Venomous Lady...

Chapter Three Annaly the Golden

Annaly’s heels made firm clacking sounds on the parquet floor as she walked down the hall to the screen door. Her pale hair, which Peter liked better at shoulder length, the ends curled softly inward, was piled high on her head, giving her a look of fragility, emphasizing the slender and delicate contour of her throat.

“Why Peter!” she said, pushing the screen door open. “What are you doing here at this time of day? I thought you had work to do.” She wore a crisp cotton dress, smooth and tight around her tiny waist. Her lips were coral pink and soft.

She was a haven, a place of refuge, a place of forgetfulness. He took her hungrily in his arms, kissed the side of her throat just under her ear, and then her lips.

With the warm breathlessness he loved, she pushed him away. “Really, darling!” she said, laughing.

“Is your father around?”

“He’s in the upstairs study. Do you want to see him?”

“No. I want to talk to you.”

“I have a guest...”

“Send her away, darling. This is important.”

Annaly shrugged and led the way down the hall to the drawing room. Peter gave a start of surprise as he saw the tall young man standing by the fireplace.

“Peter, I want you to meet Jimmy Cowl. Peter Hume.” Her voice was high, slightly nervous. “Jimmy was taking graduate work at Harvard when I was at Wellesley, Peter. He worked for the State Department.”

James Cowl was blond and tanned and thick through the shoulders. His gabardine suit was steel gray. His handshake was firm.

“Always glad to meet bridegrooms,” he said. There was a faint undercurrent in his tone that Peter couldn’t quite understand, but his voice was hearty and open.

“Surprise visit?” Peter asked.

“In a way. I’ve always threatened to drop in on Annaly. Haven’t I?” he said, turning to her.

“That’s right,” she said cheerfully. “Jimmy, Peter has something he wants to talk to me about. Would you be a dear and take your drink out onto the back terrace for a little while. Right through that door there.”

James Cowl smiled pleasantly, picked up a tall cool drink and walked out of the room.

Annaly frowned at Peter. “Now what is so horribly important, darling?”

He sat down heavily. She stood over him, her hands on her hips and looked down at him. It wasn’t the time or the place for the story he had planned to tell. His mind raced. He said:

“Annaly, honey, some people have arrived in town. You know I was in OSS during the war. Well, I was forced to make trouble for them. They’ve come to get even with me somehow, and I’m worried about you. I think it would be a good thing if you left town for a while. A week, maybe.”

Her hand went to her throat. “But the wedding, Peter! What could they do to me? Would... would they want to hurt me? But that’s ridiculous!”

“They know the wedding is in four days, honey, and they’ve got us over a barrel. We might have to skip it. Postpone it.”

Her eyes widened. “But what about you, darling? If I went away, wouldn’t they try to do something to you?”

He reached up and pulled her down into his lap. She turned, and was light and warm against him, her face in the hollow of his neck and jaw. Her coral lips were touching his as she murmured, “At this point I should say, ‘But Peter! It’s only afternoon!’ ”

He held her fragile warmth tightly and thought that should anything happen to her, there would be nothing left to live for.

Despite the heat, he shivered.

“These people are dangerous,” he said.

“But this is our own city. Full of our friends... Are they really dangerous?”

He remembered the look in Robby’s eyes as she had said, “I’d fight!”

In the quiet room the threat of Lynda seemed far away. Yet this girl was too important to take chances with.

“I can buy them off,” he said.

“Buy them off!”

“It will mean that I’ll have to get rid of the property I own. And go into debt. We won’t be as well fixed as we had planned.”

She sat up on his lap, touched her fingertips to her pale hair, looking oddly like a little girl who had just been denied an ice cream cone. She gave him a quick, alert look.

“What have you done, darling?”

“What? I don’t—”

“Oh, come now, Peter! My goodness! I know the sound of blackmail. If they want money, it means that you’ve done something you shouldn’t. If it weren’t that way, you could go to the police.”

He looked at her miserably. “It isn’t exactly that way, honey. There was a woman overseas and—”

She quickly slid out of his lap, no expression on her face, turned and put her cool fingertips against his lips.

“Don’t tell me about it,” she said, “I hadn’t planned on marrying an angel, you know. I don’t want to hear anything about her. I hate her already. Just tell these people, whoever they are, that the Mrs. Hune-to-be far prefers her husband to hang onto his money, and that she won’t be upset by anything they can tell her.”

“But you don’t—”

“Hush, darling. I know about blackmail. You run along and don’t worry. And don’t try to frighten me into going out of town so that they can’t tell me these horrid things about your past. If I get any letters that look odd, I’ll give them to you unopened. If I get any phone calls from strangers, I’ll hang up. And I won’t talk to anyone I don’t know. You go back and work hard, like a dear.” She pushed him gently toward the front hall.

The screen door slammed behind him. As he went down the steps, he looked back to wave at her through the screen. But she was — already gone.

He was back at the office at quarter to five. Robina’s raised right eyebrow was a question mark. He stopped by her desk and said, “Get me Tom Wenther on the phone.”

