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

You’ll Never See Me Again

It was the biscuits started it. How he wished, afterward, that she’d never made those biscuits! But she made them, and she was proud of them. Her first try. Typical bride-and-groom stuff. The gag everyone’s heard for years, so old it has whiskers down to here. So old it isn’t funny any more. No, it isn’t funny; listen while it’s told.

He wasn’t in the mood for playing house. He’d been working hard all day over his drafting-board. Even if they’d been good he probably would have grunted, “Not bad,” and let it go at that. But they weren’t good; they were atrocious. They were as hard as gravel; they tasted like lye. She’d put in too much of something and left out too much of something else, and life was too short to fool around with them.

“Well, I don’t hear you saying anything about them,” she pouted.

All he said was: “Take my advice, Smiles, and get ’em at the corner bakery after this.”

“That isn’t very appreciative,” she said. “If you think it was much fun bending over that hot oven—”

“If you think it’s much fun eating them — I’ve got a blueprint to do tomorrow; I can’t take punishment like this!”

One word led to another. By the time the meal was over, her fluffy golden head was down inside her folded arms on the table and she was making broken-hearted little noises.

Crying is an irritant to a tired man. He kept saying things he didn’t want to. “I could have had a meal in any restaurant without this. I’m tired. I came home to get a little rest, not the death scene from Camille across the table from me.”

She raised her head at that. She meant business now. “If I’m annoying you, that’s easily taken care of! You want it quiet; we’ll see that you get it quiet. No trouble at all about that.”

She stormed into the bedroom and he could hear drawers slamming in and out. So she was going to walk out on him, was she? For a minute he was going to jump up and go in there after her and put his arms around her and say: “I’m sorry, Smiles; I didn’t mean what I said.” And that probably would have ended the incident then and there.

But he checked himself. He remembered a well-meaning piece of advice a bachelor friend of his had given him before his marriage. And bachelors always seem to know so much about marriage rules! “If she should ever threaten to walk out on you, and they all do at one time or another,” this sage had counseled him, “there’s only one way for you to handle that. Act as though you don’t care; let her go. She’ll come back fast enough, don’t worry. Otherwise, if you beg her not to, she’ll have the upper hand over you from then on.”

He scratched himself behind one ear. “I wonder if he was right?” he muttered. “Well, the only way to find out is to try it.”

So he left the table, went into the living-room, snapped on a reading-lamp, sprawled back in a chair, and opened his evening paper, perfectly unconcerned to all appearances. The only way you could tell he wasn’t, was by the little glances he kept stealing over the top of the paper every once in a while to see if she was really going to carry out her threat.

She acted as if she were. She may have been waiting for him to come running in there after her and beg for forgiveness, and when he didn’t, forced herself to go through with it. Stubborn pride on both their parts. And they were both so young, and this was so new to them. Six weeks the day after tomorrow.

She came bustling in, set down a little black valise in the middle of the room, and put on her gloves. Still waiting for him to make the first overtures for reconciliation. But he kept making the breach worse every time he opened his mouth, all because of what some fool had told him. “Sure you’ve got everything?” he said quietly.

She was so pretty even when she was angry. “I’m glad you’re showing your true colors; I’d rather find out now than later.”

Someone should have pushed their two heads together, probably. But there wasn’t anyone around but just the two of them. “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. Well, pick a nice comfortable hotel while you’re at it.”

“I don’t have to go to a hotel. I’m not a waif. I’ve got a perfectly good mother who’ll receive me with open arms.”

“Quite a trip in the middle of the night, isn’t it?” And to make matters worse, he opened his wallet as if to give her the money for her fare.

That put the finishing touch to her exasperation. “I’ll get up there without any help from you, Mr. Ed Bliss! And I don’t want any of the things you ever gave me, either! Take your old silver-fox piece!” Fluff. “And take your old diamond ring!” Plink. “And take your old pin money!” Scuff-scuff-slap. “And you can take back that insurance policy you took out on me, too! Simon Legree! Ivan the Terrible!”

He turned the paper back to where the boxscores were. He only hoped that bachelor was right. “See you day after tomorrow, or whenever you get tired playing hide-and-seek,” he said calmly.

“You’ll never see me again as long as you live!” It rang in his ears for days afterwards.

She picked up the valise, the front door went boom! and he was single again.

The thing to do now was to pretend he didn’t care, and then she’d never try anything like this again. Otherwise, his life would be made miserable. Every time they had the least little argument, she’d threaten to go back to her mother.

That first night he did all the things he’d always wanted to do, but they didn’t stack up to so much after all. Took off his socks and walked around in his bare feet, let the ashes lie wherever they happened to drop off, drank six bottles of cold beer through their mouths and let them lie all over the room, and went to bed without bothering to shave.

He woke up about four in the morning, and it felt strange knowing she wasn’t in the house with him, and he hoped she was all right wherever she was, and he finally forced himself to go back to sleep again. In the morning there wasn’t anyone to wake him up. Her not being around didn’t seem so strange then simply because he didn’t have time to notice; he was exactly an hour and twenty-two minutes late for work.

But when he came back that night, it did seem strange, not finding anyone there waiting for him, the house dark and empty, and beer bottles rolling all around the living-room floor. Last night’s meal, their last one together, was still strewn around on the table after twenty-four hours. He poked his finger at one of the biscuits, thought remorsefully, “I should have kept quiet. I could have pretended they were good, even if they weren’t.” But it was too late now; the damage had been done.

