A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

The Night Reveals

Harry Jordan awoke with a start in complete darkness. The only thing he could make out, at first, was a ghostly greenish halo looming at him from across the room, bisected by a right angle: the radium dial of the clock on the dresser. He squinted his blurred eyes to get in focus, and the halo broke up into 12 numbers, with the hands at 3 and 6. Half past three in the morning — he’d only been asleep four hours and had four more to go.

Instead of turning over and trying again, he suddenly sat up, wide awake now. He’d had a strange feeling that he was alone in the room from the minute he first opened his eyes. He knew he wasn’t, knew he must be wrong, still he couldn’t get rid of it, any more than he could explain it Probably one of those dim instincts still lurking just below the surface in most human beings, he thought with a shiver, harking back to the days when they were just hairy tree dwellers. Well, he’d knock it for a loop and then go back to pounding his ear, only way to get rid of it.

He pivoted on his elbow, reached out gingerly to touch the Missis’s shoulder, convince himself she was right where she was every night. Blank pillow was all that met his touch, and the instinct that had warned him seemed to be laughing down the ages — it had been right after all. He threshed around the other way, flipped on the light on that side of him, turned back again to look. The pillow bore an imprint where her head had rested, that was all; the bedclothes were turned triangularly down on that side. Oh well, maybe she’d got up to get a glass of water—

He sat there awhile giving his head a massage. Then when she didn’t come back he got up and went out to see if there was anything the matter. Maybe the kid was sick, maybe she’d gone to his room. He opened the closed door as quietly as he could. The room was dark.

“Marie,” he whispered urgently. “You in here?”

He snapped on the light, just to make sure. She wasn’t. The kid was just a white mound, sleeping the way only a nine-year-old can: flashlight powder wouldn’t have awakened him. He eased the door shut once more. There wasn’t any other place she could be, she wouldn’t be in the living-room at this hour of the morning. He gave that the lights too, then cut them again. So far he’d been just puzzled, now he was starting to get worked up.

He went back to the bedroom, put on his shoes and pants. The window in there was only open from the top, so there hadn’t been any accident or anything like that, nothing along those lines. Her clothes were missing from the chair; she’d dressed while he was asleep. He went out to the door of the apartment and stood looking up and down the prim fireproof corridor. He knew she wouldn’t be out there; if she’d come this far, then she would have gone the rest of the way — to wherever it was she was going. The empty milk bottle was still standing there with a curled-up note in it, as he’d seen it when he locked up at 11. There wasn’t really anything to get scared about, it was just that it was so damned inexplicable! He’d given up all thought of trying to go back to sleep until this was solved. All the time he kept rubbing one hand down the back of his neck, where he needed a haircut.

He knew for a fact that she wasn’t a sleepwalker, she’d never suffered from that as far as he could recall. She hadn’t received an emergency call from some relatives in the dead of night, because neither of them had any. And she hadn’t got sore at him suddenly and gone off and left him, because they got along hand-in-glove. Take tonight for instance, just before turning in, when he’d filled his pipe for one last smoke, the way she’d insisted on lighting it for him instead of letting him do it himself, the affectionate way she’d held the match until the bowl glowed red, and that stunt she was so fond of doing, turning the match around in her fingers and holding the little stick by the head until the other end of it had burned down. When they got along so swell, how could she have anything against him? And the interest she showed in hearing him tell about his work each night, the way she drank in the dry details of his daily grind, asking him what premises if any he’d inspected that day and what report he was turning in to the office on them and all about it — that wasn’t just pretended, it couldn’t have been; she showed too much understanding, too much real eagerness. Instead of lessening, her interest in his job seemed to increase if anything as time went on. They’d never even had an angry word between them, not in five years now, not since that awful night riding in the cab when the door had opened suddenly and she fell out on her head and he thought for a minute he’d lost her.

He stepped across the corridor finally and punched the elevator button. If she’d been taken ill suddenly and needed medicine — but he’d been right in the room with her, and they had a telephone in the place. The elevator came up and the night operator shoved the slide out of the way. This was going to sound dumb as hell, but she wasn’t in the flat with him, that much he was sure of. “Did, did — Mrs. Jordan didn’t go down with you a little while ago, did she?” he asked.

“Yes sir, she did,” the man said. “But that was quite a while ago. I took her down about happast two.”

She’d been gone over an hour already! His face lengthened with anxiety, but it gave him a good excuse to say, “I think I’ll go down with you, wait for her by the front door.” On the way down he swallowed a few times, and finally came out with it more than he had wanted to. “She say where she was going?” He hung on the fellow’s words, leaning toward him in the car.

“Said she couldn’t sleep, just wanted to get a breath of fresh air.”

Reassuring, matter-of-fact as the reason sounded, he couldn’t get all the comfort out of it he needed. “She should be back by now,” he murmured, looking down at the floor. She might have been knocked down by a taxi, waylaid by a purse snatcher, a woman alone at that hour of the night! His face was a shade paler at the thought as he stepped from the elevator out to the front door and stood there scanning the desolate street, first up one way, then down the other. To notify the police still seemed a little drastic, like borrowing trouble, but if she wasn’t back pretty soon — he turned around. “Which way’d she go?” he asked the porter.

“Down toward Third,” the man said. Which was certainly the less safe of the two directions, the other one being Park. They were on Lexington. What could she want down there, under the shadow of the El, where drunks lying sprawled in doorways were not an uncommon sight? He began to walk slowly back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the lighted doorway. “I can’t imagine—” he said a couple of times, for the benefit of the porter who had come out and joined him. He was a pipe smoker, but this was no time for a pipe. He took a package of cigarettes out of the pocket of his jacket, which he’d put on over his undershirt. He gave the man one as well as himself, and then he felt for the folder of matches he always carried in his side pocket. They were not there; he’d handed them to Marie when she’d asked him to let her light his pipe for him earlier in the evening, and she must have forgotten to give them back to him. He tapped himself all over; she’d kept them all right, absent-mindedly, or they would be on him now.

The porter went in, got some, and came out again. “I wouldn’t worry if I was you, Mr. Jordan,” he remarked sympathetically; Jordan’s fears were beginning to be easily discernible on his face. “I don’t think she went very far away, she’ll prob’ly be back any minute now.”

And just as the calming words were being spoken, Jordan made her out, coming alone up the street toward them, from the corner of Third Avenue. She was walking very quickly, but without showing any signs of being frightened. As she joined him in the radius of the lighted doorway there was nothing either furtive or guilty about her; it might have been four in the afternoon Instead of four in the morning.

“Tsk, tsk,” she clucked comfortingly, “I just know you’ve been worried sick about me, haven’t you?”

They rode upstairs together without either of them saying anything further in the presence of the houseman. Her seedy, shapeless black coat, five years old now, looked as dilapidated as ever; she’d gone out without a hat and her graying hair was even untidier than usual as a result; otherwise she looked just the way she always did. She was carrying a small package done up in vivid green drugstore paper.

