn’t the one, he isn’t the — the father.”

“What do you want me to do, Mrs. O’Gorman?... What’s your first name?”

“Violet.”

“Who sent you here, Violet?”

“No one.” The girl widened her eyes in a show of innocence. Charlotte wasn’t fooled. She thought, I hope the word isn’t around that I perform illegal operations.

“No one sent me,” Violet repeated. “Like I told the nurse outside I saw your name in the phone book and I came to you because you was a woman, because I thought you’d understand how it is being in the family way with no husband.”

“You don’t want your baby, is that it?” ell

“How can I want it?” Violet asked simply.

“You’re young and healthy. If you go ahead and have the child you’ll be able to hold your job until the last few days...”

“I don’t have a job.”

“Well, perhaps the man involved will contribute to your support. If you can prove that it’s his child he’ll have to.”

“I can prove it, all right I wasn’t living with Eddie. He said I was making him nervous so I went to stay with my sister for a while. That’s how he knew the baby wasn’t his.” She touched the scar on her forehead with the tip of one finger. “He hit me with a lamp. I stood it for two months after that and then I left him. He said such terrible things to me. I didn’t mean to be bad.”

The girl started to cry again. Charlotte looked at her crisp and businesslike. (“Does nothing move you, Charley?” Lewis had asked her last week before he left. “In my profession I can’t afford to be moved,” she had told him. “I would be weeping all the time, and quite useless, don’t you see?” He didn’t see. In spite of his sophistication he judged the weight of an emotion by the amount of tears or laughter it displaced.)

She said, “I gather that the man involved doesn’t want to marry you.”

“He couldn’t anyway.” She fumbled in her coat pocket for a piece of Kleenex. She found one, sodden with previous tears and stained with lipstick. “He’s married already.”

“Did you know that when you...?”

“Yes. He told me. But I didn’t care then. He was so different from anyone I ever met.”

“Older than you?”

“I guess, about forty.”

“Had you known him long?”

Violet uttered a sound that was almost like a laugh. “I never saw him before in my life.”

“Yet you...?”

“Yes. Yes. I... oh, you wouldn’t understand.”

“I’ll try,” Charlotte said gravely.

“Well, he came in the bar where Eddie works — Eddie’s my husband. He began talking about the big redwood trees, how it was such a crime to cut them down. He said some of them were four or five thousand years old and two hundred and fifty feet high, and how they were almost human. I don’t remember his exact words but he talked like — like poetry.”

Charlotte watched her in silent pity.

“Well, Eddie said that was a lot of baloney about the trees, and when I started to talk he told me to shut up and go back to my sister’s. I was scared not to. Eddie is — is tough.”

“Tough?”

“He used to be a pro fighter until his appendix burst. I didn’t want no trouble, so I left.”

“But not to your sister’s.”

She shook her head. “I went out and waited beside his car. It was the only car there with a California license. I... I really only wanted to apologize to him for Eddie’s bad manners. We talked for a while and then he said he had to go back to his motel because he was leaving in the early morning, going home.”

“That is, coming here, to Safinda?”

“Yes. I was awful disappointed. I mean, didn’t you never go to a big city like Portland and maybe catch someone’s eye when you were walking along the street — and you knew right away that you had something in common, a lot in common? I felt like that about him... I guess you never been to Ashley.”

“No.” She had never heard of it.

“It’s a little town where people never stay. They go through it, heading east or north or south. No one stays.” She raised her head and said passionately, “I hate it. I hate Eddie, too.”

And out of the hatred, Charlotte thought, had come Violet’s union with the man who talked like poetry. To her he was probably a symbol of all the romantic and exciting people who passed through the town, heading east or north or south, but never stayed.

“I don’t know how it happened after that. I don’t know. I... oh doctor, please. You’ve got to help me.”

“I’m sorry I can’t, not in the way you mean.”

The girl let out a cry of despair. “I thought — I thought being you was a woman like me — being you...”

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said again.

“What can I do? What can I do with this — this thing growing inside of me, growing and growing, and me with no money and no job and no husband. Oh God, I wish I was dead!” She struck her thighs with both fists. “I’ll kill myself!”

“You can’t, Violet. Stop now and be sensible.”

Miss Schiller appeared. She’d been listening at the door. She liked excitement, and violence was always cropping up in her dreams.

“Did you need me, doctor?”

“Why, no,” Charlotte said coolly. “As a matter of fact you may go home. I’ll lock up.”

“Well, I thought...”

“Good night, Miss Schiller.”

The door banged shut again.

Violet’s face was blotched with white. “She must of heard me. She’ll go around telling everyone.”

“She has no one to tell, only her cat.”

“C... cat?”

“She has a big tomcat; the two of them gossip together for hours... Are you feeling better now, Violet?”

“Why should I? Nothing’s been changed.”

Charlotte felt a little foolish. Ordinary tact seemed silly in the face of such simple and direct reactions as Violet’s: How can I want this child? Why should I feel better when nothing is changed?

“Such operations are illegal,” Charlotte said bluntly, “unless they’re necessary. That is, medically necessary, in the case of a mother’s life being at stake.”

“My life is at stake.”

“You only think that now. Later on, when you adjust to the...”

“Please,” Violet said. “Please. Give me some medicine.”

“I can’t. Even if I could it wouldn’t work. Your pregnancy is too advanced. How far along are you?”

“Four months.”

Charlotte thought of the child secure inside Violet’s reluctant body, impervious to the violence of her fists and the animosity of her mind. It would be recognizably human by this time, the arms and legs well-formed, the cervical flexure gone, the head nearly straight, the nose and lips and cheeks already distinct. Four months — how could the girl be sure?

“I’m sure,” Violet said. “It only happened once.” She raised her head and looked at Charlotte, half-hostile, half-anxious. “I guess you don’t believe that no more than Eddie did.”

“I believe it.”

“Just once, it happened. Just for a minute, and now look at me. It ain’t fair. I don’t deserve it.”

“I know... I know... This Eddie you mentioned, your husband... Perhaps your best bet, for the time being anyway, would be to go back to him if he’ll take you?”

“Oh, he’d take me, all right. He likes to have me around, somebody to cook for him and to bully. Oh, what’s the use sitting here talking? You won’t help me.”

“I can’t.”

“You can, but you won’t, because you’re afraid. Well, I’m afraid too, worse than you.” Violet’s eyes were bleak. The crying had washed away their softness; they glared like marbles. “Doctor — you don’t know anybody else who’d...”

“I’m sorry, I don’t,” Charlotte said honestly. There were rumors, of course, about old Dr. Chisholm, but then there were about many doctors, off and on, herself included. Most of the rumors originated with disgruntled patients or chronic cranks.

Violet was watching her, sadly, bitterly. “I guess you’ve never been desperate like I am.”

Charlotte was patient. “Now Violet, let’s not make this a contest between you and me, who’s more afraid or who’s more desperate. This is a practical problem. We can’t solve it with emotions. Tell me, have you any place to stay?”

“My step-uncle keeps a boarding house downtown. He’s letting me stay in the back room upstairs until — until things are settled.”

“What things?”

“He thinks I should get money from this man — the father.”

“Have you tried?”

“Yes. But he wasn’t home. He was out of town.”

“Is he coming back?”

“Yes, tonight, they told me.”

“He doesn’t know that you’re pregnant?”

“No.”

“Do you think that he’ll admit that the child is his?”

“He’s gotta. It is. My uncle says I can go to court and make him pay a lot of money. I can ruin him forever, my uncle says.”

“I wouldn’t think of revenge, Violet — only of doing the right thing for yourself and your child.”

There was a long silence before Violet spoke again. “I don’t want to ruin him. I got no hard feelings being it was as much my fault as his. I don’t even want money. I only want to be the way I was before — without anything growing inside of me. I’ll put up with Eddie, with anything, just so’s I could be the way I was before.”

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said. “I wish I could help you.” The phone rang in the reception room and Charlotte went out to answer it. It was Lewis. She told him, rather brusquely, that she was glad he was back and that he was to call her later at home.

When she returned to her own office Violet was gone. She had slipped out the rear door, and the only evidence that she’d been there at all was the wad of sodden Kleenex left on the chair and the history sheet on Charlotte’s desk. The sheet was blank except for the name and address at the top, written in Miss Schiller’s librarian’s backhand: Mrs. Violet O’Gorman, 916 Olive Street.

She picked up the history sheet and stood holding it in her bands for more than a minute. Then she crumpled it into a ball and hurled it quite viciously at the wastebasket.

2

Just as she tried to forget Lewis during office hours, in the evenings she tried to forget her work. She wasn’t entirely successful.

“You’re jumpy tonight,” Lewis said.

“Am I?”

“Could I flatter myself that it’s strictly from joy at having me back?”

“You could not.”

“You are glad, though? Aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“I missed you, Charley.”

There wasn’t the usual banter in his voice. He sounded tired.

She went over and put her hand on his shoulder. It wasn’t often that she touched him first and on her own initiative. She was very proud; Lewis had to be the aggressor, to make the first move.

He was in his early forties now, a tall man, so rangy and loose-jointed that he could never fit into any ordinary chair. The one he occupied he’d bought himself and given to Charlotte. It was red leather and didn’t match the gray and lime color scheme of the rest of the sitting room. It stood out, compelled attention. When Lewis wasn’t there the chair was a symbol of him, a discordant note in the restful little room, as Lewis was the discordant note in her life.

He twisted his head so that her hand was pressed tight between his cheek and his shoulder. She had an irrational feeling that her hand was caught in a crevice between boulders.

She broke the silence. “Lewis?”

“Yes, darling.”

“Perhaps you should have stayed home with Gwen the first night...”

“I couldn’t,” he said simply. “Let’s change the subject.”

“All right. How was the trip?”

“Like any trip without you, long and dull.” He had gone with two other lawyers on a week’s fishing trip in the Sierras. It was an annual, routine affair. Lewis never enjoyed it; he went along merely because it was expected of him. Lewis liked to conform: his defiance of the conventions was purely verbal.

“I’m glad it was dull. I’ll seem exciting by contrast.” She spoke lightly, but she felt a twinge of pain that was part anger and part jealousy. Minutes with Lewis were few and precious. Yet he had squandered a whole week of them on a fishing trip. I’m getting possessive, she thought. I must watch myself. You can’t own people. I own my car, my house, my clothes — that ought to be enough. It wasn’t enough, though. The car had to have Lewis at the wheel; the clothes had been selected to please him; and she’d bought the house six weeks after she’d met him, not knowing why at the time, merely thinking that her apartment was too cramped and there wasn’t enough privacy.

The house had a high stone wall on three sides. On the fourth side there was a sweeping view of the city and the harbor. From Lewis’ chair by the picture window you could look down and see the city spread out below, a tangled network of lights all the way down the hill to the sea. The city was medium-sized, large enough to support half a dozen second-rate night clubs, and small enough to pass the word along if you patronized any of them. She and Lewis never went to night clubs or even to movies together. They met at her house — he hid his car in her garage, or left it a block away — or they drove down to the beach at night, as anonymous in the dark as all the other lovers parked on the blowing sand.

“I like your hair,” Lewis said, raising his head to look up at her. “It’s brown, plain brown. You don’t often see plain brown hair any more; it’s usually tinted red... Charley, you’re not even listening.”

“I am. You said I had brown hair.”

“What I really meant was that I love you. Everything about you is right.”

“That’s nice.”

“Nice.” He frowned; his black, bushy eyebrows made him look cruel. “Charley, there’s something the matter with you tonight. I’ve said or done the wrong thing again. Or you’re still sore about the fishing trip.”

“I’m not sore. I have something on my mind. A patient who came in this afternoon.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Her. I can’t tell you.”

“You often do, medical ethics to the contrary.”

“I know... Lewis, I think I made a mistake.” She stood at the window locking and unlocking her fingers. Somewhere in the city, in the chaos of yellow and red and green lights was the light that belonged to Violet — a dim, flyspecked light in the back room of a boarding house on Olive Street. And Gwen — there was a light for Gwen, too, as she sat waiting for Lewis to come home, patient and sweet as always, with the collies beside her, all of them as gentle as Gwen herself.

“As long as you didn’t kill anybody,” Lewis said, “by giving them the wrong prescription.”

“I don’t make mistakes like that. This was an error in judgment. The girl — everything the girl said was right. I was afraid, I still am. But such silly, trivial fears compared to hers... And she said I’ve never been desperate. I haven’t. I’ve never had anything to make me desperate.”

She turned suddenly, aware of a subtle change in the atmosphere. Lewis was lighting a cigarette. She knew from his expression that he was disappointed and angry at the way the evening was turning out. Their first evening together for a week — it should have been perfect, and it wasn’t, and Lewis was silently blaming her, as if it were her fault that the two of them couldn’t live separate from the rest of the world. She and Lewis would never, could never be alone, in spite of the stone wall on three sides of the house. The fourth side was unguarded, unprotected. Violet crept in, and Gwen, and Miss Schiller, even the two men who’d gone with Lewis on the fishing trip.

She said, with a sigh, “I feel depressed and quarrelsome, Lewis. Perhaps you’d better go home.”

“Perhaps I had.” He ground out his cigarette in the myrtle wood ash tray he’d brought her from up north. “Though I don’t like being ordered around like a little boy.”

“I didn’t mean it to sound unpleasant, darling. I meant, we’ll only quarrel if you stay.”

“You can sound pretty officious. God, Charley, what do you think I’m made of? You keep me hanging around, you tell me to come, and then you tell me to go peddle my papers. You rant about some silly girl and her fears when we’ve got a million things to say to each other about us.” He got up and grabbed her roughly by the shoulders. “Who cares, who the hell cares? Charley, you haven’t changed your mind, you still love me?”

“Yes. Naturally.”

“When I hold you, you draw away as if I had a bad smell.”

“Oh Lewis, for heaven’s sake,” she said sharply, pulling away from his grasp. “I told you, I’m not myself tonight. Everything’s wrong, out of focus.”

He looked grim. “Because of this girl?”

“I suppose that started it.”

“Why?”

“She’s in trouble. I refused to help her.”

“Why should you help her? She’s probably just an ordinary tart who got caught.”

“No. She’s a nice girl, sensitive, and very bewildered.”

“You’ve had cases like that before. Why does this one worry you?”

“Because of us, Lewis. Don’t you see...?”

“No.”

“If we go on together, if we become lovers, I might accidentally end up in the same boat she’s in.”

He let out a snort of disgust. “I see now. For some extraordinary reason you’ve identified yourself with this girl, and me with the man who got her in trouble, the callous, bestial male.”

“No, I haven’t.” She looked up at him, searching his face for some sign that he understood. “What would you do if I got pregnant?”

“Considering our present platonic relationship, that’s rather funny.”

“You aren’t laughing. What would you do?”

“Oh, come off it,” he said. “You wouldn’t get pregnant.”

“It’s possible.”

“Not with the proper insurance.”

She smiled, a little bitterly. “That’s a funny analogy. When you take out earthquake insurance it means you’re protected financially against an earthquake. It doesn’t guarantee that there won’t be an earthquake. The sense of security is false.”

“Now earthquakes. God, Charley, what’s got into you? You’re becoming a neurotic.”

“Am I?” She averted her face. “I think you’d better leave.”

“Certainly,” he said. “Certainly.”

He crossed the room towards the door, slowly, giving her an opportunity to call him back. She didn’t. She stood at the window until she heard his car roar out of the garage. The furious racing of the engine indicated that Lewis was taking out his temper on the car.

His cigarette was still smoldering. She carried the ash tray out to the kitchen and washed it, moving awkwardly because she was angry. Hers wasn’t a hot and immediate anger like Lewis’; it couldn’t be satisfied, as his could, by racing the engine of a car or breaking a golf club. Charlotte’s anger was slow and cold; it crept gradually through her body, depressing the nerves, making her almost incapable of moving and talking.

She thought of all the things she should have said. Then she said them silently to herself, rephrasing and cutting them until they were sharp and elegant as diamonds. It was the land of childish satisfaction that she seldom permitted herself.

She looked at the dock. Nine-thirty. Lewis would be home by now, making up a lie for Gwen. Miss Schiller would be putting up her hair and talking to her cat, perhaps even telling it about Violet: “Today a bad girl came in, bold as you please, and wanted doctor to get rid of the baby — oh, the things that happen! And the people you meet!”

Yes, the things that happen. Charlotte felt a stab of regret. I should have helped the girl, she thought I meant to do something for her, but she’d already gone.

She stood at the window, locking and unlocking her fingers. A low gray fog hung over the distant housetops and gave them the contours of a dream. Under one of the housetops was the girl Violet worrying out the night, friendless, penniless, thinking of death.

916 Olive Street. The address had stuck in her memory as the girl’s grief and terror had stuck in her throat.

With a decisive movement Charlotte turned from the window and went to the hall closet for her coat and hat.

3

Olive Street threaded north-south through the city. At one end there was an imposing hotel that rented ocean views at twenty dollars a night, at the other a flour mill. In the center, once a select suburb, the grandiose old three-storied Victorian houses had been gradually debauched by slums and abandoned. The slums had pushed ahead like an army of grasshoppers destroying everything that grew in its path. Nothing would ever grow again in that concrete wilderness except people. More and more people, whites and Negroes, Mexicans, Chinese, Italians. They kept alive and multiplied. They worked on the dock or at the freight yards; they were gardeners, busboys, charwomen, bookies; they took in washing and roomers; they sold tamales, green tea, religion, firecrackers, used furniture, souvenirs, rose bushes, and Mexican silver jewelry.

Olive Street was never empty or quiet. It had no set hours of work and rest like the middle-class parts of town. It was awake all day and all night. After dark there were fights and crap games, police sirens and recriminations.

Charlotte knew the section well. She had two regular patients within a block of 916. Though she wasn’t apprehensive about visiting Olive Street, she took the precaution of locking her Buick and removing the radiator cap that the garage man had fixed so that she could take it off and put it on herself. (She’d lost two before she caught on to the fact that you couldn’t make people trustworthy by trusting them. It was better to withdraw the temptation.)

916 was a relic. Built to last, it had lasted stubbornly through sixty years and a major earthquake and a succession of owners and tenants.

The present tenant, according to the crudely printed sign in the right front window, was Clarence G. Voss. The sign read, in full: clarence g. voss. phrenology and palmistry. fresh-out flowers for sale. piano lessons.

Inside the house someone was playing, not a piano, but a harmonica, with brash inaccuracy. An elderly Italian sat rocking on the front porch, his hands pressed tight over his ears.

Charlotte nodded and said, “Good evening.”

He lowered his hands, scowling, “What’s that?”

“I said, good evening.”

“Cold and noisy.”

“Perhaps you could tell me if Mrs. Violet O’Gorman is at home.”

“I pay no attention to other people.”

He replaced his hands over his ears and withdrew into his world of silence. He kept his eyes on her, though, as if there was a remote possibility that she might do something interesting.

Charlotte pressed the doorbell.

“Out of order,” the Italian said.

“Thanks.”

“Nobody fixes anything around here.”

“I think the button is jammed.”

“You’re wrong.”

It was jammed. She fixed it in three seconds with a bobby pin while the Italian watched her with grudging approval.

Inside the house the harmonica stopped abruptly at the sound of the bell.

A man opened the door, a small, middle-aged man with a red baseball cap pulled down over his forehead. His ears jutted out from under the cap, extraordinary ears, pale as wax and enormous. His chin and nose were elfin and sharp, his eyes were like small black peas. Charlotte could see the outline of the harmonica in the pocket of his Hawaiian-print shirt.

Charlotte didn’t smile or even attempt to look pleasant. He was the kind of man who would immediately construe a smile from a strange woman as an invitation to intimacy; a man as quick to take offense as to take liberties.

“I’m looking for Violet O’Gorman. Is she at home?”

“I don’t know.” He had a surprising voice for his stature, deep and resonant. “Who wants her?”

“I do.”

“Sure, sure, I know that, but what name will I say is calling?”

“Miss Keating.”

“Keating. Come inside and I’ll go see if Violet’s home.”

She went in, showing none of the hesitancy she felt. He closed the door by giving it a shove with his foot. The hall smelled sour. In the light of an old-fashioned beaded chandelier Charlotte saw that the linoleum on the floor was grimy and split with age. Dust grew in the corners like mold, and the paint on the woodwork had alligatored.

He stood with his hands in his pockets, his eyes narrowed. “What did you want to see Violet about?”

“A personal matter.”

“My name is Voss. I’m her step-uncle.”

“I thought so.”

“Violet and me’ve got no secrets from each other. She’s one swell little kid, believe you me. Anybody’d harm a hair on her head I’d strangle him with my bare hands.”

“I’m in rather a hurry,” Charlotte said.

He hesitated, then swung round suddenly and skipped up the stairs, quick and neat as a cat.

Charlotte lit a cigarette and wondered if she’d been wise in giving Voss her name.

She wasn’t afraid of him, but the house made her uneasy. It had an air of decadent resignation, as if so many things had happened there that one more wouldn’t even be noticed.

She could hear Voss whispering upstairs. What is there to whisper about, she wondered. Violet is in or she’s not in, there’s no need for secrecy.

But the whispering went on, and the ceiling creaked faintly under the weight of cautious feet. She raised her eyes and caught a glimpse of a face peering down at her through the rails of the banister. The face drew back into the shadows so quickly that she wasn’t sure whether it belonged to a man or a woman. She had only the impression of youth and a picture in her mind of a flat, crooked nose that looked as if it had once been broken.

She called out sharply, “Voss!”

Voss appeared at the head of the stairs. “Violet’s not in. She must have went to a movie or something.”

“You might tell her that I was here and that I’ll call her early tomorrow morning.”

He came slowly down the steps, tracing a pattern on the banister with his forefinger. “Of course, if I knew what your business was, maybe I could help you. I’ve had a lot of experience one way or another in my lifetime.”

“Thanks, I don’t require any help.” She opened the door. “Good night.”

“Good night.”

She breathed in the cool, crisp air, feeling such an overwhelming and irrational relief that her knees shook a little. She was angry at herself for being too imaginative about the house. A house could be old and dirty without becoming the scene of a tragedy. And Voss, while he was a sleazy character, might live a fairly respectable life.

She crossed the dimly lit street to her car. The old Italian whom she’d talked to on Voss’s porch was sitting on the curb out of sight of the house, eating potato chips from a cellophane bag.

He watched her silently as she took the radiator cap out of her purse and replaced it on the car. Then he said, “Voss is a no-good bum.”

“Is he?”

“I see by your car you’re a doctor, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Voss doesn’t need a doctor, he needs an undertaker,” the Italian said gloomily. “He needs one bad.” Charlotte unlocked the front door of the car.

The old man got up suddenly, spilling the bag of potato chips in the gutter. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I could ride down the road a piece with you.”

“Why?”

“I’m not going anywhere else.”

“That’s not a very good reason.”

A small black and white mongrel appeared and began to eat the potato chips one by one in a leisurely manner. The old man reached down and stroked its dusty back. “I have a good reason,” he said. “You want to know about Violet, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then... We can’t talk here. Voss is watching. He hates me, we have a great mutual hate.” Charlotte unlocked the other door. The old man climbed into the car, running his hand over the upholstered seat with a sigh of satisfaction. “This is the life, yes sir, this is where I ought to be sitting, a big shot. And I would be too if it wasn’t that years ago I got an ulcer. A peptic ulcer, the doc called it. Sometimes I suffer — how I suffer! Right now I feel good. My name is Tidolliani, by the way. Tiddles, they call me.”

“Mine is Keating.”

“I know. I heard you tell Voss. I was listening at the window.”

“Why?”

He looked surprised. “Why? Well, I like to know what my enemies are doing so I can outwit them.” Charlotte pulled away from the curb. She suspected that the old man, Tiddles, wasn’t entirely sane, but he seemed harmless and, besides, he had put into words her own feeling about Voss. (She thought of how angry Lewis would be if he ever found out. He was always trying to make her promise not to pick up hitchhikers, and he’d even bought her a gun to keep in the glove compartment of the car. Though she was flattered by Lewis’ concern, she’d refused to accept the gun.)

“You can stop anywhere now,” Tiddles said.

She turned off at the next side street and parked the car. She asked abruptly, “Where is Violet?”

“I don’t know, but Voss does. He knew she wasn’t up in her room. He took her away himself in a car two hours ago, him and another man, one of the new roomers.”

“Took her away?”

“Well, she acted like she didn’t want to go. The other man was driving the car, an old blue coupé with an out-of-state license.”

“Did she have a suitcase with her?”

“No. The three of them drove off together, and pretty soon Voss and the roomer came back. Voss had two bottles of muscatel with him, and didn’t even offer me a drink. As if I cared,” he said bitterly. “As if I cared.”

“Violet didn’t come back later on by herself?”

“No. Maybe she never will.”

“Why do you say that? Of course she’ll come back,” Charlotte said firmly. “And when she does, I want you to tell her that I’ll call her tomorrow morning, in case Voss forgets.”

“He won’t forget, but he won’t tell her.” He glanced at her slyly out of the corner of his eye. “You might think I exaggerate about Voss, eh, because I hate him? Wrong! I don’t! He is a cheap crook that ought to be in jail. When I think of the people they put in jail nowadays, and here is Voss running loose on the streets! I have a friend who committed a murder. He had a record so clean you could eat off it, he never even put a slug in a pay phone, but he got sent up for life. They ought to have let him go. He’d learned his lesson, he’d never do it again. Besides there was only this one person he ever wanted to murder, his wife it was. A very nice lady but she made him nervous. Take a man like Voss, now. He would do anything for a dime, anything that was mean and petty and miserable and low enough. Yes. Yes, he even thinks he can play the piano and the harmonica!”

The old man was getting drunk on words and hate. Charlotte said, “I’ll drive you home now.”

“All right,” he said with a sigh. “All right.”

“It was kind of you to go to all this trouble.”

“Think nothing of it. It was a pleasure.”

He got out at the corner nearest Voss’s house. Though he seemed tired, he had obviously enjoyed his little conspiracy with Charlotte against Voss.

“Voss,” he said, “Voss will think twice before coming in with two bottles of muscatel and not even offering me a drink.”

“Thanks for your help, and good night, Mr...”

He spread his hands. “Such a hard name. You call me Tiddles like the rest.”

“Good night, Tiddles.”

“I’ll wait up for Violet.”

He shuffled up the street, his head bent against the wind.

She thought about the old man all the way home. He was getting senile. The only thing that kept him alive was his hatred for Voss.

She put the car away in the garage, glad to be back again. The sight of her wide-windowed cheerful house raised her spirits. She thought, I was silly to get upset and worried over Violet. I’ll phone her tomorrow, help her in some way. The old man must have been exaggerating about Voss...

She was raising her hand to pull down the garage door when the blow struck her. She had no time to duck, or even to be aware that she’d been hit on the side of the head.

She dropped stiffly like a felled tree.

4

In the dream she was riding in a long, gray bus with Lewis and Voss and Violet and the old man, Tiddles. The rest were quarreling fiercely, and Charlotte kept trying to pacify them, to reason with them. But the words that came out of her mouth were terribly wrong: You must calm down and regurgitate yourselves. You must stop this synthetic acne and parturition. I’ll call the police and you’ll all be incarcinomated. Stop the bus, I say, stop the pus!

When she regained consciousness she was lying on the davenport in her own sitting room. Lewis was kneeling beside her, urging her to drink from the bottle of Scotch he held under her nose as if the fumes alone were medicinal like smelling salts.

She grimaced and pushed the bottle away. “No — no...”

“Charley... Darling, are you all right?”

“Yes.” There was a painful area on the side of her head, but no swelling and the skin wasn’t broken; her coronet of braids had softened the blow.

“I found you in a faint on the driveway. I keep telling you, Charley, you’re overworking.”

She sat up, feeling dizzy and nauseated. “Someone hit me,” she said in a surprised voice. “On the head.” “Lie down, darling.”

“No...”

“You hit your head when you fell.”

“No. Someone else — where’s my purse?”

“Purse? I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you find it?”

“I didn’t look for it, naturally,” Lewis said, frowning. “I came back to apologize for being irritable and found you on the driveway.”

“Lewis, get me the flashlight.”

“Why?”

“I want to see if my purse is out there.”

“You shouldn’t move around. I’ll go and look.”

“No. Let me.”

“Do you have to be so damned independent? Can’t I ever do anything for you? Hell, Charley...”

Her face was set and stubborn. He found the flashlight in the utility drawer in the kitchen and they went outside together to look for the purse. There was no sign of it.

Lewis said, “How much money was in it?”

“Forty dollars or so.”

“You’ll have to report it to the police.”

