The Bride Wore Black

I The Woman

There were four of them in the dormitory room, all in varying stages of night attire. One was sprawled across the bed in reverse, her chin and arms dangling over the foot. One was sitting perched on the windowsill, balanced with one pointed toe touching the floor, like a frozen ballet dancer. The third was sitting on the floor, clasping her reared knees, chin atop them. The fourth and last, the only one audible, was in a chair. Not sitting in it, as that position is commonly understood. She was spread across it flat like a lap robe. One chair arm supported her elbows, her legs rippled across the other. In the middle, where she sank in to meet the part of the chair usually reserved for sitting, a book balanced unsupported, rising and falling with her bodily breath. Rising and falling fairly rapidly at the moment.

“There’s a cabin waiting among the spruce and firs that needs a woman’s touch. Miss Judith,” he said.

She smiled shyly and her head dropped upon his chest. His strong arms slowly encircled her.

At this point the reader’s own shoulders twitched ecstatically, as though they were receiving the embrace in question. She let the book slide languishingly to the floor.

“I bet he’s just like that himself,” she rhapsodized dreamily, “Strong and reliant, and sort of bashful with it. D’you notice how he kept calling her ‘Miss Judith’ right through to the end, sort of respectful?”

“I bet with you he wouldn’t have been that respectful.”

The girl on the chair exulted: “You bet not, I would have seen to it he stopped being that formal right after the first chapter.”

The one on the bed said, “She’s sure got it bad.”

“I dreamed about him last night. He rescued me from an igloo that was just going to cave in.”

The other three tittered. “What else did he do?”

“That was all there was time for. The eight o’clock bell woke me up — dam it.”

“Pass around another cigarette,” somebody said.

“There’s only one left.”

“Oh, what’s the difference? We’ll get another pack for tomorrow night.”

“Yes, and don’t forget it’s your turn to bring them in next. I supplied this one.”

“All right, here goes. We’ll have to open the window again. If the smoke gets out in the hall and old Fraser comes along—”

The one in the chair gave a deep sigh that buckled her in the middle momentarily. “Why do you have to be old before you meet anyone thrilling, before anything exciting happens to you?”

“She’s still thinking about him.”

“How do you know he isn’t married, and with about thirty-two kids?”

“I know he isn’t, he couldn’t be.”

“Why couldn’t he?”

“Because it wouldn’t be fair.”

“Poor thing, I hate to see her suffer so.”

The one on the bed said impatiently, “Oh, all she does is talk about it, and it ends there. If she ever met him face to face she wouldn’t know what to do, she’d probably drop through the floor.”

The chair sprawler reared defiantly. “Is that so? I’d show you a thing or two. I’d have him eating out of the hollow of my hand in no time.”

Her detractor on the bed taunted: “I bet you wouldn’t even get past the front door.”

“I bet I would, if I ever made up my mind to! How much do you want to bet?”

“I’ll bet you my whole next month’s allowance from home!”

The one on the bed eyed her vindictively. “All right, mine against yours. And you either go through with it or keep still about him from now on. I’m sick of hearing about him.”

“Yes, get it out of your system once and for all,” one of the more sympathetically inclined listeners suggested. “It’s no use just going on pining like this.”

The skeptic on the bed said, “How’ll we know she’s telling the truth when she gets back?”

“I’ll bring proof back with me.”

“Bring one of his neckties,” one of them suggested jocularly.

“No, that’s no good, I know something better. She has to bring a snapshot of the two of them standing together.”

“And his arm has to be around her,” crowed the windowsill sitter. “We want our money’s worth!”

“Huh!” snorted the man killer in the chair self-confidently. “That’ll be putting it mild; the best parts’ll never get on the snapshot. If I ever really go to work on him, he’ll probably follow me back here on the end of a leash.”

“How’ll you get away from here?”

“I’ve got everything thought out. I’ve been daydreaming about it for the longest time, in French class and places like that, so I know just what to do. You know how scared stiff Miss Fraser is of epidemics — if you show two red dots on your face she can’t get rid of you fast enough. And my people are away right now—”

“You better see that you win,” one of the neutrals commiserated, “or you’ll be broke for thirty days straight — and don’t expect us to lend you any pocket money.”

The one bunched on the floor flew apart suddenly. “Fraser!” she hissed warningly. “I hear her step in the hall!”

The room dissolved into a flux of flurried motion, in which they all darted at cross angles to one another. Two of them made for the communicating door to the adjoining room and fled back to their own quarters. The one who had been on the windowsill dove for the recently vacated bed and disappeared with a great welling up of covers.

The one who had been in the chair was left stuck with the cigarette. She snapped out the light and its red ember made hectic spirals around in the dark, in search of a landing place.

“Take this! Take this!” she whispered frenziedly.

“You take it!” the unfeeling reply came back. “You were the last one holding it.”

It described a parabola out the open window, the bedcovers billowed up a second time, and then there was a sort of heaving silence. An instant later a grimly vigilant head was outlined against the insidiously opened hall door. It sniffed the air suspiciously, remained poised an uncertain moment or two, then finally withdrew, defeated but unconvinced.

When it had inspected the adjoining room, as well, and gone on from there, a whispered conversation in the latter was eagerly resumed.

“Don’t you think there’s something funny about her? I mean, she’s not like the rest of us, she seems older.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed that, too.”

“After all, there’s nobody here really knows anything about her. Her parents didn’t even bring her here when she registered; I heard Miss Eraser say her application was received by mail and she was enrolled on the strength of a recommendation. Who is she? Where did she come from? She suddenly plops down in the middle of us from nowhere and in the middle of the term, too.”

“Well, she was transferred.”

“Oh, that’s what she says.”

“Nobody’s ever seen her people. And she never gets letters from home like the rest of us.”

“Why is she so insane about that silly writer? I don’t see anything so wonderful about him.”

“He has a country place not far from here; maybe that’s why she came here — to be near him.”

“Maybe she’s not a schoolgirl at all.”

There was a moment of silent, shivery conjecture.

“Then what is she?”

II Holmes

Holmes’ roadster was crawling along at his usual snail’s pace, hugging the extreme outside of the road, German shepherd stiffly erect in the seat beside him, when the taxi flashed by, going the same way he was. He habitually drove in low like that, to help his thinking. He found he could get quite a lot of it done when he was out alone in the car for an airing, just drifting along aimlessly.

He couldn’t be positive, of course, but the cab had seemed to him to have just the one girl sitting in the back of it. The reason he figured it that way was the back of her head occupied the exact center of the small oval glass insert in the rear, and when there are two or more passengers they are usually more evenly distributed on the seat than that.

By the time he neared the cutoff that led into his own place, the cab should have been long out of sight, at the clip it had been going, but to his surprise it was still in view ahead as he crested the last rise. It was dawdling along erratically now, as though experiencing a contradiction of orders on its passenger’s part.