When he’d closed the door on the two of them once more, Jordan turned to her. “What on earth made you do that? You gave me a good stiff fright, I can tell you that!” There was no melodrama in the way he said it and no melodrama in the way she answered, just a man and wife talking something over quietly.

“I felt I just had to get some fresh air into my lungs,” she said simply. “I’d been lying there two solid hours without being able to close my eyes. You must have woke up right after I left,” she said casually.

He stopped unlacing his shoes and looked up at her in surprise. “Why, he said you’d been gone nearly an hour!”

“Well I like that!” she said in mild indignation. “What ails him anyway? I wasn’t out of the house fifteen minutes all told — just once around the block and then I stopped in at that all-night druggist on Third, Geety’s, and bought a box of aspirin.” She unwrapped it virtuously and showed it to him. “Are you going to take my word for it, Harry Jordan, or that no-account employee downstairs?” she demanded, but without heat. “My stars, I ought to know how long I was gone, I’m not that feeble-minded!” All this, in an easygoing drawl between the two of them, without any emphasis or recrimination.

“Forget it, Marie,” he said good-naturedly, bending over his shoes once more. “He must have dozed off for a minute and lost track of the time.” He yawned cavernously. The thin eerie wail of a fire truck came floating in on the still night air, but from such a great distance that it sounded miles away; it must have been at least two or three blocks to the east, Second or Third Avenue. “All set?” droned Jordan sleepily, and without waiting for any answer he snapped the lights out. Almost before the current had left the filaments he was sleeping the sleep of the just, now that his good wife was back at his side.

He was a little dopey next day at the office from the unaccustomed break in his sleep the night before, but there wasn’t much to do, just type out the report he’d made on that blaze the week before up in Washington Heights. The building had still been under construction, within an ace of completion, when it was mysteriously gutted and just the walls left standing. Neither his own investigation nor the report of the Fire Marshal’s office had been able to unearth any evidence that the fire was incendiary; that is to say, deliberate instead of accidental. True, there had been some vague reports of labor trouble, but he had tracked them down and found them to be absolutely groundless; there had been no difficulties of any kind between the contractors and the labor union. Another thing, the blaze had taken place on a Sunday evening, a full day and a half after the workmen had knocked off.

It had been fairly easy to trace its point of origin. One apartment, on the ground floor, had been completed and opened for inspection to prospective tenants. Marie herself, for that matter, had been up there to look at it; she’d been heartbroken when he told her the next day what had happened. As he reconstructed it, some careless visitor had tossed a cigarette into a closet while being shown through the layout. The renting agent had locked up and gone home at six, taking the key with him, and the fire had smoldered away in there for the next two hours. The night watchman had no key to the place, so that absolved him of responsibility. He’d discovered it through the windows around eight.

All this was in the notes Jordan had prepared for his report. His reports were never questioned. If they said “Pay,” the company paid; if they said “No Indemnity,” the company told its legal talent to stand by for action. Harry Jordan was its best investigator. He slipped a sheet of stationery letter-headed Hercules Mutual Fire Insurance Corporation under the roller of the typewriter and began laboriously picking out letters on the keyboard with two fingers. He always hated this part of the job; it was with hopeful anticipation therefore that he looked up as the president’s secretary halted beside him. “E. P. would like to see you in his office as soon as you’re through.”

“This can wait,” he said gratefully, and went in through a frosted-glass door.

“Morning,” Parmenter said. “Read about that awful thing on the upper East Side?”

“I got away late this morning, didn’t get a look at my paper,” Jordan admitted. Parmenter showed him his, folded back to the third page. “That’s us, you know,” he added, while Jordan moved his lips soundlessly down the column. The latter looked up, startled. “One of those old-law tenements; I didn’t know we covered—”

“We did this time,” Parmenter told him gloomily. “The bank had taken it over for an investment, tinkered with it a little, slapped on a little paint, replaced the vertical escapes with horizontals, so technically it was no longer strictly old-law. It didn’t pan out as well as they’d expected, so they turned it over to a guy named Lapolla, and he had even more extensive remodeling scheduled for the latter part of this month, soon as they could dispossess the remaining tenants. Well, on the strength of that we sold him coverage. He just called me a little while ago, tearing out his hair by the handfuls. Place is a complete wreck and if it hadn’t been for the new escapes, incidentally, everyone on the upper floors would have been cremated alive. As it is there’s three or four of them in the hospital right now with second-degree burns.” He motioned with the folded paper. “According to this it started behind the stairs on the ground floor. They have it listed as ‘suspicious origin’.”

“You think it smells sort of funny yourself, that it?” asked Jordan.

“Not from the angle of Lapolla, as beneficiary, trying to pull a fast one on us — take out insurance and then commit arson on his own property; we’ve been handling him off and on since ’31. He’s straight. But there’s always this thought: the type people living in a dump like that would be ignorant enough to resent being cleared out for the remodeling, and one of ’em might have tried to get even with the landlord. Anyway, Jordan, you know what to do, give the premises a look-see, get depositions from the janitor and whoever was in the building at the time — or as soon as they’re in a condition to make any. Track down this ‘suspicious origin’ tag the paper has given it for all it’s worth, and if you find any evidence—” But Jordan was already closing the frosted-glass door behind him, the paper wedged in his pocket.

Burned buildings were nothing new to him, but this one was a complete mess, and the teeming tenements all around it only gave its exploded blackened window spaces an added touch of grisliness. Not a pane of glass, not a splinter of frame, had been left in the whole façade; it was just a shell, and already they had the ropes up to bring down the front wall before nightfall.

“Investigator for the underwriters,” he said, and they let him through the barrier as soon as he’d produced his credentials.

“Three-alarmer,” said his departmental escort, flashing his torch down the nightmare hallway from just within the entrance. “I still don’t know how we got ’em all out, even with the nets. I tell you, if it had happened a month sooner before the new escapes had been tacked on, it woulda made history. Mushroomed up the well, like most of ’em do.” He turned his flash upward and the beam lost itself out of sight. There was no ceiling to stop it, just a weird network of charred beams through which the open sky peered from six stories above, where the roof had fallen through and disintegrated on its way down like something strained through a succession of sieves.

“Anything phony-looking about it?” asked Jordan. He edged forward along the fresh planking that had been laid between the doorway and the skeletonized staircase.

“Why would there have to be?” was the answer. “The way they leave their baby carriages parked behind the stairs — you can count the frames of four of ’em back there right now, and cripes knows what other junk was piled on ’em that’s just ashes now! That’s begging for it to happen!”

“That where it started, you think?”

“Must’ve. The basement under us wasn’t touched, and fire eats up, not down — Hey, stay back here, those stairs would fold up if a cat tried to walk on ’em!”