“In the morning,” Charlotte said. She didn’t point out to him what she observed in front of the garage door where she’d fallen. It was a dribble of moist sand. She hadn’t been to the beach for a month and there was no way the sand could have come there accidentally. Moist sand packed in a stocking or a sock, she thought. A neat home-made blackjack, except that it sometimes left traces.

They returned to the house and Lewis bolted the door. “As a lawyer I advise you to phone in a report to the police. Aimed robbery is a serious business.”

“I can’t, not tonight. They’ll come out and ask questions and I don’t feel up to answering them.”

She was rather relieved that the purse had been stolen. There had been a series of petty robberies in the neighborhood recently and she wanted to believe that this was simply one of the series and that the man who did it had no connection with Voss or Violet or the face between the rails of the banister. It was only chance that her visit to the house on Olive Street coincided with the robbery.

Lewis was looking at her sharply. “What were you doing out there on the driveway, anyway? I thought you were going to bed when I left.”

“I had a call to make.”

“Emergency?”

“I think so.”

“You’re holding something back.”

“I can’t discuss my cases with you, Lewis.”

“I don’t believe this was a case.”

“He was an Italian,” Charlotte said. “An old man about eighty.” It wasn’t quite a lie; Tiddles was a case, in a way. Lying to Lewis, even a little, pained her, but he sometimes made lying necessary by his extreme reactions to the truth. He would disapprove of her visit to Violet.

Lewis had some old-fashioned ideas about women. Gwen was, in a way, his ideal: she loved her home, she kept the place meticulous, the dogs clean and obedient, the garden neat, fragrant. But Lewis never stayed home to enjoy any of it. Gwen bored him to death, while Charlotte very frequently shocked him. It was a blow to his male pride that a woman could be as emotionally and physically independent as Charlotte. She was a competent physician and supported herself in comfort; she witnessed with detachment the most harrowing kinds of death and disease; she drove alone through the roughest sections of the city picking up hitchhikers when she wanted to, out of interest or pity; she paid calls to houses where the children slept five to a mattress on the floor. Such activities should be limited to men, in Lewis’ opinion. While it was all right for a woman to be a doctor, her practice should be confined to people of a certain level of society, within a certain income bracket. He would never understand that her background was different from his. She was fitted, by temperament and training, for the work she did. She enjoyed meeting all classes of people and she met them with an impersonal ease, and without pretensions of any kind.

“You shouldn’t stay here alone for the rest of the night,” Lewis said. “Call Miss Schiller and ask her to come over.”

“Oh no! She’ll be in bed.”

“She can get up again. Be reasonable, Charley.”

“She’ll fuss around all night.”

“Even so.”

“All right, Lewis,” she said wearily. I’ll call her.”

Miss Schiller arrived by taxi five minutes after Lewis left.

She tottered under the weight of a suitcase the size of a trunk. Her face glowed with night-cream, and in the bun of hair at the nape of her neck was stuck a pair of steel knitting needles. Miss Schiller was in a state of wild excitement.

“Imagine,” she kept repeating. “Just imagine!”

Among Miss Schiller’s friends thing were always happening — people got engaged, sick, fired, married, divorced — these were common enough. But it wasn’t every day that someone she knew got hit on the head by a burglar and left to die in the night.

She was a little disappointed at the size and seriousness of Charlotte’s injury. You’d expect at least a lump at the hands of a ruthless burglar that attacked defenseless women and left them for dead. No lump, and not a drop of blood. Miss Schiller swallowed her disappointment and reminded Charlotte that a criminal usually returns to the scene of his crime. Her tone implied strongly that very likely this one would be around during the night to finish the job.

“You can’t tell,” she said. “He might be watching us through the window this very minute.”

“He must have x-ray eyes then. The blinds are drawn.”

“I’ve never liked Venetian blinds,” Miss Schiller said decisively. “I know for a fact, anyone can see in through those cracks.”

She refused to accept Charlotte’s suggestion that she sleep in the guest room. After she’d turned out Charlotte’s light she took up her position on the davenport. From here she could watch all the windows and all the windows could watch her.

She removed the knitting needles from her hair and put them within easy reach on the coffee table.

The needles were not, as Charlotte had supposed, for knitting, but for defense. And in the big suitcase at her feet were some of Miss Schiller’s more valuable possessions. (If there was one burglar in town there was very likely another, and she was taking no chances.)

Miss Schiller spent a restless but satisfying night. She investigated noises, diagnosed shadows, patrolled the house and suffered frequent hot flashes which necessitated her getting ice water out of the refrigerator. Every ten or fifteen minutes she crept into Charlotte’s room to ask Charlotte if she was sleeping and to assure her that all was, temporarily, well.

Listening to Miss Schiller make her rounds was worse than listening to a dozen taps dripping or a couple of tomcats fighting outside the window. Towards morning Charlotte fell asleep with bitter thoughts of both Lewis and Miss Schiller.

5

After breakfast Charlotte dropped Miss Schiller and her suitcase at the office and went on to Mercywood hospital to make her morning calls. Lack of sleep never bothered her. When she pushed through the heavy swinging doors of the hospital she looked fresh and alert.

In a private phone booth in the corridor downstairs she looked up Voss’s number and dialed. Though she heard the phone being lifted off the hook at the other end, no one answered.

“Hello. Hello. Is this 2-8593?”

“Yes.” It wasn’t Voss. This voice was high and quavering, the voice of someone very old or very frightened: “Violet? Violet?”

“No,” Charlotte said. “It’s Violet I want to speak to.”

“She went away.”

“She went away where?”

But the line was dead. Charlotte hung up impatiently. Damn the girl, she thought, I’ve wasted hours on her already. I have work to do.

It was half-past ten by the time she finished making her rounds of the wards. When she returned to her office she found that Miss Schiller had done nothing in her absence; she hadn’t even opened the mail. It was quite obvious that Miss Schiller had spent the morning telephoning all her friends, telling them what had happened and probably a few things that hadn’t.

Flushing under Charlotte’s gaze, Miss Schiller picked up her appointment book.

“The little Wheeler boy’s coming in at two,” she said. “His mother says he didn’t pass and she thinks it’s because he’s so self-conscious about his warts. She wants you to take them off.”

Charlotte made a noncommittal noise. The Wheeler child’s only trouble was an hysterical mother.

“Oh, and Mrs. Ballard phoned, doctor. She had one of those palpitating spells during the night and she wants you to come over before office hours this afternoon.”

“Call her back and tell her I won’t be able to make it before five-thirty or six.”

“I told her you were booked straight through practically and you weren’t feeling well.”

“I’m feeling perfectly well,” Charlotte said. “And I wish to God you’d forget about last night.”

Miss Schiller looked injured. “Well. Well, I must say.”

“Have you a list of the house calls I have to make before lunch?”

“Here it is.”

Charlotte looked over the list. The patients were all women. The majority of her patients were women and children, a fact that irritated her, since she wanted a more general practice. She said, “I’ll be seeing Mrs. Connelly last. You can get in touch with me there if anything turns up.”

“Yes, doctor.”

“After that I’ll have to go down to the city hall and report the loss of my purse.”

“You could phone, right from here.”

“If I do they’ll send a policeman out.”

“Oh. That wouldn’t look nice, would it?”

“Not particularly.”

“I’ll call Mrs. Ballard then, doctor. A lovely person, isn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Just lovely, I think.”

Charlotte gave her a sharp glance. It wasn’t possible that Miss Schiller knew...? No, of course not. She was just chattering, as usual. To Miss Schiller, Mrs. Ballard was simply a regular patient whose husband paid her bills promptly and in person, and sometimes dropped in to talk with the doctor about his wife’s condition. Having Gwen as a patient was becoming more and more unbearable. But it had to be borne; there was no way of getting out of it. Charlotte had suggested to her several times that she consult another doctor, a nerve specialist, but Gwen had been sweetly adamant: “Oh no, Dr. Keating. I have the greatest faith in you!”

I won’t go, Charlotte thought. I’ll send someone else — Parslow or James — I refuse to go.

When she passed the mirror in the corridor on her way outside she saw that her face was pale and pinched-looking; it was beginning to show the strain, not of the past night, but of the coming afternoon.

The police department occupied the rear half of the city hall.

Charlotte knew by sight the sergeant on duty at the desk, a man named Quincy. His wife had been in a traction cast at Mercywood for several weeks and Charlotte frequently met him in the corridors looking rather ineffectual and down at the heel. In uniform, behind his desk, he seemed larger, and his tone was brusque and officious.

He reprimanded Charlotte for her delay in reporting the stolen purse.

“We might have picked the man up last night,” he said, frowning.

“You might have. It’s not likely that he’d hang around afterwards, though.”

“You can’t expect protection unless you co-operate with the police. The least people can do is report things on time.” He tapped his knuckles irritably with a pencil, as if he wished they were hers. “You say you were closing the garage door when the assailant struck you from behind and ran off with your purse.”

“Yes. I wasn’t seriously hurt, as you can see.”

“It’s assault, anyway. Did you see the weapon?”

“No, but I think it was a blackjack made with wet sand.”

He frowned again. “That’s just an amateur deduction, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I’d better mark it, weapon unknown. What did this purse look like?”

“Brown lizard with a gold clasp.” She described the contents, and estimated her total loss at seventy-five dollars.

“Next time something like that happens, phone the police immediately, Miss—” he consulted his report — “Miss Keating. Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”

“At the hospital.”

“Oh. Oh yes. You’re a nurse?”

“A doctor.”

“A doctor.” His expression was bitter. “I’ve seen so many doctors lately you’d think I’d be able to spot one at a glance. My wife...”

“Yes, I know about her. She’s had a rough time.”

“Plenty rough.”

“These bone operations are tricky, but she ought to be out soon.”

“I...” He seemed a little dazed by her sympathy. It was as if he intended to deliver a speech against doctors and illness and medical bills, and had somehow missed his cue. “Well. Well, I’ll get in touch with you if we discover anything.”

She went out, her heels tapping briskly on the marble tiles. Everything in the building seemed to be made of marble or iron or stone, hard cold materials that symbolized the hard, cold quality of impersonal justice.

At the end of the corridor an old man was standing half-hidden behind a pillar, as if he wasn’t certain whether to advance further into the building or to dart out again. He took a bandana out of his coat pocket and wiped his face and stepped back behind the pillar so that only a part of his sleeve was visible. Charlotte said, “Tiddles?”

The old man stared at her, white with surprise.

“What are you doing here, Tiddles?”

“Nothing.”

“You weren’t arrested or anything?”

“NO... no...” He wiped off his face again and put the bandana back in the breast pocket of his coat leaving the tip of it sticking out very nattily. He had on a brand-new green suit and a bow tie. He’d combed his hair and shaved. The suit was too big for him — the sleeves touched his knuckles and the trouser cuffs brushed the floor — and he kept fingering the bow tie nervously as if to assure himself that it was still there, that it hadn’t dropped off or been stolen. He smelled of bay rum and wine and moth balls.

“You’re all dressed up,” Charlotte said.

“Do I look good?”

“You look fine.”

“You have to look good to come to a police station. Otherwise — well...” His shoulders moved eloquently under the pounds of padding. “I got the suit from a friend of mine, he had to buy it to go to a classy wedding last year. You have to look respectable at a police station. The police don’t like me. I’ve been picked up a couple of times, nothing serious, just making a little noise and having a few too many. Even so. Even so, they hold things against a man.” He looked at her anxiously. “This tie is a little young for me.”

“Not at all.”

People are judged by their clothes. If you look like a bum you get treated like a bum. They won’t believe anything you tell them.”

“What are you going to tell them?”

“About Violet,” he said. “About how they murdered her.”

“Why do you think that?”

“She never came home. And Voss is nervous. Nervous as a cat.”

“I see.”

“And this morning he said to me that I’d have to move out, he wasn’t going to rent rooms any more. them...”

“Two?”

“The roomer, name of Eddie. The two of them talked all night down in the kitchen where I couldn’t hear. They’re suspicious types, always figuring that someone is spying on them.”

There was a moment’s silence before Charlotte spoke again. “I wouldn’t tell the police that Violet was murdered. They’ll ask for evidence and you haven’t any.”

“The evidence of all my senses.”

“Tell them only what you know for certain — that she didn’t come home last night.”

“You think that’s best?”

“Yes. If you make a wild accusation that you can’t prove they might consider you a crackpot.”

“Which I’m not.”

“No.”

“Never have been and never will be a crackpot.”

He walked off down the hall, his trouser cuffs picking up the dust from the marble floor.

Charlotte had an impulse to follow him, to lend her support to his story, but she held back. He could tell it alone. Her presence might only raise questions: Back again, Miss Keating? Oh, it’s a disappearing girl this time. And what’s your connection with the girl and with this old man?

Tiddles was all right. He could manage by himself. On her way back to the office she drove past Voss’s house. The windows and doors were closed, the blinds drawn. Someone had taken in the rocking chair from the porch and removed from the window the sign that had said, clarence g. voss. phrenology and palmistry. fresh-cut flowers for sale. piano lessons.

She stopped the car and got out and walked up to the house, rapidly, as if she were trying to keep ahead of her better judgment.

The doorbell had jammed again but she didn’t bother fixing it this time. She pounded on the door with her fist. Half a dozen Negro children gathered on the sidewalk to watch her, curious and silent, their eyes popping with questions.

The door opened slightly and a woman’s voice said roughly through the crack, “What do you want?”

“I’m looking for Violet O’Gorman.”

“She’s not here.”

“Well, is Mr. Voss in?”

“He ain’t around, either.” She opened the door far enough to stick her head out, and yelled at the children on the sidewalk “You lads beat it, see? I don’t want none of you niggers hanging around here.”

The children departed, hiding their mortification under wide white grins.

“Are you Mrs. Voss?” Charlotte asked.

“Yeah, not that it’s anybody’s business.” She stood with her right hand on her lip, and her left on the door, ready to slam it shut. She had a dead-white skin with a heavy blotch of rouge running from each cheekbone to the hairline above her ears. Her thin mouth had been fattened with lipstick. It looked grotesquely young and voluptuous growing on the ageing face. “I don’t get the point of standing here,” she said bitterly. “If you want Violet, look for her. I ain’t the little sneak’s mother.”

Charlotte raised her eyebrows. “Sneak?”

“I said to Clarence, get that creepy kid out of here before I go batty. No, he says, no. He’s got an angle, he says. Ha. He’s got more angles than a pretzel and not one of them’s ever paid off. Money. Money, that’s what I want. Just once before I die I’d like some money!”

Poverty and disease had desiccated her mind. Nothing would ever grow there again.

Charlotte was repelled by the woman but she felt, too, a sense of compassion. (Lewis was sometimes annoyed by this compassion. He distrusted it, he couldn’t believe that it wasn’t some kind of neurosis: “Naturally you can afford to make excuses for and feel sorry for people, Charley, because you’re not involved. No one could ever really touch you.”)

Watching Mrs. Voss’s ruined face Charlotte realized that money was the only thing for her to hope for. She couldn’t ask for the return of her beauty, her health, her youth. Money was the symbol and substitute for all three. And it was possible. There was money all over the place — a dime in a slot machine at the right time, a tip on the right horse, the right number on a lottery ticket, the right angle.

Charlotte wondered about Voss’s angle on Violet. There must be money involved, but it wasn’t Violet’s. “My uncle says I can go to court and make the man pay a lot of money.” Violet had said in the office yesterday. “My uncle says I can ruin him forever.” That must be Voss’s angle. But Violet instead of going to court, had run away.

“Well, what do you think you’re staring at, anyways?” Mrs. Voss muttered. “I don’t have to stand around being stared at.”

The door slammed so hard that the porch shook and a frightened jay flew out squawking from under the eaves.

6

When she returned to her office after lunch the Wheeler boy and his mother were already waiting in the reception room. The boy was sitting silent over a comic book while Miss Schiller talked to his mother. Miss Schiller always attempted to diagnose, advise and cure the patients in the reception room before they even reached Charlotte’s office.

“... Castor oil,” she was saying. “I’ve seen some of the most frightful warts disappear with castor oil — oh, here’s doctor now. Good afternoon, doctor.”

“Afternoon,” Charlotte said. “You can come right in, Mrs. Wheeler, and you, Tommy.”

The boy was a handsome twelve-year-old, small for his age, and timid. His mother was a giant of a woman. When she sailed into the office with Tommy behind her she looked like a three-masted schooner towing a dinghy.

“Sit down, Tommy. Up here on this table.”

He sat down. He was trembling.

“Troubled with warts again, are you? Let’s have a look at them.”

She held a magnifier over the boy’s hands. The warts had multiplied in clusters all over his knuckles and the joints of his fingers.

“Let’s see now. I took off two of these with an electric needle about a year ago, didn’t I?”

He said in a whisper, “Don’t do that again.”

“I won’t. There are too many this time.” She turned to Mrs. Wheeler. “I think we should try some bismuth shots.”

“Shots?” Mrs. Wheeler’s mouth gaped. “Oh no! Tommy’s scared to death of shots. Aren’t you, Tommy?”

The boy let out a whimper.

“See? He’s just terrified of needles, he’s always been from the time he...”

“Nobody likes shots, Tommy.” Charlotte touched his shoulder reassuringly. “Have you ever given yourself a good hard pinch?”

“I guess.”

“That’s about how much this will hurt.”

He pinched himself on the forearm, thoughtfully. “That’ll be O.K., I guess.”

He was reasonable, Charlotte thought, but he’d been exposed to so much emotion at home that it was only a matter of time before he got out of control.

She worked as fast as she could, talking to distract his attention. But in the end she had to call in Miss Schiller and all three of them held the boy forcibly on the table while Charlotte inserted the needle into his hip. When it was over Miss Schiller was sweating and Charlotte had a scratch on her wrist and Mrs. Wheeler was like a huge flabby ghost.

“He gets another shot in a week,” Charlotte said. “And next time I’d let him come alone. He can ride his bicycle over.”

“He hasn’t got a bicycle,” Mrs. Wheeler said. “I consider them too dangerous.”

“Most things are, if you want to worry about them,” Charlotte said crisply. “Tommy’s a big enough boy to come here by himself, aren’t you, Tommy?”

He put his sleeve over his eyes in shame, and his mother led him out.

There were two people waiting in the reception room, a woman with a tiny baby, and a good-looking man about thirty-five with bright blue eyes that were slightly narrowed as if in amusement. Though Charlotte had never seen him before, she had a sense of recognition. A moment later she realized, with a kind of pleasant shock, that he looked enough like her to be her brother.

He saw the resemblance too, and one corner of his mouth turned up slightly in a half-smile. Then he dropped his eyes and kept them fastened on the large manila envelope that was lying across his knees.

Charlotte turned to the woman with the baby. “Mrs. Hastings, you can go inside with Miss Schiller now. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

When the door had closed behind them the man got up and crossed the room. “Dr. Keating?”

“Yes.”

“My name’s Easter. I’m from the police department.”

“Oh.”

“You reported the loss of a purse.”

“Yes.”

“We’ve found one. It doesn’t exactly fit the description you gave but it had a card inside with your name on it.”

“One of my professional cards, you mean?”

“No. Your name and office address were typed on it, not printed.”

“There was no card like that in my purse.”

“Take a look anyway,” Easter said. He put the manila envelope on Miss Schiller’s desk and opened it. The purse slid out. It was brown but it wasn’t lizard, and instead of a gold clasp it had a plastic zipper and a shoulder strap. It gave off an odor that Charlotte couldn’t immediately identify, a kind of sea-smell.

“It’s not mine,” she said.

“But you recognize it?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Your friend did.”

“Friend?”

“The old character who calls himself Tiddles. He says this purse belongs to Violet O’Gorman.”

“Perhaps it does.” She tried to look casual under his curious stare.

“According to this man, Tidolliani, Mrs. O’Gorman was a friend of yours, in fact you were trying to locate her last night and you couldn’t.”

“She wasn’t a friend. She came to me yesterday afternoon as a patient.”

“What was the matter with her?”

“She was pregnant.”

“Married?”

“She’d left her husband.”

“Did she want you to look after her during her term and delivery?”

Charlotte looked at him dryly. “Not exactly.”

“I see.”

“I refused to help her, in that sense. But I intended to do as much for her as I could.”

“Intended?”

“I had a phone call and while I was answering it Violet left by the rear door. That’s why I went to see her last night. She seemed pretty desperate in the afternoon. She wasn’t mature enough to realize that her situation wasn’t particularly unusual or hopeless. People would have helped her, and there are several agencies that...”

“Look,” he said with a satiric smile. “You’re trying to persuade yourself, not me. I didn’t write the laws dealing with unwanted kids.”

From inside the office came the sound of Miss Schiller’s voice, strangely different, talking to the baby: “She’s so sweet. Se’s sutz a wee dumpling!”

Charlotte said, “What happened to Violet?”

“She’s dead.”

“How?”

“She came in with the tide this morning. Or most of her did, anyway. Part of her right arm is gone.”

“Are you deliberately trying to horrify me?”

“I’m just telling you. You should be used to that sort of thing.”

“You never get used to it,” she said simply. “Each time it’s new.”

He looked away, his face grim. “As for her purse, a couple of kids found it caught on one of the pilings down at the wharf. There was nothing in it but the card with your name on it. Which is odd, considering the number of things women usually carry around. Maybe the kids who found it helped themselves, but I doubt it. They would have dropped the purse back into the water if they’d taken anything out of it, instead of bringing it to us.” He slid the purse back into the envelope. Well, I’ll let you get on with your work.”

“There’s no rush. Please — I’d like to hear more about Violet.”

He let out a queer, muted chuckle. “Doctor, there isn’t any more. She was in a spot, she killed herself, she’s in the morgue. End of Violet.”

Charlotte glanced up at him with dislike. “A neat summing up. Does dealing with death make you so callous?”

“I hate it. I’m afraid of it, too.” He picked up the manila envelope and put it under his arm. “Have you noticed, by the way, that we look alike?”

“No.”

“We do. I hope it doesn’t turn out that we’re long-lost siblings. That,” he added with a long deliberate stare, “would be a damn shame.”

Charlotte turned abruptly and went into her office. Violet was dead, in the morgue. “People would have helped her and there are several agencies that...” “Look, you’re trying to persuade yourself, not me.”

The Hastings baby was lying on the table kicking her legs and waving her arms. Charlotte picked her up and held her against her shoulder — the Hastings baby — or Violet’s baby — or Violet, herself.

7

The Ballards lived in a canyon below the fogline. By five-thirty, when Charlotte arrived, the fog had already covered the sun and the air was moist and cold.

Three of the collies met her at the door. They didn’t bark because Gwen had told them to be quiet, but they sniffed Charlotte’s medical bag and her shoes, and one of them, a huge, handsome sable, planted his feet on her chest and studied her face with grave curiosity. His gold and white nose was at least five inches long. Charlotte stroked it gently.

“Oh, that Laddie,” Gwen said, laughing. “Down, Lad.”

She was wearing a blue silk housecoat that brushed the floor, and though she seemed a little nervous, she looked as well as she usually did. She had always been tiny and very thin. She traded on her size and made sure she kept it. She wore little heelless slippers and she dieted constantly, dulling her appetite with gallons of hot, strong tea.

“Down, Laddie boy,” Gwen repeated. “I just can’t teach him to stay down. He won’t listen. I guess he knows I love him best.” She took the dog’s front paws and lowered him to the floor. “He’s my baby. Shake hands with Dr. Keating, Lad.”

All three of the collies sat down and offered their paws with an air of polite boredom. Charlotte shook hands with each of them, feeling, as she always did when she came to this house, that she was entering an unreal world where values were reversed and the dogs kept Gwen as a pet.

“Are you feeling better?” Charlotte asked.

“Oh yes. Much.”

“Good.”

“I’ve made tea... I love tea.”

Charlotte left her medical bag in the hall and followed Gwen into the sitting room. The dogs came too; they went everywhere that Gwen went.

The room belonged to Gwen; there was nothing of Lewis here or anywhere in the house except his study. Gwen had braided the oval rugs herself, woven the textile for the slip covers, made the pieces of petit-point and sewed the ruffled chintz drapes. Milk glass and pewter, chintz and maple suited her, and the furniture was scaled to her size. Everything was small and fragile, and Gwen looked both picturesque and right sitting in the spindly maple chair with one foot resting delicately on a petit-point footstool. (No wonder Lewis bought me the big leather chair, Charlotte thought. There’s no place here for him to sit.)

The tea table was set with Gwen’s best Spode, and the tea was already made, the pot protected against the chill of the fog by a yellow wool cozy Gwen had made herself.

The dog, Laddie, came and put his chin on Gwen’s lap. She stroked his heavy white ruff as she talked. “In fact, I feel so much better really, I guess it was silly of me not to cancel your call. But...”

She put her head on one side, in a kind of winsome, you-know-me gesture. Her fair hair had thinned and sallowed, and her fine white skin was loose beneath her chin, but she had the mannerisms of a woman who had once been beautiful. Her history was written on her face and illustrated by her artful, fluttering hands. At eighteen she had had the world at her feet — she was the most popular debutante in Louisville; she had clippings to prove it — but the world had gradually deserted her. She had had nothing to offer it but her youth.

At forty she lived for her house and her dogs, and sometimes in the middle of the night she had spells of terror. Her pulse was so fast it couldn’t be counted; her body twitched; her head took fire. Twice Charlotte had been called in the night and found her like this and given her a sedative. There was nothing organically wrong with Gwen’s heart. Her symptoms were typical of the cardiac neurotic and couldn’t be tracked down by a doctor who had had no special psychiatric training.

“Was this attack like the others?” Charlotte felt for the pulse in Gwen’s wrist. It was still rapid, nearly a hundred.

“A bit worse, I think. Oh, I was frightened — what’s my pulse?”

“Just about normal. Have you been taking the capsules and medicine I prescribed?” The medicine was a sedative and the capsules contained estrogenic hormones, but Gwen wasn’t the kind of patient you could tell these things to. She would certainly misinterpret the hormones, Charlotte thought grimly.

Gwen looked vague, and a little hurt. “I try. I take them when I can remember. But I have so much on my mind. Winkie’s having pups again in six days. It’s going to be a huge litter, perhaps a dozen. She’s so heavy she can hardly...”

“You should be especially careful to remember the capsules. After all, you’re more important than Winkie or her pups.”

Gwen let out a little cry. “Why, that’s just what Lewis says! He’s always telling me, look after yourself, darling. Remember you’re much more precious than any dogs.”

Precious. Darling. The words stung Charlotte’s ears. She’s lying. He wouldn’t call her... But why not? They were married: they lived together day after day; there must be some tender moments. Perhaps some very tender ones, though Lewis claimed there weren’t.

She said, without expression, “It might be a good idea to cut down on stimulants like tea and coffee and coke.”

“I try, I really do. But then I love my tea so much... It’s ready now if you’d like some, doctor...”

“Thanks, I would.”

The tea was lukewarm and so strong it coated Charlotte’s tongue and the roof of her mouth. She drank it fast and put the empty cup on the table.

Gwen’s hands had a bad tremor. Because she fluttered and fussed so much by nature the tremor wasn’t noticeable until she picked up the empty cup to refill it. The cup rattled in the saucer like hail against a window.

“Are you still dieting?” Charlotte asked.

“Well, not very much. I have to, a little bit. I’m so tiny every pound shows. I mean, one avocado and there’s an inch around my hips.”

“You’re underweight I advise you to skip the diet for a while.”

“I’ll try.”

“I can’t do anything for you, Mrs. Ballard, if you won’t help yourself. There’s not much use in paying me five dollars for a prescription and then leaving it to gather dust on the bathroom shelf.”

Gwen clapped her hands with delight like a child. “Oh, that’s what I like about you, doctor. You’re so outspoken and so honest.”

“Am I? Thanks.”

The dogs sensed something, a tension, an excitement in Gwen’s laugh. They crowded her, raising their noses for attention, their wagging tails sweeping across the teacups and the ash tray. They were more than Gwen’s dogs, Charlotte thought. They were part of Gwen herself — each of them like a separate sympathetic nervous system, feeling everything that Gwen felt.

“Mollie, you bad girl,” Gwen said. “You’ve spilled the ashes. Settle down, now, all of you, and behave yourselves, or I’ll put you out in your dog run.”

The dogs quieted but they wouldn’t leave her. They followed her around the room as she turned on the lamps, as if they were expecting something out of the ordinary.

Charlotte rose, too, and began brushing the silky white collie hairs from the front of her dress. “Though it sounds pretty hackneyed, I think your real trouble may be nerves, Mrs. Ballard.”

“Oh, please call me Gwen. After all, we’ve known each other nearly a year now.”

“Nervous disorders aren’t really in my field and I suggest that you consult someone else.”