Just as it came opposite the cutoff, with its warning, T. HOLMES’, PRIVATE ROAD, NO THOROUGHFARE, stretched across it, three acoustically perfect screams winged up from it. The next moment, the door flung outward and the figure of a girl either jumped or was flung bodily onto the soft turf edging the road. She rolled over once in a complete somersault, then came to a stop right side up. The taxi put on speed and spurted down the road, red tail glowering vindictively.

Holmes glided to a stop opposite her a moment later and got out. She was in a sideways sitting position now, clutching her instep with both hands. The German shepherd undutifully remained in the car, as though that was his first love, rather than his master.

“Hurt yourself?” Holmes bent over her, took her below the arms and helped her to her feet. She immediately teetered against him.

“I can’t stand up on one of them. What’ll I do?”

“Better come into my place a minute. It’s right down the way there.”

He helped her into the car, drove the short distance down the private road, helped her out again in front of a typical remodeled-for-city-occupancy farmhouse. The dog didn’t have sense enough to follow even then, until Holmes had turned and growled at it: “Come on in, you fool. What do you want to do, stay out all night?” The dog leaped over the side of the car and approached the door independently, with an air of not belonging to anyone.

A colored man opened to the clomp of the Colonial knocker affixed to the door. He greeted Holmes with the familiarity bred of long years of association. “Well, did you get a bang-up finish for that chapter troubling your mind?”

“I did have one,” said Holmes somewhat moodily, “but it was knocked right out of my head again. This young lady’s had a mishap. Help me get her to a chair, then go out and put the car in.”

The two of them helped her down a long pine-paneled living room that ran the entire depth of the house, with a gigantic conical fireplace of cobbled stones set into one side, from floor to ceiling. That is, the trim was ceiling high; the aperture itself was about shoulder height or a little less.

She attempted to stop and sink down when she had reached a large overstuffed chair standing out before it, with its back to the salmon-pink glow. The manservant quickly gave her a little hitch onward, toward another a few paces away. “Not that one — that’s his inspiration chair.”

Seated, Holmes studied her by the firelight, aided by the watery glow of light from the ceiling. The electricity was obviously generated on the premises, judging by its insufficiency.

She was young, and the mere fact that everything about her tried to convey the exact opposite impression showed how young she really was. Eighteen; nineteen at the very outside. Her hair had probably been golden when she was a child, it was darkening to chestnut now, but with golden overtones still lingering in it. Her eyes were blue.

She had acquired, if nothing else, a generous coating of leaves and twigs in her roll by the roadside just now. She brushed at them sketchily, almost as though she hated to efface them until she was sure he had taken note of what bad shape she was in.

“What happened?” he said as soon as Sam had left to see about the car.

“The usual thing. Whenever you see a girl come out of a car without waiting for it to stop, you can draw your own conclusions.”

“But it was a city cab, wasn’t it?” It occurred to him it was a little far out for that sort of thing.

“And the ideas in it were city ideas.” She didn’t seem to want to talk about it any further.

“I guess we’d better have a doctor in to look at that foot of yours.”

She didn’t show any particular eagerness at the suggestion. “Maybe it’ll go down if I just stay off it.”

“It hasn’t gone up any, from what I can see,” he pointed out.

She withdrew it a little behind the first one, so that its outline wasn’t so distinct.

Sam had come back. “Sam, who’s the nearest doctor to us?”

“Doctor Johnson, I reckon. He don’t know us. I can try him if you want.”

“It’s pretty late — maybe he won’t want to come,” she mentioned.

Sam returned to report, “Hell be here in half an hour.”

She said, “Oh,” sort of flatly.

After a while, while they were waiting, she said, “I’ve always wondered what you were like.”

“Oh, then you know who I am?”

“Who doesn’t? I’ve read you from A to Z.” She sighed soulfully. “Imagine sitting here in the same room with you!”

He turned away. “Cut that stuff out.”

“And at least you’re like you should be,” she went on, undeterred. “I mean so many of these people that write red-blooded outdoor stuff are skinny anemic little runts wrapped in blankets. You at least cut a figure that a girl can get her teeth into.”

“You oughta be poured over waffles,” he let her know disgustedly.

Her eyes roamed the raftered ceiling, flickering with flame reflections like sea waves. “You live in this big place all alone?”

“I come out here to work.” If there was a gentle hint in that, it glanced off her.

“What a fireplace; I bet you could stand up on the inside of it.”

“They used to smoke whole hams and turkeys inside it in the old days; the hooks are still set into the inside of the chimney. It’s almost too big, takes it too long to draw and get heat up. I tried to cut it down by relining it, putting in a dummy top and sides of zinc.”

“Oh, yes, I see that chink that seems to border it all around; I thought it was a fault in the stones.”

Sam was thrusting at the fire with a heavy iron poker when the doctor’s knock sounded at the door. He stood it up against the stone facing, went out to admit him. Holmes followed him into the hall to greet the doctor. He thought he heard her give a sobbing little moan of excruciation behind him, but the doctor’s noisy ingress drowned it out.

When they came in a moment later, her face was contorted and all the color seemed to have left it. The iron poker lay horizontal on the floor, as though it had toppled down of its own weight.

“Let’s have a look,” the doctor said. He felt gently with his fingers, and she winced, gave an inarticulate little cry. The doctor clicked his tongue. “You’ve got a bad contusion there, I should say so! But it’s not a sprain, more like one of the little cartilages is smashed, from something heavy dropping on it. Wrap it up in cotton wool. You’ll have to spare that foot for a day or two, give it a chance to mend.”

Even while the overflow wrung from her by pain slowly trickled out of the comer of each eye, the look she gave Holmes seemed to hold something of triumph in it.

Afterward, when the doctor had gone, he said, “I don’t know how we’re going to do it. The station’s a forty-minute pull from here, and I don’t even know if there are any more trains in tonight. I could drive you all the way in to the city myself, but we’d get there about daylight.”

“Can’t I stay?” she said wistfully. “I won’t bother you.”

“It isn’t that. I’m single and I’m alone in the house. Even Sam sleeps out over the garage.”

“Och.” She tossed that off like a puffball. “The dog’ll be chaperon enough.”

“Well... er... won’t your people worry about you if you stay away overnight?”

Something like a choked laugh sounded in her throat. “Oh, sure, three days from now. They’re in New Mexico. By the time they hear I wasn’t home, I’ll be home all over again.”

He gave Sam a look and Sam gave him one. “Fix up that ground-floor room that has the cot in it for the lady, Sam,” he said finally.

“Freddy Cameron’s the name,” the childish-looking figure ensconced in the chair supplied. “Short for Frederica, you know.”

They sat there in silence, waiting for Sam to get the room ready. Holmes sat staring down at the floor, she sat staring at him with all the unconcealed candor of a child.

“Why do you keep all those rifles and shotguns stacked up in the corner?”

“Because I do a lot of hunting when I’m not working.”

“Are they loaded?”

“Sure they’re loaded.” He waited a moment and then he added: “They give a terrible kickback when they’re fired.”