“Lemme that a minute,” said Jordan, reaching for the torch. “I’m not going up, I just want to take a look behind ’em. Nothing ever happened to me yet in one of these places.”

He sidled forward to the end of the plank, then got off it onto the original flooring, which was ankle-deep in debris that had fallen from above but hadn’t given way on this floor. Testing it each step of the way before he put his weight down on it, he advanced slowly to what had been the back of the hall. The torch revealed a number of tortured metal frames, upthrust under the stairs, that had once been the hoops enclosing baby carriages. The heat here must have been terrific at the height of the blaze; the door that had once led downward to the basement was completely burned away. An iron knob and two twisted hinges were all that remained to show there had been one. The steps going down were brick, however; they remained.

“C’mon back,” the assistant marshal said irritably, “before you bring the whole works down on us!”

Jordan got down on his heels and began to paw about, using the rib of an umbrella for a poker. Fine ash, that had once been the pillows and blankets lining the carriages, billowed up, tickling his nostrils. He sneezed and blew a little round clear space on the charred floor boards.

It was when he had straightened up and turned to go, and had already shifted the torch away, that he first saw it. It sent up a dull gleam for an instant as the light flickered over it. He turned back to it with the flash, lost track of it at first, then finally found it again. It had fallen into one of the springs of the erstwhile perambulators and adhered there, soldered on by the heat like a gob of yellow-brown chewing gum. He touched it, pried it loose with a snap, it came off hard as a rock. It was, as a matter of fact, very much like a pebble, but it was metal, he could see that. He was going to throw it away, but when he scratched the surface of it with his thumbnail, it showed up brighter underneath, almost like gold. He found his way back to the fire marshal and showed it to him.

“What do you make of this?”

The marshal didn’t make very much of it. “One of the bolts or gadgets on one of them gocarts, melted down, that’s all,” he said.

But it obviously wasn’t one of the “bolts or gadgets” or it wouldn’t have fused with the heat like that, the rest of the springs and frames hadn’t; and what metal was softer than iron and yellow — but gold? He slipped it into his pocket. A jeweler would be able to tell him in a minute — not that that would prove anything, either.

“What time was the alarm sent in?” he asked the marshal.

“The first one came in at the central station about 3:30, then two more right on top of it.”

“Who turned the first one in, got any idea?”

“Some taxi driver — he’s got an early morning stand down at the next corner.”

Jordan traced the cab man to the garage where he bedded his car. He caught him just as he was leaving on a new shift.

“I heard glass bust,” he said, “and first I thought it was a burglary, then when I look I see smoke steaming out.”

“Had you seen anyone go in or leave before that happened?”

“Tell you the truth, I was reading by the dashlight, didn’t look up oncet until I heard the smash.”

At the emergency ward, where the three worst sufferers had been taken, Jordan found none in a condition to talk to him. Two were under morphine and the third, a top-floor tenant named Dillhoff, swathed in compresses steeped in strong tea to form a protective covering replacing burned-away tissue, could only stare up at him with frightened eyes above the rim of the gauze that muffled even his face. His wife, however, was there at the bedside.

“Yah, insurance!” she broke out hotly when Jordan had introduced himself. “He gets his money — but vot do I get if my man diess?”

He let her get that out of her system first, then — “Some of those people that Lapolla forced to vacate were pretty sore, weren’t they? Did you ever hear any of them make any threats, say they’d get even?”

Her eyes widened as she got the implication. “Ach, no, no!” she cried, wringing her hands, “we vas all friends togedder, they would not do that to those that shtayed behind! No, they vas goot people, poor maybe, but goot!”

“Was the street door left open at nights or locked?”

“Open, alvays open.”

“Then anybody could have walked into the hallway that didn’t belong there? Did you, at any time during the past few days, pass anyone, notice anyone, in the halls or on the stairs that didn’t live in the house?”

Not a soul. But then she never went out much, she admitted.

He left on that note, got in touch with the rewrite man who had shaped the account sent in by the reporter who had covered it. “What’d he say that made you people label it ‘suspicious’ orgin?”

“I put that in myself for a space-filler,” the writer admitted airily. “Anything with three alarms, it don’t hurt to give it a little eerie atmosphere—”

Jordan hung up rather abruptly, his mouth a thin line. So he’d been on a wild-goose chase all day, had he, on account of the careless way some city rooms tossed around phrases! There wasn’t a shred of evidence, as far as he’d been able to discover, that it was anything but accidental.

Parmenter, when he went back at five after seeing Lapolla and getting a statement from the Chief Fire Marshal himself, nodded in agreement after listening to him outline the results of his investigation. “Make out your report,” he said briefly, “I’ll see that a check’s sent to Lapolla as soon as he files his claim.”

Jordan wound up both reports, the one he’d been working on that morning and the new one, then went home, still heartily disgusted with the methods of city journalism. The kid scuffled to the door to let him in, gamboled about him. Marie planted an amiable kiss on his cheek. “Something you like dear — giblets,” she beamed.

It was when she turned her head to reach for something behind her, near the end of the meal, that he looked twice at her neck. “Something missing on you toni—”

She touched her throat absently. “Oh, I know — my locket, isn’t that what you mean?”

“What’d you do, lose it?”

“No,” she said slowly, “it finally came off, after all these years. I left it at the jeweler’s to be fixed.”

“That reminds me—” he said, and touched bis side pocket.

“Reminds you of what?” she asked calmly.

“Oh nothing, never mind,” he answered. If it was worth anything, gold, maybe the jeweler’d give him some trinket in exchange he could surprise her with. He got up and went out again right after the meal, said he’d be right back. “My wife’s locket ready yet?” he asked the little skullcapped man behind the counter.

“What locket?” was the tart response. “She left no locket with me. I haven’t seen your wife in three months, Mr. Jordan.”

Must’ve been some other shop then. He coughed to cover up the mistake. “Well, as long as I’m in here, take a look at this. Worth anything?” He spilled the shapeless calcinated blob of metal onto the glass counter. The old man screwed a glass into his eye, touched a drop of nitric acid to it, nodded.

“Yop, it’s gold. Wait, I find out if it’s solid or just plated.”

He took a file, began to scrape it back and forth across the surface. There was a tiny click, as though he’d broken it. He turned back to Jordan, holding his palm out in astonishment to show him. There were two blobs now instead of one, both identical in outline but thinner; two halves of what had been a locket before it fused together in the fire. A little powdered glass dribbled off one, like sugar, as the jeweler moved his hand.

“What’s that, there?” said Jordan, pointing to a scorched oval of paper adhering to one side. “Lemme use that glass a minute!”

With the naked eye it was just a brown blank, like undeveloped film; under the glass a dim outline revealed itself.

“Haven’t you got anything stronger? Get me a magnifying glass.”