He had to eat out at a counter by himself, and it was very depressing. He picked up the phone twice that evening, at 10:30 and again at 11:22, on the point of phoning up to her mother’s place and making up with her, or at least finding out how she was. But each time he sort of slapped his own hand, metaphorically speaking, in rebuke and hung up without putting the call through. “I’ll hold out until tomorrow,” he said to himself. “If I give in now, I’m at her mercy.”

The second night was rocky. The bed was no good; they needed to be made up about once every twenty-four hours, he now found out for the first time. A cop poked him in the shoulder with his club at about three in the morning and growled, “What’s your trouble, bud?”

“Nothing that’s got anything to do with what’s in your rule book,” Bliss growled back at him. He picked himself up from the curb and went back inside his house again.

He would have phoned her as soon as he woke up in the morning, but he was late again — only twelve minutes behind, this time, though — and he couldn’t do it from the office without his fellow draftsmen getting wise she had left him.

He finally did it when he came back that evening, the second time, after eating. This was exactly 8:17 p.m. Thursday, two nights after she’d gone.

He said, “I want to talk to Mrs. Belle Alden, in Denby, this state. I don’t know her number. Find it for me and give it to me.” He’d never met Smiles’ mother, incidentally.

While he was waiting for the operator to ring back, he was still figuring how to get out of it; find out how she was without seeming to capitulate. Young pride! Maybe I can talk the mother into not letting on I called to ask about her, so she won’t know I’m weakening. Let it seem like she’s the first one to thaw out.

The phone rang and he picked it up fast, pride or no pride.

“Here’s your party.”

A woman’s voice got on, and he said, “Hello, is this Mrs. Alden?”

The voice said it was.

“This is Ed, Smiles’ husband.”

“Oh, how is she?” she said animatedly.

He sat down at the phone. It took him a minute to get his breath back again. “Isn’t she there?” he said finally.

The voice was surprised. “Here? No. Isn’t she there?”

For a minute his stomach had felt all hollow. Now he was all right again. He was beginning to get it. Or thought he was. He winked at himself, with the wall in front of him for a reflector. So the mother was going to bat for her. They’d cooked up this little fib between them, to punish him. They were going to throw a little fright into him. He’d thought he was teaching her a lesson, and now she was going to turn the tables on him and teach him one. He was supposed to go rushing up there tearing at his hair and foaming at the mouth. “Where’s Smiles? She’s gone! I can’t find her!” Then she’d step out from behind the door, crack her whip over his head, and threaten: “Are you going to behave? Are you ever going to do that again?” And from then on, she’d lead him around with a ring in his nose.

“You can’t fool me, Mrs. Alden,” he said self-assuredly. “I know she’s there. I know she told you to say that.”

Her voice wasn’t panicky; it was still calm and self-possessed, but there was no mistaking the earnest ring to it. Either she was an awfully good actress, or this wasn’t any act. “Now listen, Ed. You ought to know I wouldn’t joke about a thing like that. As a matter of fact, I wrote her a long letter only yesterday afternoon. It ought to be in your mailbox by now. If she’s not there with you, I’d make it my business to find out where she is, if I were you. And I wouldn’t put it off, either!”

He still kept wondering: “Is she ribbing me or isn’t she?” He drawled undecidedly, “Well, it’s damned peculiar.”

“I certainly agree with you,” she said briskly. He just chewed the inner tube of his cheek.

“Well, will you let me know as soon as you find out where she is?” she concluded. “I don’t want to worry, and naturally I won’t be able to help doing so until I hear that she’s all right.”

He hung up, and first he was surer than ever that it wasn’t true she wasn’t there. For one thing, the mother hadn’t seemed worried enough to make it convincing. He thought, “I’ll be damned if I call back again, so you and she can have the laugh on me. She’s up there with you right now.”

But then he went outside and opened the mailbox, and there was a letter for Smiles with her mother’s name on the envelope, and postmarked 6:30 the evening before.

He opened it and read it through. It was bona fide, all right; leisurely, chatty, nothing fake about it. One of those letters that are written over a period of days, a little at a time. There was no mistaking it; up to the time it had been mailed, she hadn’t seen her daughter for months. And Smiles had left him the night before; if she’d gone up there at all, she would have been there long before then.

He didn’t feel so chipper any more, after that. She wouldn’t have stayed away this long if she’d been here in town, where she could walk or take a cab back to the house. There was nothing to be that sore about. And she’d intended going up there. The reason he felt sure of that was this: With her, it wasn’t a light decision, lightly taken and lightly discarded. She hadn’t been living home with her mother when he married her. She’d been on her own down here for several years before then. They corresponded regularly, they were on good terms, but the mother’s remarriage had made a difference. In other words, it wasn’t a case of flying straight back to the nest the first time she’d lost a few feathers. It was not only a fairly lengthy trip up there, but they had not seen each other for several years. So if she’d said she was going up there, it was no fleeting impulse, but a rational, clear-cut decision, and she was the kind of girl who would carry it out once she had arrived at it.

He put his hat on, straightened his tie, left the house, and went downtown. There was only one way she could get anywhere near Denby, and that was by bus. It wasn’t serviced by train.

Of the two main bus systems, one ran an express line that didn’t stop anywhere near there; you had to go all the way to the Canadian border and then double back nearly half of the way by local, to get within hailing distance. The smaller line ran several a day, in each direction, up through there to the nearest large city beyond; they stopped there by request. It was obvious which of the two systems she’d taken.