“G’night, Mr. Holmes and lady,” Sam called on his way out. The front door closed after him.

The silence became almost cottony, the sort of thing that can be tasted in the mouth.

“Why don’t we say something?” she suggested after about a quarter of an hour.

His eyes flicked over her, then down to the floor again, for answer. There was something wary about the slight deflection.

She bunched her shoulders defensively, looked behind her. “Something about this place, it gets you. It’s like — something was going to happen.”

“It’s like,” he concurred curtly, and got up and left her without anything further. He moved up the stairs to the upper floor with almost painful deliberation, head bowed as though he were listening intently.

A cooling log ash exploded in the fireplace; his shoulders squared off, then relaxed again. Then the heavy, oily stillness came rolling back again and obliterated the momentary sound.

His door closed, up above somewhere.

Sam came in and found them sitting at the table together.

“What’s this?” he cried with mock outrage that had an undercurrent of pique to it.

“The Number Two Boy rustled it up for him this morning. But she has no luck, he won’t eat.”

“He’s thinking of a plot,” Sam suggested.

Holmes gave him a startled look, as though the remark was disconcertingly shrewd. He filled a saucer from his cup, put it on the floor. The German shepherd came over and noisily siphoned it up.

“Well, is the plot finished yet?” she wanted to know presently.

“Incomplete,” Holmes said. He had been watching the dog. “But I’ll get it later.” He took up his cup, drained it, held it out to her for more.

He got up, threw her a brief, “See you tonight,” and went into the living room.

“What does he mean, ‘See you tonight’?” she asked Sam blankly. “What am I supposed to be, invisible until then?”

“He’s going to produce now.” Sam went in after him, as though his presence was required to set things in order. She watched from the doorway. Sam shifted the “inspiration chair,” cocked his head at it, readjusted the chair with hair-line precision.

“Does that have to be in the exact same place each time?” she asked incredulously. “I suppose if it was two inches out of line he couldn’t think straight.”

“Shh!” Sam silenced her imperiously. “If it ain’t even with that diagonal pattern of the carpet, it distracts him.”

Holmes was standing looking out the window, already lost to the world. He made an abrupt backhand gesture of dismissal. “Get out! Here it comes now.”

Sam tiptoed out with almost ludicrous haste, frenziedly motioning her before him. She stood there a moment outside the closed door, unabashedly eavesdropping. Holmes’s voice filtered through in a droning singsong, talking into the dictating machine:

“Chinook mushed on through the snow wastes, face a mask of vengeance under his fur parka—”

Sam wouldn’t leave her in peace even there. “Don’t stand this close, you’re liable to make the floor creak.”

She turned away reluctantly, limping on her one slippered foot. “So that’s how it’s done. And there must never be the slightest variation in detail, not even in the way his chair stands.”

Sam poised himself, watch in hand, outside the door, one fist upraised in striking position. He waited until the sixtieth second had ticked off, then brought his fist down. “Five o’clock!” he called warningly.

Holmes came out haggard, hair awry, shirt open down to his abdomen, cuffs open, shoelaces untied, even his belt buckle unfastened.

A prim, mousy little figure of a middle-aged woman, sitting under the antlered hat rack near the door, stood up. She wore an ill-fitting tweed suit, steel-rimmed spectacles, and had her graying hair drawn tightly back into an unsightly little knot at the nape of her neck.

“I’m the new typist, Mr. Holmes. Mr. Trent says he hopes I’ll be more satisfactory than the last one he sent you.”

The Cameron girl had come to the doorway of her room, opposite them, drawn by the sound of his emergence.

“I’m afraid the damage has been done already,” he said with a glance at her. “Did you come prepared to stay?”

“Yes.” She indicated a venerable Gladstone bag on the floor beside her. “Mr. Trent explained the work would have to be done on the premises.”

“Well, I’m glad you got here. I’ve already done six chapters into the machine. I don’t know how fast you are, but it’ll take you at least three or four days to catch up.”

“I’m more accurate and painstaking than I am speedy,” she let him know primly. “I pride myself on never having had so much as a comma misplaced on any of my typescripts.” She folded her hands limply together, dangled them out before her.

“Sam, carry Miss — I didn’t get your name.”

“Miss Kitchener.”

“Carry Miss Kitchener’s bag up to the front second-floor room.”

The Cameron girl came toward him, a look of sulky disapproval on her face, as soon as he was alone. “So we’re going to have Lydia Pinkham with us for a while.”

“You seem put out.”

“I am.” She wasn’t being playful about it, either; she was seething. “A woman likes the run of the place. This was ideal.”

He gave her a long, level look. “I’ll bet it was,” he said dryly, turning away at last.

Sam said later, “We’re sure getting a run of women out here! Maybe you better do your work in town, where it’s nice and lonely, after this, Mr. Holmes.”

“I have an idea they’ll be thinning out soon,” Holmes answered, brushing his hair at the mirror.

The three of them sat back after Sam had taken out the dessert plates. Freddy Cameron still had the sulky look on her face. Throughout the meal she had tried, much to his amusement, to give the other woman the impression she was a legitimate member of the household.

“Sam,” he called. And when the man had returned to the doorway, “How long since you’ve had a night off?”

“Pretty long. But ain’t no use in having one out here. There’s no place to go.”

“Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll treat you to one in the city. I’ll drive you over to the station when I go out for my usual evening spin. There are some things I want you to stop in and get at the flat in town while you’re there, anyway.”

“I’d sure like that! But will you be able to get along without me, Mr. Holmes?”

“Why not? You’ll be back by midmorning. Miss Cameron can rustle up breakfast for me, like she did today.”

Her face brightened for almost the first time since the typist’s arrival. “Can I!”

“And I can build my own fire when I’m ready to start work in the morning. Just see that there’s enough wood on hand.”

It was nearly eleven when he drove slowly back to the house alone, after dropping off his loyal retainer at the depot. The German shepherd, aloof as usual, sat in the seat beside him. The countryside was as still as a grave. The road was empty; no speeding city taxi passed him tonight.

He put the car away himself, opened the house door with his own key. It seemed strange; he was so used to having Sam do these little things for him. The Cameron girl was standing out at the foot of the stairs, listening. A sound like frightened, low-pitched sobbing reached him from above.

She smiled inscrutably, thumbed the staircase. “The old maid’s walking out on you.”

“What d’you mean?”

“She’s packing up to go. She’s got the heebie-jeebies. Somebody threw a rock through her window warning her to clear out.”

“Why didn’t you go up and calm her at least?” he snapped.

“I didn’t have to. She came tearing down here to me in an 1892 flannel nightie and practically jumped into my lap for protection. That’s only the trailer you’re listening to now. I looked up the trains for her, as long as she wanted to leave that bad.”

“It would have surprised me very much if you hadn’t.”

She ignored that. “Some mischievous kids must have done it, don’t you think?”

“Undoubtedly,” he said as he started up. “Only there don’t happen to be any for miles around here.”