The jeweler came hurrying back with it, Jordan got the thing in focus under it, and suddenly found himself looking at a dimmed snapshot of his own kid, taken at the age of three or four. He didn’t say a word, just gave a peculiar heaving snort down his nose, like a horse drinking water. There couldn’t be any mistake, it was no optical illusion, the glass played up the engraved lettering on the inside of the other half-locket: H. J. to M. J. 1925.

He heard some other guy walk out of the shop saying to the jeweler he didn’t want to sell it after all; it must have been himself, because here he was on his way back home with it again. He didn’t say a word when he got in, just sat there reading the account of the fire in the morning’s paper over and over, and shivering a little more each time. Finally he put the crusher on that by getting up and pouring himself a shot from the bottle in the closet.

“What jeweler’d you leave that locket with?” he asked her quietly.

She looked up from one of the kid’s stockings she was darning. “Old man Elias,” she answered unhesitatingly. “He’s the only one I know of around here.”

He’d just been there. He didn’t say another word for the next hour. Then, very slowly, around 11 he took out his pipe for his usual last smoke. He had to keep his wrists from trembling as he reached for the tobacco tin, filled the bowl, pressed it in with his thumb. His lashes were low over his eyes the whole time, it was hard to tell where he was looking. He took a folder of matches out of his pocket. She came right over to him with a housewifely smile. “No, no, that’s my job,” she said. She lit the pipe for him and then she turned the flickering match upside down, deftly pinched it at the head, and let it burn itself up to a finish. He kept looking down his nose at the bowl of his pipe, and beyond, to where her other hand was. You could only see a quarter of the match folder now; her hand covered the rest. You couldn’t see it at all now, it had been tucked completely out of sight. She straightened up and moved around the room. She’d forgotten to give him his matches back, as she had the night before. His face was moist sitting there, as if the room were too warm. He got up and went to bed, leaving on his socks and trousers under the covers.

She stayed in the kitchen for awhile, and then came in carrying a cup and saucer with steam coming from it. “Harry,” she said, “I want you to try some of this, just to make sure of getting a good night’s sleep. The druggist I was speaking to last night recommended—”

“You seem to need it, not me,” he said dryly.

“I just had mine out there,” she assured him. “Now don’t let it get cold—”

He took the cup from her, sat up, keeping the covers around his shoulders with one hand. “Well, bring me the box and let me see what it is, I like to know what I’m swallowing.”

She turned and went out again docilely. He promptly thrust one leg far out, flipped up the lid of the radiator cover, and emptied the cup into the humidifying pan below.

“Tasted swell,” he said, handing the cup back when she returned with a can marked Ovaltine. He gave her a wretched grimace that was the closest he could get to a grin. “Just like in the ads,” he said, and flopped limply back on the pillow. The lights went out.

She came in again in about half an hour and bent over him, listening. “Harry,” she said guardedly, “Harry,” and even shook him a little by the shoulder. He didn’t move. It sure was supposed to be strong, all right! he thought. He heard the front door close, and he reared up, shoved his feet into his shoes, whipped on his coat, and made for the door. He heard the elevator slide open and close again outside just as he got there. He tore the flat door open, attempted to catch the elevator before it went down, then stopped short. Stop her? What good would it do to stop her? She’d only say she couldn’t sleep again, like last night, and he’d end up by half believing her himself. He had to find out once and for all, make sure, and there was only one way to do that.

He waited till the red shaft light went out before he rang to bring the car back again. It flashed on again, white, and the porter gave him a surprised look when he saw who it was. There wasn’t a joke in poor Jordan’s whole system, but he managed to force one out nevertheless. “Insomnia seems to be catching.” The porter smirked. He didn’t believe him, and Jordan didn’t blame him.

She was still in sight when he got to the door, hugging the building line as she walked. Third again, where the houses weren’t fireproof and there were no doormen. He waited until she’d turned the corner before he started out from their own place, because if she should look back — the porter was right beside him the whole time, wondering what it was all about. Jordan covered the pause by pretending to scrape something off the sole of his shoe that wasn’t there at all. When he finally got to the corner she was already two blocks up, avenue blocks being shorter than the lateral ones. He crossed to the other side, so he could get closer to her without being conspicuous, then crept up until he was just half a block behind her, she on the west side, he on the east. The El pillars kept coming between them like a sort of sparse picket fence, and then there were occasional barber poles and empty glass sidewalk display cases to screen him. But she never once looked around.

When she got to the corner where the scene of the fire was, ten blocks north of where they lived, she stopped, and be saw her stand there gazing down the street at the wrecked building. The front wall had been pulled down by now, but the side walls were still up, with an occasional floor beam to link them. It was almost as if she was gloating, the way she stood there devouring the scene, and it was the deadest giveaway ever that she knew what it was, that she’d been there once before.

He put his hand to his windpipe, as if he couldn’t get enough air in, and turned his head away. Any shred of hope he may have had until now, that she’d lost the locket and someone living in that house had picked it up and carried it there to lose it a second time in the fire, was swept remorselessly away — no room any more for benefit of doubt.

She started on again, so he did too. Why didn’t she turn back — wasn’t it bad enough, what she’d done already? Was she going to do it over again, the very night after? But hope springs eternal, and a minute after she’d damned herself irrevocably by standing there staring at her handiwork, he was again trying to find an out for her in his own mind. She had undoubtedly been there the night before — there was no denying that — but could she have come home so calm after she had purposely done a thing like that? Nobody could. It must have been accidental. She might have had to light a match to find her way downstairs, thrown it over the banisters, and gone away without realizing what she’d done. Or someone else had done it, right after she left. She might have been visiting some indigent relative or black sheep that she didn’t want him to know about, given them the locket to turn into cash, and then fibbed about it to him; even the best of women kept certain things like that from their husbands at times. It was that alone that kept him from swiftly overtaking, stopping her. Only why didn’t she go home, why in God’s name didn’t she go home now?

Instead she went two blocks farther, then abruptly, as if on the spur of the moment, she chose a side street to the right, leading down toward Second Avenue. Again, he took the opposite side of the street, but hung back a little, since it was much narrower than the north-south artery. It was a neighborhood of decrepit, unprotected tenements, all crammed from basement to roof with helpless sleepers, and his spine turned cold as ice as he darted in and out from doorway to doorway after her. And at each moldy entrance that she herself passed, her head would turn a little and she’d glance in, he couldn’t help noticing. Past Second she went, all the way to First, and then without warning she doubled back, began to retrace her steps. He shrank back into the nearest doorway and flattened himself there, to let her go by. At last, he breathed with relief, she was going home. And then the horrid thought occurred — had she just been reconnoitering, trying to pick the right spot for her ghastly act?