“I won’t be shunted off to some so-called specialist. You’re too modest, doctor. You don’t realize how much good you do me. Why, after one of your visits I feel just wonderful. Lewis notices it too. He said one day, Dr. Keating’s a regular tonic for you, Gwen darling.”

Gwen darling. “That only proves my point. I don’t actually do anything for you. I’m a kind of emotional sedative, a reassurance.”

“Why, I believe you’re right.”

“That’s why I recommend a — nerve specialist.”

“You mean a psychiatrist?”

“Yes.”

Gwen smiled. But the smile wasn’t real and the dogs knew it; they stood with their plumed tails between their legs and watched and waited.

“But I don’t want to,” she said. “I can never do anything I don’t want to.”

“There’s no longer any stigma attached to going to a psychiatrist, you know. As a matter of fact it’s become a mark of distinction — only rich people can afford to.”

Gwen’s tone was playful. “Now doctor, you’re only trying to get rid of me, ’fess up. You think there are so many really sick people in the world that you’re wasting your time on me and my silly old spells.”

“Not at all. When I can’t treat a patient to my satisfaction I recommend someone else.”

“Well, I won’t have anyone else, so there. Imagine me at a nasty psychiatrist’s, telling him everything. Oh, I’d die!”

Charlotte drew on her gloves. Throwing words at Gwen was like throwing bubbles; they burst before they got anywhere. “I’m glad I was able to help in some way,” Charlotte said. She felt such tension and weariness that she was ready to weep. You’re so honest, doctor, so honest... “Take the capsules and the medicine and try not to worry too much about the spells. I don’t think they’re serious.”

She went out to the hall and picked up her medical bag, and Gwen and the dogs followed, Gwen looking a little hurt by her departure, like a disappointed child.

“Oh, it’s a shame you have to leave, doctor. Dinner’s ready, and it would be easy as pie to set another place. Lewis will be home any minute now.”

“Thanks. I...”

“Another time, perhaps?”

“Yes.”

“I know,” Gwen said gently, “that Lewis would love to have you.”

“That’s — nice.”

“Good-bye, now.”

“Good-bye.”

Outside, the fog had thinned, but the sky was darkening.

8

She had a late dinner at home alone. The house was dead and quiet. She put some records on the Capehart to drive away the silence, but the silence stayed in ambush underneath the music waiting to spring at her between records.

She hadn’t heard from Lewis all day. (Such a long day, she thought. It seems a week since I had breakfast with Miss Schiller this morning and saw Tiddles in his green suit at the police station... A long day for me, and a long night for Violet, a long, dark forever... Don’t think, don’t think about it. It wasn’t your fault.)

Lewis always phoned her once or twice during the afternoon. They didn’t talk long — they were both busy — but the calls reassured Charlotte. They made her feel that she was loved, that she wasn’t just playing around with a married man; she was in love and so was Lewis, and it was their bad luck that he was already married when they met. She hadn’t called him at his house for a long time; she had to look up the number in the telephone directory before she dialed.

Lewis answered, sounding falsely genial as he always did before he identified a caller. It was part of his public personality. “Hello. This is Lewis Ballard.”

Charlotte spoke fast “I want to see you. Can you come over?”

“Sorry, you must have the wrong number.”

“Does that mean you can’t?”

“That’s right. This is 5-5919.”

“Darling — Lewis, I...”

But he’d already hung up.

It wasn’t his fault, she thought. He had to hang up; Gwen was there listening. Even so she felt rejected, and a little cheap. “Sorry, you must have the wrong number, toots.” “Maybe I have, bud.” She went over and sat in Lewis’ chair, holding the palms of her hands over her eyes.

The front door was still open, as she’d left it to air out the house after she’d cooked dinner, and the wind slid across the floor and chilled her legs.

She went to the door to close it. Two men were coming through the gate into the walled garden. The taller one bolted the gate carefully behind him and wiped his hands on his trousers. The other man was small. He moved through the shadows with furtive delicacy like an elf and his ears stuck out from his red baseball cap, pale enormous blobs of wax silhouetted against the dark trees.

He flitted across the flagstones towards the light of the open door, a moth of a man. It was too late to dose the door. Too late and too futile. The little man could fly through a window, drop from a chimney, crawl out of a crack and scamper through an evil dream.

“Remember me? Eh?”

“You’re Mr. Voss.”

“Sure, that’s right.” He jerked his thumb towards his companion. Charlotte saw that both men were wearing crudely sewn mourning bands on their sleeves. “This here’s my pal, Eddie O’Gorman.”

“I’ve seen Mr. O’Gorman before.”

O’Gorman stepped into the circle of light. Though he was still young his face was a record of violence and neglect, the nose broken, the left ear a mash of tissue, the cheeks pitted with acne scars.

He held his fists clenched against his heavy thighs. “You seen me where?”

“At Mr. Voss’s house. You were watching me through the rails of the banister.”

“Yeah? What’s so wrong about...”

“Now, now, Eddie,” Voss said and turned to Charlotte. “Poor Eddie’s upset. He got bad news today, real bad. Didn’t you, Eddie?”

“Yeah.” Eddie touched the mourning band on his sleeve with a convulsive gesture, as if he wanted to rip it off.

“His wife died,” Voss said. “Killed herself. But maybe you already heard about Violet.”

“Yes, I have.”

“Poor little Violet. Who’d of thought she’d of done it the way she did? It came as a terrible shock to Eddie. Didn’t it, Eddie?”

“Sure.”

Voss explained to Charlotte, “He don’t talk much anyway, don’t talk at all when he’s grieving, he gets speechless, he...”

“What do you want?” Charlotte said. “Why are you here?”

He looked a little injured by her abruptness. “Well, I figured, me and Eddie figured, that maybe you hadn’t heard about Violet, and being you were so interested in her you’d like to know before you read about it in the newspaper.”

“Well, you’ve told me. Thanks, and good night.”

“Now wait a minute.” Voss’s face creased in a malevolent little pout. “Now that’s no way to treat a couple mourners. Is it, Eddie?”

Eddie coughed, holding one hand over his chest. “We could talk better inside. This night air ain’t so good for my bronichal tubes.”

“It won’t kill you,” Charlotte said. “It’s the same as day air.”

“Say, you’re a doctor. Say, what’s it mean when you get up in the morning and cough and cough and then maybe an hour later you’re O.K. again? Do you think that’s serious?”

She started at him through the screen door. This was Violet’s husband. “He hit me with a lamp,” Violet had said... “He’d take me back, he likes to have me around, somebody to bully.” She glanced at the telephone ten feet away, hoping it would ring so that she could establish contact with someone. It didn’t ring, and she was afraid to go over and pick it up; the action might precipitate trouble.

“Well?” Eddie scowled. “Is it serious? You think maybe I’m a lunger?” His mouth twitched nervously at one corner. Eddie was scared to death, and violence was the denial of his fears.

“No,” Charlotte said. “The cough is probably caused by a post-nasal drip. That is, when you’re sleeping phlegm accumulates at the back of your nose and drips into your throat. In the morning you cough it up.”

“What’s that word again, what I got?”

“Post-nasal drip.”

“How about that. Say, Voss, this dame knows her stuff, takes one look at me and says post-nasal drip, just like that.”

“Oh, shut up,” Voss said. “For Christ’s sake I got symptoms, too, only I don’t yap about them when there’s business to be done.”

Charlotte repeated, “Business?”

“Not business, exactly. You see, poor Violet didn’t have many friends, only Eddie and me and the wife, and you. Violet was one swell kid, she don’t deserve to have a pauper’s funeral, no flowers or nothing. Funerals come high nowadays. I was around pricing them this afternoon, and boy, those undertakers are sure raking in the coin. Though some of those caskets were real beautiful. Weren’t they, Eddie?”

“Sure.”

“We thought of a white satin casket with maybe a great big horseshoe made of purple violets.”

“Gee,” Eddie said, “that’d be pretty.” He touched his nose tenderly. He felt swell. Here, all this time he’d been worried about being a lunger and it was just his post-nasal drip.

“So,” Voss said, “that’s why Eddie and me came here. We figured Violet had a few friends, maybe we’d take up a little collection, buy a couple wreaths, stuff like that.”

“How much?” Charlotte said flatly.

“I hate to think about cold cash, with Violet where she is. Still” — he shrugged — “that’s what makes the world go round. Who am I to try stopping it?”

“How much?”

“Say $300”

There was a long silence before Charlotte spoke. “That would buy a great many wreaths.”

“Sure, but consider the casket.”

“I haven’t got three hundred dollars.”

“You can get it. You have a friend.”

“I have quite a few friends.”

“One special friend, though.”

“Several.”

“One very special.”

“Stop it,” Charlotte cried. “You must be crazy to think I...”

“Three hundred dollars wouldn’t mean a thing to him. Or to you. Think of poor Violet.”

“I only saw the girl once in my life.”

“But you helped kill her,” Voss said, quite pleasantly. “She came home yesterday and she says, I’ve been to the doctor only she won’t help me, I wish I was dead.”

“I think you’d better leave,” Charlotte said, trying to keep her voice steady. “This sounds like extortion.”

“Now wait a minute, that’s a nasty word. Ain’t it, Eddie?”

“It sure is. I don’t like it.”

Voss fingered the mourning band on his sleeve. “We came here as Violet’s friends because we wanted to give her a good send-off. Christ, we even got to pay a minister. How far do you think three hundred dollars will go?”

“I don’t know or care.”

“Don’t act so snotty or you will. You’ll end up caring plenty.” He turned to Eddie. “Extortion, she says. How about that?”

“How about it, that’s what I say.”

A mockingbird began to chatter from his perch on the lemon tree, abusing the invaders.

“You’d both better go home,” Charlotte said, “and start thinking up some new angles.”

“We don’t have to,” Voss said. “The angles are all there, and they ain’t nice, lady, they ain’t nice at all.”

“You’re very vague.”

“I don’t have to be vague. I can spell it out for you in straight ABC’s. There’s you, y-o-u, and there’s him, B-a-l-l-a-r-d. And then there’s my poor little Violet. Quite a threesome, eh? Eh?”

“Be more explicit,” Charlotte said. “You want me to pay you three hundred dollars because of Mr. Ballard and because you think I’m partly responsible for Violet’s suicide. Is that right?”

“Maybe. Maybe you haven’t figured the angles, though.”

“What angles?”

“Think about it.” Voss turned to his companion. “Come on, Eddie.”

“But she didn’t give us the money,” Eddie protested. “We didn’t get the three hundred...”

“You heard the lady. She don’t want to give us the money.”

“You said she would.”

“She will. She’s got to have time to figure, is all. Maybe she’s a little slow in the head. Come on, let’s go.”

“Wait,” Charlotte said. She was assailed by an obscure and terrifying feeling that the little moth of a man was threatening to eat away the fabric of her life. Already she felt naked, unprotected.

Voss turned his indeterminate eyes on her, squinting against the light that shone above the door. “You changed your mind?”

“No.” She reached her decision suddenly. “I’ve had enough of this. Get out of here or I’ll call the police.”

Eddie began to edge towards the steps, but Voss still faced her: “I don’t think so. You pore over what I said, and when you change your mind you know where I live. Only you better make it soon. I got lots of important business on the fire, see? Maybe I don’t look it but I’m a big shot, I’m a very important...”

“You’re a cheap crook,” Charlotte said. “Get out of here.”

She slammed and bolted the door and stood with her back against it until she heard the squeaking of the gate as it opened and closed again. Then she picked up the phone and dialed police headquarters. She acted on impulse, without planning what she would say or thinking of the consequences.

“Police headquarters. Valerio speaking.”

“H... hello?”

“What’s your trouble?”

“I need some kind of — protection.”

There was a voice in the background, a whining voice made harsh by whisky — “lost every damn cent of it, and then comes crying to me about it...”

“Oh, can it for a minute,” Valerio said. “I’m talking on the phone. Hello? What’s your name and address?”

“Charl...” Her throat constricted, pressing back the words: Charlotte Keating, 1026 Mountain Drive. I’m being blackmailed. The men involved are potentially dangerous, they should be arrested. No, I can’t give evidence. No, I can’t tell you why I’m being blackmailed, but it’s nothing criminal, nothing bad. I’ve been seeing a married man...

She could picture the two of them grinning knowingly if she told them, Valerio and the man with the whine, snickering together: “Seeing a married man, that’s a hot one, that’s a lulu...”

“I didn’t get the name,” Valerio said.

She hung up quietly.

She switched on the floodlights in the yard and went out to her car.

9

She phoned Lewis from a small café at the foot of the breakwater where they sometimes met.

I’m down at Sam’s, Lewis. I have to see you.”

“Aren’t you the same person who phoned here before? You still have the wrong number.”

How quick-witted of Lewis, Charlotte thought. Gwen might be suspicious of two wrong numbers so close together. Pretending the calls were from the same blunderer was clever of Lewis. Too clever. It suggested practice in easy deceptions.

“Please hurry, it’s important for both of us,” she said quickly and hung up before he could reply.

She waited outside in her car, watching the boats at anchor inside the breakwater. A whole city of boats, like a city of people, all lands, all classes; sleek and lavish yachts with their riding lights twinkling, sturdy fishing sloops, spruce little starboats fast as arrows, flatties and snowbirds, and weathered dinghies barely afloat.

A car drove past slowly and pulled to a stop a few yards ahead of her. Lewis got out, his shoulders hunched against the wind. She hardly recognized him. He wore a topcoat and a fedora and he had a scarf drawn high around his neck.

They walked in silence towards the lighthouse at the end of the breakwater.

“I didn’t even know you owned a hat,” she said at last.

“Now you do.”

“It’s quite a — disguise, isn’t it?”

“I couldn’t find my false whiskers. The hat will have to do.”

“Oh Lewis.”

There was no one else on the breakwater, and the only lights were feeble, from the three-quarter moon and the green signal that flashed off and on from the top of the lighthouse.

She clung to his arm, hiding her face against his sleeve. “Lewis.”

“What is it, darling? Here. Here, sit down.”

He drew her down to one of the stone benches that lined the breakwater. The bench was wet from the spray of the tide that was now ebbing, but neither of them noticed.

“Let’s have it,” he said, smoothing back her hair with his hand. “What’s the matter, Charley?”

“I’m in trouble.”

“Sorry.”

“So — are you.”

“That’s nothing new,” he said wryly. “I’ve been in trouble ever since I met you a year ago.”

“This is worse.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know how to begin.”

“Begin at the beginning and go on until you come to the end.”

Her smile was faint, sad. “That’s from Alice in Wonderland, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I wish I were Alice.”

“Why?”

“Then I could wake up and find it was all a nightmare, that I never really met...” She lapsed into silence, listening to the cruel crash of the water on the rocks below. “I’m being blackmailed.”

“Why?”

“Someone knows about you and me.”

“Well,” he said quietly. “Well. Who is it?”

“Two men.”

“Strangers?”

“Not exactly. I knew one of them before. I met him last night.”

“On that ‘call’ you made after I left?”

“Yes. Partly.”

“It wasn’t actually a call, was it...? No, don’t turn away. Answer me. Was it, Charley?”

“I went down to see if I could find the girl who was pregnant, the one I told you about last night.”

She had to tell him everything then, about Voss and the old man Tiddles, and Violet and Eddie; about Easter’s visit to her office with Violets sea-stained purse, and the ugly scene on her veranda when Voss asked for the money for Violet’s funeral.

When she had finished Lewis said, “The girl killed herself?”

“The police think so.”

“Don’t they know?”

“It’s too early for an autopsy report. She was only found this morning.”

“I see.” He took his cigarette lighter out of his pocket and began playing with it absently, flicking it off and on in unconscious rhythm with the lighthouse signal. “That’s quite a group of characters you’re messing around with.”

“I guess.”

“I’ve warned you before about that informal way you have of picking people up. Well.” He sighed. “I suppose it’s too late for one of my maiden-aunt talks. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s illegal to pay blackmail.”

“I know. I... in a way I’d like to give him the money and get it over with. Three hundred dollars isn’t very much to pay for my peace of mind. If I could only be sure that it would end there...”

“You’re talking crazy, Charley.” He peered down at her, half-muzzled, half-angry. “You’re afraid of this man. Aren’t you?”

“A little, I guess.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure.” Though candor was her habit, she felt unable to speak out, to voice her doubts. The moving sea, which she had always loved, had become a threat to her, and the concrete breakwater seemed insecure, adrift.

Lewis’ hand on her shoulder was strong and steady, but it wasn’t a strength she could lean on, it was a strength that could be used against her.

“Listen to me,” he said harshly. “If you’re willing to pay three hundred dollars to everyone who finds out about us you’re going to end up broke. At least a dozen people already know. It’s not a criminal act...”

“You wore a hat and scarf tonight.”

“It’s windy, it’s cold.”

“Not that cold.”

She turned her face away. The rocks below the seawall were slimy with eel-grass exposed by the ebbing tide. She couldn’t see it in the dark but she could smell its presence. The smell reminded her of Violet’s purse and of death.

“You haven’t told me everything,” he said. “What else has Voss got on you?”

“Nothing definite.”

“But he implied something?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“He...” She watched his face while she spoke. It was white and blurred. “He said I’d better think over the angles, that Violet and you and I made — a threesome.”

“A threesome?” His jaw dropped in genuine astonishment. “What in God’s name did he mean by that?”

“I don’t know. I thought perhaps he meant that you — that you knew Violet in some way.”

“I never even heard of the girl until you mentioned her last night.”

She knew he was telling the truth. She felt suddenly light-headed, as if a physical pressure had been removed from a section of her brain. “I wanted to be sure, Lewis. Don’t get angry.”

“How can I help it,” he said simply. “This Voss must be crazy. He’s got to be stopped.” He rose from the stone bench and pulled his coat collar up around his neck. “Where does he live?”

“Olive Street, 916. What are you going to do?”

“See him. Talk to him. I won’t stand for him bothering you like this. I’ll scare the bejesus out of him if I have to.”

“There won’t be any trouble, will there?”

He looked down at her grimly. “Of course there’ll be trouble. What do you expect? The man’s blackmailing you and I’m going to stop him.”

The breath caught in her throat. “I’d rather pay him the money than have you get into a brawl.”

“Going soft on me, Charley?” His smile was uglier than a frown. “That’s your trouble. You get involved with people like Voss and O’Gorman, and then you don’t know how to deal with them. You haven’t any defenses because they don’t fight with your weapons.”

In spite of the brisk onshore wind, he was sweating. His face was streaked with moisture, and when Charlotte reached for his hand to be pulled to her feet, his palm was clammy. She knew that he was nervous, perhaps even afraid. His legal practice had nothing to do with crime or criminals; it was confined to wills and trusts and estates, and an occasional discreet and very expensive divorce. She realized what a great effort it had been for him to undertake to go and see Voss himself.

“I’m coming along,” Charlotte said.

“What for?”

“Because I want to. Because...”

“Haven’t you gotten into enough of a mess already?” he said. “Look. You can’t deal with a crummy gang like that. You’re sensitive, you’re a woman. You ascribe to these people feelings and thoughts and morals they don’t have. You’ve fallen among thieves, Charley, and you’re a nice, gentle girl for all your knowledge.”

“I’m coming along, she repeated.

“Stubborn, aren’t you?”

“A little. I have to be.”

“Why do you want to come along? Don’t you trust me?”

She hesitated briefly before she answered. “I don’t trust your temper, your mood.”

“I see. You think the situation is going to call for a woman’s soothing influence.”

“Perhaps. Why should that make you angry?”

“I’m not angry.”

“You are... Did you have a quarrel with Gwen?”

“Gwen doesn’t quarrel,” he said heavily. “She sits around looking, very, very pained,”

“I saw her this afternoon.”

“She told me.”

“I can’t go on treating her any more,” Charlotte said. “Get me out of it, Lewis.”

“How?”

“That’s absurd,” he said. “I refuse.”

They walked back towards the café in strained silence, Charlotte keeping a little ahead of him, her step firm and stubborn.

He put her in her car. “I suppose there’s no use reasoning with you? You’re coming?”

“Yes, I am. Don’t you see, perhaps I can help, perhaps I can...”

“Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. All right, I won’t argue.” He closed the door or the car. “I’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.”

“It won’t take that long, will it? It’s only on Olive Street.”

“I have to stop at my office. I have some business to attend to first.”

“At this time of night?”

“Yes. It’s something Vern asked me to look after and I forgot about it.” Vern Johnston was his partner in the law firm. “He wanted me to put some more food in the aquarium.”

“I see.” She knew he was lying; Vern would never dream of letting anyone else feed his precious fish.

“Meet me in twenty minutes, then.”

“All right.”

“And park on Junipero Street ” he said. “There’s no point in advertising our visit.”

He stood for a minute looking down at her through the open window, his head bent. She thought he was going to kiss her. She wanted him to. Instead, he turned suddenly and walked back to his car.

10

On Olive Street the adolescent Vosses and Eddies flocked sheeplike in front of the bars and poolrooms, crept singly down alleys like hungry cats, pressed together for love or warmth like rabbits in the dark between the walls of shacks.

But the people on Olive Street were not animals, as Lewis seemed to think. Charlotte had made calls among them by day and night, and knew them. They’re people like myself, she thought, only they haven’t had my luck, so I owe them something. I owe them tolerance, understanding and even faith. Faith in Voss and his wife, in Eddie? No, no, it was too late. They were already too crippled for therapy; the damage was done, the muscles atrophied, the nerves degenerated.

She turned off on Junipero Street and parked in front of a brown wooden cabin. There were no blinds on the windows and she could see the family inside — a withered little Mexican woman ironing, and a young couple dancing without music, oblivious to the woman and the ironing board, the girl lean and lithe, the boy with his hair worn long and parted sleekly in the middle all the way to the nape of his neck.

Lewis’ blue Cadillac slid up behind her, looking as conspicuous in that neighborhood as the little Mexican would look at the opera with her ironing board. Charlotte stepped out of her car and they came together on the broken sidewalk.

“Did you — feed the fish?”

“Fish? No.” He avoided her eyes. “Vern was there. He stopped by to check up on one of the black mollies. He thinks she’s pregnant.”

Bubbles of laughter rose suddenly in her throat and stung her eyes to tears. She clung weakly to his arm and pressed her face against the sleeve of his coat “What’s so funny, Charlotte?”

“I don’t know. Everything. Vern fussing over a pregnant fish... I’m sorry. I’m sorry I laughed.”

“Here.” He gave her a handkerchief. “Wipe your eyes. You weren’t laughing.”

“I was. I was laughing.”

“I don’t think so.” They were talking in whispers, as if Voss might be in ambush behind a tree, or hidden in the trunk of one of the cars, listening. “Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Come on, then.”

He held her arm as they crossed the street.

Except for a square of flickering light in the attic, Voss’s house was dark, a corrupt monster with one dying eye. The porch smelled of wet wood, and where the warped planks slipped towards the center there was a small puddle of water. Within the past hour someone had hosed down the porch and it hadn’t had time to dry. Charlotte leaned over the railing. The hose had been flung into a pyracantha bush and it was still connected, still dripping water through the tiny thorny leaves. Someone (Voss?) had washed the porch in a hurry and then run away or gone into the house to hide in the dark.

No one answered Lewis’ knock. He rapped again and waited, jabbing his hands nervously in and out of his pockets.

“Lewis...”

“Yes?”

“You’ve got a gun in your pocket.”

“Are you surprised?”

“Very,” she said in a whisper. “Very surprised.”

“I carry it to improve my morale.” He rapped on the door again. “Sometimes it sags.”

“Lewis, don’t threaten these men, it wouldn’t work. Voss is a psychopath, he’s dangerous when he’s cornered or frightened or feeling inferior...”

“All right, I’ll tell him what a hell of a fine fellow he is, then I’ll hand him three hundred dollars as a slight token of my esteem.”

“I hate guns,” she said passionately. “I hate violence.”

He turned away with a little shrug of his shoulders. “Go ahead and hate it, but don’t pretend it doesn’t exist.”

A long, lean, gray cat appeared out of the shadows and swaggered along the splintered railing of the porch waving his tail contemptuously. Charlotte reached out her hand to stroke him. He spat at her and leaped off the railing, vanishing in a spidery tangle of geraniums.

“This is a waste of time,” Lewis said. “No one’s home.”

“We could try the back door.”

“Why bother, if nobody’s here?”

“There’s a light in the attic, and other people live here besides Voss and Eddie — the old Italian that I told you about. Probably others too. It’s supposed to be a rooming house.”

“God,” Lewis said.

Charlotte’s eyes had adjusted to the dark and she could see quite distinctly as she went down the porch steps and around to the side of the house. Here, the stench of decaying garbage fought and overpowered the fragrance of night-scented jasmine.

The path that led to the back yard was tangled with weeds and littered with rubbish. It was as if every roomer and tenant and owner who had ever lived in the house had flung his debris haphazardly out of doors and windows. There were piles of newspapers and empty bottles and rusted foul-smelling cans; a legless chair, two tarnished picture frames lying across the corroded springs of a bed, an old automobile headlight with the glass shattered, and an abandoned wardrobe, its cardboard belly bulging with age. There were even evidences of children; the frame of a box kite, a doll — the glass eyes sunk into its head as if pushed by exploring, curious fingers — and a wicker baby carriage with the front wheels gone, so that it seemed to be down on its knees praying.

All the broken, useless things, the scraps and parings and rinds of living.

“God,” Lewis said again. “Have you had enough?”

“I... guess so.”

“Then let’s get out of here.”

“All right.”

She turned to go back, and in turning, she looked up at the window in the attic with its flickering light. A woman’s face was pressed against the pane, contorted, weirdly white and luminescent like a fish in the blue-black depths of the sea.

There was a sudden smash of glass, followed by a series of silvery tinkles as the fragments struck the roof of the porch.

The woman began to scream. “Help, help! Let me out of here, let me out!”

“Were coming,” Charlotte answered. “It’s all right, Mrs. Voss, stop screaming.”

“Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!”

Two boys passing on the street turned their heads briefly and then walked on. Screaming women were common on Olive Street; the boys knew better than to interfere, to be around if and when the police arrived.

The back door of the house was half open. Lewis went in ahead, fumbling his way along the wall until he found the switch and turned on the lights. The kitchen table bore evidences of a drinking-party — three empty bottles of muscatel and four smudged glasses and half a bag of potato chips. A number of potato chips were scattered over the floor as if someone had become drunkenly playful and started throwing them around like confetti. The table and the drain-board of the sink were silvered with cockroaches.

Mrs. Voss’s screams continued, muted by the massive old walls.

The attic was four flights up. At some time it had been partitioned to serve as a separate apartment; Mrs. Voss was locked in the tiny room that had once been the kitchen. The key was in the lock, turned sideways so that Mrs. Voss couldn’t push it out with a hairpin and maneuver it through the crack at the bottom of the door.

Charlotte opened the door. Mrs. Voss stopped in the middle of a scream, her mouth gaping, both hands clutching at her throat. She was sitting on the floor with her legs sprawled out in front of her. Her skirt was slit to the hip where she’d torn at it in her frenzy. A little red Christmas candle was burning in one corner of the room — the light bulb had been removed from the ceiling months or years ago, and tiny house spiders lived like kings in the empty socket.

“I didn’t have nothing to do with it!” Mrs. Voss shrieked. “I didn’t have nothing to do with anything! I didn’t even hear nothing, I didn’t, I didn’t!”

“Of course you didn’t,” Charlotte said. “Of...”

“They wouldn’t let me go along, they wouldn’t take me, they locked me here to die!” She began beating the floor with her fists and shaking her head back and forth. The candle flame flickered, leaning away as if in fright. “They said I talked too much, I can’t keep my mouth shut. They said I got hysterical alla time. Me, me, me, hysterical!” She drew a long shuddering breath. “They wouldn’t take me along.”

“I can’t understand you when you shout like that,” Charlotte said softly. “No one’s going to hurt you. Take it easy.”

“They said I got hysterical alla time. I don’t, I don’t! I never did!”

“Easy now.” She turned to Lewis who had remained outside the door. “There’s some brandy in my car. Would you get it?”

“And leave you here alone with...”

“Of course. Mrs. Voss realizes that I’m her friend, I’m going to help her.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Voss sobbed. “Yes, yes! You’re my friend! You’re my friend!”

Tears spurted out of her eyes as if something had suddenly smashed inside her. Charlotte knelt down and put her arm around the woman’s shoulders. She could hear Lewis going down the stairs, very swiftly, as if he was glad to get away.

“I didn’t have nothing to do with it, I didn’t.” She dabbed her eyes with the hem of her torn skirt. Even after all her shouting and weeping, her face was still white. “They can’t put me in jail. I’d die if I was put in jail. I’m sick anyways, I’m sick.”

“I know.”

“You can see in my face I’m sick. Maybe I’m going to die, anyways.”