Miss Kitchener was packing things into the Gladstone bag, between whiffs at a bottle of smelling salts. There was a fist-size rock on the table, and a crudely penciled scrap of paper that had been wrapped around it lay nearby. He read the message on it.

One of the small partition panes in the window was shattered into a star-shaped remnant.

“You’re not going to let a little thing like that get you, are you?” he suggested.

“Oh, I couldn’t sleep a wink tonight after this!” she snuffled. “I’m nervous enough other nights as it is, even in the city.”

“It’s just a practical joke.”

She paused uncertainly in her packing. “Wh-who do you suppose—?”

“I couldn’t say,” he said decisively, as though to discourage further questioning on that score. “Did you look out, try to see who was down there at the time?”

“Dear me, no! I ran for my life down the stairs as soon as I’d finished reading it. I... I feel so much better now that you’re back, Mr. Holmes. There’s something about having a man in the house—”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t want to oblige you to stay here if you’re going to be frightened and uncomfortable. I’m willing to drive you in to the station and you still have plenty of time to make the quarter-of-twelve train. You can do the typing next week in the city, when I come back. It’s entirely up to you.”

The avenue of escape he was offering obviously appealed to her. He saw her look almost longingly toward her open bag. Then she took a deep breath, gripped the foot rail of the bed with both hands as if to steel herself. “No,” she said. “I was sent out here to do this work for you, and I’ve never yet failed to carry out anything that was expected of me. I shall stay until the work is complete!” But she spoiled the fine courage of the sentiments she was expressing by stealing a surreptitious after glance at the shattered window.

“I think you’ll be all right,” he said quietly, with a half-formed little smile at the corner of his mouth. “The dog’s an effective guarantee that no one will get in the house from outside. And my own room’s right down at the other end of the hall.” He turned to go, then turned back to her again from the doorway. “There’s a small revolver kicking around in one of my bureau drawers somewhere; would you feel any better if I looked for it and let you keep it here with you tonight?”

She gave a squeak of repulsion, palmed her hands at him hastily. “No, no, that would frighten me more than the other thing! I can’t bear the sight of firearms of any description, I’m deathly afraid of them!”

“All right. Miss Kitchener,” he said soothingly. “You’re showing a considerable amount of gallantry in remaining — even though there’s really nothing to be worried about — and I won’t forget to speak favorably to Mr. Trent about it.”

The Cameron girl was in the far corner of the living room, turning over a rifle in her hands, when he appeared unexpectedly in the doorway a few moments later. His descent must have been quieter than he realized.

He clasped hands behind his back, tilting the tail of his coat up out of the way. “I wouldn’t monkey around with any of those if I were you. I think I already told you last night they’re kept loaded.”

She looked over at him, hesitated a moment before putting it down, even turned full face toward him with it still clasped in her hands but crosswise to her own body.

He didn’t move. There was a dancing quality in his eyes, as though his muscular coordination was prepared to meet a need for instantaneous action, but he didn’t show it in any other way.

She stood the gun up against the wall, ostentatiously brushed her hands. “Sorry. Everything I seem to do is wrong.”

His hands unclasped, the skirt of his coat fell flat. “Oh, no, I wouldn’t say that. Everything you seem to do is right.”

He sat down in the “inspiration chair.” She hovered around uncertainly in the background. “Am I intruding?”

“You mean at the moment or by and large?”

“I mean at the moment. By and large I am, I don’t need to be told that.”

“No, you’re not intruding at the moment. I don’t mind your being in here.”

“Where you can keep an eye on me,” she finished for him with a satiric laugh. Her eyes went up toward the raftered ceiling. “Did she decide to stay?”

“Much to your regret.”

She sighed elaborately. “We either understand each other too well or not at all.”

That was the last thing either of them said. The fire had dwindled to a garnet glow, dark as port. The rest of the room was all blue shadow. Just their two faces stood out, pale ovals against the surrounding gloom. A cricket chirped in the velvety silence outside that pressed down, smothered the house like a feather bolster.

He rose to his feet at last, and all you could see rising was the oval of his face; the rest of him already blended into the shadows. He went outside to the stairs, and the scuffing measure of his tread was audible going slowly up them. She stayed on in there, with the garnet embers and the guns.

He closed the door of his room after him, but he didn’t put on the light. It was hard to make him out in the India-ink blackness. White suddenly peered faintly over there by the door, in two long columns and a little triangular wedge, and he’d doffed his coat without moving away from before the door seam. A chair shifted, and the white manifestations ebbed lower on it but still there up against the door. A shoe dropped an inch or two, with the sound a shoe makes; then its mate.

The cricket went on outside, and the silence went on inside, and the night went on outside and in. Once, an hour before dawn, a faint disembodied stirring of air seemed to come into the room, but not from the direction of the window, from the direction of the door — as though he had eased it narrowly open without permitting the latch to make any sound. A floorboard creaked in the distance, somewhere far below. Maybe it was just the wood contracting from the increasing night-long coldness. Or maybe stealthy pressure had been put upon it.

Nothing else sounded after that. After a long while, the extra little swirl of air was cut off again. Outside, an owl hooted in a tree and the stars began to pale.

The Cameron girl was unusually vivacious at breakfast, perhaps because she had had the making of it. She was whistling blithely when Holmes came down, a derelict with a shadowy jawline and soot under his eyes. Miss Kitchener was there ahead of him, shining with soap and water, her nocturnal timidity a thing of the past — at least until the coming night.

“You ladies’ll have to excuse me,” he said, tracing a hand down his sandpapery face as he sat down.

“It’s your house, after all,” Freddy Cameron pointed out.

Miss Kitchener contented herself with a thin-lipped smile, as though there were no excuse for personal untidiness under any circumstances.

The German shepherd came muzzling up to him, evidently remembering yesterday. He ignored it. Freddy Cameron breathed, so low he barely caught it, “No poison test today?”

He shoved his chair back. “Sam’ll be back about noon, to take up where he left off. I’m going in there now and expect to be left undisturbed.”

“I’ll go upstairs and begin my typing,” Miss Kitchener said. “I don’t believe you’ll hear me from where you are.”

“I’ll paint Easter eggs,” Freddy Cameron said disgruntledly.

He closed the living-room door after him, thrust cords of wood into the fireplace, kindled a wedge of newspaper under them. He stripped the oilcloth hood off the dictating machine that stood on the table, adjusted it to the best of his ability but with an air of somewhat baffled uncertainty, as though Sam had usually been delegated to attend to this detail along with all the others. The “inspiration chair,” he noticed, was slightly out of true with the diagonal pattern of the carpet. He shifted it slightly, smiling a little to himself, as if at his own idiosyncrasies. Then he picked up the speaking tube appended to the machine, sat back, everything in readiness for a long day’s creative work. Everything but one thing—

The apparatus made a muted whirr, waiting. The necessary flow of thought wouldn’t seem to come. Inspiration appeared to be log-jammed. He glanced helplessly up at the row of his own books on a shelf, as if wondering how he’d done it before.