There was not even a taxi driver around this time; the street, the whole zone, was dead. She passed a building that was vacant, that had been foreclosed and doomed to demolition perhaps, whose five floors of curtainless windows stared blankly forth, most of the lower panes broken by ball-playing kids. She had passed it once before. Now suddenly, just as she came abreast of it, the blackness of its yawning entryway seemed to suck her in. One minute she was there in full view on the sidewalk, the next she had vanished; she was gone like a puff of smoke, and he shuddered at the implication.

He came out of his retreat and started crossing diagonally toward where she had gone in. As he neared it he quickened his steps, until he was nearly running. He looked in from the sidewalk; it was like trying to peer through black velvet. He stepped in, treading softly, one hand out before him. Something suddenly slashed across his waist and he nearly folded up like a jackknife. One hand pressed to the excruciating stomach pain that resulted, he explored the obstacle with the other. The front door had evidently been stolen off its hinges, carted away for firewood. In place of it the new owners or the police had nailed up a number of slats to keep out intruders, all but the middle one of these had also been yanked away, and you could either slip in under it or, rather foolishly, climb up over it. He ducked below it, went soft-shoeing down the musty hall, keeping the wall at his shoulder to guide him, stopping every other minute to listen, trying to find out where she had gone.

Suddenly the thin glow of a match showed ahead, far down at the other end of the hall. Not the flame itself — that was hidden — just its dimmer reflection, little more than darkness with motes of orange in it. It was coming from behind the staircase; so too, before he could take even another step forward, was the rattling and scuffling of dry papers, then the ominous sound of a box being dragged across the floor. He plunged forward, still keeping his heels clear of the ground. The match glow went out once before he got there, then a second one immediately replaced it. He turned the corner of the staircase base and stopped dead—

He saw it with his own eyes; caught her in the very act, red-handed, killing all condonation, all doubt, once and for all. She had dragged a box filled with old newspapers into the angle formed by the two walls of the little alcove just under and behind the long tinder-dry wooden staircase that went up five stories, with a broken skylight above to give it a perfect flue. He saw the lighted match leave her hand, fall downward into the box, saw a second one flare and follow it with the quickness that only a woman can give such a gesture, saw her preparing to strike a third one on the sandpaper.

He caught her with both hands, one at the wrist, the other just under the thick knot of hair at the back of her neck. She couldn’t turn, gave a sort of heave that was half vocal and half bodily, and billowed out like a flag caught in a high wind. He flung her sideways and around to the back of him, let go his hold, and heard her stumble up against the wall. The silence of the two of them only added to the horror of the situation, in a gloom that was already beginning to be relieved by yellow flashes coming up from the box, each time higher than before. He kicked it further out with the back of his heel, to where he could get at it, then tamped his foot down into the very middle of it, again and again, flattening the papers, stifling the vicious yellow brightness. It snuffed out under the beating; pitch-darkness welled up around him, and he heard the pad of her footfalls running down the long hallway, careening crazily from side to side until they vanished outside in the street. He couldn’t go after her yet, he had to make sure.

He made the mistake of reaching down for the box with his hand, intending to drag it after him out into the open. The draft of the abrupt motion must have set a dozen wicked little red eyes gleaming again inside it, then an unevenness between two boards of the rotting floor jogged it, caught it, up-ended it behind him before he could check his progress. It was out from under the stairs now, with an open flume straight up through the roof to the sky above sucking at it. Instantly papers and red sparks went swirling upward in a deadly funnel; before bis eyes he saw the sparks fanned brighter, bigger, the scorched papers burst into yellow flame once more as they shot up the long dark chute, striking against this banister and that like so many fireballs setting off the dried woodwork. Before he could reach the nearest of them, on the floor above the whole crazy spiral from top to bottom was alight with concentric rings of brightness, one to a floor. It was too late — she’d accomplished what she’d set out to do, in spite of him! He turned back from the first landing that he’d climbed up to, raced down again and out along the hall, remembering the board at the entrance just in time. A faint crackling already sounded from the shaft behind him, like a lot of mice nibbling at something. He tore out of the tunnel-like doorway, and turned up toward the corner.

He saw her just a few steps ahead of him, she hadn’t gone very far after all. She was lingering there about the premises as though she couldn’t tear herself away. He caught her by the hand as he swept by, pulled her after him as far as the corner, where the alarm box was. She didn’t resist, didn’t try to escape from him at all, not even when he let go of her to send in the call. Then he hurried onward with her, not waiting for the apparatus to get there. If he’d been alone it would have been different, but he was afraid she’d say something, give herself away, if they questioned her. He didn’t want her arrested — not until he had a chance to find out what was the matter with her first. They were three blocks away already, hurrying homeward, when the engines went roaring and clanging past them up Third Avenue, satanic red lights aglow. He bowed his head, but she turned and stared after them.

The only time he spoke, the whole way, was once when he asked her in a muffled voice, “How many times did you do it — before tonight?” She didn’t answer. When the porter in their own building had taken them up to their floor and said “Good night,” she was the one who replied, just as though nothing had happened. Jordan closed the door and locked it on the two of them — and what they both knew, and nobody else. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, then turned and leaned it against the wall.

“People might have been living in that house,” he said heavily.

“But there weren’t any, it was vacant,” she said simply.

“There were plenty in the houses on either side of it. It doesn’t matter even if it was just a pile of brushwood in a vacant lot.” He took her by the shoulders and made her look at him. “Don’t you feel well? Does you head bother you? What makes you do it?”

She shrank back, suddenly terrified. “No, no, not that! I know what you mean. Oh Harry, don’t take my mind from me, you can’t! There’s nothing the matter with me! They told you that long ago, they proved it, all of them, after my accident!” She would have gone down on her knees, but he held her up.

“Then why do you do it? Why? Why?” he kept asking.

“I don’t know. I can’t help it.” That was all they said that night.

He was still in the same clothes, hadn’t been to bed at all, when the morning paper was left at the door. He lifted himself stiffly off the chair that he had tilted on its two hind legs against the door, to make sure that she stayed in the place, took the paper inside and looked for the account. It wasn’t played up much, they’d put it out after it had destroyed the staircase, and they were inclined to think that two tramps who had found shelter on one of the upper floors had inadvertently started it, either by smoking or cooking their food. One had run away but one had been found with a broken leg, in the rear yard where he’d leaped down trying to save himself, and was in the hospital. Jordan got an envelope and jotted down the fellow’s name and the hospital on the outside of it, then stuck two five-dollar bills in it with a note, just two words: Sorry, buddy.

Then he got the police on the wire. “Are there going to be charges against the vag So-and-so with the broken leg, in connection with that fire last night?” There certainly were, he was assured: vagrancy, unlawful entry, and setting fire to the premises, and who wanted to know anyway? “I’m an investigator for the Herk Insurance Company. He’ll have to take the rap on the first two counts maybe, but I’d like to say a word for him on the fire charge. Let me know at my office when the case comes up.” Time enough to figure out a way of clearing the man without involving her, when the time came.