“That’s nonsense. You need some good, nourishing food, and a nice rest in the hospital.”

“No, no, I’m scared of hospitals. I never been in one.”

“That’s why you’re scared... Here, hold onto my arm and well go downstairs.”

Mrs. Voss was still breathing heavily and rapidly, but she was no longer hysterical. She had enough presence of mind to remind Charlotte to blow out the candle before they went downstairs.

In the huge barren living room Mrs. Voss lay down on the couch and Charlotte took off her coat and wrapped it around Mrs. Voss’s legs.

“What happened that you had nothing to do with?” she asked.

“I don’t know nothing.”

“Yes, you do. I can’t help you if you won’t tell me anything.”

“They was fighting, they was all arguing down in the kitchen after I went upstairs.”

“Who was?”

“Eddie and Clarence and the old man.”

“Tiddles?”

“Yes, Tiddles.”

“What were they arguing about?”

“A purse. Something about a purse.”

Lewis returned with the brandy and Charlotte mixed an ounce of it in half a tumbler of water. She wasn’t sure what effect brandy would have on Mrs. Voss; too much, undiluted, might send her back into hysterics.

“They were arguing,” Charlotte said, “and then what?”

Mrs. Voss began to cry again, softly, exhaustedly. “Oh, I can’t tell. I don’t know.”

“Something happened.”

“I think — I think Tiddles — died.”

“Do you mean they killed him?”

“No — oh, I don’t know. I didn’t see. I just know there was blood, a lot of blood. I heard Eddie on the porch talking about it, he’s ascared of blood. He kept saying they got to wash it off. I started to come downstairs to see what’d happened, only Clarence saw me. That’s when they took me up to the attic and locked me in. They wouldn’t take me along, they said I couldn’t keep my tonsils from flapping. ‘Good-bye, sweetheart,’ Clarence says, ‘good-bye sweetheart, it’s been hell knowing you.’ ” She turned her face away and pressed it against the brown mohair upholstery to hide her shame and humiliation.

Lewis had gone out into the hall again. Charlotte could hear him walking around on the creaking floor, walking and walking, like a man exploring the possibilities of escape from a cell.

Charlotte said, “What makes you think Tiddles is dead?”

“The quiet. They was all arguing in the kitchen first, afterwards on the porch. And then suddenly there was a quiet, a long, dead quiet before Eddie started to talk about the blood and washing it off with a hose. That’s when I started to come downstairs and Clarence heard me. ‘Something has come up,’ he says, ‘Eddie and me are going on a little trip.’ ”

“Where do you think they went?”

“Somewheres in Eddie’s car, I don’t know where. Maybe they took the old man away.”

“Maybe.”

“I’m tired, I’m so tired.”

“I know. I’ll see what can be done.”

She found the phone in the dining room and dialed the County Hospital. When she had finished talking she went out into the hall. Lewis was sitting on the bottom step of the staircase rolling an unlighted cigarette between his fingers. He looked grimly amused, as if it had just occurred to him how funny it was that he, Lewis Ballard, should be in such a place.

“Now what?” he said.

“I though you could drive Mrs. Voss out to the County General. They’re expecting you...”

“Why me?”

“I have to go to the police. I think there’s been a murder and it’s better if you stay out of it entirely.” He was no longer amused, no longer anything but frightened. He said, “Christ,” and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

“You needn’t come into the picture at all,” Charlotte said, keeping her voice low so that Mrs. Voss wouldn’t overhear. “I’ll tell them that I came here alone and found Mrs. Voss locked up and hysterical and that I phoned a friend to come and drive her to the hospital.”

“Your story’s not going to match hers.”

“She’s confused. She may not even remember that we came here together.”

“I hope to God not.”

“Take her around to the back of the hospital — there’s a door with ‘emergency’ printed on it. The doctor on duty is a friend of mine. I told him what to do. Just drive her there. Don’t stay, get home as fast as you can.”

“Christ.”

She went back into the sitting room and told Mrs. Voss that she was going to be driven to the hospital.

“I don’t want to go,” Mrs. Voss moaned. “No. I’m scared.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ll have a good sleep tonight and tomorrow morning I’ll come in to see you. We’ll try and get you back to normal again.”

Lewis brought his car around to the front of the house and he and Charlotte half carried Mrs. Voss out and put her in the back seat.

Mrs. Voss was weeping again, hiding her face with her hands. Good-bye sweetheart.

11

When the car was out of sight she went back into the house and called Easter. The phone rang eight or nine times before he answered.

“Mr. Easter?”

“Yes.”

“This is Charlotte Keating. I don’t know if you remember...”

“I remember.”

“I’m down at 916 Olive Street. Something pretty bad has happened. I don’t know exactly what. Could you come and have a look around?”

“I’m in bed.”

“You can get out of bed.”

“If I had a reason.”

“One reason is that I’m asking you to.”

He was there in ten minutes. She couldn’t force herself to stay alone in the house, so she was waiting for him on the porch when he arrived.

He crossed the front yard slowly, taking his time, looking up at the windows of the house, the shattered glass on the roof of the porch. In the half-dark his eyes looked peculiar, intensely penetrating, as if they could see more than eyes were meant to see.

“What’s up?”

“I’m not sure, but I think the old man, Tiddles, has been murdered.”

“Why didn’t you call headquarters and tell them instead of me?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I... well, I didn’t like the way the policeman sounded over the phone.”

“Then you did call headquarters?”

“No — I mean I called earlier. About a different matter.”

Easter leaned against a pillar, attempting to look casual, but his eyes betrayed him. “What matter?”

“It has nothing to do with — with this. Why do you stand there asking me such silly questions?”

“Because I’m getting such silly answers.” He glanced at the front door of the house where the big wooden numbers 916 had been nailed. “This is where Violet O’Gorman lived. What are you doing here?”

Her hesitation lasted only a fraction of a second, but he noticed it. One eyebrow shot up in an amused, skeptical way.

Charlotte said, “I came to see if there was anything I could do for Violet’s relatives.”

“It’s after eleven o’clock. Do you always get your charitable impulses at such awkward times?”

“I get all kinds of impulses at all hours of the day or night.”

“Sounds inconvenient.”

“I didn’t ask you to meet me here so we could discuss my impulses. In fact I’m sorry now that I called you at all.”

“Are you?”

“Naturally. I didn’t expect you to go into that hammy tough-cop routine. I’m not on trial for anything.”

“Then why the lies?” Easter said, gravely.

“Lies?”

“You called the police earlier but on a different matter. You hung up because the policeman’s voice wasn’t pretty enough. Then you came here to offer your help to Violets relatives. I’ve met Violet’s relatives, O’Gorman, and Voss and his wife, and the only kind of help anyone would offer them is help to drop dead. Now let’s be more reasonable, Miss Keating. Whatever’s going on around here, you’re mixed up in, perhaps innocently, perhaps not so innocently. I don’t know much about you. When I came to your office this afternoon I was impressed. I thought you were a remarkable woman. But that may have been simply because you look like my kid sister.”

“You’re very frank.”

“Setting a good example.”

“I don’t know whether I can trust you.”

“You can try,” he said. “I’ve never met anyone I can trust completely, but maybe you’ll be luckier.”

“I came to — because Voss wanted some money from me.”

“What for?”

“He has some information I don’t want generally known.”

“A man.”

“Yes.”

“Married.”

“Yes.”

“How much? Not how much married, how much blackmail?”

“Three hundred dollars.”

“Cheap enough.”

“I wasn’t going to pay him. And my relationship with this man isn’t what you’re thinking, Mr. Easter.”

“It’s pure as the driven snow.”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He smiled at her suddenly, a very warm and friendly smile. “You know, I believe you. Lying doesn’t come natural to you. You have a lot of guts.”

The praise was so unexpected and so sincere that she felt herself blushing. She turned away, annoyed at herself, and at Easter too, for the easy way he’d gotten the information he wanted. Yet there had been nothing else for her to do but tell him. Someone had to know the truth. Better Easter than another policeman less intelligent and less honest.

“All right,” he said. “You came to see Voss and then what?”

“No one answered the door. Mrs. Voss was locked in the attic. She broke the window with her shoe to attract our attention.”

“Our?”

“Mine.”

“Editorial our, eh?”

She didn’t answer.

“When you were a kid,” he said, smiling, “did you ever have to write fifty times on the blackboard, Charlotte Keating told a fib?”

“No.”

The lean, gray cat had returned. Charlotte could see his lustrous green eyes staring at her between the leaves of a hibiscus bush no more than a yard away. He began to wash himself, very fastidiously, as if he was showing his contempt for the squalor in which he lived and meant to rise above it. Both of his paws were black with blood.

“The cat,” Charlotte said.

“Where?”

“Under the bush. He has blood on him.”

“May have caught a rat.”

“He wouldn’t get in such a mess. Just killing a rat.” Easter went to his car and brought back a flashlight A trail of bloody paw prints led to the side of the house, vanished in a clutter of broken bottles and appeared again across the top of the discarded wardrobe with its bulging sides.

She saw then what she had missed before. Behind the wardrobe, half-hidden by weeds, was the foot and part of the leg of a man. The shoe was black, newly polished but split across the instep, the sock striped with yellow, the trouser leg green splattered with red; gay Christmas colors.

She thought of Tiddles in all his borrowed finery, anxious to show the police that he was no bum, but a solid, respectable citizen. Tiddles was dead now. It no longer mattered to him what he had been in life and what people thought, or that he was lying in a foul pile of rubbish and a cat had walked in his blood. Charlotte picked her way through the rubbish and leaned over. Tiddles. He was lying on his back staring up at the sky, his eyes fixed in terror, though the terror had long since passed. He was covered with blood, so much blood that it was impossible at first glance to tell where he had been wounded or how. It had squirted from his nose and gushed from his open mouth, smelling sour of vomit.

Easter lifted one of the old man’s hands; the fingers were cold and already beginning to stiffen. “It’s going to be hard to fix the time of death.”

“Mrs. Voss knows. She heard the argument Tiddles was having with the other two men, and then the sudden quiet.”

“Argument about what?”

“A purse.”

“Where’s Mrs. Voss now?”

“I sent her out to the County General. She’s ill, perhaps very ill, I don’t know yet.”

“What happened to your friend?”

“He drove her there. I don’t want him to be...”

“And Voss and O’Gorman?”

“They went away in O’Gorman’s car.”

Easter turned the flashlight on the old man again. “There are no head wounds and none of his clothing is torn. All the blood seems to have come from his nose and mouth. Notice the smell?”

“Yes.”

“Damn funny.” The flashlight moved restlessly up and down the body, across the wardrobe with its bloody cat prints, and down to the tarnished picture frames lying on the broken bedsprings. Under the bed-springs, a yard or so beyond the reach of Tiddles’ left hand, was a brown lizard purse with a gold clasp. Charlotte recognized it as her own.

She took a step forward, but Easter had seen the purse too and realized her intention. He put a restraining hand on her arm. “Don’t touch it, don’t touch anything. I’ll go and call headquarters.” He hesitated. “You’ll have to stick around for a while. I suppose you know that.”

“Yes.”

“About your friend — I’ll do my best to keep him out of it. For your sake.”

“Thank you.”

“For his sake,” he added softly, “I’d like to bust his jaw.”

12

The following noon, when she returned to her office after making rounds at the hospital, she found Easter talking to Miss Schiller. Easter looking like an alert young salesman with a zippered briefcase under his arm; Miss Schiller pleased and flushed, giddy as a girl.

“Oh doctor, Lieutenant Easter has just been telling me some of the most fascinating things about fingerprints. Did you know that my fingerprints are different from any fingerprints in the world?”

“No, I didn’t. Are they?”

“Absolutely different, absolutely unique. It changes one’s whole outlook on oneself. Here I always thought I was just like everyone else.”

“You needn’t have worried,” Charlotte said.

The phone rang in Charlotte’s office and Miss Schiller went in to answer it, making little clucking noises of disappointment.

“Have you had lunch?” Easter said.

“No.”

“The two autopsies were performed this morning. I thought we could discuss the report over something to eat.”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever been invited to lunch to discuss autopsy reports.”

“I specialize in being absolutely different and unique, like Miss Schiller’s fingerprints.”

“In that case...”

“You’ll come? Good.”

“Where shall we go? I have to leave a phone number with Miss Schiller.”

“The Green Onion.”

“All right.”

The Green Onion, in spite of its name, was a good French restaurant in the heart of town. They sat in a back booth and Charlotte ordered an omelet and a green salad from a waitress who spoke with a phony French accent and called her Madame.

Easter said he wanted chops.

The waitress raised a pair of impossible black eyebrows. “Choaps? What kind of choaps, Monsieur?”

“Any kind. Lamb, pork, veal. Doesn’t matter.”

“Well reely,” the girl said and moved away with an indignant swing of hips. (People never acted so peculiar back home in Buffington Falls, Iowa.)

“Did you get any sleep last night?” Easter said.

“Enough.”

“I’m sorry the police routine took so long.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” The last she remembered of the routine was a policeman in uniform putting a waterproof tarpaulin over the place where Tiddles had lain — over everything, the wardrobe and the bed springs, the tangled weeds and rusted cans.

Easter put the briefcase on the table and took out several typewritten sheets of paper and a dozen enlarged photographs.

“Why are you taking the trouble to tell me about the autopsies?” Charlotte said.

He raised his head quickly. “I thought you’d be interested.”

“Is that all?”

“What do you mean, is that all?”

“I thought — I imagined you had some other motive.”

“No other motive, no.”

But she didn’t like the way he smiled. She had the feeling that he was setting a trap for her, and she couldn’t elude the trap because she didn’t know why or where it was being set.

“Violet’s autopsy was done first,” Easter said, “so I’ll tell you about it first. It’s a fairly clear case of suicide.”

“Why?”

“I’ll give you the main evidence. The first picture here is one of Violet when she was found.” Charlotte looked at it. Violet, but not the Violet she had seen two days before, and not the smiling pretty girl whose picture had been printed in the morning paper. This Violet was hardly recognizable because the lower half of her face was covered with white foam like soapsuds.

Easter’s eyes were on her. “I know you’re a doctor,” he said, “but I don’t know how much personal experience you’ve had with violent deaths like drowning.”

“Very little. You won’t hurt my feelings by being too explicit, if that’s what you mean.”

“Good. The foam is typical of death by drowning. It’s part mucus from the throat and windpipe, and part sea water. If she was dead or unconscious when she entered the water the foam wouldn’t be there. It’s indicative of a violent struggle for air. In attempting to breathe she gasped in some sea water. The irritation to the membranes caused the mucus, which mixed with the water and got churned up into foam by her efforts to breathe. The fact that her mouth is open is also typical of drowning deaths.”

The waitress returned with the order. Charlotte put her fork into the omelet; it was light and very fluffy, like fine foam. She pushed it away.

Easter hadn’t even noticed the indeterminate-looking chops that had been placed in front of him. He said, “The next picture is a close-up of Violet’s left hand — the right, as I told you before, was missing; it may have been eaten by a shark or amputated by the propeller of a big boat. Since it was obviously a postmortem injury we didn’t bother trying to fix the cause.”

Violet’s fist was clenched, and a long thread of sea-grass was caught between her second and third fingers. She still wore her wedding-ring.

“When we opened the fist,” Easter added, “we found a small pellet of tar from the underwater oil wells, and also deep indentations made by her finger nails on the palm of her hand. A drowning person clutches at anything. In the next picture...”

“Please. I don’t think I want to see any more pictures right now.”

“Sorry.” He put the photographs back in the briefcase. “I didn’t mean to spoil your lunch. We won’t talk about Violet until later.” He smiled, that oddly warm and unexpected smile that always surprised her, made her feel friendly when she was on the point of antagonism. “It’s funny, the only thing we’ve ever talked to each other about is death. I don’t know whether you go to the movies or what kind of books you like, or whether you clean your teeth before or after breakfast, or how you like your eggs fried.”

“Our relationship isn’t a personal one.”

“Perhaps not. But I think it is.” He hesitated, his fork in mid-air. “Well, do you go to movies?”

“When I have the time.”

“Would you go with me?”

“I don’t know,” she said, honestly. “I don’t really know.”

“Why not?”

“I feel that I shouldn’t.”

He broke open a roll and buttered it. He had immense hands that moved with precision. “I see. You’re being true to Ballard.”

“Bal...?” Her mouth opened, closed again. A pulse beat in her temple, fast and hard. “How did you — find out?”

“My Gestapo works night and day. Besides, you should be more careful to destroy his letters.”

“Letters?”

He took an envelope out of his coat pocket and flung it on the table with a gesture of contempt or of anger. “This was in the brown lizard purse last night. I removed it before anyone else had a chance to see it. Accept it with my compliments.”

It was the letter — the only letter — that Lewis had written to her while he was fishing in the Sierras. She had kept it in her purse to reread when she felt lonely, not thinking that the purse would be stolen, and that the letter had been written on Lewis’ office stationery.

Easter began to quote, word for word, his tone suddenly soft and venomous: “Charley dearest, what a rotten time I’m having without you. Everything is bleak and empty...”

She tore the letter into pieces. “Do you always read other people’s mail?”

“When I nave a reason.”

“You’re a fraud and a cheat.”

“I don’t think so,” he said simply. “I’m human, and I guess I’m suffering from a very common human frailty — jealousy.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “It’s a sucker’s racket, Charlotte — playing around with another woman’s husband.”

“It’s my business, not yours.”

“I’d like to know how Ballard did it. I might pick up a few pointers.”

“Pointers?”

“Oh how he got you to fall for him so hard, I meant I’d like to do the same thing.”

“You’re insulting...”

“I don’t intend to be. I admire you. You’re a strong woman. It would take a lot of strength to live with you. I have it. You’d never lean on me, but I don’t have to be leaned on to feel superior. I feel superior anyway.”

“And you always will,” she said bitterly. “Your ego will take care of that nicely.”

He looked grave. “It wouldn’t be very smart to latch onto someone without an ego. He’d make too many demands on yours.”

“I won’t — I won’t discuss the — the matter.”

“Very well. Just let it creep into your subconscious now and then. That’s good enough for the present.” The waitress came with the coffee. Easter changed the subject, his voice and glance impersonal again, as if he had the ability to turn her on and off in his mind like a faucet. “There was a wallet found in your purse too — no money left in it, of course. That accounts for the wine-party in the kitchen. Four glasses, four merrymakers; we can presume they were Voss and his wife and O’Gorman and the old man Tidolliani.”

“Voss and Tiddles hated each other.” We have a great mutual hate, Tiddles had told her the night they first met.

“My guess is” Easter continued, “that Tidolliani was snooping and they found him snooping and decided to play it friendly, over three bottles of wine. They got the old man drunk, probably, but they got themselves drunk, too and the argument began about the purse. I think we can assume that Tidolliani found it where Voss or O’Gorman had hidden it, perhaps in the rubbish pile... I went to see Mrs. Voss early this morning.”

“So did I.”

“Is she putting on an act?”

“No,” Charlotte said. “She doesn’t remember anything about last night. She’s disoriented to some degree. She has an idea that she’s going to have her tonsils out and that Voss is coming to see her any minute.” She sipped her coffee, thinking of Mrs. Voss lying in the hospital bed, looking quite relaxed and contented, but with that strange vagueness in her eyes: Voss hadn’t deserted her, no, quite the opposite. She had deserted him, had come to the hospital like a real lady to have her tonsils removed, and Voss would come to see her during visiting hours. “I got bad tonsils,” she’d told the nurse.

Charlotte said, “Why did Voss want to steal my purse? I live way out on Mountain Drive, there must have been a hundred purses more readily available than mine.”

“They weren’t after your purse,” Easter said, but he refused to give his reasons for the statement.

Charlotte persisted. “It had something to do with Violet?”

“Yes.”

“But you think Violet killed herself, she wasn’t murdered?”

“That’s what the evidence says,” Easter replied with a shrug. “In addition to the external evidence I’ve given you, there were internal signs, too — foam in the windpipe and the bronchial tubes, water in the stomach, the lungs and the duodenum, water containing algae and other minute particles of sea life. Lungs distended, heart dilated on one side.”

“All that,” Charlotte said quietly, “isn’t evidence that she committed suicide. It’s only evidence that she died in the water.”

“You’re hard to convince.”

“Perhaps.”

“The final point is circumstantial evidence only — the fact that she was despondent over her pregnancy. She didn’t want the child.” He saw the question in her eyes. “It was a boy.”

A boy. She thought of the inexplicable craftsmanship that had gone into the making of that dead boy — the delicate precision of the cells, the network of nerves and veins, the interplay of glands, the gradual growth, just so much and no more, all marvelously balanced and molded from one tiny ovum and one infinitesimal spermatozoon.

Easter’s question came, as unexpected as a blow. “Who was the man involved with Violet?”

“I don’t know. How could I know?”

“She could have told you something.”

“Only that he was married, that he was away when she called him but that someone told her he was returning that night. She intended to see him.”

“Some day,” Easter said grimly, “I intend to see him myself.”

“If you find him.” (The father of Violet’s baby, she thought. The most important figure in the case, because without him there would have been no case — yet the most shadowy figure, unknown and unreal; perhaps even quite innocent of the train of events to which he had given the initial push.)

She repeated her thoughts aloud, but Easter said, “Innocence is no more of an excuse than stupidity or ignorance.”

“I see. You don’t make excuses for people?”

“Sometimes. But to excuse, to explain, isn’t enough. You don’t correct a neurosis by eliminating it, you have to offer an acceptable substitute. The positive approach: here’s a gumdrop, junior, now stay out of the ant paste.”

She raised her brows. “I didn’t realize you were a philosopher.”

“Philosophy is for poets,” he said curtly. “I deal with people, dead or otherwise.” He pushed his coffee cup aside and the muddy liquid splashed over the side like a wave breaking over a sea-wall. “I think the real reason you don’t want to believe that Violet killed herself is that it would leave a scar on your conscience.”

“That’s what a conscience is made of, scar tissue,” Charlotte said. Little strips and pieces of remorse sewn together year by year until they formed a distinctive pattern, a design for living.

“If Violet was murdered it was by someone she trusted — not Voss, who had no reason, not O’Gorman, whom she feared. O’Gorman had reasons to kill her, but fists are his weapons — there’s nothing fancy or subtle about Eddie. No. The person who might have murdered Violet would have to be someone she liked or trusted well enough to accompany out to the pier near the point where her purse was found. Someone like you, for instance.”

“She didn’t like or trust me. And you surely can’t be serious about suspecting that I...”

“I’m curious. I’m curious about the card she was carrying in her purse with your name and address typed on it.”

“All I can tell you is that I didn’t give it to her.”

“Some day,” he said, “I’ll find out who did. It might be interesting.” A fly circled the table, came to rest on his knuckles. He didn’t brush it off. He watched it explore the hill of one knuckle and walk gingerly into the valley between his fingers. “Have you ever walked out on the pier late at night?”

“Sometimes.”

“I went down there last Friday after midnight looking for a fisherman who’d stabbed a man in a bar. I didn’t find him. I didn’t find anyone, in fact. There wasn’t a soul on the pier and every boat was dark. But it was noisy. The sea was noisy and the wind was noisy and there was a loose piling that kept rubbing against the planks at every wave and shrieking like a gull. A good place for a murder. A push, a drop of fifteen feet into the water, perhaps a scream. But, as I said, there are natural noises out there. They might cover the scream as the night would cover the murderer.” He had been sitting, tense, on the edge of the seat as he described the pier. He leaned back now, visibly relaxing. “Well, that’s what could have happened. And probably didn’t.”

The fly had discovered the coffee cup and was walking cautiously around the rim like an explorer at the edge of a crater.

“As for the old man,” Easter said, “there’s no question of murder.”

“No question?”

“His death was natural. No signs of any blows or wounds. He died of an acute peptic ulcer that eroded through a blood vessel and caused a fatal hemorrhage. The argument he had with Voss and O’Gorman probably precipitated the hemorrhage but there’s no way of proving that. Voss and O’Gorman are technically innocent as lambs.”

She looked incredulous. “You mean you’re not even going to try and find them?”

“Oh, there’s a warrant out for their arrest, certainly. But not in connection with Violet’s death, or the old man’s. We can’t prove anything there; we can’t prove any charge of attempted extortion; we can’t even prove they locked Mrs. Voss up in the attic. All we have on them is suspicion of armed robbery in connection with the purse they stole from you. Sad, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“There’s no justice. Go on, say it.”

“There’s no justice,” she repeated. “But there should be.”

“Certainly there should be,” he said ironically. “There ought to be a law. Say that one, too — there ought to be a law.”

“Well, there ought to be!” She spoke in such a loud, angry voice that the man in the next booth turned to stare at her, half anxious, half hopeful, as if he’d like to witness a good quarrel, providing it didn’t get too rough.

“Looking for someone?” Easter asked.

“Me?” The man coughed. “Well, no. Not at all.”

His head disappeared like a turtle’s.

“Nice girls don’t raise their voices in public,” Easter said. “Or tangle with blackmailers. Of course, there’s always the possibility that you’re not a nice girl, that my eyes have been bedazzled. They are, you know. Absolutely bedazzled. It’s the damnedest thing. Are you interested?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t have to blush if you’re not interested.”

“If I’m blushing, it’s because I’m embarrassed by your impudence.”

He smiled. “Blushing or unblushing, you look fine... Where was I? Oh yes, at my bedazzlement. Well, that covers everything, actually. There you have it.”

“What am I expected to say?”

“Oh, you don’t have to say anything. Just blush now and then. It encourages me.”

“You’re — you’re insufferable.”

“Only at first glance,” Easter said, patiently. “Second and third glances reveal my sterling, less obvious qualities.”

“I don’t care to see them.”

“You will, though. I’ll be around.”

She looked at her watch, attempting to appear cool and indifferent. “I have to get back to my office.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t bother driving me. I can walk.” She got up. “Thank you for the lunch.”

“I hope there’ll be others.”

“That’s unlikely.”

“Other autopsies, other lunches,” Easter said. “By the way, there’s one thing I forgot to mention.” “What is it?”

“Any time you and Ballard need a chaperon, give me a call.”

13

At five o’clock Miss Schiller started making preparations to go home. Ever since lunch, when she’d read in the newspaper about Violet’s death, she had been talking continually to a succession of patients, enlarging now and then on the truth: “There she stood in the doorway, looking so alive, you know what I mean? Yet I knew, I knew by her eyes that something was up.”... “It’s a blot on the city, but then of course she wasn’t a native. She came from a little town in Oregon, it says in the paper.”

A rich, a full, a satisfying afternoon, marred only by an occasional black look from Charlotte and the fact that some patients selfishly preferred to discuss their own symptoms.

Miss Schiller combed her hair and replaced the net over it. With the net on, it hardly looked like hair at all but like a fuzzy gray cap under which the real Miss Schiller hid, bald as an egg.

The newspaper that she’d bought at lunchtime lay on her desk folded so that she could glance at Violet’s picture whenever she felt the excitement beginning to deflate inside her. Mrs. Violet O’Gorman, of Ashley, Oregon, whose body was found this morning on West Beach apparently a suicide...

Miss Schiller was reading the report all over again, with the intense fascination of one reading about herself, when Charlotte came out of her office dressed for the street and carrying her medical bag.

Miss Schiller hurriedly turned the paper over and said in her most alert, efficient voice, “Yes, doctor?”

“How many house calls to make?”

“Only three. Here they are.”

“Lord,” Charlotte said. She leaned against the desk and closed her eyes for a moment. The thought of even three house calls appalled her.

“It’s none of my business, doctor, but I must say you haven’t been looking at all well the past few days.”

“No?”

“Haggard, you look, real haggard.”

“Thanks.”

“I was reading only the other day that doctors die sooner than people in any other profession. Now this new herbal tonic I’m taking, really, it’s so invigorating.”

“The stuffs probably loaded with alcohol. No wonder it peps you up.”

“Alcohol?” Miss Schiller blanched. “Oh no. They wouldn’t dare...”

“Cheer up. It won’t kill you,” Charlotte said.

“But I don’t drink. I don’t believe in alcohol.”

“Well, maybe the tonic will help you change your mind.”

The phone rang, but Miss Schiller was too perturbed to answer it. In her imagination she was already an alcoholic, doomed to a drunkard’s grave, through no fault of her own. The vicious stuff was right this minute churning around in her bloodstream, corroding her will, destroying her character. That’s what they told her when she took the pledge — that one never knew when one’s will was being corroded until it was too late. Oh dear. She felt quite giddy.

“Charley? Bill Blake.”

“Hello Bill,” Charlotte said.

“I have to go out of town the beginning of next week. I thought we’d try a switch again, if you’re willing.”

“Certainly.”