A floor board creaked unexpectedly somewhere near at hand. He whirled around in the chair, frowning menacingly at the supposed interruption.

There was no one in the room with him at all; the door was still securely closed. The flames leaped higher behind him, filling the cavern of the fireplace with heat and a crimson rose glow.

The Cameron girl snapped her head around, found his eyes boring into her from the doorway some five minutes later. “Wh-what happened?” she faltered uneasily. “No quarantine this morning?”

“I seem to have hit an air pocket. Come in here, will you? I want to talk to you. Maybe that’ll help to get me started.”

“You sure you want me in there in the holy of holies?” she wanted to know almost frightenedly.

“I’m sure,” he said in a flinty voice.

She made her way in ahead of him, looking back across her shoulder at him the whole way. He closed the door on the two of them. “Sit down.”

“That chair? I thought no one else was allowed—”

“That’s Sam’s line of talk.” His eyes fixed themselves on her piercingly. “What’s the difference between one chair and another?” The question almost seemed to have a special meaning.

She sank into it without further protest. He squatted down, adding an extra log or two to the fire, which was only now beginning to draw, as though he’d had to start it a second time. Then he sat back diagonally opposite her, in a chair she had occupied whenever she had been in here before. He seemed to be watching her closely, as though he’d never seen her before.

“What’ll I talk about?” she suggested presently.

He didn’t answer, just kept watching her. A minute or two ticked by; the only sound in the room with them was the steadily increasing hum from the fireplace.

“Deep thought,” she said mockingly.

“Let me feel your hand a minute,” he said unexpectedly. She extended it to him indolently. The palm was perfectly dry. The wrist was steady.

He flung it back at her with such unexpected force that it struck her across the chest. He was on his feet. “Come on, get out of that chair fast,” he said hoarsely. “You sure had me fooled. What’s your racket, kid?”

But before she had a chance to answer, he was already over at the door, had thrown it open, was thumbing her out past him with an urgency that had something tingling about it.

“What’s the matter with you, anyway?” she drawled reproachfully as she regained her own doorway opposite.

“Keep out of the way for a while; don’t come in here, no matter what you hear. Got that straight?” Some of the rough edge left his voice as he called up the stairs with suddenly regained urbanity, “Miss Kitchener, could I speak to you down here a minute?”

The diligent pitter-patter of her typing, which had been like soft rain on a roof, broke off short and she came down unhesitatingly, at her usual precise, fussy little gait.

He motioned her in. “How far have you gotten?” he asked, closing the door.

“I’m midway through the opening chapter,” she announced, beaming with complacency.

“Sit down. The reason I called you is I’m changing this lead character’s name to— No, sit down there, right where you are,”

“That’s your chair, isn’t it?”

“Oh, any chair. Sit down while I discuss this with you.” He forced her to take it by preempting the other one.

She lowered a spine stiff as a ramrod to the outermost edge of it, contacting it by no more than half an inch.

“Will changing his name give you any extra work? Has he appeared by name yet in the part you’ve already transcribed?”

She was up again with alacrity. “Just a moment, I’ll go up and make sure—”

He motioned her down again. “No, don’t bother.” And then with mild wonderment, “You were just going over that part, how is it you can’t recall offhand? Well, anyway, it occurred to me that in Northern stories readers are used to identifying French-Canadian characters with the villain, and therefore it might be advisable to— Miss Kitchener, are you listening to me? What’s the matter, are you ill?”

“It’s too warm in this chair, the heat of the fire. I can’t stand it.”

Without warning he reached forward, seized one of her hands before she could draw it back. “You must be mistaken. How can you say the chair’s too warm for you? Your hand’s ice-cold — trembling with cold!” He frowned. “At least let me finish what I have to say to you.”

Her breathing had become harshly audible, as though she had asthma. “No, no!”

They both gained their feet simultaneously. He pressed her down by the shoulder, firmly but not roughly, so that she sank into the chair again. She attempted to writhe out of it sideways this time. Again he gripped her, pinned her down. Her spectacles fell off.

“Why is your face so white? Why are you so deathly afraid?”

She seemed to be in the throes of hysteria, beyond reasoning. A knife unexpectedly flashed out from somewhere about her — her sleeve, perhaps — and was upraised against him across the back of the chair. Her hand was quick; his hand was quicker. He throttled it by the wrist, pinning it down over the chair top; it turned a little, and the knife fell out, glanced off the low fire screen behind her and into the flames.

“That’s a funny implement for a typist to be carrying around with her; do you use that in your work?”

She was struggling almost maniacally against him now; something seemed to be driving her to a frenzy. He was exerting his strength passively, holding her a prisoner in the chair with one hand riveted at the base of her throat. He was standing offside to her, however, not directly before her. She alone was in a straight line with the fireplace.

“Let me up... let me up!”

“Not until you speak,” he grunted.

She crumpled suddenly, seemed to collapse inwardly, was suddenly a limp bundle there in the chair. “There’s a gun in there, above the zinc partition — trained on this chair! Any minute the heat will—! A sawed-off shotgun filled with—”

“Who put it there?” he probed relentlessly.

“I did! Quick, let me up!”

“Why? Answer me, why?”

“Because I’m Nick Killeen’s widow — and I came here to kill you. Holmes!”

“That’s all,” he said briefly, and stepped back.

He took his hand away too late. As it broke contact, there was a blinding flash behind her that lit up his face, a roar, and a dense puff of smoke swirled out around her, as though blown out of the fireplace by a bellows worked in reverse.

She heaved convulsively one more time, as though still attempting to escape by reflex alone, then deflated again, staring at him through the smoke haze that veiled her.

“You’re all right,” he assured her quietly. “I emptied it out before I started the fire up a second time, only left the powder charge in it. The dictation machine saved me; you must have accidentally brushed against the lever, turned it on, when you came in here last night. It recorded the whole proceeding, from the first warning creak of the floor to the replacing of the zinc sheet that roofs the fireplace. Only I couldn’t tell which one of you it was; that’s why I had to give you the chair test.”

The door flashed open and the Cameron girl’s frightened white face peered in at them. “What was that?”

He was, strangely enough, twice as rough spoken and curt to her as he had been to the woman in the chair, the way one is to a puppy or a child that can’t be held responsible for its actions. “Stay out of here,” he bellowed, “you damned nuisance of an autograph-hunting, hero-worshiping school brat, or I’ll come out there, turn you over my knee and give you a spanking that’ll make you need cotton wool someplace else besides your ankle!”

The door closed again twice as quickly as it had opened, with a gasp of shocked incredulity.

He turned back to the limp, deflated figure still cowering there in the chair. She seemed to hang suspended in a void; she had lost one personality without regaining another. His voice dropped again to ordinary conversational pitch, as with an adult. “What were you going to do to her — in case it had worked?” he asked curiously.

She was still suffering from shock, but she managed a weak smile. “Exactly nothing at all. She wasn’t even on my list. She couldn’t have endangered me. I might have tied her up in order to get away, that’s all.”