That should have simplified matters greatly for him; he found out it didn’t. He went down to the terminal and approached the ticket-seller.

“Were you on duty here Tuesday night?”

“Yeah, from six on. That’s my shift every night.”

“I’m trying to locate someone. Look. I know you’re selling tickets all night long, but maybe you can remember her.” He swallowed a lump in his throat. “She’s young, only twenty, with blond hair. So pretty you’d look at her twice, if you ever saw her the first time; I know you would. Her eyes are sort of crinkly and smiling. Even when her mouth isn’t smiling, her eyes are. She — she bought a ticket to Denby.”

The man turned around and took a pack of tickets out of a pigeonhole and blew a layer of dust off them. “I haven’t sold a ticket to Denby in over a month.” They had a rubber band around them. All but the top one. That blew off with his breath.

That seemed to do something to his powers of memory. He ducked down out of sight, came up with it from the floor. “Wait a minute,” he said, prodding his thumbnail between two of his teeth. “I don’t remember anything much about any eyes or smile, but there was a young woman came up and priced the fare to Denby. I guess it was night before last, at that. Seeing this one ticket pulled loose out of the batch reminded me of it. I told her how much it was, and I snagged out a ticket — this loose one here. But then she couldn’t make it; I dunno, she didn’t have enough money on her or something. She looked at her wrist watch, and asked me how late the pawnshops stay open. I told her they were all closed by then. Then she shoveled all the money she could round up across the counter at me and asked me how far that would take her. So I counted and told her, and she told me to give her a ticket to that far.”

Bliss was hanging onto his words, hands gripping the counter until his knuckles showed white. “Yes, but where to?”

The ticket-seller’s eyelids drooped deprecatingly. “That’s the trouble,” he said, easing the back of his collar. “I can’t remember that part of it. I can’t even remember how much the amount came to, now, any more. If I could, I could get the destination by elimination.”

“If I only knew how much she had in her handbag when she left the house,” Bliss thought desolately, “we could work it out together, him and me.” He prodded: “Three dollars? Four? Five?”

The ticket vendor shook his head baffledly. “No use, it won’t come back. I’m juggling so many figures all night long, every night in the week—”

Bliss slumped lower before the sill. “But don’t you keep a record of what places you sell tickets to?”

“No, just the total take for the night, without breaking it down.”

He was as bad off as before. “Then you can’t tell me for sure whether she did get on the bus that night or not?”

Meanwhile an impatient line had formed behind Bliss, and the ticket-seller was getting fidgety.

“No. The driver might remember her. Look at it this way: she only stood in front of me for a minute or two at the most. If she got on the bus at all, she sat in back of him for anywhere from an hour to four hours. Remember, I’m not even guaranteeing that the party I just told you about is the same one you mean. It’s just a vague incident to me.”

“Would the same one that made Tuesday night’s run be back by now?”

“Sure, he’s going out tonight again.” The ticket man looked at a chart. “Go over there and ask for No. 27. Next!”

No. 27 put down his coffee mug, swiveled around on the counter stool, and looked at his questioner.

“Yare, I made Tuesday night’s upstate run.”

“Did you take a pretty blond girl, dressed in a gray jacket and skirt, as far as Denby?”

No. 27 stopped looking at him. His face stayed on in the same direction, but he was looking at other things. “Nawr, I didn’t.”

“Well, was she on the bus at all?”

No. 27’s eyes remained at a tangent from the man he was answering. “Nawr, she wasn’t.”

“What’re you acting so evasive about? I can tell you’re hiding something, just by looking at you.”

“I said, ‘Nawr, I didn’t.’ ”

“Listen. I’m her husband. I’ve got to know. Here, take this, only tell me, will you? I’ve got to know. It’s an awful feeling!”

The driver took a hitch in his belt. “I get good wages. A ten-dollar bill wouldn’t make me say I sawr someone when I didn’t. No, nor a twenty, nor a century either. That’s an old one. It would only make me lose my rating with the company.” He swung around on his stool, took up his coffee mug again. “I only sawr the road,” he said truculently. “I ain’t supposed to see who’s riding in back of me.”

“But you can’t help seeing who gets off each time you stop.”

This time No. 27 wouldn’t answer at all. The interview was over, as far as he was concerned. He flung down a nickel, defiantly jerked down the visor of his cap, and swaggered off.

Bliss slouched forlornly out of the terminal, worse off than before. The issue was all blurred now. The ticket-seller vaguely thought some girl or other had haphazardly bought a ticket for as much money as she had on her person that night, but without guaranteeing that she fitted his description of Smiles at all. The driver, on the other hand, definitely denied anyone like her had ridden with him, as far as Denby or anywhere else. What was he to think? Had she left, or hadn’t she left?

Whether she had or not, it was obvious that she had never arrived. He had the testimony of her own mother, and that letter from her from upstate, to vouch for that. And who was better to be believed than her own mother?

Had she stayed here in the city then? But she hadn’t done that, either. He knew Smiles so well. Even if she had gone to the length of staying overnight at a hotel that first night, Tuesday, she would have been back home with him by Wednesday morning at the very latest. Her peevishness would have evaporated long before then. Another thing, she wouldn’t have had enough money to stay for any longer than just one night at even a moderately priced hotel. She’d flung down the greater part of her household expense money on the floor that night before walking out.