“If you haven’t anything critical on your books, I could take over your practice for the rest of this week, and you take mine next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.”

“That suits me.”

“Swell,” Blake said. “Dare I hope that Miss Schiller has quit and gone into a nunnery?”

“You dare not.”

“All I can do is keep her under ether, then. I’ll see you, and thanks, Charley.”

“Good-bye.” She hung up and turned to Miss Schiller. “Dr. Blake sends you his love.”

“He does?” Miss Schiller bounced out of her drunkards grave with the single-minded agility of a rabbit “Well, I must say I’m flattered. Dr. Blake is such a sweet man.”

“Yes. He’ll be around now and then for the rest of the week. Any calls that come in, just relay to his office. And in the morning you’d better phone the patients who have appointments and send them to Dr. Blake, or else make new appointments. The charts are all in order?”

“Of course.” Miss Schiller was offended. “Well, I mean, really. I’ve been in this business for...”

“No offense meant.” Charlotte picked up her medical bag from the desk where she’d put it when she answered the telephone. It seemed heavier than usual. She realized that for the first time in years she felt exhausted. She moved slowly, as if part of her brain tissue had been destroyed like a spastic’s, and each physical move she made had to be thought out and the muscles forced to obey.

“What a nice coincidence that Dr. Blake phoned,” Miss Schiller said. “Now you can have a good rest for a few days. Go down to the beach and lie in the sun.”

“Perhaps I will.” She wondered, briefly, about the “nice coincidence,” and then forgot about it as soon as she reached the street and got into her car.

It was nearly seven and the sky was showing its first stars, when she arrived home. Even before she turned into the driveway she could hear her phone ringing, a shrill rising, falling, like the sound of tree toads. The ringing stopped as she was unlocking her front door and began again a few seconds later.

She thought it might be Lewis calling and when she answered the phone she tried not to sound tired. Lewis hated her to sound tired; it always started an argument about her working too hard.

“Hello?”

“You work late,” Easter said.

“I wish you’d stop bothering me.”

“Who’s bothering you? I have a new lead in Violet’s case and I thought you’d like to hear about it.”

“What is it?”

“I’ve just learned that Violet has an older sister who lives in Ashley, a war widow by the name of Myrtle Reyerling. Violet may have confided in her about the man we’re after — let’s call him Mr. B.”

“Why Mr... B?”

“No reason. I’m driving up to Ashley tomorrow, unofficially, to have a talk with Mrs. Reyerling. Do you want to come along?”

“No thanks.”

“Think it over.”

“I’ve thought.”

“The trip will do you good,” Easter said. “Fresh air, etcetera.”

“There’s fresh air here.”

“But the Oregon fresh air is said to have therapeutic qualities for nervous women — a sort of gaseous Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.”

The door chime pealed. “I’ve never been nervous in my life and my doorbell’s ringing.”

“I hear it.”

“So if you’ll excuse me...”

“I will, but I don’t want to.”

“Thank you for the invitation.”

“Keep thinking it over,” Easter said, and hung up. As she was going towards the door it occurred to her that Easter’s invitation was oddly coincidental with Dr. Blake’s offer to take over her practice for a few days. There was no connection, of course, but it worried her. She wondered about Easters motives, whether he was falling in love with her as he pretended, or whether he thought she knew more about the case than she had told him.

Before she opened the door she glanced out of the little window at the top and saw that her caller was Lewis.

For a moment he looked to Charlotte like someone she had once known well and hadn’t seen for years. His face was grim, his mouth a tight bitter line. There were dark gray circles under his eyes like smudges of soot.

“Hello, Charley.”

“Lewis... Lewis, are you ill?”

“No.” He kissed her on the cheek; his breath smelled of brandy.

She withdrew from his embrace, holding him at arms’ length so that she could see him better. “You haven’t been drinking too much, or anything?”

“I am not ill and I haven’t been drinking.” He crossed the room and flung himself wearily into the red leather chair. He was wearing the hat and topcoat he’d had on the previous night when they’d met on the breakwater. He leaned his head against the back of the chair and the hat slid off and rolled on the floor. He didn’t seem to notice. “At least I’ve been drinking only enough for medicinal purposes, to keep me from strangling my wife.”

The words jarred her. “You mustn’t talk like that.”

“If I didn’t talk it I might just go ahead and do it... Have you seen the papers?”

“Yes.”

“It’s the same girl, the one who came to you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry for the girl, and sorry you had to be mixed up in it.” All during dinner Gwen had talked about it: “Oh, the poor child, how lonely she must have felt! I know so well what loneliness is. Sometimes when you’re not here, Lewis, when you stay away in the evenings for hours and hours, I almost feel like — like killing myself.” Gwen, sitting across the table from him, an animated little doll with the big dogs pressing their noses moistly against her arm begging for attention, for a scrap of meat He had felt a murderous rage, a terrible desire to stop those white fluttering hands, that gentle voice: “That poor, poor girl. Think how the man must feel who got her into that condition.”

He covered his eyes with the palms of his hands. Charlotte sat on the hassock at his feet. “I tried to call you this afternoon at the office.”

“I wasn’t there.”

“I know.”

“I went to a movie.”

“I didn’t think you ever went to movies,” she said, half lightly.

“I don’t. I was tired. I thought I’d go to sleep from boredom, but I didn’t... I need some sleeping pills, Charley.”

“I have a couple of Nembutals I can give you.”

“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

She brought the capsules out of the medicine chest in the bathroom. “Don’t take them until about twenty minutes before you go to bed.”

“All right.”

“Lewis, is anything the matter?”

“Not a thing.”

“I’m glad, Mr. B.”

He looked very surprised, and pleased. “You haven’t called me that for a long time. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“I love you, Miss K.”

“Darling, it’s nice to see you smiling again.”

“I’m out of practice.”

“I know. Things will be better for us someday, wait and see.” She gave him a cigarette and lit it for him, feeling happy that she was able to help him when he was tired. Her own tiredness was nearly gone. “I’m taking the rest of the week off, Lewis.”

His hand tightened on her arm. “Sudden, isn’t it?”

“The chance came up. I thought that I’d take a little trip in the car, perhaps.”

“A trip where?”

“Oh anywhere. You know I’ve always liked driving to new places.”

He hadn’t taken his eyes off her, hadn’t even blinked. “New places such as where?”

“Well, I haven’t seen much of Oregon,” she said. “They say it’s very nice in the summer.”

“Who says?”

“I though perhaps...”

“Stop that thought-perhaps business. Your mind’s made up. It always is. Where are you going in Oregon?”

“Ashley.”

“Where the girl lived?”

“Yes.”

“Haven’t you gotten into enough trouble already?”

“Please, darling...”

“Don’t go,” he said. “Don’t go, Charley.”

“I want to. I feel that I should.”

“Why should you? It’s none of your affair.”

“The police are going.”

“Police?”

“I want to get there first. I don’t like the lieutenant in charge of the case, Easter.”

“I know him,” Lewis said. “He’s a troublemaker.”

“He rang me up tonight and asked me to go with him to Ashley and talk to Violet’s sister. I refused. I think he was trying to set a trap for me. I know I haven’t done anything, but the feeling is there that in some obscure way I’m deeply implicated in Violet’s death.”

“Don’t go, Charley,” he said again.

“But I want to. I’m not afraid of Easter. I’m just curious.”

“Just curious. Oh God.”

“Besides, driving rests me, the trip will do me good.”

“It might do us both good. A world of good.”

He got up. When he leaned over to pick up his hat from the floor he staggered slightly, and she wondered if he had had more to drink than he admitted, or if he was simply exhausted.

He kissed her at the door, a long kiss that seemed to Charlotte to be sad and bitter. She felt suddenly like weeping.

“Good-bye, Charley. Good-bye, darling.”

“Lewis, you’ll take care of yourself?”

“Of course. Have a nice time.”

“Wait. Lewis, if you don’t want me to go, if you have a reason...”

“Reason?” he repeated. “No. No reason except that I’ll miss you.”

“I hope you will.”

“Good-bye, Charley.” The words had an air of finality, as if he never expected to see her again.

The door closed.

14

She left the following morning long before sunrise. For the first hundred miles she drove along the coast where the road meandered like a concrete river following the curves of the sheer, barren cliffs, blanketed by fog. As the sun rose it swallowed the fog, leaving only a few undigested wisps hiding in the hollows and dips of the road.

The highway turned suddenly inland beyond the reach of the sea, where the heat lay thick over the fertile valley. Here the barren cliffs seemed remote and Charlotte could hardly imagine them only a few miles away from this sudden profusion of growth: acres and acres of silver-green lettuce — greengold, the farmers called it — and groves of oranges too huge to look real and miles of fat tomatoes reddening on the vines.

But the valley ended with the same finality as the cliffs. The road ascended, and the area of the redwoods began, trees so high, so ancient, that their origins dazed the imagination. There was a clearing where the trees had been ruthlessly cut down and hauled away, and from here Charlotte could see two mountains to the northeast, their snowy caps untouched by changes in the weather or by the footprints of men. It was as if nature — and the department of highways — had collaborated to give the tourist the whole scope of California in a few hundred miles.

When she crossed the border into Oregon she had to cut her speed because the noon sun, pressing down through the huge trees, made such brilliant patterns on the road that it was difficult to see any distance ahead or to distinguish the real from the shadow. Now and then she heard a mountain stream chortling furiously, violently, as if nothing could ever stop its mad, hilarious descent to the Pacific.

She reached the outskirts of Ashley a little after two o’clock. A sign informed her that she was about to enter Ashley, the Friendliest Little Town in the West, Population 9,394, Come Early and Stay Late.

She stopped at the first AAA motel that she came to. It was built in a small clearing of trees, two hundred yards off the highway, and it was so new that it still smelled of fresh wood.

A fat man in shirt sleeves was sitting on a kitchen chair tilted against a door marked “office,” fanning himself with a comic book. A dozen other comics were scattered around his chair, half of them without covers, the others brand-new, True Love Comics, Teen-Age Romance, I Was Jilted, Western Love and Romances. The fat man’s face was as innocent and devoid of thought as a marshmallow. He was probably laughed at in school as the fat boy, Charlotte thought. Now he’s getting back, he’s the hero of all the comic books, the lover who jilts, the cowboy who rides roughshod over women’s hearts. Poor man, poor boy.

“Any vacancy?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. Number Four over there. Bath and shower, Beautyrest mattress. Six dollars a night.”

“That will do.”

She parked her car in front of Number Four, and came back to register at the office her name and address and the make and license number of her car. A card on the desk identified the fat man as Mr. Boy H. Coombs, Mgr., La Siesta Motel.

“You a doctor, eh?” Mr. Coombs said. “I see by your car.”

“Yes.”

“I never saw a lady doctor so close up before. In the movies I have, though. Ingrid Bergman was a doctor in a movie once, fell in love with Gregory Peck, only Peck happened to be...”

“Yes, I know. ‘Spellbound.’ ”

“Yes, yes, that was it. ‘Spellbound.’ I don’t know what she saw in Gregory Peck. He’s skinny as a broom, besides being a nut — in the picture, I mean.”

“Have you a phone book?”

The question took him by surprise. He had to stop a moment to make the transition from romance to phone books. “Well, sure we have.”

“I just want to look up an address.”

“Oh. Sure.” He searched around the desk and under the counter for the phone book and couldn’t find it. He stood up, panting from the exertion, and wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his pink shirt. “Somebody must have swiped it off of me. That’s low, stealing a phone book.” (But there was a dreamy look in his eye; the fat boy was Dick Tracy, out for revenge, on the trail of the thief who took the telephone book. On his slender wrist, a two-way radio. In his head, a photographic memory.)

“Perhaps you can help me locate someone,” Charlotte said crisply, and Mr. Coombs’s eyes snapped back into focus.

“I should be able to, lived here in town all my life.”

“Do you know Mrs. Myrtle Reyerling?”

“Myrtle? I sure do. Why, Sergeant Reyerling’s one of our war heroes, got his name on a plaque in the First National Bank, corner of Third Street. Myrtle lives in an apartment above Woolworth’s. You can’t miss it. Drive straight into town and there it is.”

“Thanks.”

The Woolworth store had a bright new façade but the apartments above it were dark and airless and smelled of last month’s grease and last week’s cabbage.

Charlotte paused before a door marked in pencil on a torn slip of paper, M. Reyerling. The transom was open and there were sounds inside the room, not sounds of quarreling, but of two women vociferously agreeing with each other about a third who wasn’t present

“I told her. I told her time and again.”

“I know you did, you bet you did.”

“But no, no, she was headstrong. Always believing the best of people. The best. Huh. I know now there’s no best in anyone. Only better. And them damn little better than the worst.”

“You’re absotively right, Myrtle, but don’t let it get you down.”

It was Myrtle Reyerling who opened the door, a tall, thin woman in her late twenties, with a six-inch pompadour that listed slightly to one side like a schooner in a high wind. Her mouth was pinched-looking, her jaw hard, but there was something pathetic about her eyes; they were questioning, bewildered.

“Mrs. Reyerling?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Charlotte Keating, a friend of Violet’s.”

The woman turned away, swallowing, swallowing again, before she spoke. “I guess you know about her then?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Come in if you want to. This here’s my girlfriend, Sally Morris.”

A dark-haired young woman with a wiry body and big muscular legs acknowledged the introduction with a nod.

“It’s all over town,” Mrs. Reyerling said. “Whisper, whisper, whisper, about how Violet was in the family way and not by Eddie. I don’t believe it. Violet was a good girl. My kid sister. Was a good girl and don’t anybody say different.”

“Now take it easy, Myrt.”

“She was a good girl.”

The young woman called Sally made a little gesture of impatience. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, good girls can do a lot of the same things as bad girls. I just told you, I saw her with my own eyes. She was in that bed, sleeping. And there were signs — know what I mean?”

“No!”

“Now Myrt, you know me, I’m no gossip, but I’m no dumbbell either. I’ve been working around there long enough to know the signs.”

Charlotte interrupted, “Signs of what?”

“Well, you know.” There was an embarrassed silence before the girl broke out again: “In the first place what was she doing there, sleeping at eight o’clock in the morning in a man’s room? The man was already checked out — he left the key in the lock outside like it says on the door to do when you check out. Well, I saw the key and I figured I’d get the room made up early. I went in, and there was Violet sleeping peaceful as a baby. I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t any of my business. I just walked out again and rapped on the door real hard to wake her up. Then I beat it. I didn’t even tell Myrtle about it until today. She always made so much fuss when Violet did anything wrong, even when she took a drink or smoked a cigarette.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Mrs. Reyerling whispered. “I didn’t. I had to look after her, she was my kid sister. I wanted her to grow up to be a lady.”

“Sure. Sure, I know, Myrt. I’m not blaming you. It’s life, is all. We all got to take it on the chin.”

“How many times do I have to take it? How many chins you think I’ve got?”

“Now, Myrt.” The girl turned to Charlotte. “I work at a motel, see? Rose Court, it’s called; on the other side of town. That’s where I saw her, in this guy’s room.”

“Do you remember the man?” Charlotte asked.

“I didn’t see him. But when I was making up the room afterwards I found a tie he’d left behind in the john. I never saw a tie like it before. It was blue with gray coins on it and little wee dice with red eyes. I thought I’d hook it to give to my old man, maybe it’d bring him luck in a crap game. But I got cold feet, and turned it in to my boss, Rawls. Rawls is as honest as the next guy, which isn’t saying much, because he started to wear the tie himself, instead of mailing it to the man who’d left it behind.” She hesitated a moment. “I’m not saying anything against Rawls, exactly. If he found a wallet he’d probably turn it in to the police minus a few bucks for his trouble. But this tie — he couldn’t resist it. He thinks he’s a pretty classy dresser. Around town they call him Adolphe Menjou.”

Mrs. Reyerling had gone to the window and was looking down into the street below, her arms folded across her breasts.

“Here’s how I figure it,” Sally said. “If it happened once it could have happened plenty of times, so maybe this man who left the tie had nothing to do with Violet’s being in the family way.”

“It never happened at all.” Mrs. Reyerling didn’t turn. She addressed the window pane as if it was some land of impersonal umpire. “The kid was Eddie’s. He said it wasn’t because he was sick of Violet. He was playing around with somebody else and he wanted to drive Violet away.”

Sally didn’t argue. She made a little grimace at Charlotte to indicate that Myrtle was beyond reasoning.

Charlotte said, “Perhaps if I could talk to Mr. Rawls, he might remember...”

“Now wait a minute. You think he’d admit anything? Not on your life! He’d swear black and blue there wasn’t any man or any tie or even any motel. How could he admit about the tie without admitting he’s a crook? Why, if he did, they might take away his AA Approved card. Those AAA people are fussy. They don’t stand for stuff like that. They’re always snooping, around to see if I changed the bath mats and the shower curtains and swept under the beds.” She paused. “Rawls won’t tell you a thing. Besides, I might get fired, see?”

“I see, of course.”

“You won’t go to Rawls, then?”

“No.”

“I should have kept my yap shut, anyway,” Sally said with a trace of bitterness. “I don’t know what gets into me, to talk so much. I just came over here to help Myrt, to cheer her up.”

Mrs. Reyerling turned a flat gaze on her. “Cheer me up... Tell me lies about my own sister.”

“Now listen, Myrt. Don’t go turning against me.”

“Bad lies.”

The girl was beginning to get angry; a red flush crept gradually up her neck like the colored mercury in a thermometer. “You better look into your own conscience. Who was it that got Violet going around with Eddie in the first place? Who was it kept saying, ‘Eddie’s a nice dependable guy. He’ll make some girl a good husband.’ Who was it said, ‘Looks aren’t everything.’ Hell no, looks aren’t everything, he may look like a chimpanzee with smallpox but you’ll get used to it, Violet Once you got Mrs. in front of your name...”

“I didn’t,” Mrs. Reyerling cried. “I didn’t force her to marry him. I didn’t even ask her to. She liked him.”

“You told her to like him.” Her mimicry was sharp, cruel: “ ‘Marry Eddie and love will come later, and maybe he’ll even get over those little habits of his, like pulling the wings off flies.’ ”

“Stop! Stop it!” Mrs. Reyerling put her hands over her ears and ran into the bedroom.

They could hear the thud of her body as she flung herself across the bed. She didn’t weep, but heavy, anguished breathing rose and fell in the humid air, the breathing of a wounded animal.

Sally’s belligerence was gone. She stood scratching the side of her neck where the flush had been, looking ashamed of herself. “I guess I ought to keep my temper more.”

“I suppose we all should.”

“What I said was the truth, but not the whole truth. The whole truth — well, that’s hard to get at, the why of everything. I guess Myrt had her reasons for wanting Violet to be married, to be settled down and safe. It’s not her fault that she judged Eddie wrong.” She lapsed into silence.

“I’d better leave,” Charlotte said. “If there’s anything I can do to help Mrs. Reyerling, I’ll be at the Siesta Motel.”

“I know it. It just opened. We already got so many nobody’s making money any more.”

“Perhaps I can drive you back to work.”

“No thanks. I’m through for the day. I’d stay here and make Myrt some tea. She’ll snap out of it. I looked after her the day she got the telegram about Tom dying.” She added, with a sad little sigh, “Maybe we don’t act like friends, sometimes, but we are.”

Charlotte stepped out into the hall. She had the feeling that the girl had spoken the truth. She and Myrtle had a bond of friendship that would survive the bickerings, as well as the tragedies, of day-today existence.

On the street below, the rays of the late afternoon sun shot through the plate-glass windows of stores and ricocheted off the sidewalks and the white stucco walls of buildings. The heat was palpable, like a layer of jelly, through which the cars crawled and the pedestrians moved sluggishly.

Only the children hurried, boys on bicycles weaving through the traffic with careless ease, and grade-school girls, intent and purposeful, impatient for the next minute, the next week, the next year.

Charlotte unlocked her car. She thought of Violet walking up and down this same street, softer than the other girls, not quite so forceful, so decisive. (And Mrs. Reyerling had known this about Violet, perhaps — had tried to protect her and blundered.)

She had a feeling of discontent, of failure. The further she plunged into Violet’s life, the murkier and more diffuse it became. It was like diving into a strange lake, diving deeper and deeper and gradually realizing that the lake had no bottom, only a constantly moving silt that would never settle. One could reach out and grasp at the silt — as Violet herself had reached out and grasped in her final moments — but when the fist was opened it contained only a few grains of sand and the marks of fingernails on one’s own flesh.

15

She turned the car around and headed back in the direction of the motel. She wondered if Easter had arrived in town yet and what he was up to. Perhaps the girl Sally would be too afraid of losing her job to tell him about the tie Rawls had kept. Or perhaps he wouldn’t see Sally at all. She might be gone by the time he reached Mrs. Reyerling’s apartment and it was unlikely that Mrs. Reyerling would tell Easter about her and give Sally a chance to repeat her story.

She felt obscurely pleased that Easter might never find out about the episode in the motel but she didn’t understand why she should feel this way. The episode didn’t involve her personally. It concerned only the nameless, faceless man who had left a tie in a motel bathroom and the seed of a child in Violet’s womb. She realized that she was afraid of Easter. Though he couldn’t harm her, couldn’t even touch her, the fear was growing, stupidly, irrationally. What had he said on the telephone last night...? That he was driving up “unofficially.” This could mean that, officially, the case was closed. She suddenly hoped that it was, closed and filed away forever in a steel drawer.

She had an early dinner at a drive-in on Main Street. When she arrived back at her motel the sun was settling into a pillow of pink clouds and Mr. Coombs had turned on his red neon vacancy sign. He was still sitting in the kitchen chair, looking strangely dwarfed by the background of huge trees. He had finished his comics for the day, piled them neatly on the wooden step with a stone on top to keep his dreams from blowing away. Captives, they fussed and fluttered in the rising wind.

Mr. Coombs nodded, and tipped an invisible hat “Evening.”

“Good evening.”

“Cooling off some. Still too hot inside, though. If you want to sit out for a spell, I’ll bring you a chair.”

“No thanks, don’t bother.”

Mr. Coombs slapped at a mosquito on his forearm. “You get in touch with Myrtle Reyerling all right?”

“Yes.”

“Her kid sister died. A genuine tragedy.”

“I heard about it.”

“O’Gorman, her name was. I know her husband, we went to school together. He worked in a bar about a quarter-mile up the road, but I hear he blew town.”

“What bar?”

“Sullivan’s. Sullivan’s been dead for ten years, but they still call it that.” He stopped, looking a little embarrassed. “If you should want a drink there are places better than Sullivan’s. I mean, it’s not a very high-class establishment, that’s what I mean.”

A car with a skiff strapped to its top turned in from the highway and Mr. Coombs waddled over to meet it.

The sign, Sullivan’s Log Cabin, was hung between two posts just off the highway, but the building itself was set a hundred yards back from the road in a grove of redwoods. There was a cleared space for parking to the left of the sign. Charlotte left her car there and began walking up the footpath to the bar. There had once been a string of lights along the path but the bulbs had worn out or been broken; only the wires and empty sockets remained, and fragments of glass that crunched under Charlotte’s feet In spite of the brisk wind a sour smell rose from the ground, as if a long succession of drunks had tottered down the path, paused to be sick, and gone on. In the east a full moon was rising but its pallid light couldn’t penetrate the trees, and Charlotte had to feel her way timidly along the path.

She stopped suddenly and looked back over her shoulder — an instinctive movement; she’d heard nothing behind her, but she had an overwhelming impulse to look around.

A man stepped out from behind a tree, a tall man with massive sloping shoulders that gave his body an aspect of menace.

“Hello, Charlotte.”

“Oh. I... you startled me.”

“I hope so,” Easter said. He sounded angry. “Quite a fast one you pulled, coming here ahead of me.”

“I didn’t intend it as a ‘fast one.’ I merely drove up to...”

“Get some fresh air. I know. Well, now that fate and a mutual interest in fresh air has brought us together, let me buy you a drink.”

“No thanks.”

“Weren’t you on your way into Sullivan’s?”

“No.”

“Just out for a stroll, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t snap. It’s unbecoming.” He took her arm. “Come on, Charlotte. You and I have some things to discuss.”

“What things?”

“Things,” he said vaguely.

His hand on her arm was firm and surprisingly reassuring. She realized that this strange, somber place frightened her, and her fear of Easter was lost in the more immediate fear of walking alone up the dark path.

He matched his step to hers. “I talked to Mrs. Reyerling. She told me about the ‘nice-looking lady’ who claimed to be a friend of Violet’s.”

“Oh?”

“About the only additional fact that I learned about Violet was that she couldn’t swim. But — there was a girl with Mrs. Reyerling in the apartment, a Miss Morris. She seemed very quiet, very nervous.”

“Well, I didn’t make her quiet and nervous, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“I didn’t imply it. But it’s a thought — maybe you did.”

“How?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Easter said.

“I like to see you guess, you’re so good at it.”

“All right, I’ll guess that she gave you some information and you asked her not to tell me for some reason. You’re quite a devious character, Charlotte, in spite of that honest pan, that let’s-put-all-our-cards-on-the-table look.”

“You’re awfully quarrelsome, aren’t you?”

“I don’t think so. I get along all right with other people.”

“So do I. By the way, I don’t very much like being leaped at from behind trees. It’s cute and boyish and all that, but it gives me a pain.”

His teeth gleamed white in the darkness. “I’ll have to keep on giving you a pain if I can’t get any other reaction.”

Sullivan’s was a long narrow building made of logs, with Acme on Tap written across the front window in green neon. Inside, a middle-aged man in levis was playing two nickel slot-machines alternating between them with such quick precision that he seemed to be working a machine in a factory rather than enjoying himself. At the bar two men were studying a racing form, checking selections with a pencil, conferring in whispers, checking again. Sullivan’s had an air of deadly earnestness.

The bartender was young and bored.

“Beer for me, please,” Charlotte said.

“Make it two. Easter flipped a coin on the counter. “Things slow tonight, eh?”

“Slow every night at this time. It’s too early. The afternoon drunks haven’t had a chance to sober up and come back again.”

Easter sipped his beer. It tasted metallic. “I see O’Gorman’s not around any more.”

“He quit last week. You a friend of his?”

“We have a lot in common.”

“I heard just tonight that he’s back in town,” the bartender said.

“Good. I’d like to catch up with him again.”

“I figure it’s just a rumor, though. This guy that claims he saw him said O’Gorman was driving a new Ford convertible. O’Gorman’s car was an old Plymouth that couldn’t do fifty if it was going downhill. You don’t get rich tending bar, believe you me.”

“Funny if he’s in town and didn’t call me. I’m kind of disappointed.”

“Yeah?” The bartender blinked. “I wouldn’t be too disappointed.”

“If he shows, tell him Easter is looking for him, Jim Easter.”

“He won’t show. He stuck me with a bum check for ten dollars. That and the convertible don’t make sense, unless the car’s hot.”

“Maybe it is.”

“A cop, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t want any trouble here.”

“You won’t get any.”

“That’s a promise. I hope.” He ambled down to the other end of the bar and began talking to the two men who were bent over the racing form.

“So that’s the real reason you came up here,” Charlotte said. “Not to talk to Violet’s sister, but to look for O’Gorman and Voss.”

“Both. There was an off-chance that O’Gorman might be stupid enough to come home. In fact, he may not even know there’s a warrant out for him and Voss. The last report I had on O’Gorman was that he was heading north. He sold his ‘38 Plymouth at Crescent City for a hundred and fifty dollars. That’s about fifty dollars less than the list price, and after the deal was closed the new owner got a little suspicious about it. He called the local police and they called us.” He drained his glass. “This is the first I’ve heard about the Ford convertible, though. It makes it fairly certain that he’s around here someplace, not to stay, probably, but to do a little showing off in front of the home-town folks.”

“How could he buy a new car? He had no money.”

“He has now. What I’d like to know is where he got it. Any ideas?”

“No.”

“Sure of that?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Not even one tiny idea?”

“No! What are you getting at? I... you’re confusing me. You don’t think that I gave O’Gorman the money? I didn’t. When I went there, he and Voss had already gone.”

“Let’s be confused together,” Easter said lightly. “You know, I went to a lot of trouble for the privilege of buying you a beer.”

“Trouble?”

“Of course I didn’t think it would end up the way it did. I’m an incurable optimist. I figured that you would drive up here with me and give me a chance to parade my wit and charm etcetera, and we would return home, you with the first flush of love on your cheeks, and me feeling the same way as I did when I started. As I do now. Well,” he added, “it didn’t work out.”

“I’m beginning to see a little light.”

“Yes? Tell me about it.”

“It concerns a doctor I know called Bill Blake.”

“Blake? Yes, I believe I know him too.” He was smiling. “In fact we went to college together. I introduced him to the girl he married.”