Then he telephoned his boss. “Cancel that report I turned in on the fire night before last, the Lapolla property, and hold up the indemnity.” He swallowed hard. “It wasn’t accidental — it was arson.”

Parmenter got excited right away. “Who was responsible, got any idea?”

“An unknown woman,” said Jordan limply. “That’s all I can tell you right now. Lapolla himself had no connection with it, take my word for it. I’ll give you a new report when I get a little more evidence — and — and I won’t be in until late today.”

He went to the bedroom door, took the key out of his pocket, and unlocked it. The room was dark, he’d nailed down the Venetian blinds to the window sills the night before. Looking at her lying there so calm, so innocent, he wondered if she was insane, or what. Yet the specialists who had examined her when he and she had brought suit against the taxi company whose cab she had fallen out of, hadn’t been able to find anything, not even a fracture or concussion; she was right about that. They had lost the suit as a result. But maybe things like that came on slowly, or maybe there was no connection, it was something deeper, more inexplicable. He woke her up gently, and said, “Better go in and get the kid ready for school. Don’t say anything about last night in front of him, understand?”

When the boy had left he said, “Let’s go out and get some air, I don’t have to go to work today, Parmenter’s laid up.” She got her hat and coat without a word. They set out without seeming to have any fixed destination, but Jordan led toward Fifth Avenue and there he flagged a bus. He pulled the cord at 168th, and she followed him out in silence. But when he stopped a little further on, she looked up at the building. “Why, this is the Psychiatric Institute!” she said, and got white.

“Parmenter’s in there undergoing treatment, they told me about it when I telephoned the office,” he said. “You come in and wait, I want to go up and see how he’s getting along.”

She went in with him without further protest. He left her sitting there out in the reception room, and asked to see one of the staff members. He closed his eyes, could hardly answer when he was asked what they could do for him. “I’d like to have my wife put under observation.” He had rehearsed what he was going to say on the way there; he still couldn’t bear to tell them the whole truth — not yet anyway. She would be liable to imprisonment if sane, commitment to one of the hideous state institutions if unbalanced, he couldn’t let that happen to her. There were always private sanitariums, nursing-homes, he could put her in himself — but he had to find out first. What symptoms, if any, did she show, he was asked.

“Nothing very alarming,” he said, “she — she goes for short walks by herself in the middle of the night, that’s all, claims she can’t sleep.” The fire must stay out of this at all costs; reluctantly he brought out a small bottle of chocolate-colored liquid that he had collected from the pan of the radiator before leaving the flat. “I have reason to believe she tried to give me a sleeping potion, so that I wouldn’t worry about her going out. You can tell if you’ll analyze this. We have a child; I think for his sake you should set my mind at rest.”

He could, they told him, engage a private room for her if he wanted to and leave her there for the night, have one of the staff doctors look at her when he came in. It would have to be voluntary, though, they couldn’t commit her against her will merely at his request and without a physician’s certificate.

He nodded. “I’ll go out and talk it over with her.” He went back and sat down beside her. “Marie, would you trust me enough to stay here overnight so they can tell us whether there’s anything the matter with you?”

She got frightened at first. “Then it wasn’t your boss! I knew that, I knew you were going to do this from the time we left the house!” She lowered her voice to a whisper, so they wouldn’t be overheard. “Harry, I’m sane! You know it! Don’t do this to me, you can’t!”

“It’s either that, or I’ll have to go to the police about you. Which is it going to be?” he asked her, also in a whisper. “I’ve got to, I’m an accessory if I don’t. You’ll end up by killing somebody, if you haven’t already without my knowing it. It’s for your own sake, Marie.”

“I’ll never do it again — I swear I won’t!” she pleaded, so convincingly, with such childlike earnestness, that he saw where the real risk lay. It was like water off a duck’s back; she didn’t seem to realize even now the heinousness of having done it at all, and certainly she would keep on doing it again and again, every time she got the chance.

“But you said yourself you didn’t know why you did it, you couldn’t help it.”

“Well, keep matches away from me, then; don’t let me see any, don’t smoke in front of me.”

“Now, I haven’t said a word to them about the fire — we’ll keep that to ourselves, until we find out one way or the other. But don’t lie to them, Marie. They’re only trying to help you. If they ask you, tell them openly about this craving of yours, this fascination matches have for you, without letting them know you’ve already given in to it.” He stroked her hand reassuringly. “How about it?”

She was much calmer now, she was over her first fright. “Do you swear they won’t try to hold me here against my will, use force — a strait jacket or something?”

“I’m your husband, I wouldn’t let anything like that happen to you,” he said. “You stay here just for tonight of your own free will, and I’ll come back tomorrow for you, without fail, and we’ll hear what they have to say.”

“I don’t like to leave the kid like that. Who’ll look after him, Harry? Who’ll get his meals?”

“I’ll send him over to Mrs. Klein, let him eat supper there and stay overnight — the mother of that little fellow he plays with.”

“All right,” she agreed. “I’ll do it — but you’ll see, they’ll tell you there’s nothing the matter with me. Wait’ll you hear what they say.” And as they stood up, she smiled confidently, as if already sure what the outcome would be. He made the necessary arrangements with the reception clerk, and as the nurse led her away she was still smiling. He didn’t like that.

He went to the office but he couldn’t keep his mind on what he was doing, tried three times to make out a new report on the Lapolla fire and tore up each attempt. How could he keep faith with his firm, present evidence that it was arson, and not involve her? There must be a way, but it would have to wait until he was calmer, could think more clearly. He went back to the flat at three, to meet the kid when he came back from school.

“Your mother’s on a visit,” he told him. “You ask Mrs. Klein if it’s all right for you to stay overnight at their house.” The kid was tickled, and went sailing out. Then in about ten minutes he came back again; the Kleins lived on the next block. “Darn it, Sammy’s getting a new brother and they can’t have any company in their house!”

Jordan knew he could have taken him out to a cafeteria with him, if the meal was all that mattered, but the kid was so disappointed he felt sorry for him. “Got any other pals you could stay with?” he asked him.

“Sure, I could go to Frankie’s house, he’s a swell guy!”

“All right, but you give me the address first. I’ll stop up there later on tonight, and if I don’t like the looks of the place I’m bringing you home with me again.” Vizetelly was the name; he jotted down the number of the house, it was in their own immediate neighborhood but a little farther to the east. It was a jim-dandy place, the kid assured him, he’d been there lots of times before. Jordan just smiled and let him go. Then he gave a sigh and went back to the office again.