“At least you’re fair-minded in your death dealing,” he conceded grudgingly. He watched her for a moment, then went over and poured her a drink without turning his back on her. “Here. You seem to be all in shreds. Knit yourself up again.”

She tottered waveringly erect at last, one hand out to the chair back. Then little by little a change came over her. She seemed to fill out before his very eyes, gain color, body, like those outline drawings they had once given to a child named Cookie Moran. The life-force, that inextinguishable thing, flowed back into her. Not the cold, spinsterish tide that had been Miss Kitchener; something warmer, brighter. Though her hair was still artfully streaked with gray and drawn tightly back, the last vestiges of the prissy Miss Kitchener seemed to peel away, roll off her like a transparent cellophane wrapping. She was somehow a young, more vibrant woman. A woman who knew no fear, a woman who knew how to admit defeat gracefully. But a vengeful sort of grace it was, even now.

“Well, I got them all but you. Holmes. Nick will overlook that. I’m only a woman, after all. Go ahead, call the police, I’m ready.”

“I am the police. Holmes was hijacked into safety weeks ago; he’s lying low in Bermuda. I’ve been living his life for him ever since, tearing the covers off his old books and reading them over again into the machine, waiting for you to show up. I was afraid the dog would give me away; it showed so plainly I wasn’t its master.”

“I should have noticed that,” she admitted. “Overconfidence must have made me careless. Everything went like clockwork with all the others — Bliss and Mitchell and Moran and Ferguson.”

“Look out,” he warned her dryly, “I’m getting it all on there.” He thumbed the dictation machine, making its faint whirring sound again.

“Do you take me for the usual petty-larceny criminal for gain, trying to cover up what he’s done, trying to welsh out of it?” There was unutterable contempt in the look she gave him. “You have a lot to learn about me! I glory in it! I want to shout it from the housetops, I want the world to know!” She took a quick step over beside the recording apparatus; her voice rose triumphantly into the speaking tube. “I pushed Bliss to his death! I gave cyanide to Mitchell! I smothered Moran alive in a closet! I shot Ferguson through the heart with an arrow! This is Julie Killeen speaking. Do you hear me, Nick, do you hear me? Your debt is paid — all but one. There, Detective, there’s your case. Now bring on your revenge. To me it’s a citation!”

“Sit down a minute,” he said. “There’s no hurry. It’s taken me two and a half years to catch up with you; a few minutes more won’t matter. I want to talk to you.”

And when she had sat down, he said, “So you helpfully put it all on the record for me. All but one thing. You neglected to add why; what this outstanding debt was. I happen to know — now, I didn’t for years. It was what held me up. I found out just in the nick of time — for Holmes’s sake, anyway. If I hadn’t he — the real Holmes — would have been where the rest are by now.”

“You happen to know why!” Sparks seemed to dart from her eyes. “You couldn’t, no, nor anyone else. Did you live through it? Did you see it with your own eyes? A dry line or two on some forgotten, dust-covered police report! But it still stings in my heart.

“It’s a long time ago now, as time goes, and yet all I have to do is shut my eyes and he’s beside me again, Nick, my husband. And the pain wells up around me again, the hate, the rage, the sick, cold loss. All I have to do is shut my eyes and it’s yesterday again, that long-past, unforgotten yesterday.”

III Flashback: The Little Casket Around the Corner

“—For better or for worse, in sickness or in health, until death do ye part?”

“I do.”

“I now pronounce you man and wife. Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. You may kiss the bride.”

They turned toward each other shyly. She drew the filmy veil clear of her face. Her eyes drooped closed as his lips met hers in the sacramental kiss. She was Mrs. Nick Killeen now, not Julie Bennett any more.

The members of their wedding party came crowding around; they were engulfed in a surging surf of bobbing heads, backslapping hands, congratulatory voices. The bridesmaids’ tinted chiffon hats swept over her face one by one like colored gelatin slides, dyeing it without obscuring it, while each gave her a little peck of benediction. Through all the commotion, his eyes and hers kept seeking each other, as if to say, “You’re all that really matters to me, you, over there.”

Then they were side by side again, Mr. and Mrs. Nick Killeen, her hand tucked submissively under his arm, as a wife’s should be, her step matched to his, her heart beating his music. Down the long, vaulted church aisle they moved, toward where the doors stood open wide and the future, their future, waited. And behind them, two by two, came the bridesmaids like a bed of mobile flowers, yellow, azure, lilac, pink.

The apsed doorway receded overhead, gave way to a night sky soft as velvet, pricked with a single star, the evening star. Promising things, long life and happiness and laughter; promising things — but with a wink.

Their attendants hung back, as if bonded in some mischievous conspiracy, as the two principals unsuspectingly started down the short, spreading flight of church steps. The foremost of a short line of cars that had been held in readiness a few doors up the street meshed gears and started slowly forward to receive them. A gust of surreptitious giggling swept over those crowded in the doorway behind them. Hands sought paper bags, and the first few swirls of rice began to mist the steps. The bride threw up her arm to ward off the bombardment, huddled closer to the room. Squeals of glee were emitted, the air whitened with the falling grains.

There was a sudden caterwauling of hysterical brakes; a large black shape, blurred for a moment by its very unexpectedness, careened around the corner of the church. It skimmed over the curb, nearly threatened to mount the steps themselves for a moment. Then by some miracle of maniac steering it veered off, straightened out, revealed itself for a split second as a black sedan, then shot forward into blurred velocity again. A series of ear-splitting detonations had punctuated the whole incredible apparition, and reflected flashes traced it from window-pane to windowpane along the lower floors of the row houses opposite. In its wake a noxious cloud of black smoke blanketed the church steps and those on them, as though an evil spirit had passed that way, and only began to thin out long after the malignant red taillight had twisted from sight at the far upper end of the street.

The laughter and playful shouts had changed to strangled coughs and sputterings. Then there was a sudden silence, as of premonition. In it, a voice spoke a name. The bride spoke her husband’s name. “Nick!” Just once, in a hushed, terrified voice. An instant longer they stood down there motionless at the bottom of the steps, side by side, just as they had left the church. Then all at once she stood alone, and he lay at her feet.

The others broke, came milling down off the steps, fluttering around her. In the middle of them all his face peered up at her, like a white pebble lying at the bottom of a deep pool. There was a tiny fleck of red, a comma, so to speak, down near the bottom of her snowy veil. She kept staring at it as if hypnotized. His face didn’t move. Not a comma, no; a period.

Minutes went by that had no meaning any more. She was a statue in white, the one motionless, the one fixed thing, in all the eddying and swirling about. Voices shouting suggestions reached her as from another world, holding no meaning. “Open his shirt! Get these girls out of here, put them in the cars and send them home!”

Hands were extended toward her, trying to lead her away. “My place is here,” she murmured tonelessly.

“Stunned,” someone said. “Don’t let her stand there like that; see if you can get her to go with you.”

She motioned briefly, mechanically, and they let her be.