“You also introduced him to the idea of calling me up and offering to...”

“Well, don’t get sore about it.”

“I’m not sore. I’m boiling.”

“You ought to be flattered.”

“You planned everything.”

“Not quite everything,” he said dryly. “I underestimated your obstinacy, or whatever quality a woman like you has that makes it impossible for her to see what’s good for her.”

“You’re good for me, are you?”

“I am,” he said. “Ballard isn’t.”

“Please leave him out of this.”

“How can I? You think you’re in love with the man.”

“I think so and I am.”

“You intend to marry him.”

“When it becomes possible, yes, of course I’ll marry him.”

“The thought makes me sick.” He ordered another beer, but when it came he didn’t drink it. He kept tracing a letter with his forefinger on the mist that appeared on the outside of the glass. B, B, and then again, B. “I have an interesting theory about you, Charlotte.”

“Have you?”

“I think the reason you picked Ballard is because you unconsciously wanted to avoid marriage. By falling in love with a man who couldn’t marry you anyway, your problem was solved for you, at least temporarily. Until his wife dies. Or something.”

“What do you mean, or something?”

“Just or something.” He erased all the B’s from his glass with one swipe of his palm. “People do die, you know. Like Violet.”

She stared at him, her eyes hostile. “If you’re implying that Gwen Ballard might possibly kill herself, I assure you you’re wrong. She isn’t the type.”

“You know her, then?”

“She’s been a patient of mine for a year.”

“Well,” he said. “Well. That’s very interesting. I don’t suppose you’ve ever been tempted to slip a little prussic acid in her cough medicine.”

“No,” she said steadily. “I’ve never been tempted. And I consider the remark incredibly boorish.”

His face had gone suddenly grave. “I’m glad it shocked you. It was intended to. If anything ever hap-pens to Mrs. Ballard, you’ll be hearing lots of remarks like that. You’re asking for them. You’re not only her doctor, you’re her husband’s girlfriend. That’s boorish too, eh?” When she turned away without answering, he added, “I suggest, very seriously, that you turn Mrs. Ballard over to another doctor.”

She was too proud to tell him that she had already tried. “Thanks for the advice.”

“You have a lot to lose, Charlotte. Stop leading with your chin... Now I suppose you’re sore again.”

“I’ve never stopped. You’re simply — simply impossible.”

“Now that’s a silly remark,” Easter said patiently. “I’m the most possible man you know.”

“I want to leave.”

“The door’s open.” He saw her hesitation. “What’s the matter, afraid of the dark?”

“No!”

“Well, go on. Leave.”

“Thanks, I will.”

“By the way if you want to get in touch with me, I’m staying at the Rose Court Motel. That’s where Miss Morris works. I thought it would be a nice place to stay. She’s such an interesting character.”

Charlotte walked to the door. She felt Easter’s eyes on her back, and she wondered if her stocking seams were straight

16

At the motel, there was a light in Mr. Coombs’s office but the door was closed and the blinds were drawn. A radio was turned on inside, a crime program, Charlotte thought as she drove past and heard the loud, heated voices and the eerie background of organ music.

She parked the Buick in the carport beside Number Four. She was still breathing hard, angrily, as she unlocked the door of the cabin and fumbled for the light switch on the wall. Before her hand reached the switch the light clicked on, as startling as a flash of lightning.

“Surprise,” Voss said with a low satisfied chuckle. “Hey look, Eddie. She’s surprised all right, ain’t she?”

“She sure is.” Eddie grinned self-consciously and stroked the lapel of his green and brown plaid coat. They were both wearing brand-new outfits that were almost identical. Plaid suits, with vests, and brown suede loafers, and ties with the picture of a half-naked woman hand-painted on each.

With a motion so swift that Charlotte had no time to forestall it, Voss reached behind her and slipped the bolt into place across the door.

She didn’t try to unbolt it. She made no physical movement at all.

“Surprised, eh?” Voss repeated. “I kind of thought you would be.”

“Get out,” she said, “or I’ll call the manager.”

Voss made a half-circle around her and sat down on the luggage rack at the foot of the bed. “The manager? That’s a hot one. Why, Coombs is an old school chum of Eddie’s. That’s how we come here. Eddie wanted to drop in on Coombs and say good-bye, and maybe show off his snazzy new outfit.”

“Who’s a show-off?” Eddie muttered. “Say that again. Who’s a show-off?”

“Oh, take a joke, can’t you, and stop interrupting me. Like I was saying, we came to pay Coombs a little social call, and I just happened to glance at the register in his office and see your name. I figured I better wait around and find out what’s your angle.” His eyes roamed the room. “Not a bad little dump, eh, Eddie? But this is peanuts compared to how we’ll be living some day.” His gaze returned to Charlotte and settled there. “We’re leaving the country, Eddie and me.”

“Good.”

“Came up here to say good-bye to the folks, and then we’re heading for better climes, like they say.” He paused, frowning. “Hey, Eddie, take off your hat. Ain’t you got no manners? And offer the lady a chair — she looks like she could use one.”

Eddie took off his hat. He had a new duck-tailed haircut, the kind affected by some of the gangs of juveniles Charlotte had seen on Olive Street.

She said, “I’ll stand, thank you, and Eddie looks better with his hat on.”

“Don’t act so snippy. Remember, we still have some information about you that wouldn’t do you much good if it got around the right circles.” But he didn’t say it threateningly. He was smiling, in fact, and the smile broke into a chuckle, as if he had some secret and wonderful joke. “The right circles. Oh dear, oh dear. I guess my sense of humor gets the best of me sometimes.”

Eddie was laughing too, in a feeble, puzzled way, as if he didn’t know what the joke was, but was willing to go along for the ride.

“Yes, sir,” Voss said. “It’s better climes for Eddie and me.”

“Where did you get the money?”

“We earned it. That’s a good one, eh, Eddie? We earned it.”

The two men began laughing again, gleefully, like a couple of boys who had outwitted a parent.

“I don’t claim to be extra smart,” Voss said at last, wiping his eyes. “Just lucky. For once I was in the right place at the right time and I got the right answers.”

“Answers to what?”

“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you exactly how it happened. Eddie and me was walking up the street and suddenly the guy in front of us started to toss thousand-dollar bills in the air, and Eddie and me picked them up. How’s that?”

“Fine,” Charlotte said. “I wouldn’t count on those better climes, though.”

“Yeah? Why not?”

“There’s a warrant out for your arrest. Easter’s looking for you.”

“Easter? The cop?”

“Yes.”

Voss’s face crinkled up in incredulity and outraged innocence. “We haven’t done anything. What would he be looking for us for? We’re innocent.”

“Maybe about the old man,” Eddie said. “Maybe the old man died.”

“We didn’t touch the old man,” Voss said. “We was out on the porch having a friendly little argument when suddenly, oops, he starts to vomit, the vomit got bloody.” He broke off, frowning. “Damn near turned my stomach. So the old man died, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Well, they can’t pin any rap on me. I wouldn’t demean myself bumping off a two-bit pickpocket like Tiddles. Murder’s a sucker’s racket.”

“So is robbery. You stole my purse.”

“Purse?”

“You didn’t plan to steal it, you meant only to frighten me. When I went down to Olive Street that first night to see Violet, you were afraid that I’d changed my mind about helping her dispose of the baby. That baby was valuable to you; as long as Violet was carrying it she was a means of making money for you. So you headed me off while I was talking to the old man Tiddles. You were waiting for me when I got home, intending to scare me off. But when you saw my purse you couldn’t resist stealing it, could you?”

“I didn’t steal any purse,” Voss said, with a sly glance at Eddie.

The cigarette hanging from Eddie’s lip gave a nervous wiggle. “Me neither! Me neither, I tell you.”

“Who said you did?”

“You looked at me.”

“Sure, I looked at you. I look at everybody. I got eyes, ain’t I?”

“You don’t have to use them creepy.”

“O.K. O.K. I apologize that I got creepy eyes. That suit you?”

“No, it don’t suit me. You looked at me like I stole that purse. I don’t like it.”

“Stop flapping your tonsils. That’s what this dame wants, don’t you get it? She wants you to talk your way into a trap.”

Eddie turned his scowl towards Charlotte. “Where’s this trap?”

“There is no trap,” Charlotte said. “I told you the police are looking for you. If you’re sensible, you’ll give yourselves up. You’ll have a chance to prove your innocence.”

“How can I prove my...”

“Shut up!” Voss yelled at him. “Shut up!”

“Sure. But how can...”

“Come on, let’s get out of here.” Voss was almost hopping up and down in his excitement “Come on, step on it.”

“Sure. Sure.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Charlotte said. “But you’ve made so many already that one more won’t matter.”

“Yeah?” Voss unbolted the door. “You make your mistakes, sister, and I’ll make mine. Come on, Eddie, get the lead out of your seat.”

“Where are we...?”

“Shut up!”

Voss closed the door very quickly as if he was afraid that Charlotte would follow them out, screaming. Ten seconds later she heard the car shoot past with a grinding of gears. She opened the door and went out, in the hope of catching the license number. But Voss had cut the car lights; she couldn’t even tell which direction he took on the highway.

Mr. Coombs trudged, yawning, out of his office. “Thought I heard a car.”

“So did I.”

“Some friends of yours were here a while back. They get in touch with you?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“Local boys who made good, from the looks of them. Funny thing, I never thought Eddie had the brains to make good. It goes to show... Well, about time for me to be closing up and getting my beauty sleep, ha ha.”

“I’d like to use the phone first, if I may.”

“Private call?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll stay out here then. I never like to eavesdrop. Bad business, eavesdropping. Bad business, and bad for business.”

She called Sullivan’s bar, but Easter had already left, and the man who answered the phone at the Rose Court Motel told her that Mr. Easter, in Number Twenty-one, hadn’t come back yet.

There was nothing to do but wait. She sat down at Mr. Coombs’s desk and picked up the current issue of Thrilling Love Comics. She felt like weeping, for the innocents like Mr. Coombs, and Violet and Gwen, and for the lost and twisted people like Voss, and the angry, stupid ones like Eddie O’Gorman.

17

She left the motel at sunrise the next morning and by eight o’clock she was at the California border. Here, inside a bridgelike structure were three gates guarded by state inspectors in uniform.

Charlotte slipped into the empty middle lane and stopped. At the gate on her left a woman with four children and a dog were standing beside an old station wagon with a New Jersey license. They were all, including the dog, eating cherries out of a box as if their lives depended on it.

Between bites, the woman registered her complaint. “You can take cherries from Wyoming to Idaho. You can take cherries from Idaho to Oregon. But you can’t take cherries from Oregon to California. No. California, They take cherries from you.”

“Madam,” the inspector said, “we’ve gone into that already. We did not take any of your cherries. We gave you the privilege of eating the cherries here at file border.”

“I paid for those cherries and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t take them with me. It’s a free country. Just who does President Truman think he is? Either he steals my cherries, or he forces my kids to eat them so fast they maybe’ll get the colic.”

“It is not President Truman, madam. It’s the fruit fly. These diagrams on the wall here illustrate the life cycle of the fruit fly...”

“Fruit fly. Now I’ve heard everything. Hurry up, Tommy, Janet... Not one of us moves an inch till all those cherries are eaten. Fruit fly. Next maybe you’ll start searching my dog for fleas. Maybe the dogs in California don’t have fleas. They got butterflies, maybe, gold butterflies... Hurry up, Tommy.”

The little boy addressed as Tommy, after a sly glance at the inspector, cautiously slipped half a dozen cherries down the front of his shirt. He caught Charlotte’s eye and instantly assumed an expression of unassailable virtue.

Charlotte turned away, suppressing a smile. She noticed then, for the first time, the car that had stopped at the third gate. It was Easter’s car, but Easter wasn’t in it. He was standing beside a poster, watching her. She didn’t look at him. She looked at the poster. It showed how many millions of dollars of damage a pair of fruit flies could do.

He said, “Cute kid, that Tommy.”

“Are you following me?”

Easter shook his head. “If that isn’t just like you, Charlotte — there’s one main north-south highway and you think everyone behind you is deliberately following you.”

“I don’t think everyone is. Just you.”

“My dear Charlotte, I have to get home, too. I was hoping 101 would be big enough for both of us.”

An inspector approached, opened the back door of the car, and glanced around. “Any citrus fruits, lemons, oranges, limes...?”

“No fruit at all.”

“How about that box of cherries you bought at Grant’s Pass?” Easter said. “Cherries are teeming with fruit flies.”

“I didn’t buy any cherries,” Charlotte told the inspector. “This man is just trying to delay me.”

“I have to check up anyway,” the inspector said. “May I have your trunk keys, please?”

She handed him the keys, and he went around to the back of the car and opened the trunk.

“See you later,” Easter said, and climbed back into his car. He honked the horn as he went past, and waved his hand at her.

She kept the speedometer at seventy-five for the next hundred miles, but she didn’t catch up with Easter. She didn’t even know why she wanted to, except to prove to him that though she was a woman she was just as efficient and skillful a driver as any man.

She gave up the attempt at Eureka where she had to stop for gas and for lunch. She ate at a hamburger stand. She was amazed at herself for trying to overtake Easter, and at all the other rather childish things she’d said and done since she met him. The poise, the self-control, that she’d cultivated for years seemed to slip away when she was with Easter, leaving her as gauche as a high-school girl, quick to blush, quick to be angered or take offense.

If I can’t catch up with him, Charlotte thought, I will lag away behind. I will make him wonder what’s happened to me. No, no, that’s absurd. I mustn’t even think of such a thing. I must be myself, not this half-aggressive, half-coy female. I will drive home in the ordinary way, as if Easter didn’t exist. I should be home by five.

It was nearly eight when she turned into her driveway.

In the headlights of the car the overhead door of the double garage loomed, a blank wall of white. The door was closed, and she’d left it open. Fear alerted her senses, quickened her imagination. The night wind, which only a moment ago had felt fresh against her skin, now seemed to have a treacherous softness about it. A laughing bird taunted her from his perch on a telephone wire.

She had left the garage door open and now it was closed. It was puzzling, but there was no reason to be afraid. She tried to convince herself that anyone could have closed it — Lewis, Miss Schiller, the postman, a child playing in the neighborhood, perhaps even Easter, trying to startle her as he’d startled her when he stepped from behind the tree at Sullivan’s — but common sense told her that none of these was a real possibility. Easter was no cruel practical joker and neither Lewis nor Miss Schiller had any reason to come here, knowing she was away. The child, the postman — she had thought of them only because she wanted quite desperately to believe that the closed door meant nothing, held no secrets.

She left the headlights on. As she walked towards the garage she remembered Easter’s picture of Violet’s face lathered with death-foam. But the sea is far away, she thought, not even visible at night like this; and I can swim. I can swim a mile if I have to.

It was the first time since she’d become involved in the case that she was afraid of physical violence directed against herself. Her vague diffuse fears (of Easter, of the old house on Olive Street) had synthesized into something so tight and compact it could fit on the point of a needle and pierce her spine.

The door was unlocked and, she saw now, not even fully closed. There were three or four inches of space at the bottom, as if someone in urgent haste had slammed the door down and it had bounced up a little and stuck there.

She had to strain to open it, breathing hard, her whole body tensed, braced against attack. But there was no attack, no one in the garage at all. Only a car, parked on the right side where Lewis always parked his — a small convertible with the top up.

She turned on the ceiling light and walked over to the front of the convertible. It was a blue Ford. She had seen many of them on the streets, but she didn’t know anyone who owned one and she could think of no reason for the car to be parked in her garage. It had been driven at high speed — gray and yellow blobs of insects splattered the windshield and the headlights and a small dead bird was caught in the chromium grillwork. She felt the hood of the engine with her hand; it was cold. The car had been standing there for some time.

A Ford convertible, the kind of car Eddie was said to have bought. But Voss and Eddie were miles away by this time, perhaps already out of the country, as they had planned. “It’s better climes for Eddie and me.”

She got into the front seat and turned on the dashboard fights. The ignition key was gone; the car had been left there to stay in her garage. There was no way of getting rid of it except to push it upgrade by herself, which was impossible, or to call the Auto Club for a tow truck.

She turned sideways to step out of the car and a glint of metal on the back seat caught her eye. She leaned over the edge of the seat and saw that Voss and Eddie had reached their better climes.

They were curled up on the floor like a pair of lovers in a fatal embrace. Voss’s head was buried against Eddie’s chest; there was nothing to show how he had died. But Eddie’s face was upturned, pinned against the door, and on his forehead two neat dark holes had been bored. Death had come to him more easily than to Violet. He looked peacefully asleep except for the extra eyes on his fore head.

On the seat lay an ordinary jackknife with the large blade pulled out, a knife like the one Eddie had used the previous night. He’d taken it out of his vest pocket, and flipped the blade open and cleaned his fingernails while Voss was talking. The knife lay now on the back seat of the car, a childish, impotent weapon of defense against the swift certainty of a gun. Eddie had had no chance to use the knife; its blade was unstained, gleaming blandly in the light of the garage.

She stumbled out of the car, half paralyzed, not by the shock of seeing wo dead bodies, but by the realization that there was no way now that she could get rid of the car and he bodies. They were hers, they were hanging from her neck like the mariner’s albatross. A scream died in her throat.

Outside, the bird was still laughing at her from the telephone wire.

18

A car passed on the road, not speeding as cars usually did on Mountain Drive at night, but groping along, as if the driver was searching for a certain house, a certain person. The car paused, reversed gear, and braked to a stop outside her house.

She ran out of the garage and pulled down the door just as Easter stepped through the wooden gate into the yard. He didn’t speak for a minute. His eyes traveled from her face to the Buick with the headlights still on, to the closed door of the garage.

“I’ll open the garage for you,” he said.

“No.” She made a convulsive movement of protest that stiffened her whole body, like an electric shock. “No, thanks.”

“All right, do it yourself.” He added something under his breath that sounded like “damn emancipated females.”

“I... I’d prefer to leave the car out.” Her voice was unnatural, high and tight, as if hands were squeezing her larynx. “I never know when I’ll have to make a call.”

“Blake’s taking your calls.”

“Stop arguing with me. I’m — tired. If you don’t mind, I wish you’d go away.”

“You’re always wishing I’d go away. It’s painful to me. Easter, Easter, go away, don’t come again some other...”

“Please. I really am tired.”

“I know. I won’t keep you. I came to see whether you got home all right.”

“Well, I did. I did, You can see that.”

“I can see a lot of things,” he said slowly. “You’re nervous as hell. What’s up?”

“Nothing. You... you didn’t really come here to see if I arrived safely. You’re spying on me.”

“Why should I?”

“Because you think that I’m mixed up in all these terrible things.”

“They’re not so terrible — a suicide, a natural death — no murder.” He repeated, “No murder,” in an insinuating tone as if he expected her to contradict him. She said nothing.

He walked over to her car, turned off the headlights and removed the key ring from the ignition. He tossed it to her. It fell in the grass at her feet and she watched it dully, as if her mind were too dazed to understand the concept of catching something that was thrown at her.

“Your keys,” Easter said.

“Keys? Oh. Yes, of course.”

They knelt, simultaneously, to pick up the key ring and their arms touched. She drew back as if he’d aimed a blow at her.

He picked up the key ring first. “I’m poison to you, eh?”

“No. Not poison.” A jackknife, a gun, foam.

“You won’t be making any calls tonight. I’ll put your car away for you and bring your luggage into the house.”

“No! I won’t let...”

“What’s the matter? Is there something in the house you don’t want me to see?”

“No.”

“Ballard, perhaps?”

“There’s nothing in the house,” she said contemptuously. “Come in and see. Snoop all you want to.”

“Since you put it so charmingly, I will.”

He got her week-end bag out of the car while she unlocked the front door.

She turned on all the lights in the sitting room: “There. See anything?”

“No.”

“No guns or b — bodies?”

He looked at her quizzically. “I hardly expected to find any guns or bodies. Just Ballard.”

“Why do you want to see Lewis?”

“For one thing, his wife reported him missing this morning.”

“Missing? Lewis?”

“But that’s just one thing. There are other things... Where is he?”

“I don’t know. And if Lewis wants to go away, it’s not my business, and it’s certainly not yours, Mr. Easter.”

“You might be surprised.”

“You have nothing against Lewis except that I love him.”

“The way I feel, that’s plenty to have against a man. Even if it were all.”

His intensity disturbed her. She didn’t know what to say or do. She stood near the door, her hat and gloves still on, her handbag under her arm. She said finally, “Sit down and I’ll find something to drink.”

“I’ll stand, thanks. I feel more like a policeman when I’m standing and less like a guy calling on the woman he loves. I’m both. But right now I’m standing. Where’s Ballard?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since the night before last at dinner-time. I told him I was going to drive up to Oregon.”

“Did you tell him why?”

“Yes.

“And he didn’t want you to go?”

“He didn’t care.”

“You’re lying.”

“He didn’t care much.”

“Plenty.”

“Stop beating around the bush like this,” she said passionately. “If he cared at all, it was because the trip meant that I wouldn’t see him for a couple of days. What other reason would he have for caring whether I went to Ashley or not?”

“I can think of several.”

“You. You can think of anything against Lewis. He told me that’s what you were — a troublemaker.”

“That’s what I am.” He lit a cigarette. There was no draft in the room. The smoke moved directly, purposefully, to the ceiling. “By the way, I have news for you about Voss and Eddie.”

She felt the blood draining out of her face. She turned and began taking off her gloves and her hat, fussing with her purse — any kind of quick movement to distract his eye from her pallor.

“They’ve disappeared. Sunk without a trace. I’m a little disappointed about losing them. I was hoping to ask Eddie a few questions about where he got the money to buy his new car.”

You can still ask him. But he won’t answer.

The telephone began to ring. She looked towards it, dazedly, as if she’d never heard a phone ring and was surprised that the curious black object could make such a noise.

“Answer it,” Easter said. “Or I will, if you like.”

“No. No, I will.” She crossed the room and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Dr. Keating, it’s me, Gwen Ballard. I’ve been trying to get you all day. Miss Schiller kept telling me to phone Dr. Blake. But I wouldn’t. I said, no, Dr. Keating’s my doctor, I won’t see anyone else.”

Charlotte glanced over her shoulder at Easter. He hadn’t moved, but his body was tense as if every nerve cell was straining to help him hear what was being said at the other end of the line. She put her hand over the receiver and said, “This is a private call from one of my patients. You wouldn’t be interested.”

He didn’t speak, just looked at her, unblinking.

She took her hand away from the receiver. “Is there anything the matter?”

“I’ve had another attack.” Gwen’s breathing was labored, her voice faint and tremulous. “I’m alone. I’m afraid.”

“There’s nothing to worry about Take it easy and...”

“I must see you. Please come, Dr. Keating — Charlotte — I must talk to someone, a friend.”

A friend. Gwen, alone and in terror, calling to her, of all the people in the city, as a friend. Charlotte felt a nausea rising from her stomach, souring her throat “Has anything happened?”

“He tried to kill me. Yes! He tried to kill me! He said he hated me, he’d always hated me!”

The pitch and volume of Gwen’s voice had risen. Charlotte saw that Easter had heard, not the words perhaps, but the notes of hysteria. She had to quiet Gwen before Easter got suspicious. She said, “I’ll be right over. Ten minutes.”

“Oh, thank you, Dr. Keating, thank you.”

Charlotte replaced the phone. “I have to make a call.”

“So I heard.”

“If you’ll excuse me now...” She looked pointedly towards the door.

Easter raised one eyebrow. “You want me to leave?”

“It’s customary.”

“Suppose I like it here. It’s cozy and warm, and I expect Ballard to call.”

His reaction was something she hadn’t foreseen. She’d thought he would leave when she did, giving her a chance, later, to plan what to do about Voss and O’Gorman. There was no way of forcing him to leave except — and the irony stung — to call the police.

Silently, she picked up her hat and purse and went out the door. She didn’t look back, and Easter didn’t speak.

As she backed her car out of the driveway she saw that she had made a fatal error.

In her hurry to close the garage door when she heard Easter’s car, she had forgotten to turn out the light. Its beams shone gaily out of the little window at the side of the garage, as if inviting anyone to come in and see for himself.

19

Nine o’clock. An offshore wind was blowing and the palm trees cringed and leaned away from it, waving their frantic arms.

The Ballard house couldn’t be seen from the street. It appeared suddenly, at a curve in the cypress-lined walk, a handsome house of oiled redwood set in a formal garden. Charlotte had always disliked this garden. The flower beds were too meticulously planned; they seemed to have no connection with nature any more. They were Gwen’s and not the earth’s. The lawn, too, was so immaculate that it was impossible to imagine real people walking on it.

And real people never did, Charlotte thought. The lawn wasn’t to be walked on, but to be admired from the dining alcove or from the picture window in the living room. Even the collies, whom Gwen loved best, were not allowed on the grass. They had their own yard behind the house, fenced runways and miniature houses and a brooder for the bitches with new pups.

A light was kept on for them all night. Charlotte could see several of the dogs watching her cautiously through the wire fencing, their tails half raised, as if they weren’t sure yet that she was a friend.

She spoke to them softly and one of the tails began to wag, slowly, with dignity, like a feathered fan waved by a condescending duchess.

The other dogs, Gwen’s three favorites, were upstairs with her in her bedroom. They lay beside her bed, a protective phalanx. Gwen had told them to lie down and they had obeyed; but their eyes were restless, they followed Charlotte’s every move, they searched Gwen’s face for reassurance, and now and then the big sable-colored male let out a whimper like a child.

“Doctor... doctor, I can’t breathe.”

“You’re trying too hard. Relax.”

“I will. I’ll relax. I won’t — choke?”

“No. The attack’s nearly over. See for yourself. Put your fingers here on your wrist. There, feel your pulse?”

“I guess so.”

“It’s not much faster than mine.”

“It isn’t?”

“Of course not.”

Gwen’s breathing had steadied as soon as her attention was no longer focused on the necessity of breathing. Charlotte often encountered the same reaction in children who were afraid to go to sleep because they might stop breathing.

Gwen’s head sank back among the lace-trimmed pillows. Charlotte saw, then, the bruise on the side of her neck, a recent bruise, still blue, about the size of a thumbnail.

Gwen saw her staring at the bruise, and she touched it with her finger, gently. “He tried to kill me. He said he would, some day, and now he’s tried. But he got frightened, perhaps the dogs frightened him with their growling. He let go of me suddenly and went up to his room and I haven’t seen him since. It was the night before last, just about this time.”

“The bruise isn’t serious,” She thought, not as serious as the bullet holes in Eddie’s forehead, the acrid choking water that Violet had swallowed in her fight for air. No, the bruise wasn’t serious, but the intent behind it was. She remembered what Lewis had said the last time she’d seen him: “I haven’t been drinking. Or at least only enough for medicinal purposes, to keep me from strangling my wife.” She wanted to say something to reassure both herself and Gwen, but all she could think of was, “People do odd things in moments of anger.”

“He wasn’t angry. I did nothing to make him angry. He came home that night, and I said, ‘Hello darling, where have you been?’ And he said, ‘In hell, I’ve been in hell.’ I was so surprised. Lewis always tells me where he’s been.”

No, he doesn’t, you fool, you pathetic fool. You make me hate myself, hate Lewis, hate life itself.

Gwen said softly, “You know my husband.”

“Yes.”

“You know him as he appears to you, but you can’t know him as he is. He’s a cruel man. He has no feelings. Other people are stones to him; he can pick them up or toss them aside or kick them around. He never thinks they’re human and can feel pain and despair just as he can.”

He’s not like that, Charlotte wanted to protest. He’s a good man, but he’s been warped by your narrowness, soured by your eternal sweetness. Don’t blame Lewis, or yourself either. It’s nobody’s fault. Fate tricked you both, and me, and even Easter. A four-ply trickery.

Gwen’s tiny mouth was twisted in perplexity. “It’s such a funny kind of cruelty he has. The more I do to please him, the more he despises me. He looks at me across the table at dinner and my heart turns cold. I try to be bright and amusing the way wives are supposed to. I even read a book about little stories to tell and interesting facts and things like that. But”... One slender arm rose and fell, in a gesture of futility. “The funny things I say aren’t funny, and the stupid things sound so much stupider when he’s watching me like that — as if I were a worm he’d like to crush under his heel.”

“You’ve never told me any of this before.”

“I have my pride,” Gwen said stiffly, “my reputation.”

“Of course.”