“All I can do,” he thought apprehensively, “is make a round of the hotels and find out if anyone like her was at any of them Tuesday night, even if she’s not there now.”

He didn’t check every last hotel in town, but he checked all the ones she would have gone to, if she’d gone to one at all. She wouldn’t have been sappy enough to go to some rundown lodging-house near the freight yards or longshoremen’s hostelry down by the piers. That narrowed the field somewhat.

He checked on her triply: by name first, on the hotel registers for Tuesday night; then by her description, given to the desk clerks; and lastly by any and all entries in the registers, no matter what name was given. He knew her handwriting, even if she’d registered under an assumed name.

He drew a complete blank. No one who looked like her had come to any of the hotels — Tuesday night, or at any time since. No one giving her name. No one giving another name, who wrote like her. What was left? Where else could she have gone? Friends? She didn’t have any. Not close ones, not friends she knew well enough to walk in on unannounced and stay overnight with.

Where was she? She wasn’t in the city. She wasn’t in the country, up at Denby. She seemed to have vanished completely from the face of the earth.

It was past two in the morning by the time he’d finished checking the hotels. It was too late to get a bus any more that night, or he would have gone up to Denby then and there himself. He turned up his coat collar against the night mist and started disconsolately homeward. On the way he tried to buck himself up by saying: “Nothing’s happened to her. She’s just hiding out somewhere, trying to throw a scare into me. She’ll show up, she’s bound to.” It wouldn’t work, much. It was two whole days and three nights now. Marriage is learning to know another person, learning to know by heart what he or she’d do in such-and-such a situation. They’d only been married six weeks, but, after all, they’d been going together nearly a year before that; he knew her pretty well by now.

She wasn’t vindictive. She didn’t nurse grievances, even imaginary ones. There were only two possible things she would have done. She would have either gotten on that bus red-hot, been cooled off long before she got off it again, but stayed up there a couple of days as long as she was once there. Or if she hadn’t taken the bus, she would have been back by twelve at the latest right that same night, with an injured air and a remark like: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself letting your wife walk the streets like a vagrant!” or something to that effect. She hadn’t, so she must have gone up there. Then he thought of the letter from her mother, and he felt good and scared.

The phone was ringing when he got back. He could hear it even before he got the front door open. He nearly broke the door down in his hurry to get at it. For a minute he thought—

But it was only Mrs. Alden. She said, “I’ve been trying to get you ever since ten o’clock. I didn’t hear from you, and I’ve been getting more and more worried.” His heart went down under his shoelaces. “Did you locate her? Is it all right?”

“I can’t find her,” he said, so low he had to say it over again so she could catch it.

She’d been talking fast until now. Now she didn’t say anything at all for a couple of minutes; there was just an empty hum on the wire. Something came between them. They’d never seen each other face to face, but he could sense a change in her voice, a different sound to it the next time he heard it. It was as though she were drawing away from him. Not moving from where she stood, of course, but rather withdrawing her confidence. The beginnings of suspicion were lurking in it somewhere or other.

“Don’t you think it’s high time you got in touch with the police?” he heard her say. And then, so low that he could hardly get it: “If you don’t, I will.” Click, and she was gone.

He didn’t take it the way he, perhaps, should have.

As he hung up, he thought, “Yes, she’s right, I’ll have to. Nothing else left to be done now. It’s two full days now; no use kidding myself any more.”

He put on his hat and coat again, left the house once more. It was about three in the morning by this time. He hated to go to them. It seemed like writing finis to it. It seemed to make it so final, tragic, in a way. As though, once he notified them, all hope of her returning to him unharmed, of her own accord, was over. As though it stopped being just a little private, domestic matter any more and became a police matter, out of his own hands. Ridiculous, he knew, but that was the way he felt about it. But it had to be done. Just sitting worrying about her wasn’t going to bring her back.

He went in between two green door lamps and spoke to a desk sergeant. “I want to report my wife missing.” They sent a man out, a detective, to talk to him. Then he had to go down to the city morgue, to see if she was among the unidentified dead there, and that was the worst experience he’d had yet. It wasn’t the sight of the still faces one by one; it was the dread, each time, that the next one would be hers. Half under his breath, each time he shook his head and looked at someone who had once been loved, he added, “No, thank God.” She wasn’t there.

Although he hadn’t found her, all he could give when he left the place of the dead was a sigh of unutterable relief. She wasn’t among the found dead; that was all this respite marked. But he knew, although he tried to shut the grisly thought out, that there are many dead who are not found. Sometimes not right away, sometimes never.

They took him around to the hospitals then, to certain wards, and though this wasn’t quite so bad as the other place, it wasn’t much better either. He looked for her among amnesia victims, would-be suicides who had not yet recovered consciousness, persons with all the skin burned off their faces, mercifully swathed in gauze bandaging and tea leaves. They even made him look in the alcoholic wards, though he protested strenuously that she wouldn’t be there, and in the psychopathic wards.

The sigh of relief he gave when this tour was over was only less heartfelt than after leaving the morgue. She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t maimed or injured or out of her mind in any way. And still she wasn’t to be found.

Then they turned it over to Missing Persons, had her description broadcast, and told him there wasn’t anything he could do for the present but go home.

He didn’t even try to sleep when he got back the second time. Just sat there waiting — for the call that didn’t come and that he somehow knew wouldn’t come, not if he waited for a week or a month.