“He buys... Peter, you’re not going to—”

“Get me Tom Wenther!”

He slammed the door to his private office. When Wenther was on the line he said, “Tom, you still interested in my house?”

“Not particularly, Pete.”

“Sacrifice, Tom. Eighteen thousand cash deal. On the line.”

Wenther laughed. “Pete, it’s too hot for humor. Every time I laugh I start sweating again. On a cash deal I’d give you twelve. Not a penny more.”

“Split the difference?”

Wenther coughed dryly. The line was silent. “Deal for fifteen cash,” Wenther said. “We’ll fix up the papers tomorrow. Meet me at the bank at eleven.”

“How about the Mill Road farm? Cash deal. Make an offer?”

“Pete, boy, are you in trouble?”

“I need the money for a hot investment.”

“You sound more like a guy who has made an investment that wasn’t so hot. Try Murray Graham. See you tomorrow.” The line clicked and was dead.

Before he hung up, Robina, on the same line said, “Shall I get Murray Graham for you?”

“Immediately.”

Murray Graham was oily and slick and careful. He had cleaned up during the war and was putting large bundles of cash into farm properties when the price was right.

He haggled and whined and finally made a tentative offer of sixty-six thousand for the two farms, but refused to make any offer for either of them separately. Peter accepted the offer and Graham promised cash in five days.

After he hung up, he sat with his face in his hands, his elbows on the desk. Robina came in slowly, stood looking at him. He lifted his face and gave her a weak smile.

“I take it the bride wouldn’t cooperate?”

“No, Robby.”

“So you’re letting the ex have her way?”

“Not a flattering way to put it, Robby. I can’t take chances with Annaly. I’d never forgive myself if anything happened to her. Money isn’t very important when you weigh it against some things.”

“Where will you live?”

“The Wintons are leaving one of the upstairs apartments. We can rent it from Tom.”

“This is going to make Annaly very happy.”

“She’ll get used to it. I’ll get the money back.”

“In no less than fifteen years, chum. Let me see — Annaly will be thirty-seven at that point.”

“What are you trying to prove?”

“That love may be blind, but it can still add.”

“What have you got against Annaly?”

Her sea green eyes got very round. “Why nothing, Peter! How can you say such a horrid thing to poor little me?” She went out and slammed the door behind her.

After dark that night Peter walked the night streets of Sayreton. The voices of the children at play under the big elms were shrill. An ice cream man tinkled his interminable bell. He had a date with Annaly, but he called up and said that he couldn’t make it. She replied that it was all right with her because she didn’t feel well. It was a short cool conversation.

A million locusts sang in the trees and the fields. In the swamp near the edge of town the peepers made shrill chorus. Once he stopped, doubled his fist and slammed it against a tree between the sidewalk and the curb. All it did was hurt his knuckles. It didn’t make him feel any better.

The next day he signed the proper papers and transferred the fifteen thousand into his account. He worked quietly and moodily in his office. Robina had little to say. The day was as depressingly hot as Thursday had been.

Krakow phoned at one fifteen. His thin, tired voice was low and confidential. “You’re playing this real smart, guy.”

“What do you mean?”

“A deed was recorded at noon over at the courthouse. I got a glimpse of the tax stamps. Fifteen. You got time to get it out of the bank. Bring it on over as a down payment, guy.”

“When?” Peter asked weakly.

“Soon as you can make it. Get the cash and put it in a brown paper bag. I’ll be up in my room.” He hung up.

Peter walked blindly down to the bank, wrote out a check for the fifteen thousand. The cashier looked at him peculiarly as he said, “Small bills. Nothing more than a fifty.”

“Trouble, Mr. Hume?”

“Of course not! Do as you’re told!”

“Sure, Mr. Hume. Sure.”

He shoved the bills into his briefcase, walked back up to the office. With the door shut, he transferred them to a brown paper bag.

He heard a soft step behind him and half turned before his head exploded into fragments and he fell down through unending space into blackness.

He came to on the floor, stretched out on his back. Somebody was bathing his forehead with cool water. He opened his eyes, winced and reached up to touch the lump over his ear.

Robina smiled down at him and said, “Good morning, morning glory.”

He struggled up to a sitting position. “Somebody hit me!”

“The heat hit you, Peter. Heat stroke, I guess. I went down the hall for a minute. When I came back I found you on the floor. You’d keeled over and hit your head on your desk on the way down.”

“Brown paper bag!” he gasped.

“Say, are you off your wagon?”

He lurched to his feet, wavered dizzily. “Where is it?”

“Where is what?”

“The brown paper bag!”

It was completely and definitely gone. He sat down heavily behind his desk. In a dull tone he asked, “Did you see anyone leave the office?”

“Didn’t see anyone come or go.”

“Robby, that bag had fifteen thousand dollars in it.”

Her mouth was a round O.

“I was supposed to take it over to — her.”

“What do you do now?”

“I’ve got to go tell Krakow. He’s the man with her. He’s expecting me.”