“No one will ever take that away from me, though Lewis tries.” She fussed with the pillows; they were tiny, scaled to her size, like everything else in the room. A little girl’s room, Charlotte thought, looking at the teddy bear propped on the chifforobe, the smiling French doll sitting at the window. The years were passing, but the little girl was afraid to grow up. Here, in her own room, she was immune to time. Though she no longer played with the teddy bear, it was there ready to be picked up, its soft furry body a comfort, a symbol of security and innocence. But the little girl was ageing, and with age came fear. Fear of the dark, fear of stopping breathing; other nameless fears that her heart knew — and it beat in futile frenzy like the heart of a frightened bird.

“I know you don’t believe that Lewis tried to kill me,” Gwen said. “But he did, and I know why. He has another woman. Why, you look surprised, Dr. Keating, almost as surprised as I was when I found out. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. It happens in the best of families. The husband gets tired of the wife and takes up with anyone he can find, a waitress or a shop girl or any kind of cheap slut with no more morals than a cat.”

Charlotte’s face was like stone.

“Do I sound bitter, Dr. Keating? Well, I am. It’s terrible, it’s a terrible thing knowing about this woman, yet not knowing who she is so I could go and talk to her, make her realize.”

“Realize what?”

Gwen blinked. “What? Well, that she’s breaking up a home, a marriage.”

She’s not, I’m not, breaking up anything, Charlotte thought. The home belongs to you and the dogs, and the marriage was broken long before you introduced me to Lewis, here in this very house. Nor am I a slut. I’m a respectable woman; I work hard, and when I’m lucky I even do some good.

“I think that’s where he is now,” Gwen said. “With her. I didn’t tell the police that when I called this morning. I was ashamed to. I just told them that my husband was missing. Then, late this afternoon, a policeman came here to the house. He said he wanted to look around, to see if he could find any evidence of where Lewis might have gone. He had an unusual name — Easter. Do you know anything about police work, Dr. Keating?”

“Very little.”

“I just wondered. It seemed to me that this policeman behaved very oddly. He went up to Lewis study and I heard him typing. Isn’t that odd? Why would he want to use Lewis’ typewriter?”

“I don’t know,” Charlotte said. But he had a reason, he always has a reason.

“Then when he came downstairs again he asked me all kinds of funny questions.”

“Funny?”

“I thought they were. He asked about any trips that Lewis and I have taken since Christmas. Well, of course, I don’t take trips. There’s my heart, for one thing, and for another, I love my little home. I’m happy here. I don’t need the excitement that Lewis seems to crave... I told the policeman that. He said he wanted to know about the little trips and holidays that Lewis took because Lewis might have gone to one of the same places again. People repeat themselves, he said.” She twisted a strand of her fair hair with thin, nervous fingers. “I didn’t tell him that Lewis choked me. I have my pride.”

There was a long silence. Charlotte thought of Easter, prowling around Lewis’ study, his eyes sharpened by hate... Easter, waiting for her at home, perhaps wandering out to the kitchen and from there seeing the light in the garage.

“If I knew where he is,” Gwen said, “I could sleep, I could stop worrying like this. But he’s been acting so strange nearly all week. The last dinner we had together two nights ago he hardly spoke at all. I was trying to make conversation so that Mrs. Peters wouldn’t suspect anything was wrong — she’s the cook and she loves to gossip. Well, I’d just read in the paper about that girl who drowned herself and I mentioned it to Lewis because I thought he’d be interested, but he told me to shut up, right in front of Mrs. Peters... That was a terrible thing, about the girl.”

“Yes.”

“I wonder, did she — suffer?”

“She must have.”

“But it was quick, wasn’t it? Of course. It must have been. Very quick. Oh, I hate to see things suffer. I could never be a doctor, like you. But I guess doctors get used to seeing suffering and death.”

“In a sense.”

“I never could. I’m too sensitive.” Her lower lip began to tremble. “At least the girl is dead. She’s out of things now. She has no more troubles. Oh, I’m so tired. So awfully tired.”

“I’ll give you a sleeping capsule.”

Gwen’s eyes widened in quick panic. “No. No, I won’t take anything. I must be alert, in case he comes back, in case he tries...”

“There’s little danger of that. But I could call Mrs. Peters and ask her to stay with you for tonight.”

“No. She has her own family, her own worries. Doctor — Dr. Keating, what would you do if you were in my place?”

“I don’t know. Go to a hotel, perhaps.”

“But the dogs. There’s no one to look after them.”

“I can’t advise you anyway,” Charlotte said slowly. “Personal problems can’t always be worked out by objective reasoning. What I would do might be the opposite of what would be good for you to do.”

“That’s right, isn’t it? My, you’re so sensible and intelligent! I wish you knew my husband better. He likes intelligent women, maybe because I’m so stupid.” One corner of her mouth curved in a sad little smile. “I wish I had everything under control in my private life, the way you must have. I bet you have no problems at all.”

For Charlotte, it was the final irony. She looked at the French doll on the window seat. Its painted smile was knowing.

20

Easter was waiting for her. There was no need to ask him if he had found Voss and Eddie: The garage was dark.

He looked at her across the room. All the lamps were still burning and every line and angle of his face was distinct, grim.

“You’ve got a bad case of trouble, Charlotte.”

In silence she went to the big window where Lewis’ chair was, and stared down at the lights of the city. It was only five nights ago that she’d stood in this same place and wondered which of the city lights belonged to Violet. She had told Lewis about Violet that night, she’d said, “Lewis, I think I made a mistake.”

Well, the mistake had grown, cancerously; its wild, malignant cells had spread from life to life until it covered them all, Violet and Eddie, Voss and his wife and the old man Tiddles; Easter and Lewis and Gwen and Mrs. Reyerling. Her mistake had infected each of them, but its final victim was herself, Charlotte Keating.

She said, without turning, “Have you reported it?”

“Not yet.”

“You will, though.”

“I have to.”

“I suppose you know it will mean the end of my life here, my work.”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes. The lids felt dry and dusty. “It’s ironic, isn’t it? I meant only to help Violet when I drove down to Olive Street that night. My duty seemed so clear, so inescapable. I didn’t want to go to that house. I was afraid of it. I remember thinking so many things had happened there that one more wouldn’t even be noticed. I was wrong. I’ve done quite a few wrong things, I suppose; pushed the wrong buttons, knocked on the wrong doors.”

“You still have a chance,” Easter said, “if you can find Ballard.”

“Do you hate him so much you must try to drag him into this?”

“He’s not big enough to hate. And he’s getting smaller by the minute.”

“You talk so oddly.”

“It will make sense if you’ll listen. Or don’t you want to listen?”

“I’m not sure. I’m — mixed up. All these hints about Lewis...”

“I’ve tried to let you down easy, Charlotte. You wouldn’t come down. You were treading clouds, still are. When a cloud gets too heavy, it rains. Stormy weather.”

“Talk straight, please.”

“Trying to,” Easter said. “Ballard didn’t tell you he knew Violet?”

“He didn’t know her.”

“He did. He sent her to you.”

“No! I won’t believe it!”

“You must. It’s true. The child was his. He sent her to you knowing how you felt about people in a jam, hoping you’d help Violet get rid of the child, help Violet and save his skin at the same time.”

“No.” The feeble denial stuck in her throat. “He told me — the night I met him on the breakwater — he said he didn’t even know Violet. I believed him. He was telling the truth, I’m sure of it.”

“He may have been telling the truth, as far as he knew it. Maybe he didn’t remember the girl; maybe he never even knew her name, until he saw her picture in the paper the next day, her picture and the name of the little town she came from. He knew then.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the ticking of the dock on the mantel, the passing of the restless minutes.

“I’m not guessing,” Easter said. “I know he sent Violet to you because your name and address on the card found in your purse were written on the typewriter in Ballard’s study.”

“You’re framing him. You’re manufacturing evidence against him.”

“I don’t operate like that,” he said flatly, “even for the love of a lady. Want more proof?”

“No.”

“You could use it.” He took a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and opened it for her to see. It was a photostatic copy of a sheet from the register of the Rose Court Motel, Ashley, Oregon, C. Vincent Rawls, Owner and Manager. Date, Feb. 26/49. Name, L. B. Ballard. Address, 48 °Corona del Mar, Salinda, California. Make of car, Cadillac, License, California 17Y205.

She couldn’t take her eyes off the name on the photostat. It had been written very carelessly and quickly, and she wasn’t sure whether the writing was Lewis’ or not. She said, “It doesn’t look exactly like Lewis’ writing.”

“It is.”

“And it proves nothing except that he stopped at Ashley for a night.”

“On February twenty-sixth.”

She didn’t reply, though she knew the significance of the date. It was the beginning of July now, and Violet had been four months gone with child when she died. But how could it have happened? Lewis wasn’t like that at all, Charlotte thought. He would never have looked at Violet — she was young enough to be his daughter, young and ignorant and not even pretty; and Lewis was a respectable man, a little stolid, a man who valued his place in the community and his reputation. Lewis and Violet. The thought made her sick. It stuck in her throat; it couldn’t be swallowed; it couldn’t be coughed up. Lewis and Violet. And the baby boy that had died with Violet was Lewis’ child; it might even have grown to look like him — the son that he’d always wanted, now in a garbage can in the morgue or already burned to dust in an incinerator. Poor Lewis, she thought. But running through her pity was an iron stripe of bitterness.

Easter was watching her, narrow-eyed. “I’m not interested in bringing Ballard to trial on moral grounds. That’s woman’s work. What he does with his spare weekends in Ashley or Cucamonga is no business of mine.”

“You’ve managed to make it your business. Do you also break into locked hotel rooms and peer over transoms and creep under...”

“I’m after a murderer,” Easter said. “Not a four-bit Romeo.”

She leaned her forehead against the window to steady herself. The lights of the city whirled, slowed, stopped. “Lewis is neither,” she said at last.

“He’s both.”

“No you have no proof.”

“I can’t prove that he killed Violet. But he’s made it easier for me by shooting Voss and O’Gorman and leaving the bodies in your garage.”

She turned to face him. “He wouldn’t do such a thing. Even if he were desperate, he wouldn’t involve me in such a mess. He loves me. You can laugh at that, but it’s true. He loves me.”

“He loves himself, too, and that’s the big passion. You’re running a poor second, Charlotte.”

She repeated stubbornly, “He would never do such a thing.”

“I admit it’s a pretty stupid idea to drive a convertible containing two bodies into your girlfriend’s garage. But I figure that he didn’t expect you back for a few days, and he intended to use the time to think himself out of the jam. When you look at it like that, Ballard was playing it smart. Your garage was practically the one safe place in town where he could hide the bodies until he planned a way to dispose of them.”

Lewis and Violet. Lewis and Voss. Lewis and Eddie. Three deaths already, and Easter with death in his eyes.

Easters mouth moved with a question, but she hadn’t heard it.

“I repeat,” Easter said. “Ballard had a key to your garage?”

“I don’t see what difference it...”

“But he had a key?”

“I left the door open.”

“Did he have a key?”

“Yes!”

Both their voices were raised, but Easter’s had lowered in pitch, and Charlotte’s was high and shrill.

“Do I have to squeeze everything out of you?” Easter said. “Don’t you know I’m trying to help you?”

“I don’t want your kind of help.”

“You can’t be choosey at this stage of the game. You’d better take all the help you can get while you can get it. You’ve got a car with two very dead men out in your garage, and I have to report it. I have to report it to the chief, to the D.A., to the sheriff. I should have reported it half an hour ago, but I gave you a chance. Where’s Ballard?”

“I don’t know.”

“And even if you knew...?”

“I wouldn’t tell you.”

“The loyal-little-woman role, eh?” An ugly smile crossed his face. “Well, come on, loyal little woman, I have something to show you.”

“I don’t have to...”

“Come on. I want to see that loyalty explode right in your two blind eyes.”

She felt a surge of violence. She wanted to reach out and hit him. It was the first time since childhood that she had wanted to strike someone, to hurt “You’re — you’re a contemptible...”

“Bully,” he said. “Gad. Yeah, I know all that.”

“My — my loyalty isn’t as absurd as you seem to think it is. There’s no proof that Lewis is guilty of anything.”

“Not enough for a court of law. It might take a month, two months, to line up the witnesses and the ballistics and medical experts and to organize the evidence. But right now I’m convinced, as the judge puts it in his instructions to the jury, I’m convinced beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty, that Ballard killed all three of them, Violet, O’Gorman and Voss.”

Beyond a reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. Heavy, somber words, like a funeral sermon.

Easter glanced at his watch before he opened the front door. “You haven’t much time. Coming?”

“Where are you going?”

“Just to the garage.”

“I don’t want to.

“Afraid you’ll be convinced?”

“No.”

“Come on, Charlotte.”

“No.”

Easter made an impatient gesture. “If I have to convince you that Ballard is a murderer before you’ll do anything to help yourself out of this mess, you must come out to the garage and see for yourself.”

“See what?”

“The gun.”

“Gun?”

“You’re in a worse spot than you think you are, Charlotte. The evidence indicates that the shooting was done in the convertible, perhaps right in your garage.” He paused. “Coming?”

“Yes.” She wanted to see the gun. She even had a sudden hope that she would be able to say definitely that it didn’t belong to Lewis. Lewis had a target pistol, a pair of them, in fact. She remembered the day she’d first seen them. She thought back to the time when she and Lewis were having a picnic on a remote stretch of beach near Pismo, and Lewis was trying to explain to her the difference between a revolver and an automatic pistol.

“These are revolvers. Now an automatic works differently. The cartridges are loaded into a clip that fits into the handle and the recoil mechanism discharges the empty shell and throws a new cartridge into the chamber. But a revolver like this has a revolving cylinder which — you haven’t even been listening, Charley.”

“I have so.”

“All right, what is this in my hand?”

“It’s a .38 caliber Colt target pistol. Darling, the sun’s making me sleepy. Anyway, what is a caliber?”

“You actually don’t know what a caliber is?”

“I actually don’t.”

“You are an amazingly ignorant but lovable woman,” Lewis said solemnly. He had leaned over to kiss her, one of the pistols still in his hand.

It had been a happy day. She thought of it now as she followed Easter silently out to the garage. The beach, the sun, the happiness, were as remote as a dream.

Easter beamed his flashlight into the back seat. It pointed like an accusing finger at the gun on the floor beside Voss’s knee. “See it?”

“Yes.”

“Recognize it?”

“No — I don’t know — I’m very ignorant about revolvers.”

“You can’t be very ignorant or you wouldn’t have called it a revolver.”

“I... I thought guns and revolvers were the same.”

“Did you?” The light hadn’t moved off the gun; it was mercilessly steady. “Well, it is a revolver and a very interesting one. Note the ramp built up along the barrel. That’s for more accurate sighting. Know anyone who goes in for target shooting?”

“No.”

He made a sound of disbelief. “The gun’s a common make, a Colt .38. What makes it uncommon is the fancy hand-made grip, and the fact that it’s one of a pair. And the other one of the pair is in Ballard’s study. I saw it there this afternoon.”

She turned away. The ceiling light of the garage was on, and she could see, in sharp contrast to the convertible and its contents, the ordinary items of her everyday existence: her gardening tools, the canvas gloves she wore to protect her hands, the trunkful of woolen clothes she had stored away for the summer, the old bicycle she used sometimes for exercise. They all seemed remote, like the day at the beach with Lewis. It was as if she would never again be able to take up her life where she had left off. The stitch had been dropped, and even if she could return to pick it up, the pattern had already, and inexorably, been changed.

She spoke wearily, “I have a legal right to say nothing.”

“That’s true.”

“I think I’ll — go in now.”

He followed her back into the house. His face was unnaturally red, the face of a man trying to control himself and restrain his anger. He walked the length of the room and back again, slowly, heavily, his full weight on every step.

“Charlotte...”

“You’d better make you report.”

“Not yet. I can hold off for a few more hours. You’ve been away, understand? You’ve been away and you haven’t come back yet.”

“I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d never gone. I wish I’d never met any of you, Violet or Eddie or you or...”

“Take it easy.” He went out into the kitchen and found a bottle of Bourbon and poured her some in a water glass. “Drink it.”

“I don’t want any.”

“Afraid you’ll talk too much? Look, Charlotte, this is no longer a matter of loyalty. It’s a matter of trying to protect yourself from being ruined.”

“I can’t protect myself. They’re there, Voss and Eddie. I can’t get rid of them.”

“I know you can’t.” He put the glass of Bourbon on the coffee table. “But you can minimize the importance of their being found in your garage. As the case stands now, that’s the point the newspapers are going to concentrate on. Double Slaying in Garage of Prominent Physician — they’ll give it the business, and whether you’re guilty or innocent, you’re going to be smeared. You’ll be accused and tried, not by a jury of your peers, but by a couple of newspaper reporters who want a juicy story, a deputy D.A. who likes to have his picture in the paper, several hundred housewives who resent your position as a doctor, a few disgruntled patients, some or your friends who ‘knew it all the time,’ a couple of W.C.T.U. members who saw you drink a beer once in 1943, and the usual assortment of religious cranks, neurotics, sadists... There’s your jury. Like it?”

“No.” Her throat felt raw, as if she’d been chewing glass.

“What we’ve got to do now is to change the emphasis,” Easter said. “Where Voss and O’Gorman are found won’t seem so important if the man who killed them is found first. If he is found and confesses.” He looked at his watch again. “You haven’t much time to decide. Where’s Ballard?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know who his friends are?”

“Some of them.”

“Where would he be likely to hide out?”

“I don’t think he’d be hiding anywhere near here.”

“Use your head,” Easter rasped. “He’s got to be near here. He didn’t drive that car into your garage and intend to leave it there. He intended to come back, to get rid of it But I don’t know when, and time is running out.”

“What am I expected to do?”

“Find him. I’ll give you three hours.”

“What if I can’t?” Her legs and arms felt cold, brittle as twigs.

“Try. You know his habits, his friends, the places he likes to go.”

She hesitated. “If I find him, what will I do?”

“Tell him to stop running, the race is over.”

“Where... where will you be?”

“Me?” His mouth moved in a smile, but his eyes didn’t change. They looked flat and hard as coins. “I’ll be waiting here. If Ballard turns up I wouldn’t want him to get lonesome.”

She knew from his face that that was what he wanted — for Lewis to come for the car, and for him, Easter, to be waiting, like a lion waiting at a watering hole in the certainty that the antelope would turn up. He didn’t expect her to find Lewis; he was only trying to get rid of her so the two of them could meet alone. A trickle of fear ran down her spine. I must get to Lewis first, she thought. No matter what he’s guilty of, I must warn him against Easter.

She looked across the room at Easter. She felt a surge of hatred for him — for his arrogance, his power, his obsession against Lewis. When she passed him on her way to the door, her fists clenched, ready to strike.

He saw them. His smile vanished. With a swift, violent movement he reached out and grabbed her wrists and held them together against his chest with one hand. With his other hand gripping the back of her neck, he leaned down and pressed his mouth against hers.

He let go suddenly, and she fell back a step, holding the back of her hand over her bruised mouth.

“That’s for nothing,” he said. “That’s for no encouragement, no co-operation. That’s for no pretty smiles, no soft looks, nothing.”

“You’re a cheap, rotten...”

“Beat it,” he said quietly. “Find Lover-boy. My patience is wearing thin.”

21

At some time in the past hour a Santa Ana had begun to blow from the desert on the other side of the mountain — a hot, dry, choking wind that harried the trees, hurled the dust down the city streets, swept the people into their houses or into the shelter of doorways where they huddled coughing, shielding their eyes with their hands. Bits of refuse fluttered up and down the road like bold birds, clung convulsively to the windshields of cars for a moment and swooped off again.

The wind was tearing up the city, emptying the streets, stripping the trees, a crazy, confused wind that blew in all directions at once. Charlotte felt that she was a part of it, sharing its wild confusion. She didn’t know where Lewis was or how to find him. She didn’t even know if he was alive.

The moon leered through the leaves of the giant, oaks, veiled, provocative, like a half-told secret: Is he alive? Perhaps, maybe. Where? Somewhere, here or there.

She had no hopes, no plans, but she had to start somewhere. She drove to the building where Lewis had his office. There was a light on the second floor behind the partly closed Venetian blinds. Lewis often worked at night and she had often waited for him, sitting in her car or standing in the entrance hall downstairs pretending to read the directory beside the elevator. H. M. Morris, Electrolysis. Salinda Rental Association. C. Charles Tomlinson, Broker. Ballard and Johnson, Attorneys...

The elevator was locked for the night. An elderly Negro with a white woolly cap of hair was mopping the tiled floor, mopping the same place over and over again, as if his thoughts were far away, dwelling on softer things than tile.

“Hello, Tom.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She knew he didn’t remember her. People walked in and walked out, traded names, traded faces, wore each other’s clothes — so many people they lost their identities in Tom’s mind, and he erased their footprint with his mop.

“Fine clear evening, ma’am,” Tom said. Though it rained, or the city was smothered with fog or mauled by a desert wind, the evenings were always fine and clear to Tom. He stayed inside, slept in the basement, and ate his meals sitting on an upright chair in the broom closet while he read the Bible, or at least held it open on his lap. (“He can’t read,” Lewis had told her once, in front of Tom. “But he’s very religious and he likes to pick out the words he knows, like God and heaven.” “God and heaven is fine words,” Tom said with dignity.)

“Tom...”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Is — have you seen Mr. Ballard tonight?”

“No, ma’am, I don’t r’lect seeing him.”

“There’s a light in his office.”

“Might be. I didn’t r’lect to turn it off.”

“I’ll go up and see.”

“Elevator’s closed, ma’am. Have to walk up.”

“That’s all right, Tom.”

“Steps is wet, you walk easy.”

“I will.”

The corridor upstairs was dim, and smelled of soap and chlorine. The door to Lewis’ office was half open and she could see part of the reception room — the luxurious gold satin love seat and the tropical aquarium that had been built into the wall. The aquarium lights were on, and the miniature fish moved silently behind glass, striped angel fish and velvety black mollies and brilliant neons as tiny as tacks.

She knew, as soon as she saw that the aquarium lights were on, that it couldn’t be Lewis in the office. He paid no attention to the fish; they belonged to Vern Johnson who fed and fussed over them with the same care Miss Schiller gave her cat.

She rapped on the door and said, “Vern?”

“Who is it?”

“Charlotte.”

“Well, come in, come in, Charley.”

She went in and closed the door behind her. Vern Johnson was a big moon-faced man with thick horn-rimmed glasses that gave his face a false aspect of vagueness. She had known him for years, had gone to school with his sister, and turned down his somewhat boozy and brotherly proposals. It was at one of his parties that she had her first personal talk with Lewis, a week after Gwen had introduced him to her. “You know, I asked Vern to invite you, Miss Keating.” She didn’t like the approach. She said distantly, “Did you?” “Yes. I wanted to talk to you. I’ve been planning for two days what I’d say but now I’ve forgotten all of it. The general idea, though, was to impress you with my mind.” “Why should you want to do that?” “Damned if I know, except that you look so competent and superior I’d like to show you that I’m competent and superior, too.” He spoke with a kind of rueful candor. “And are you, Mr. Ballard?” “I’ve always thought so.” She changed the subject, then, with deliberate abruptness. “Mrs. Ballard’s not with you tonight?” “No.” “I hope she’s not ill.” “No, she’s not ill.” He turned and walked away, and a little later Vern came and told her that Lewis had left. “What did you say to him, anyway?” “Why, nothing, nothing at all.” “He’s a hell of a good guy, Charley. Which is a miracle, considering his wife.”

“Sit down, Charley,” Vern said.

“Thanks.”

“Looking for Lewis?”

“I... Yes.”

“That makes three of us. Gwen’s been calling all day.”

She didn’t sit down. She said, “I won’t disturb you if you’re busy, Vern.”

“I’m not busy.” He picked up a small glass bowl from the table and held it up to the light. It contained a single black mollie, no more than an inch and a half long. “See this little lady? She doesn’t look much like it but she’s about to become a mother. The trouble is, her feeding instincts are considerably stronger than her maternal instincts, so I have to wait around and see that she doesn’t eat her offspring.”

“Vern — when did you see him last?”

“Three days ago.”

“Hasn’t he phoned?”

“Yesterday morning. He was drunk.”

“Drunk?”

“Sounded like it.” He put the glass bowl back on the table, but he kept his eye on the mollie as he talked. “What gives with Lewis, anyway?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Won’t tell me.”

“Both.”

“Top secret, eh? My guess is that Gwen is kicking up a row because she’s found out about you and Lewis. Our Gwen isn’t as dumb as she looks. She’s nutty as a fruitcake, but she’s not one hundred percent dumb.”

“She hasn’t found out. This has nothing to do with Gwen. It’s more — serious.”

“I see.”

“Vern, when he phoned did he tell you where he was?”

“No. All I know is that it was a local call and that he wasn’t phoning from a booth. There was a lot of noise in the background, people talking and dishes rattling, and the sound of a cash register. He must have been in some café or bar where they had no private phone booth.”

“Didn’t you ask him where he was?”

“Certainly. He didn’t answer. Apparently he’d had some land of quarrel with Gwen, because he asked me to call her up and tell her he was sorry but not to try and find him. I called her, but by that time she’d already phoned the police. Gwen has a pretty talent for doing the wrong thing.”

The mollie dropped her first offspring. It looked like a quarter of an inch of narrow black velvet ribbon, but it was alive and it was complete. It began immediately to swim around the bowl, as indifferent to its mother as she was to it; spending its first moment of life as it would spend its last — in the pursuit of food.

Vern’s face was excited. “Well, here we go again. By God, isn’t he a cute little fellow? You know, last time she had twenty-two of them. It took her over four hours.”

She looked at the mollie who had just demonstrated with the bored ease of an expert the miracle of birth. She thought of a human baby, itself a fish, but helpless, boneless, blind and deaf and fed through a cord — its growth slow; its birth cruel. And between the two violences, the shock of birth and the shock of death, its life was incalculable.

The mollie spotted her offspring, circled it, and lost interest because she had already eaten.

“Charley,” Vern said.

She looked up at him, wearily.

“Charley, for nearly a year, off and on, I’ve been thinking that I should apologize to you.”

“Why?”

“I guess I shouldn’t have fooled around playing cupid. Remember the first night you met Lewis at my house?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t think things would turn out the way they have.”

“No one did.”

“I thought — well, damn it, I’m so fond of you both, and I wanted you to get together. You seemed a natural, you know? And I hoped — well, I guess what I really hoped was that Gwen would drop dead or something. What a dreamer I am, eh?”

“I’ve had a happy year,” Charlotte said. “I should thank you for it.”

“Well, don’t,” he said sharply. “I feel responsible.”

“You shouldn’t. I was ready to fall in love and I did. I had never loved anyone before.”

He smiled then, a friendly, but rather sad little smile. “Not even me?”

“No.”

“My trouble is that I’ve got to wait around for a woman who likes fish, or who likes me well enough to get to like fish.” He saw her glance towards the door and said, “Don’t leave yet.”

“I have to.”

“If he doesn’t want to be found, don’t look for him, Charley. He may have reasons.”

“I have reasons, too.”

“In that case.” He opened the door for her. “Good luck, anyway.”

“Thank you, Vern.”

Downstairs in the lobby the old Negro was still mopping the tiled floor, humming to himself as he worked.

“Good night, Tom.”

“Floor’s wet, you walk easy.”

“Yes, I will.”

“A fine clear evening, ma’am.”

She stepped out into the dusty street.

The wind went everywhere, like an inquisitive ghost through keyholes, down chimneys; under the cracks of doors; and everything felt gritty to the touch.

The beach was littered with the broken shafts of palm trees. In the little café near the breakwater the tables were layered with fine sand that blew in when the door was opened and gradually settled over everything. Sam, the proprietor, went around muttering to himself and making futile swipes with a dish towel.

Charlotte sat at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee. The phone was where she remembered it, at the end of the counter beside the cash register. The hope grew in her mind that it was the phone Lewis had used yesterday morning to call Vern. She and Lewis had often come here for a late supper. The food was terrible and the dishes never quite clean, but it was the sort of place where neither of them would be likely to meet people they knew. Besides, in the rear booth where they usually sat, there was a tiny window like a square porthole, with a view of the breakers crawling up the beach. Our view, Lewis called it, with a kind of sadness in his voice, as if he meant that it was the only view they would have together, from the small murky window.

Sam brought the coffee. He was a Greek from Brooklyn, a fat curious-eyed man with spindly legs and narrow, delicate feet that could hardly support his weight. He talked a lot, always in a whisper out of the side of his mouth like a movie spy.

“How come you’re sitting up here? The back booth’s empty.”

“I’m alone tonight.”

“Mother of pearl, aren’t we all,” Sam said gloomily. “I’m thinking myself of maybe getting married again. I have the type of lady in mind, a nice widow with a little something in the bank and a little insurance. But they’re hard to find and in this business the dice are loaded against you. Take a nice widow coming in here for instance — sees me in this lousy apron and don’t see no further than the apron. Get what I mean? Sure ya do.” He leaned his elbows on the counter to ease the weight off his feet. “That your steady boyfriend you come in here with?”