It was starting to get light by that time. The third day since she’d been swallowed up bodily was dawning. She wasn’t in the city, alive or dead, he was convinced. Why sit there waiting for them to locate her when he was sure she wasn’t here? He’d done all he could at this end. He hadn’t done anything yet at the other end. The thing was too serious now; it wasn’t enough just to take the word of a voice over a telephone wire that she wasn’t up there. Not even if the voice was that of her own mother, who was to be trusted if anyone was, who thought as much of her as he did. He decided he’d go up there himself. Anything was better than just sitting here waiting helplessly.

He couldn’t take the early-morning bus, the way he wanted to. Those building plans he was finishing up had to be turned in today; there was an important contractor waiting for them. He stood there poring over the blueprints, more dead than alive between worry and lack of sleep, and when they were finally finished, turned in, and O.K.’d, he went straight from the office to the terminal and took the bus that should get in there about dark.

Denby wasn’t even an incorporated village, he found when the bus finally got there, an hour late. It was just a place where a turnpike crossed another road, with houses spaced at lengthy intervals along the four arms of the intersection. Some of them a quarter of a mile apart, few of them in full view of one another due to intervening trees, bends in the roads, rises and dips of the ground. A filling-station was the nearest thing to the crossroads, in one direction. Up in the other was a store, with living-quarters over it. It was the most dispersed community he had ever seen.

He chose the store at random, stopped in there, and asked, “Which way to the Alden house?”

The storekeeper seemed to be one of those people who wear glasses for the express purpose of staring over instead of through them. Or maybe they’d slipped down on the bridge of his nose. “Take that other fork, to your right,” he instructed. “Just keep going till you think there ain’t going to be no more houses, and you’re sure I steered you wrong. Keep on going anyway. When you least expect it, one last house’ll show up, round the turn. That’s them. Can’t miss it. You’ll know it by the low brick barrier wall runs along in front of it. He put that up lately, just to keep in practice, I reckon.”

Bliss wondered what he meant by that, if anything, but didn’t bother asking. The storekeeper was evidently one of these loquacious souls who would have rambled on forever given the slightest encouragement, and Bliss was tired and anxious to reach his destination. He thanked him and left.

The walk out was no picayune city block or two; it was a good stiff hike. The road stretched before him like a white tape under the velvety night sky, dark-blue rather than black, and stars twinkled down through the openings between the roadside-tree branches. He could hear countryside night noises around him, crickets or something, and once a dog barked way off in the distance — it sounded like miles away. It was lonely, but not particularly frightening. Nature rarely is; it is man that is menacing.

Just the same, if she had come up here — and of course she hadn’t — it wouldn’t have been particularly prudent for a young girl alone like her to walk this distance at that hour of the night. She probably would have phoned out to them to come in and meet her at the crossroads, from either the store or that filling-station. And yet if both had been closed up by then — her bus wouldn’t have passed through here until one or two in the morning — she would have had to walk it alone. But she hadn’t come up so why conjure up additional dangers?

Thinking which, he came around the slow turn in the road and a low, elbow-height boundary wall sprang up beside him and ran down the road past a pleasant, white-painted two-story house, with dark gables, presumably green. They seemed to keep it in good condition. As for the wall itself, he got what the storekeeper’s remark had intended to convey when he saw it. It looked very much as though Alden had put it up simply to kill time, give himself something to do, add a fancy touch to his property. For it seemed to serve no useful purpose. It was not nearly high enough to shut off the view, so it had not been built for privacy. It only ran along the front of the parcel, did not extend around the sides or to the back, so it was not even effective as a barrier against poultry or cattle, or useful as a boundary mark. It seemed to be purely decorative. As such, it was a neat, workmanlike job; you could tell Alden had been a mason before his marriage. It was brick, smoothly, painstakingly plastered over.

There was no gate in it, just a gap, with an ornamental willow wicket arched high over it. He turned in through there. They were up yet, though perhaps already on the point of retiring. One of the upper-floor windows held a light, but with a blind discreetly drawn down over it.

He rang the bell, then stepped back from the door and looked up, expecting to be interrogated first from the window, particularly at this hour. Nothing of the kind happened; they evidently possessed the trustfulness that goes with a clear conscious. He could hear steps start down the inside stairs. A woman’s steps, at that, and a voice that carried out to where he was with surprising clarity said, “Must be somebody lost their way, I guess.”

A hospitable little lantern up over the door went on from the inside, and a moment later he was looking at a pleasant-faced, middle-aged woman with soft gray eyes. Her face was long and thin, but without the hatchet-sharp features that are so often an accompaniment of that contour of face. Her hair was a graying blond, but soft and wavy, not scraggly. Knowing who she was, he almost thought he could detect a little bit of Smiles in her face: the shape of the brows and the curve of the mouth, but that might have been just autosuggestion.

“Hm-m-m?” she said serenely.

“I’m Ed, Mrs. Alden.”

She blinked twice, as though she didn’t get it for a minute. Or maybe wasn’t expecting it.

“Smiles’ husband,” he said, a trifle irritatedly. You’re supposed to know your own in-laws. It wasn’t their fault, of course, that they didn’t. It wasn’t his, either. He and Smiles had been meaning to come up here on a visit as soon as they could, but they’d been so busy getting their own home together, and six weeks is such a short time. Her mother had been getting over a prolonged illness at the time of their wedding, hadn’t been strong enough for the trip down and back.