In the welter of sounds a dismal, clanging bell approached in the distance, rushing through the streets. Then it stopped short. A black bag stood open at her feet. “Gone,” a low voice said. A girl screamed somewhere close at hand. It wasn’t she.

The black bag was held partly toward her. “Here, let me give you—”

She motioned them aside with one hand, the one with the new gold wedding band on it. “Just let me hold my husband in my arms a moment. Just let me say goodbye.” She knelt over him, with a great welling up of white tulle around her like a snowdrift stirred by the wind. The two heads joined, as they had been meant to join, but only one gave the caress. Those hovering closest heard a soft whisper. “I won’t forget.”

Then she was erect again, the straightest one among all of them; like ice, like white fire. A whimpering bridesmaid plucked helplessly at her sleeve. “Please come away now, please, Julie.”

She didn’t seem to hear. “How many were in that car, Andrea?”

“I saw five, I think.”

“That is what I saw, too, and I have such very good eyes. What was the license number of that car, Andrea?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t have time—”

“I did. D3827. And I have such a very good memory.”

“Julie, don’t, you’re frightening me. Why aren’t you crying?”

“I am, where you can’t see it. Come with me, Andrea. I’m going back inside the church.”

“To pray?”

“No, to make a vow. Another vow to Nick.”

IV Postmortem on Nick Killeen

“So that was it, and you’ve repaid your debt,” Wanger said musingly, “and nothing we can do to you now can take away the satisfaction of your accomplishment, is that it? No punishment that you receive from us can touch you — inside, where it really matters, is that right?”

She didn’t answer.

“Yes, I had you figured that way all along, and now I see that I had you figured right. Sure, imprisonment won’t be any punishment to you, no, nor even the chair itself, if they should happen to give you that. There isn’t a flicker of remorse in your eyes, there isn’t a shadow of fear in your heart.”

“There isn’t. You read me right.”

“The state can’t punish you, can it? But I can. Listen, Julie Killeen.

“You haven’t avenged Nick Killeen. You only think you have, but you haven’t. On the night that Bliss, Mitchell, Ferguson, Holmes and Moran tore past those church steps, howling drunk in their car, a man crouched at the first-floor window of a rooming house opposite, watching for the two of you, a gun in his hand, waiting for you to come out. He’d missed Killeen going in for some reason; maybe the cab Killeen arrived in formed an impediment in his line of fire, maybe there were too many people around him, maybe he reached his death post too late. And so he stayed there; he wasn’t going to miss him coming out.”

“He didn’t.”

“He raised his gun as you and your husband came down the steps. He sighted at Nick, and he pulled the trigger. The car streaked by in between at that instant, with its exhaust tube exploding a mile a minute. But his bullet found its mark, over the car’s low top. It was a freak of timing that wouldn’t have happened again in a hundred years, that couldn’t have happened if he had tried to arrange it that way. The very reflections of the backfiring along the row of unlighted windowpanes helped to cover up his flash.

“There’s your punishment, Julie Killeen. You’ve sent four innocent men to their deaths, who had nothing to do with killing your husband.”

He hadn’t reached her with that, he could tell; there was still the same glaze of icy imperviousness all over her. There was disbelief in her eyes. “Yes, I remember,” she said contemptuously, “the papers tried to hint at some flimsy possibility like that at the time, no doubt deliberately encouraged by you people to cover up your own incompetence. There have been cases before that were never solved — Elwell, Dorothy King, Rothstein — and there’s always the same reason; rottenness in the wrong places, bribery in the right places, pull. But there never was a case in the whole history of the police force that was allowed to pass so unnoticed as this. Not even a suspect questioned in it from first to last. As though a dog had been shot down in the streets!”

“As far as our encouraging the papers at the time goes, it was the other way around. We did everything we could to keep them from mentioning the man-across-the-way angle, deliberately misled them with stories of a stray shot from some rooftop, hoping if we kept quiet about it, if this unknown gunman thought he wasn’t suspected, it would be easier to get our hands on him.”

“I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now! I saw with my own eyes—”

“What you saw was an optical illusion, then. If you had come to us at the time, asked us how we were progressing, we could have proved it to your satisfaction once and for all. But no, you hugged your vengeance to yourself, nursed your bitterness, wouldn’t interview the police. You deliberately withheld the information that was in your own possession — inaccurate though it was — and used it for murder.”

She flashed him a look that was a complacent admission.

“There were powder bums found on the window curtains in that room opposite the church. There were people in it, on the floor above, who distinctly heard a shot beneath their feet, over and above all the backfiring outside. They were in a better position to judge, after all, than you. We even found a discharged shell, of the same caliber as that taken out of your husband’s body, wedged between a crack in the floorboards. We knew from the start where the death shot had been fired from; that was why we didn’t have to go tracing wild cars all over the city. We knew everything but who the killer was. We only found that out now, recently. Don’t you want to know who he is? Don’t you at least want to hear his name?”

“Why should I be interested in what rabbits you pull from a trick hat to try to mislead me?”

“The proof is in our files right now. It came in too late to save Bliss, Mitchell, Moran or Ferguson. But it’s there today. Scientific proof; proof that cannot be gotten around. Documentary proof; a signed confession — I have a copy with me in my own pocket at this very minute. He’s been in custody down in the city for the past three weeks.”

For the first time, she had no challenging answer to make.

“You’ll meet him face to face when you go back there with me shortly. I think that you’ll remember meeting him before.”

The first superficial crack had appeared on the glaze that protected her. A flicker of doubt, of dread, peered from her eyes. A question forced its way out. “Who?”

“Corey. Does the name mean anything to you?”

She said with painful slowness, “Yes, I remember this Corey. Twice he crossed my path, for a moment only. Once, on a terrace at a party, he brought me a drink. It would have been so easy to— But I sent him away, to clear the decks for—”

“The murder of Bliss, isn’t that right?”

“According to you, someone who had never harmed me, never even seen me before that night.” She held her forehead briefly, resumed: “And the second and last time, I was up in his very room with him, for a few minutes. I went back to his apartment with him as the simplest way of getting rid of him. I remember I even held him at the point of a gun to make sure of getting out again unhindered. His gun.”

“The gun that killed your husband. The gun that fired the bullet into Nick Killeen. Through a slip up on the part of a rookie it was checked by ballistics instead of by the fingerprint department for your prints, which was what he had brazenly turned it over to us for.

“I remember I was sitting there raising cain with the fingerprint bureau for not sending me a report on a weapon that had never reached them, when someone at ballistics telephoned me and said, ‘That gun you sent us to be tested matches the markings on the slug taken out of Nick Killeen; we suppose that’s what you wanted, you weren’t very definite about it.’ I had to see it with my own eyes before I’d believe them. Then just to make the irony all of a piece, Corey comes walking in to find out if we were through with the gun and he could have it back again. He never got out again!