“Yes. In fact, I’m looking for him now.”

“Anything the matter?”

“No, I just — well, yes. We had a quarrel. I want to find him to apologize.”

“He hasn’t been in today. Say, he’s got class, you know? I guess it’s the clothes, nifty tweeds instead of a lousy apron like...”

“What about yesterday?”

“Oh yesterday, sure. He came in early for breakfast. Ate a couple of eggs, drank some coffee and asked if he could use the phone. I said sure, go ahead. Though I’m telling you, confidentially, that I don’t encourage people to use the phone. How do I know they aren’t going to call their Aunt Daisy in Jersey City?”

He paused long enough to turn over a couple of hamburgers that were cooking on the gas grill.

“Well, he made the call, and then he bought a loaf of bread and a quart of milk and some cigarettes. He wasn’t looking himself. He had on a pair of dungarees and an old mackinaw. I said, kidding-like, ‘Going on a fishing trip?’ He didn’t answer. Paid his check and walked out. I was kind of curious, so I went to the window and watched where he went. He was heading hell for leather down the breakwater where all those dinghies are tied up. Well, then this girl in pink shorts happened to walk past with a rod and reel, and well, you know how it is. My eye kind of wandered. I’m very interested in rods and reels.” He chuckled at his own joke, supporting his heaving stomach with the palms of his hands.

Charlotte didn’t hear him. She knew now where Lewis was.

22

The breakwater was dark but there was light in the harbor master’s little office and the door was open. A young man was sitting on top of the desk examining the sole of one of his canvas shoes. He was about seventeen, clad in skin-tight levis and crew shirt, with a yachting cap pushed back on his head. He was full-grown but his face was beardless, and his manner had the uncertainty of adolescence.

When he saw Charlotte in the doorway he jumped down from the desk with an embarrassed grin.

“I’m looking for the harbor master,” Charlotte said.

“He went home, ma’am.”

“Are you in charge?”

“Well, kind of. I mean, he’s my uncle and I’m just kind of hanging around for the summer vacation.”

“There’s a boat anchored here called the Mirabelle.”

The boy’s uncertainty vanished. “Oh sure, that’s Mr. Johnson’s cruising sloop. He let me go aboard her tonight when I asked him if I could.”

“Tonight?” If Vern had been on the boat tonight it meant that her whole theory was wrong, that Lewis wasn’t hiding there after all. She felt defeated, exhausted, like an animal that had been trying for hours to find its way out of a maze of closed traps and blind alleys.

He was looking at her curiously, his brown eyes as round and alert as a spaniel’s. It was apparent that he wasn’t used to well-dressed women coming alone to the breakwater at nearly eleven o’clock at night. “You want to go out to the Mirabelle, ma’am?”

“Yes. I... Mr. Johnson’s a friend of mine.”

“Oh, he is?”

“A very good friend. You can verify that if you like.” She couldn’t understand the sudden blush that stained his cheeks and the lobes of his ears. “I guess you can take one of the skiffs that’s down there on the float, ma’am, if you bring it back in the morning.”

“I’ll have it back in half an hour.”

He didn’t say anything, he seemed too embarrassed to speak.

“Look,” Charlotte said. “If you’re in any doubt, you can phone Mr. Johnson. I believe he’s still at his office.”

“Mr. Johnson’s on board.”

“On board?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“I saw him at his office half an hour ago.”

“No ma’am,” the boy said stubbornly. “He’s aboard. He said he was going to s-sleep there.”

She went down the gangplank to the float, thinking, Vern can’t have reached here ahead of me. But if he did, why? Did he suspect all the time that Lewis was hiding on the boat? Did he come to warn him? No, that’s absurd. Vern doesn’t even know what kind of trouble Lewis is in.

The heavy float was rolling gently in the ebbing tide. Half a dozen skiffs were drawn up on it, bottoms up. The boy eased one into the water and walked back up to the top of the gangplank silhouetted against the light of the tiny office.

The Mirabelle was anchored a hundred yards off shore, its sails furled, its cabin portholes dark. She tied the skiff up at the stem and climbed awkwardly up the ladder.

“Vern?”

She crossed the deck and opened the door of the cabin. Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness and she could make out the figure of a man lying on the lower bunk, face down.

She descended the five narrow steps, slowly, as if her legs were numb. “Vern?”

He stirred, moaned; one of his hands came up to his head as if to ward off a blow that he saw coming in a nightmare. She found the light and turned it on.

It wasn’t Vern. It was Lewis.

He was sleeping, but still moving, moving his head back and forth, and shielding his face with his arms. The dream stopped as suddenly as it began, his hands dropped, the fight was over.

She knelt down and touch his cheek gently. “Lewis, it’s me, Charley. Wake up, Lewis.”

He opened his eyes. They were pink and swollen, as if from tears. In the dream he had fought and won — or fought and lost — and the fight, the effort, was real; his forehead was drenched with sweat

“Lewis...”

He turned his face to the bulkhead. The back of his neck looked very young and vulnerable. “I have nothing to say, Charley.”

“You can’t go on hiding like this. They’ll find you just as I did.”

“I don’t care.”

“You must care. Things will be so much harder for you if they have to come and get you, harder for — for all of us.”

He got up off the bunk without answering. There wasn’t enough headroom in the cabin for him to stand upright. The portholes were closed and the air was suffocating and heavy with the odor of Bourbon. He seemed not drunk, but stunned, as if he had used the Bourbon not as a method of escape, but as a weapon against himself, had hit himself over the head with it in self-punishment.

“I must talk to you, Lewis. Come up on deck.”

“It’s too late for talk

“No, no, it isn’t.” But her voice held no conviction, she knew it was too late. Easter had given her three hours and two of them were gone.

She went up on deck and he followed her. The shore looked far away, and the lights of the city as remote as stars.

While the little harbor waves slapped and sucked at the stem of the boat, she told him everything that Easter had said. Her voice was quiet and calm. It had no relation to the things she was saying or to the fear and pain and pity in her heart. Evidence, she repeated, evidence, and it seemed to her a word as final as death, more terrifying than murder.

When she had finished Lewis was silent for a long time, his head buried in his hands so that she couldn’t see his face, find on it the expressions any innocent man would be wearing — shock, denial, protest.

When he finally looked up at her, there was no expression on his face at all. He spoke flatly, “On advice of counsel, I have nothing to say.”

“You must say something, you must!”

“I’m sorry, Charley.”

“Sorry. Sorry.” She felt hysteria rising in her throat like bile. She swallowed, fighting it down, but the harsh bitterness of its taste remained. She knew that he would say nothing to incriminate himself, not even if it meant saving her. She remembered the words Easter had spoken a few hours ago: “He loves himself, too, and that’s the big passion. You’re running a poor second, Charlotte.”

“If I could only understand,” she said painfully. “If I knew why, why...”

He took her hand and pressed it against his hot dry cheek. “Perhaps some day you’ll know all the answers... Don’t draw away, don’t be afraid.”

But she was afraid. She looked down into the black water and thought of Violet.

“Tell me you loved me, Charley.”

“I... I did love you.”

“And now?”

“I don’t know... You lied to me about Violet. You said you’d never even heard of her.”

“It wasn’t a lie then. I didn’t know it was the same girl until I saw her picture the next morning. I... God, she was just a kid. I’d been drinking quite a bit. She kept hanging around me, I couldn’t get rid of her, I... But it’s too late now for excuses, explanations. No, you mustn’t cry, Charley, please don’t.” She hid her face against the sleeve of her coat. He stroked her hair, awkwardly. “Tell me, Charley, do you believe in another life, a second chance?”

“I... I try to, but I can’t.”

“I can’t, either. This is all there is, there isn’t any more. No second chances.” His eyes were fixed blindly on the dark horizon. “It’s a funny ending to a dream, isn’t it? Stop now. Stop crying, Charley. You’ll come out all right I promise you.”

She wept for a long time, like a child, her fists jammed into her eyes. When she had stopped he wiped her face with his handkerchief and raised her to her feet. “You’d better leave now, Charley. Perhaps we’d both better leave.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’ll go home.”

“Home?”

“Yes. You can tell Easter I’ll be there waiting for him.”

23

The cypresses that lined the walk fought the wind, bent and convulsed in fury like mad boneless dancers.

The veranda lights were lit, as if Lewis had deliberately turned them on like a good host, to welcome the guest he expected, Easter. Bold shafts of light struck the garden, and Charlotte could see that it was no longer Gwen’s garden, formal and precise. The lawn was a clutter of broken flowers, and palm fronds and dry prickly oak leaves and little mauve dots, like confetti, that had once been part of jacaranda clusters. The wind had beaten the flowers. The stocks and dahlias cringed, half naked, on the ground; the foxgloves had toppled like poles and their pink bells rolled silently across the lawn.

The collies, herded together at the fence gate, made nervous little noises, as if they would have liked to bark but didn’t dare, knowing that Gwen would appear with a folded newspaper in her hand and tap the wire fence with it warningly. They feared the newspaper and Gwen’s displeasure more than they feared the lunatic wind, the unquiet night.

They went up the front steps in silence — Charlotte holding her coat collar over her face to shield it from the grinding dust, and Easter with his hands in his pockets, unaware of wind or dust.

The drapes of the living room had been pulled back all the way. Charlotte wondered whether this, like the veranda lights, was a gesture of welcome, an invitation to stop, to look in. On her first visit tonight the drapes had been closed, the house blacked out, and Gwen upstairs in her room with a bruised throat.

The bruise was hidden now in a froth of blue lace; and the woman who had received it, and the fear and pain it had caused, they were all hidden as rocks are hidden under a high tide.

Through the window Charlotte could see them both clearly, Gwen and Lewis. Gwen sat knitting, her feet resting on the little petit-point footstool, a silver tea service on the table beside her. The three collies huddled together on the davenport, uncomfortable and restless, but refusing to give up this special privilege. Lewis was standing by the fireplace, with an unopened magazine in his hand, as if he had picked it up and meant to read it when Gwen had finished talking.

The fire was lit. Its flames danced in the silver teapot and in the copper bowl filled with scarlet berries. The room looked gay as Christmas, the people natural, the scene commonplace: “More tea, dear?” “No thanks, it’s getting late.” “Why, so it is, nearly midnight, and you have to get up for work in the morning.”

In the morning, if there was a morning.

“Please,” Charlotte said, “let me go in alone first.”

“I can’t. I didn’t want you even to come along. It’s too dangerous.”

“Not for me.”

“Especially for you.” Easter pressed the door chime.

A scurry of dogs in the hall inside, a single sharp bark, then Gwen’s quick footsteps, the click of her heels on the parquet floor.

The door opened and Gwen stood on the threshold, bracing herself against the wind.

“Why, it’s Dr. Keating — Charlotte!” she said with an excited little laugh. “My goodness, how nice to see you. Come out and see who’s here, Lewis.”

Lewis appeared in the doorway of the sitting room. He had changed his clothes and shaved. His face was as blank as a shuttered window. Only his eyes showed pain; they looked across the hall at Charlotte as if across an immense and unbridgeable canyon.

Gwen was flushed and smiling, as delighted as a child at unexpected company. “And you’ve brought a friend with you, Charlotte. How nice. Oh, this is fun, I think. Having company at this hour — it makes me feel so pleasantly wicked. Come in, come in, please do.” She didn’t recognize Easter until he took off his hat. “Why, I know you, of course. You’re the policeman who was here this afternoon. Mr. Easter, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Mrs. Ballard.”

“Well, Lewis, look who’s here, a real policeman. I hope you haven’t done anything, darling!”

The two men didn’t look at each other.

“Well, my goodness,” Gwen cried. “Everyone’s so quiet. I haven’t said anything wrong, have I?” She sighed, and turned back to Easter. “I guess I have. I always do. Please give me your hat and come in and sit down. Lewis and I were just having a chat and a cup of tea before going to bed. I adore tea. Charlotte scolds me, but...” She smiled nervously at Easter as he gave her his hat. One of the collies came over and sniffed at the hat and then at the cuffs of Easter’s trousers. She tapped the dog’s nose with her forefinger. “Go and lie down, Laddie. I... well, this is fun, isn’t it? Come into the parlor. That’s what I used to call it when I was a little girl — my parlor. And I still think it’s a prettier word than sitting room or drawing room, don’t you?”

No one answered. No one had to. Gwen didn’t seem to expect or want an answer.

The parlor was stifling. The heat had withered the berries in the copper bowl, and the dogs sprawled in the doorway in the hope of a draft, their tongues out.

“I feel quite gay,” Gwen said, pouring Charlotte a cup of tea. “Unexpected company, and Lewis home again, it’s wonderful. You both know that Lewis has been very naughty. He stayed away for two whole days all because of a little quarrel we had. But now he’s home for good, aren’t you darling?”

Lewis spoke for the first time. “Yes, Gwen.”

“Where on earth did you stay, darling?”

“On Vern’s boat.”

“Now isn’t that absurd, staying on a wobbly old boat when you had your own nice house to come back to!”

“Absurd. Yes, I guess it was.”

“And Lewis, dear, you must remember your manners. Perhaps Mr. Easter doesn’t want tea but something stronger.”

“Nothing for me, thanks,” Easter said.

“You make me feel like a very poor hostess. You won’t even sit down. I... well, it’s been a lovely summer so far, hasn’t it? I do hope it keeps up.”

The wind pressed against the windows and the walls, until the whole house seemed to shake, ready to tear loose from its foundations and blow across the lawn like the silent bells of the foxgloves. A blast came down the chimney; the flames leaped and a log jumped nervously and fell against the side of the grate.

Gwen jumped too, at the noisy shower of sparks. “Oh. Oh, that scared me. The wind — I know it’s silly, but I hate the wind. Charlotte, I bet you’re sitting there thinking how neurotic I am.”

Charlotte shook her head. “No, I’m not.”

“I bet you are, really. I know Lewis thinks I’m neurotic. Every time I get an ache or a little spell of forgetfulness Lewis thinks it’s my mind, which is — which — which...” She paused, blinking. “This isn’t a very gay party, I must say. Back home in Louisville we used to have the gayest parties. Daddy was very strict, though; everyone had to leave at twelve like Cinderella. Lewis dear, you remember.”

“I only went to one,” he answered.

“Oh, you were awfully handsome in those days; you were handsome and I was pretty. Like a Dresden doll, people used to say. Like a — a Dresden doll. Oh, quite, quite different from you, Charlotte, quite different. I was very small and my bones were so delicate Daddy was always afraid of me falling and breaking one.” Her hands fussed with her hair. Charlotte saw that they had a spastic trembling, and the unpainted nails were bluish at the tips. “I never thought in those days that the world could be so cruel, so ugly and cruel and — it was a great shock to me when I found out, a great shock — a hell, a terrible hell — a...”

“Gwen,” Lewis said.

She tinned and frowned at him. “You mustn’t interrupt me all the time. It’s not polite. One of the things Daddy taught me at home was never to interrupt. Oh, we used to have some sessions on manners, I can tell you! We’d go over and over things until I’d learned everything perfectly. Daddy would pretend that he was somebody like the Duke of Gloucester, say, and then he’d knock on the parlor door, rap, rap, rap, and say: ‘The Duke of Gloucester presents his compliments to Miss Gwendolyn Ann Marshall!’... Lewis dear, isn’t that someone knocking at the front door?”

“It’s only the wind,” Lewis said.

“You’re quite mistaken. You’re always mistaken, Lewis. You don’t realize it but you’re always making...” She went to the front door and opened it, and came back smiling, shaking her head. “Just as I said, it’s the wind. Lewis, you owe me an apology.” Lewis turned his face away. It was ghastly in the firelight, distorted, bloodless, like a wax mask found by a child and pinched and mauled beyond recognition.

“Lewis, dear.”

“Yes.”

“You really should apologize. You’ve made another of your mistakes.”

“I apologize.”

“Well, you aren’t very gracious about it.”

“I... for God’s sake, Gwen.”

“And swearing at me in front of guests, that’s very vulgar.” She looked appealingly at Easter. “That man swore at me too, that awful little man.”

“Voss,” Easter said.

“Voss, that’s it, that’s his name. I told him how vulgar it was to swear in front of a lady but he only laughed at me.”

“Gwen,” Lewis said again. “Be quiet.”

“I won’t be quiet.”

“He’s a policeman.”

“Well, I know he’s a policeman. I’m not stupid. I’m not afraid of him, anyway. I haven’t done anything wrong, except drive without my license.”

“When did you drive without your license, Mrs. Ballard?” Easter asked, quietly.

“Now, that’s childish, trying to trap me like that. I won’t tell you, so there.”

The dog Laddie, suddenly rose on his haunches. Without warning he pointed his nose in the air and began to howl, a terrifying, mournful sound that seemed to come, not from the dog’s throat but from the very origins of time. Twice he stopped to draw a new breath, and begin again; and when he had finished he slunk back into the hall as if in shame, his tail between his legs.

The smile had vanished from Gwen’s face. “Someone has just died.” She sipped the cold, bitter syrup left in the bottom of her cup. “I’m glad it’s not me.”

Charlotte glanced uneasily at Easter. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t even shifted his weight from one foot to another. He seemed satisfied to let Gwen continue talking while he picked out a fact here, a fact there, from her uneven flow of words.

Charlotte went over to Easter and said in a hurried whisper, “She’s confused, irrational. Anything she says is...”

“Let me handle this.”

“I heard that, Charlotte,” Gwen cried. “I heard what you said.”

“I was only...”

“You said something about me. Well, I’ve got something to say about you, too.” She crossed the room towards Charlotte, with a slow graceful glide, as if she had suddenly remembered the times at home when she had walked with a book balanced on her head to improve her carriage.

“You want to hear it?”

“Yes.”

“Trollop,” she said. “Trollop.”

Lewis called her back. “Gwen. Please, Gwen.”

“Please, Gwen. You keep out of this, lecher. A trollop and a lecher. A fine pair, aren’t they, Mr. Easter? And so clever at fooling poor old Gwen, so terribly clever that I’ve known all about the two of them for months and months. But I’ve had my revenges, little ones and big ones. Oh, when I think of the times Charlotte came here to attend me and I’d tell her how honest she was, how trustworthy, then I’d tell her all about Lewis. Her face — oh dear, it was really quite funny!”

Charlotte had backed away quietly, leaving the two of them facing each other, Gwen, like a doll suddenly endowed with a voice and blurting out anything and everything that had been stored up in its stuffed head during the years of silence; and Easter, a giant by contrast, cunning, dispassionate.

“And the big revenge?” he said.

“Gwen,” Lewis said. “I warn you, anything you say now will be used...”

“I...” She tossed her head contemptuously: “I don’t take advice from a lecher. The big revenge, well, don’t you think it was a big revenge, Mr. Easter?”

“I’m not sure yet what it was, or how you managed it.”

“You can’t be very clever.”

“I’m not.”

“You could at least try to guess. You’ll never get ahead in your work if you don’t try.”

“I’ll try.”

“Well, I should think so. Go on.”

“My guess is that Violet came here last Monday afternoon to see your husband. She saw you instead.”

“That’s right. You remember Violet, don’t you, Lewis?”

Lewis didn’t look at her. “I... yes.”

“Well, you should. She was carrying your baby, wasn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t it funny, you gave her a baby but not me, not me, and I’m the one who wanted it!”

“I’m sorry.”

“There isn’t any baby now, is there, Lewis?”

“No — no!”

“And no Violet either. You and Charlotte killed her.”

“No!”

“Well, morally you did. I was only the instrument. You and Charlotte are the real murderers.”

“Leave Charlotte out of it.”

“Why should I? I put her in. I sent the girl to her. You hear that, Lewis? I sent her! I thought what a wonderful thing it would be to bring your two trollops together.”

The room was cooling as the fire died.

“Such a good idea, I thought. But it didn’t work out as I planned. I wanted Charlotte to find out what kind of man Lewis really was. And I wanted, too, for her to get rid of Violet’s baby, to spare me the disgrace and scandal of her bringing suit against Lewis, dragging my good name through the courts and the newspapers. But Charlotte refused. And that night after dinner Violet came back to me again. I was in the garden... Have you seen my garden, Mr. Easter?”

“Yes.”

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Very beautiful.” Flowers beaten to the ground, wind-stripped trees, broken cypress. “Was she alone when she came the second time?”

“Two men drove her here in a car. The little one brought her across the lawn to where I was sitting on the swing. He said he was Violet’s uncle and he thought Violet and I should talk about terms while we were waiting for Lewis. That was the word he used — terms. He left her there with me. She began to cry. Tears don’t affect me any more — I’ve cried too much myself — but I was kind to her. I was brought up to be kind to everyone, especially my inferiors.”

“Did she mention money?”

“No, I did. I asked her how much she’d take to leave town and never come back. She got hysterical then. She kept saying over and over again that Voss was trying to force her to take money but she didn’t want any money. All she wanted was to get rid of the baby, to be ‘ordinary’ again, she called it. She talked as if the baby was a terrible disease.”

Charlotte remembered the scene Violet had made in her office, the way she’d struck her thighs with her fists and cried: “I’ll kill myself!.. I don’t even want money. I only want to be the way I was before, with nothing growing inside me.”

Gwen’s hands were fidgeting with the lace around her throat. “She asked to see Lewis, and when I said he wasn’t here she accused me of lying, of trying to protect him. I told her I wasn’t lying, that Lewis had gone on a fishing trip. She misunderstood what kind of fishing trip it was, and she threatened to go down to the wharf and wait for him. I said, ‘All right, I’ll go with you.’”

“And you did,” Easter said.

“I did? Yes, I must have. I don’t know how, though. Do you think we walked?”

“It’s not far.”

“Yes, I guess we walked. I’m not a very good driver. It was cold and foggy down there and there was a bad smell. I can’t stand it,” she kept saying, ‘I’ll kill myself.’ And she did. She did kill herself.

“No.”

“She must have. I can’t remember.”

“Try.”

“I won’t try. I don’t want to remember. Lewis, Lewis, help me! Don’t let him make me remember! Lewis — Daddy!”

“It’s all right,” Easter said. “You don’t have to remember if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t?”

“No. Forget Violet.”

“Yes. Yes, I think I’ll forget all about her. She was an ignorant girl with no manners.”

“You don’t mind remembering about Voss though, do you? You don’t like Voss. He swore at you.”

“Yes, he did. He swore at me.”

“You saw him again later that night?”

“I think so. I think it was that night. He came to call for Violet, and I told him she was on her way home.” She rubbed her eyes. “I’m... I’m getting confused. I shouldn’t be telling you all this, should I? Lewis is looking at me funny. Stop, Lewis, stop looking at me like that.”

“I... all right, Gwen,” Lewis said. “All right.”

“You’re mad at me for borrowing your gun.”

“No, I’m not, Gwen. You couldn’t help it.”

“That’s right, I really couldn’t. There wasn’t any other gun and I had to have one to protect myself.”

“Mrs. Ballard,” Easter said. “On Monday night when Voss came to get Violet, did he believe you when you told him she was on her way home?”

“No. He said he’d been here earlier and when no one answered the door he drove around a little while, and then he — he saw me walking with Violet down towards the wharf. He said he waited and watched, and I came back alone. He accused me — he said bad things...”

“That’s when you gave him money?”

“I had to. All the money I had, the housekeeping money and the six hundred dollars I’d gotten on Saturday for the pair of blue merles I sold, and two rings and a necklace. He promised he’d keep quiet and go away and not come back.”

“But he came back,” Easter said.

“Yes, early this morning. Very early. It was still almost dark. Lewis hadn’t phoned or anything. I was worried and couldn’t sleep. I heard the car and looked out the window and saw them, Voss and the other man, walking across the driveway. I put on my shoes and coat, and then I went into Lewis’ study and got one of the guns and hid it in the pocket of my coat.

“I went downstairs and opened the front door. I said, what do you want? And Voss said something new had come up, that he and Eddie needed more money so they could get out of the country for good. ‘We can’t talk here,’ I said, ‘Lewis is upstairs in bed, he’ll hear us.’ “

Charlotte looked across the room at Lewis, and she knew from the tragic regret in his eyes that his thoughts were like her own: he should have been upstairs in bed that early morning and he should have been at home when Violet first came. If he had been, all four of them would still be alive, still have a future, Eddie and Violet and Voss, and Gwen herself. For Gwen the road ahead was dark and twisted, with here and there a patch of light and an arrow pointing back, back, back to the gay parties, to Daddy and the teddy bear and the smiling French doll, back to the kinder years, further back, and further, until the end of the road was the beginning.

“We went out to the car,” Gwen said. “Voss got in the front seat and the other one, Eddie, got in the back with me, and he drove out past the cemetery. Eddie laughed as we went past and said, ‘People are just dying to get in there.’ I laughed too, and then I shot him. I shot him two or three times. Voss stopped the car. I told him I was going to shoot him, too. He asked me not to, but I did, anyway.”

One of the dogs began to dream; tail twitched, paws moved in pursuit.

“He was a little man, not much bigger than I am, but he was heavy. I put my hands under his armpits and pulled him over into the back on top of Eddie. Then I got behind the wheel and started the car. I thought of driving it over a cliff, but I didn’t want to kill myself because then who would look after the dogs? You understand?”

Easter nodded. “Of course.”

“Well, then I remembered that Charlotte was away, and I thought, what a clever idea to drive the car into her garage and leave it there. I thought how surprised she’d be when she came back. And you were surprised, weren’t you, Charlotte?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said gravely. “Very surprised.”

“I wish I’d been there to see your race. I’ve never liked your face anyway. Liar’s face. Trollop’s face. I’d like to split it open with a knife. I’d like to...”

“Gwen,” Lewis said.

She turned to him. Her expression changed suddenly and completely. “Yes, Daddy?”

“Remember your manners.”

“I’ll try to, Daddy. Do forgive me for telling you the truth, Charlotte, trollop, please have another cup of tea, it’s quite fresh, refreshing and — I have a headache. I’m nervous. Lewis, I’m so nervous.”

“I know,” he said.

“People oughtn’t to make me nervous, ought they?”

“No, Gwen.”

“But they do. You must stop them.”

“I will.” He went over to her and put his hands on her trembling shoulders.

“You love me, Lewis?”

“Yes.”

“You always have?”

“Yes.”

“And you hate her, don’t you? You despise her. You hate her face. You’d like to split it open with a knife, wouldn’t you?”

“Gwen — oh God.”

“Say it.”

“No.”

“Say it.”

“I... hate her.”

“And her face, what would you like to do with it?”

“Split — it open — with a knife.”

“There. You see, Charlotte? Two against one. We must hate you, Lewis and I. Isn’t that right, Mr. Easter? Why, where’s Mr. Easter?”

“He’s using the telephone,” Lewis said. “He had a call to make.

She held one of his hands against her cheek. “We don’t care, do we?”

“No, Gwen.”

“Why, it’s like old times. Carry me upstairs the way you used to.”

“Not yet.”

“Yes, now. I am tired. I’ve danced all night.”

He picked her up gently and carried her out into the hall. The tears that fell from his eyes lost themselves in her fading yellow curls. He went slowly up the stairs. She was tired — she had danced all night — and she fell asleep in his arms.

The wind had vanished, as if a great hole had opened in the sky and all the winds in the world had been sucked up into the hole.

Easter opened the wooden gate. The police had come and gone, the car had been driven away, and the glow of morning was in the East.

“Good-bye, Charlotte.”

“Good-bye.”

“Get some rest.”

“No, I don’t want any, I’m not tired.” I haven’t danced all night.

He touched her hand. “I’m sorry things didn’t work out for you.”

“It’s my own fault. I asked for it.” Split it open with a knife.

“I’m sorry about Ballard, too. I did him an injustice; he’s a better man than I thought he was. He’ll stick by her, and perhaps some day she’ll be cured.”

“Perhaps. Yes, perhaps.”

“This isn’t the time or place to tell you that I love you but I’m telling you, anyway. There are tough days ahead. Perhaps my love might be a comfort to you.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“Will it be?”

“Yes. A — great comfort.” Tears pressed behind her eyes like cruel thumbs, until her eyeballs seemed ready to burst.

“Cry if you want to,” he said.

“I never — I never cry.”

“Cry now, long and hard. It will make things easier for you.”

“I can t.”

“You will, though.” He bent down and kissed both of her tearless eyes. “Good-bye, Charlotte.”

“Good-bye.”

The gate closed, softly, like the leaf of a book falling into place.

She went back into her house and sat for a long time in Lewis’ chair by the window, watching the brightening sky. She wasn’t sure at what moment the city lights went out and morning came.

Content

Margaret Millar
Do Evil In Return

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