Both her hands came out toward his now, after that momentary blankness. “Oh, come in, Ed,” she said heartily. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, but I wish it had been under other circumstances.” She glanced past his shoulder. “She’s not with you, I see. No word yet, Ed?” she went on worriedly.

He looked down and shook his head glumly.

She held her hand to her mouth in involuntary dismay, then quickly recovered her self-control, as though not wishing to add to his distress. “Don’t know what to think,” she murmured half audibly. “It’s not like her to do a thing like that. Have you been to the police yet, Ed?”

“I reported it to them before daylight this morning. Had to go around to the different hospitals and places.” He blew out his breath at the recollection. “Huff, it was ghastly.”

“Don’t let’s give up yet, Ed. You know the old saying, ‘No news is good news.’ ” Then: “Don’t let me keep you standing out here. Joe’s upstairs; I’ll call him down.”

As he followed her inside, his whole first impression of Smiles’ mother was that she was as nice, wholesome, and inartificial a woman as you could find anywhere. And first impressions are always half the battle.

She led him along a neat, hardwood-floored hall, varnished to the brightness of a mirror. An equally spotless white staircase rose at the back of it to the floor above.

“Let me take your hat,” she said thoughtfully, and hung it on a peg. “You look peaked, Ed; I can tell you’re taking it hard. That trip up is strenuous, too. It’s awful; you know you read about things like this in the papers nearly every day, but it’s only when it hits home you realize—”

Talking disconnectedly like that, she had reached the entrance to the living-room. She thrust her hand around to the inside of the door frame and snapped on the lights. He was standing directly in the center of the opening as she did so. There was something a little unexpected about the way they went on, but he couldn’t figure what it was; it must have been just a subconscious impression on his part. Maybe they were a little brighter than he’d expected, and after coming in out of the dark — The room looked as though it had been painted fairly recently, and he supposed that was what it was: the walls and woodwork gave it back with unexpected dazzle. It was too small a detail even to waste time on. Or is any detail ever too small?

She had left him for a moment to go as far as the foot of the stairs. “Joe, Smiles’ husband is here,” he heard her call.

A deep rumbling voice answered, “She with him?”

She tactfully didn’t answer that, no doubt to spare Bliss’s feelings; she seemed to be such a considerate woman. “Come down, dear,” was all she said.

He was a thick, heavy-set man, with a bull neck and a little circular fringe of russet-blond hair around his head, the crown of it bald. He was going to be the blunt, aggressive type, Bliss could see. With eyes too small to match it. Eyes that said, “Try and get past us.”

“So you’re Bliss.” He reached out and shook hands with him. It was a hard shake, but not particularly friendly. His hands were calloused to the lumpiness of alligator hide. “Well, you’re taking it pretty calmly, it seems to me.”

Bliss looked at him. “How do you figure that?”

“Joe!” the mother had remonstrated, but so low neither of them paid any attention.

“Coming up here like this. Don’t you think it’s your business to stick close down there, where you could do some good?”

Mrs. Alden laid a comforting hand on Bliss’s arm. “Don’t, Joe. You can tell how the boy feels by looking at him. I’m Smiles’ mother and I know how it is; if she said she was coming up here, why, naturally—”

“I know you’re Teresa’s mother,” he said emphatically, as if to shut her up.

A moment of awkward silence hung suspended in the air above their three heads. Bliss had a funny “lost” feeling for a minute, as though something had eluded him just then, something had been a little askew. It was like when there’s a word you are trying desperately to remember; it’s on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t bring it out. It was such a small thing, though—

“I’ll get you something to eat, Ed,” she said, and as she turned to go out of the room, Bliss couldn’t help overhearing her say to her husband in a stage whisper: “Talk to him. Find out what really happened.”

Alden had about as much finesse as a trained elephant doing the gavotte among ninepins. He cleared his throat judicially. “D’ja do something you shouldn’t? That how it come about?”

“What do you mean?”

“Wull, we have no way of knowing what kind of a disposition you’ve got. Have you got a pretty bad temper, are you a little too quick with the flat of your hand?”

Bliss looked at him incredulously. Then he got it. “That’s hardly a charge I expected to have to defend myself on. But if it’s required of me — I happen to worship the ground my wife walks on. I’d sooner have my right arm wither away than—”

“No offense,” said Alden lamely. “It’s been known to happen before, that’s all.”

“Not in my house,” Bliss said, and gave him a steely look.

Smiles’ mother came in again at this point, with something on a tray. Bliss didn’t even bother looking up to see what it was. He waved it aside, sat there with his arms dangling out over his knees, his head bent way over, looking straight down through them.

The room was a vague irritant. He kept getting it all the time, at least every time he raised his head and looked around, but he couldn’t figure what was doing it. There was only one thing he was sure of: it wasn’t the people in it. So that left it up to the room. Smiles’ mother was the soothing, soft-moving type that it was pleasant to have around you. And even the husband, in spite of his brusqueness, was the stolid emotionless sort that didn’t get on your nerves.

What was it, then? Was the room furnished in bad taste? It wasn’t; it was comfortable and homey-looking. And even if it hadn’t been, that wouldn’t have done it. He was no interior decorator, allergic to anything like that. Was it the glare from the recent paint job? No, not that, either; now that he looked, there wasn’t any glare. It wasn’t even glossy paint; it was the dull kind without highlights. That had just been an optical illusion when the lights first went on.

He shook his head a little to get rid of it, and thought, “What’s annoying me in here?” And he couldn’t tell.