He stayed on at his desk long after everyone else had gone, moiling over the Lapolla report under a shaded light when it got too dark to see any more. The best he could do with it was to doctor up the statement of the taxi driver who had turned in the alarm, making it appear he had seen an unknown woman run out of the doorway 15 to 20 minutes before the fire had been discovered. The Herk Company wouldn’t cross-question the driver over and above his say-so, he felt pretty sure; the trouble was, if it ever got to the ears of the Fire Marshal’s office — ouch! It was the first time he’d ever put down a deliberate falsehood in one of his reports, he thought wryly; but to let it go down on the record as being accidental, knowing what he did, would have been an even greater misstatement. That Washington Heights affair of the week before ought to be reopened too, he realized, but an indemnity payment had already been made, and it would be a mess to tackle it now. He clasped his head dejectedly between his hands. Finally he shoved the report out of sight in the drawer, got up and looked at the clock. It was after nine, he’d stayed hours overtime. He snapped out the light, felt his way out, and locked up the silent office after him.

He went into a beanery and bought some food, just out of pure habit, then found he couldn’t touch it after all. He sat there smoking one cigarette after the other, wondering what the verdict was going to be. They must have examined her by this time. They wouldn’t wait to do it at one or two in the morning. Maybe he could find out if he called. Maybe they’d let him talk to her. He could cheer her up, find out how she was taking it. Why not? She wasn’t bedridden, there was nothing the matter with her physically. Finally he couldn’t stand it any more, had to know, took a deep breath, and stood up. Ten-twenty-five, the clock said. He shut himself in a booth and called the Psychiatric.

“Would it be at all possible for me to say a word to Mrs. Marie Jordan?” he asked timidly. “She was entered for observation at noon, room 210. This is her husband.”

“This is not a hotel, Mr. Jordan,” was the tart rejoinder. “It’s absolutely against the regulations.”

“Not allowed to call her to the phone, eh?” he asked forlornly.

“Not only that,” the voice answered briskly, “the patient was discharged half an hour ago at her own request, as of perfectly sound mind and body.”

Jordan straightened up. “Oh Lord!” he groaned, “do you people know what you’ve done?”

“We usually do,” she snapped. “Just a second, I’ll look up the report the examiner left with us, for your information.” He was sweating freely as he waited for her to come back. Then she began to read: “Marie Jordan, age thirty-eight, weight one hundred forty, eyes blue, hair — is that your wife?”

“Yes, yes! What has he got to say?”

“Perfectly normal,” she quoted. “Strongly developed maternal instinct, metabolism sound, no nervous disorders whatever. In short, no necessity for undergoing treatment of any kind. I would like to call your attention, Mr. Jordan, to a short postscript in Dr. Grenell’s own handwriting. Dr. Grenell, you may not know, is one of our biggest authorities in this field. He usually knows what he’s saying and he seems to feel rather strongly about your wife’s case.” She cleared her throat meaningly. “This seems to my mind a glaring instance of willful persecution on the pan of the patient’s husband. The shoe seems to fit on the other foot, judging by his habit of following her furtively along the street, so that she was finally compelled to go out only when she thought him asleep, as well as the fact that he imprisoned her in a locked room, mounting guard outside her door, and had hallucinations that the food she prepared for him was drugged. A chemical analysis of the specimen submitted to us proved the charge unfounded. Subjection to treatment of this sort over a period of months or years will undoubtedly have an adverse effect on this woman’s mind and bodily health, but so far there are no signs of it. I have told her she is entitled to police protection if it recurs. Case discharged. Grenell, M.D.”

“Tell Dr. Grenell I congratulate him,” groaned Jordan. “He’s turned a pyromaniac loose on the sleeping city!” And he hung up and just stood there weaving back and forth on his heels for a minute in the narrow confines of the booth.

Maybe she was sane, maybe they were right — but then she was a criminal, in the worst sense of the word, without even the usual criminal’s excuse for her actions, hope of gain! He kept shaking his head. No, he was right and they were wrong, in spite of all their experts and all their findings. She’d been lucky and she’d fooled them, that was all. Her actions alone convinced him that bedtime drink had had something in it, but the sediment must have gone to the bottom of the radiator pan and in scooping it up he hadn’t gotten any of it. He didn’t blame them in a way, he’d deliberately withheld the key to the whole thing from them, thinking only to spare her; as a result it had boomeranged. Sure he’d locked her in her bedroom and sure he’d followed her along the street — what they didn’t know was he’d caught her dropping burning matches into a box of kindling under the staircase of a vacant tenement at one in the morning! Well, the hell with them, they hadn’t helped him any! It was in his own hands again, as it had been at the start. He’d have to handle it the best he could without outside help.

Strongly developed maternal instinct! Sure she had it, why not? She was perfect in every way, A-l, except for this one horrible quirk that had cropped up? Strongly developed — The kid! His extremities got cold all at once. She’d been discharged half an hour ago, she’d look him up the first thing, he’d told her where he was going to take him! He didn’t trust her in anything now. He was going up there and get the kid quick, before she did! He didn’t think she’d really harm him, but she might take him away with her, not show up at home any more, disappear, afraid of him now or sore at what he’d done to her. Not while he knew it! He wasn’t going to let that kid out of his sight from now on, sleep right in the same room with him even if she had come back to the flat! A woman that didn’t have any more moral sense than to cremate people alive, slip a sedative to her own husband — no telling what she’d end up by doing!

He nearly shattered the glass, by the speed with which he got out of the phone booth. He tossed money at the cashier without waiting for change, jumped into a cab in front of the place, gave the fellow the Kleins’ address. “Hurry it up will you — every minute counts!”

“Do the best I can, Cap,” the driver promised.

“That ain’t good enough,” Jordan grunted. “Double it, and it’ll still be too slow to suit me!”

But they’d started from way downtown, very near his office. Quarter-to-eleven had run up to nearly 40 after, even with the driver using a stagger system on the lights, before they got up into the East Side Eighties. He jumped out in front of the Kleins’ place, paid the cab, and ran in. He rang the bell of their flat like fury. Klein came to the door himself, there was subdued excitement in the place, all the lights lit. “Sh!” he warned proudly, “my wife’s presenting me with an addition to the family.” He whipped a long black cigar out of his vest pocket, poked it at Jordan with a grin. Jordan fell back a step in sudden recollection.

“Oh, I remember now! He told me that this afternoon, he didn’t come here after all, went someplace else — my kid—” He fumbled in his clothes for the slip of paper he’d written the name and address on.

“Yeah, your wife was here asking for him a little while ago. She thought he was up here too,” Klein said. “I didn’t know anything about it, but I heard Sammy, that’s my youngster, telling her he’d gone to some other boy’s house—” He broke off short in surprise, watched the other man go tumbling down the stairs again, holding a scrap of paper in one hand; looked down at his feet and saw the cellophaned cigar he’d just presented him with lying there. He bent down and picked it up, shaking his head. “No fatherly feeling at all,” he muttered.

Jordan was hanging onto the paper for dear life, as though that would get him over there quicker. Vizetelly, that was the name, why hadn’t he remembered sooner! She must have beaten him to it by this time, been there and already taken the kid away. If she went home with him from there, all right, but if she took it into her poor warped mind to beat it off with him, hide herself away someplace, how was he ever going to—?