“He’d come forward to help us of his own accord. He had a license for the gun; he was only too willing to let us have it, to see if we could get your prints off it. I suppose by then so many years had passed since the Killeen killing, his sense of immunity had become almost a fetish. He thought nothing could—

“It took a little while, but we finally broke him down. In the meantime I had been working independently on what we all thought was an entirely different matter and came across an obscure item in old newspapers at the library, datelined on one of those Fridays that the Friday-Night Fiends had been on the loose. Just a little human-interest thing, tragic to those immediately involved but not particularly important. A bridegroom had been struck dead by a stray shot, presumably fired from some roof near by, as he was leaving the very church he’d just been married in.

“To me that story offered the only possible reason for the murders of the Friday-Night Fiends, who had already lost three charter members and the bartender they carried around with them on those tears of theirs. I put two and two together. No mention was made of who the bereaved bride was, but after all there must have been one; a man doesn’t marry himself.

“So we soft-pedaled Corey’s arrest, held him practically incommunicado, to be sure you wouldn’t get wind of it and pull your next and last punch. It was easy to figure out where it would land, so I simply got into position under it.

“But what I can’t figure out is what you did with yourself between visitations, so to speak. How you were able to vanish so completely each time, effect all these quick changes of coiffure and personality. I knew you were coming but to the last minute didn’t know from where or how. It was like trying to come to grips with a wraith.”

The woman answered abstractedly, “There was nothing very supernatural about it. I suppose you looked for me in out-of-the-way hiding places, rooming houses, cheap hotels. I came into contact with dozens of people daily who never gave me a second look. I lived in a hospital. I’ll give you the name if you want, one of the biggest in the city. I worked there and lived right there, didn’t have to go out. My hair was kept covered, so no one knew — or cared — what color it was, from first to last. When I was off duty I stayed in my room, didn’t encourage friendship from the staff. When it came time to — strike again, I would get a short leave of absence, go away, return again a few days later.

“All for what? All for nothing.”

She was breathing again with difficulty, as she had in the chair before. As though something inside her were breaking up, clogging her windpipe.

“So I held the very gun he killed Nick with, in my own hands! Had him helpless at the point of it; lowered it and walked out, to go and kill an innocent man.” She began to shiver uncontrollably, as though she had a chill. “Now I can hear that awful cry of Bliss as he went over the terrace. I didn’t hear it then. Now I can hear Mitchell’s groan. I can hear them all!”

She bowed her head as abruptly as though her neck had snapped. Her sobbing was low pitched but intense, even paced as the pulsing of a dynamo.

A long time after, when it had ended, she looked up again. “What did he do it for — Corey, I mean?” she asked. “I must know that.”

Paper rattled under his coat. He took out a copy of the confession, unfolded it, offered it to her.

She glanced only at the beginning and at the signature at the end of the last page. Then she returned it. “You tell me,” she said. “I believe you now. You are an honest man.”

“They were working a racket together, your husband and Corey. A nice, profitable, juicy little racket. The details are here in his confession.” He broke off short. “Did Killeen ever tell you that?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yes, he told me. I knew. He told me — all but the names. He told me what would happen to him if he quit. I didn’t believe him. I wasn’t as familiar with violence then. I told him it was either that or me. I didn’t think it was as serious as all that, I didn’t believe it could be. You see, I loved him. He took a week or two to make up his mind, and then he made his choice. Me.”

For the first time Julie Killeen looked directly at Wanger. She spoke quietly, as though telling him some other woman’s story. “He changed his quarters. Our meetings became furtive. I suggested that we go to the police for protection, but he told me he was in it as deep as whoever it was he feared. He said we’d go away. We’d go away fast, right from the church door straight to the ship. That was another thing I insisted on, a church wedding.” She smiled grimly. “You see, I killed him, in a way. That made my obligation even greater afterward.” She hesitated a moment, weary, then went on.

“He said we wouldn’t come back right away. Maybe we wouldn’t come back for a long time after. He was right. We went away all right — but not together. And we neither of us ever came back again.

“I knew I had to take him on those terms or not at all. There was never much question of a choice in it for me. I wanted him. Lord, how I wanted him. I used to lie awake at nights breaking down the time there still was to go without him into minutes and seconds. It made it seem shorter that way. His business” — she shrugged — “he promised he’d give it up. That was all my conscience was strong enough to demand.”

“The mistake you both made,” Wanger mused almost to himself, “was in thinking that there’s ever any quitting the game he was in. They’d chalked up several killings behind them in the course of ^business.’ And then there was the question of the final division of the profits, which is always the main rub. Corey couldn’t let him go. They had each other deadlocked.”

The woman interrupted. There was fury in her quiet voice.

“He quit. He not only quit but made himself over. Mr. Corey, the dashing man-about-town. That’s what he’s become! Why couldn’t he have let Nick go? Why did he have to kill him?”

For the first time in his career Wanger was answering questions instead of asking them. There was a quality of despair in Julie Killeen that carried them both outside the rules of captive and captor.

“Yes, Corey quit. But by the time he tried it there was no one left to reckon with but himself, don’t forget. When Killeen tried it, there was still Corey. And the way he did it wasn’t any too reassuring. Just broke the connection off short, put himself out of reach — probably listening to your well-meant advice — but with enough on Corey to send him to the chair in three or four round trips. Not to mention several thousand dollars that Corey thought was coming to him. Corey had his reasons, all right. He wouldn’t have known a moment’s peace from then on. There would have been an ax hanging over him every minute of his life. He went out to get Nick while the getting was good, before Killeen got him first. The church was the only place Corey would be sure to find him. Before that, Nick evidently didn’t show himself.”

“He laid low, very low,” she said quietly, almost indifferently.

“Nick had moved. Corey didn’t know who the girl was, where she lived.”

“We met in the dark in the movies, always two seats in the last row.”

“But he finally thought of a way. He went around to all the churches asking questions. Somebody slipped up, and he found out where and when the wedding was going to take place. Then he rented a room that commanded the side entrance. He knew Killeen would use the side entrance. He took a gun in there with him, and a package of food, and he didn’t go away from that window for forty-eight hours straight. He figured the time of the ceremony might be moved up at the last minute as a precaution.”

There was silence in the room. Wanger thought of the bullet that had killed Nick Killeen, the bullet that had gone over the heads of five other men and yet had inevitably caused the death of four of them. He sighed and looked at Julie Killeen.

“You — he never knew who you were from first to last. You were just that unimportant little white doll-like figure next to his target. And he — you never knew who he was either, did you — the man who took you to his room one night, the man who had killed your husband?”

The woman didn’t answer, didn’t seem to hear.

“Afterward, he sent a wreath to the funeral, in care of the warden of the church.”

The woman shivered, put up a hand as though Wanger had struck her.

He saw that he had convinced her at last.

He got up, put the manacle around her wrist, closing it almost gently, as if trying not to disturb her bitter reverie. She seemed not to notice it.

“Let’s go,” he said gruffly.

She stood up, suddenly became conscious of the steel that linked their wrists. She looked at Wanger and nodded gravely.

“Yes,” said Julie Killeen, “it’s time for me to go.”