He was holding a lighted cigarette between his dangling fingers, and the ash was slowly accumulating.

“Pass him an ash tray, Joe,” she said in a watery voice. She was starting to cry, without any fuss, unnoticeably, but she still had time to think of their guest’s comfort. Some women are like that.

He looked and a whole cylinder of ash had fallen to the rug. It looked like a good rug, too. “I’m sorry,” he said, and rubbed it out with his shoe. Even the rug bothered him in some way.

Pattern too loud? No, it was quiet, dark-colored, and in good taste. He couldn’t find a thing the matter with it. But it kept troubling him just the same.

Something went clang. It wasn’t in the same room with them; some other part of the house, faint and muffled, like a defective pipe joint settling or swelling.

She said, “Joe, when are you going to have the plumber in to fix that water pipe? It’s sprung out of line again. You’ll wait until we have a good-sized leak on our hands.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said. It sounded more like an original discovery than a recollection of something overlooked. Bliss couldn’t have told why, it just did. More of his occultism, he supposed.

“I’ll have to get a fresh handkerchief,” she said apologetically, got up and passed between them, the one she had been using until now rolled into a tight little ball at her upper lip.

“Take it easy,” Alden said consolingly.

His eyes went to Bliss, then back to her again, as if to say: “Do you see that she’s crying, as well as I do?” So Bliss glanced at her profile as she went by, and she was. She ought to have been; she was the girl’s mother.

When she came in again with the fresh handkerchief she’d gone to get, he got to his feet.

“This isn’t bringing her back. I’d better get down to the city again. They might have word for me by now.”

Alden said, “Can I talk to you alone a minute, Bliss, before you go?”

The three of them had moved out into the hall. Mrs. Alden went up the stairs slowly. The higher up she got the louder her sobs became. Finally, a long wail burst out, and the closing of a door cut it in half. A minute later bedsprings protested, as if someone had dropped on them full length.

“D’you hear that?” Alden said to him. Another of those never-ending nuances hit Bliss; he’d said it as if he were proud of it.

Bliss was standing in the doorway, looking back into the room. He felt as if he were glad to get out of it. And he still couldn’t understand why, any more than any of the rest of it.

“What was it you wanted to say to me on the side?”

Blunt as ever, Alden asked, “Have you told us everything, or have you left out part of it? Just what went on between you and Teresa anyway?”

“One of those tiffs.”

Alden’s small eyes got even smaller; they almost creased out in his face. “It must have been some tiff, for her to walk out on you with her grip in her hand. She wasn’t the kind—”

“How did you know she took her grip with her? I didn’t tell you that.”

“You didn’t have to. She was coming up here, wasn’t she? They always take their grips when they walk out on you.”

There wasn’t pause enough between their two sentences to stick a bent comma. One just seemed to flow out of the other, only with a change of speakers. Alden’s voice had gone up a little with the strain of the added pace he’d put into it, that was all. He’d spoken it a little faster than his usual cadence. Small things. Damn those small things to hell, torturing him like gnats, like gnats that you can’t put your finger on!

Right under Bliss’s eyes, a bead of sweat was forming between two of the reddish tufts of hair at the edge of Alden’s hairline. He could see it oozing out of the pore. What was that from? Just from discussing what time his bus would get him back to the city, as they were doing now? No, it must have been from saying that sentence too fast a while ago — the one about the grip. The effects were only coming out now.

“Well,” Bliss said, “I’d better get a move on, to catch the bus back.”

Her door, upstairs, had opened again. It might have been just coincidental, but it was timed almost as though she’d been listening.

“Joe,” she called down the stairwell. “Don’t let Ed start back down again right tonight. Two trips in one day is too much; he’ll be a wreck. Why not have him stay over with us tonight, and take the early morning one instead?”

Bliss was standing right down there next to him. She could have spoken to him directly just as easily. Why did she have to relay it through her husband?

“Yeah,” Alden said up to her, “that’s just what I was thinking myself.” But it was as though he’d said: “I get you.”

Bliss had a funny feeling they’d been saying something to one another right in front of his face without his knowing what it was.

“No,” he said dolefully, “I’m worried about her. The sooner I get down there and get to the bottom of it—”

He went on out the door, and Alden came after him.

“I’ll walk you down to the bus stop,” he offered.

“Not necessary,” Bliss told him curtly. After all, twice now this other man had tried to suggest he’d abused or maltreated his wife; he couldn’t help resenting it. “I can find my way back without any trouble. You’re probably tired and want to turn in.”

“Just as you say,” Alden acquiesced.

They didn’t shake hands at parting. Bliss couldn’t help noticing that the other man didn’t even reach out and offer to. For his part, that suited him just as well.

After he’d already taken a few steps down the road, Alden called out after him, “Let us know the minute you get good news; I don’t want my wife to worry any more than she has to. She’s taking it hard.”

Bliss noticed he didn’t include himself in that. He didn’t hold that against him, though; after all, there was no blood relationship there.

Alden turned as if to go back inside the house again, but when Bliss happened to glance back several minutes later, just before taking the turn in the road that cut the house off from sight, he could still detect a narrow up-and-down band of light escaping from the doorway, with a break in it at one point as though a protruding profile were obscuring it.

“Wants to make sure I’m really on my way to take that bus,” he said to himself knowingly. But suspicion is a two-edged sword that turns against the wielder as readily as the one it is wielded against. He only detected the edge that was turned toward him, and even that but vaguely.