The sickening keen of a fire siren, off someplace in the distance, stopped him for a minute like a bullet, turned his spine to ice; he went right on again with a lurch. Too far away to mean anything, but Lord, what a thought that had been just now! But it didn’t fade out, instead it rose and rose and rose, and suddenly it burst into a full-throated scream as the trucks went tearing across the lower end of the side street he was following, first one and then a second and then a third; and when he turned the corner he saw people running, just like he was running himself only not so fast and not so scared, toward another side street two blocks up. And that was the one the paper in his hand told him to go to.

He shot across the thronged avenue with the immunity of a drunk or a blind man, and felt some squealing car sweep his hat off his head, and didn’t even blink or turn to look. Oh no! he was praying, there are 20 other houses on that block, it can’t be just that very one, 322, that’s laying it on too thick, that’s rubbing it in too strong — give a guy a break once in awhile! He turned the corner, and he saw the ladders going up, the hoses already playing on the roof, the smoke quilting the sky, black on top, red underneath, and it was on the near side, the even-numbered side. He had to slow up, he was knocking people over every minute as the crowd tightened around him. 316 — gee, he’d better get him out in a hurry, those people must live in the house right next door! 318 — a cop tried to motion him back and he ducked under his arm. Then he came up flat against a solid wall of humanity dammed up by the ropes they’d already stretched out, and a yell of agony wrenched from him as his eyes went on ahead unimpeded. One more doorway, 320, with people banked up in it, kept back by a fireman, and then the one beyond, just a hazy sketch through the smoke-pall, blurred oilskinned figures moving in and out, highlighted with orange by some hidden glare inside. Glass tinkling and the crowd around him stampeding back and axes hacking woodwork and thin screams from way up, as in an airplane, and a woman coming down a ladder with a bird cage, and somebody hollering, “My kid! My kid!” right next to him until he thought he’d go nuts. Then when he turned to look, it was himself.

He quit struggling and grappling with them after a while because he found out it used up too much strength, and he only lost ground, they shoved him further back each time. He just pleaded with them after that, and asked them over and over, and never got any answer. Then finally, it seemed like, hours had gone by, they had everyone out — and no sign of his kid anywhere. He didn’t even know what the people looked like, he ran amuck among the huddled survivors yelling, “Vizetelly! Vizetelly!” He found the man in as bad a shape as he was himself, gibbering in terror, “I don’t know! I can’t find my own! I was in the tavern on the corner when they came and told me!”

This time they had to fling him back from within the black hallway of the building itself, coughing and kicking like a maniac, and the cop they turned him over to outside had to pin him down flat on his back on the sidewalk before he’d quit struggling. “He’s up there, I tell you! Why don’t they get him out! I’m going to get him myself!”

“Quiet, now, quiet, or I’ll have to give you the club! They’ve gone up again to look.”

The cop had let him up again but was holding onto him, the two of them pressed flat against the wall of the adjoining building as close as they dared go, when he saw the two firemen coming down the ladder again. One of them crumpled as he touched the ground and had to be carried away. And he heard what the other one yelled hoarsely to his commanding officer, “Yeah, there is something up there in the back room of that top floor flat, can’t tell if it’s a kid or just a burnt log, couldn’t get near enough. I’m going up again, had to get Marty down first.” A boom like dynamite from inside, as if in answer.

“There goes the roof!” said somebody. A tornado of smoke, cinders, and embers blew from the door like an explosion, swirling around them where they stood. In that instant of cringing confusion Jordan slipped the cop’s revolver out of its holster with his free hand, hid it under his own coat. The man, wheezing, eyes smarting, already disheveled from their previous struggle, never missed it.

It was only later, tottering down the street alone, that he began to fully understand why he’d done it. She’d done this, like the others, and he’d known it from the beginning, that was why he had the gun on him now. Some day, sooner or later, he’d find her again. He’d never rest from now on until he had, and when he did! He didn’t have to overhear what that woman tenant had been gabbling hysterically to one of the assistant marshals, to know. “I tell you I saw a woman that didn’t belong in the house running out of the door only ten minutes or so before it started! I happened to be by the window, watching for my husband to come home! She was all untidy-looking and she kept looking back all the way to the corner, like she’d done something she shouldn’t!” He didn’t have to see the man Vizetelly straining a kid to him and rolling grateful eyes upward, to know what that “burnt log” in the top floor-rear stood for now. The only life lost, the only person missing, still unaccounted for, out of all that houseful of people — his kid and hers! It couldn’t have worked out more damnably if she’d plotted it that way on purpose. And maybe she had at that, demented fire worshiper that she was! Strongly developed maternal instinct, and fire was happiness to her, and she’d wanted her kid happy too. He sucked in his breath as he stumbled along. He was going to go crazy himself pretty soon, if he kept on thinking of it that way. Maybe he already was.

They’d wanted to ship him off in an ambulance at first, to be treated for shock, but he’d talked them out of it. He had the cure right with him now under his coat, the best cure.

He was going home first, wait awhile, see if she’d show up not knowing that he already knew, and if she didn’t, then he was going out after her.

The porter took him up when he sagged in, and stared at the strange whiteness of him, the hand clutched to his side under his coat as if he had a pain, but didn’t say anything. When the operator had gone down again he got his key out and put it to the door and went in.

He was too dazed for a minute to notice that he didn’t have to put the lights on, and by that time he’d already seen her, crouched away from him in the furthest corner of the living-room, terror and guilt written all over her face. There was the answer right there, no need to ask. But he did anyway. He shut the living-room door after him and said in a lifeless voice, “Did you do that to 322 tonight?”

Death must have been written on his face; she was too abjectly frightened to deny it. “I only went there — I— I— oh, Harry, I couldn’t help it! I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help it — my hands did it by themselves. Take me back to the hospital—”

“You’d only beat that rap again, like you did before.” He was choking. “You know what you’ve taken from us, don’t you?” She began to shake her head, faster and faster, like a pendulum. “Come closer to me, Marie. Don’t look down, keep looking at my face—”

It went off with a roar that seemed to lift them both simultaneously, so close together had they come, almost touching. She didn’t fall; there was a mantel behind her; she staggered backward, caught it with both upturned hands, and seemed to hang there, gripping life with ten fingers. Her eyes glazed. “You shouldn’t have — done that,” she whispered. “You’ll wake up the kid.”

The door came open behind him; he turned and saw the kid standing there, staring from one to the other. She was still upright, lower now, one hand slipped from the mantel edge. “Almighty God,” he said. He stood staring at the boy. Then he said, “You go out to the telephone and say you want a policeman. You’re a big guy, son, you know how to use it. Close the door. Don’t stand there looking in at us.”