He reached the crossroads and took up his position. He still had about five minutes to wait, but he’d hardly arrived when two yellow peas of light, swelling until they became great hazy balloons, came down the turnpike toward him. He thought it was the bus at first, ahead of its own schedule, but it turned out to be a coupe with a Quebec license. It slowed long enough for the occupant to lean out and ask:

“Am I on the right road for the city?”

“Yeah, keep going straight, you can’t miss,” Bliss said dully. Then suddenly, on an impulse he was unable to account for afterward, he raised his voice and called out after him, “Hey! I don’t suppose you’d care to give me a lift in with you?”

“Why not?” the Canuck said amiably, and slowed long enough for Bliss to catch up to him.

Bliss opened the door and sidled in. He still didn’t know what had made him change his mind like this, unless perhaps it was the vague thought that he might make better time in with a private car like this than he would have with the bus.

The driver said something about being glad to have someone to talk to on the way down, and Bliss explained briefly that he’d been waiting for the bus, but beyond those few introductory remarks, they did not talk much. Bliss wanted to think. He wanted to analyze his impression of the visit he had just concluded.

It was pretty hopeless to do much involved thinking with a stranger at his elbow, liable to interrupt his train of thought every once in a while with some unimportant remark that had to be answered for courtesy’s sake, so the most he could do was marshal his impressions, sort of document them for future reference when he was actually alone:

At this point, before he got any further, there was a thud, a long-drawn-out reptilian hiss, and a tire went out. They staggered to a stop at the side of the road.

“Looks like I’ve brought you tough luck,” Bliss remarked.

“No,” his host assured him, “that thing’s been on its ninth life for weeks; I’m only surprised it lasted this long. I had it patched before I left Three Rivers this morning, thought maybe I could make the city on it, but it looks like no soap. Well, I have a spare, and now I am glad I hitched you on; four hands are better than two.”

The stretch of roadway where it had happened was a particularly bad one, Bliss couldn’t help noticing as he slung off his coat and jumped down to lend a hand; it was crying for attention, needled with small jagged rock fragments, either improperly crushed in the first place or else loosened from their bed by some recent rain. He supposed it hadn’t been blocked off because there was no other branch road in the immediate vicinity that could take its place as a detour.

They’d hardly gotten the jack out when the bus overtook and passed them, wiping out his gain of time at a stroke. And then, a considerable time later, after they’d already finished the job and wiped their hands clean, some other anonymous car went steaming by, this time at a rate of speed that made the bus seem to have been standing still in its tracks. The Canadian was the only one in sight by the stalled car as its comet-like headlights flicked by. Bliss happened to be farther in off the road just then. He turned his head and looked after it, however, at the tornado-like rush of air that followed in its wake, and got a glimpse of it just before it hurtled from sight.

“That fellow’s asking for a flat,” the Canadian said, “passing over a stretch of fill like this at such a clip.”

“He didn’t have a spare on him, either,” Bliss commented.

“Looked like he was trying to beat that bus in.” Just an idle phrase, for purposes of comparison. It took on new meaning later, though, when Bliss remembered it.

They climbed in and started off again. The rest of the ride passed uneventfully. Bliss spelled his companion at the wheel, the last hour in, and let him take a little doze. He’d been on the road steadily since early that morning, he’d told Bliss.

Bliss woke him up and gave the car back to him when they reached the city limits. The Canadian was heading for a certain hotel all the way downtown, so Bliss wouldn’t let him deviate from his course to take him over to his place; he got out instead at the nearest parallel point to it they touched, thanked him, and started over on foot.

He had a good stiff walk ahead of him, but he didn’t mind that — he’d been sitting cramped up for so long. He still wanted to think things over as badly as ever, too, and he’d found out by experience that solitary walking helped him to think better.

It didn’t in this case, though. He was either too tired from the events of the past few days, or else the materials he had were too formless, indefinite, to get a good grip on. He kept asking himself, “What was wrong up there? Why am I dissatisfied?” And he couldn’t answer for the life of him. “Was anything wrong,” he was finally reduced to wondering, “or was it wholly imaginary on my part?” It was like a wrestling bout with shadows.

The night around him was dark-blue velvet, and as he drew near his own isolated semi-suburban neighborhood, the silence was at least equal to that up at Denby. There wasn’t a soul stirring, not even a milkman. He trudged onward under a leafy tunnel of sidewalk trees that all but made him invisible.

Leaving the coupe where he had, and coming over in a straight line this way, brought him up to his house from behind, on the street in back of it instead of the one running directly before it, which was an approach he never took at other times, such as when coming home from downtown. Behind it there was nothing but vacant plots, so it was a shortcut to cross diagonally behind the house next door and go through from the back instead of going all the way around the corner on the outside. He did that now, without thinking of anything except to save a few extra steps.

As he came out from behind the house next door, treading soundless on the well-kept backyard grass, he saw a momentary flash through one of his own windows that could only have been a pocket torch. He stopped dead in his tracks. Burglars was the first thought that came to him.

He advanced a wary step or two. The flash came again, but from another window this time, nearer the front. They were evidently on their way out, using it only intermittently to help find their way. He’d be able to head them off at the front door, as they stole forth.

There was a partition hedge between the two houses, running from front to back. He scurried along that, on his neighbor’s side of it, keeping head and shoulders down, until he was on a line with his own front door. He crouched there, peering through.

They had left a lookout standing just outside his door. He could see the motionless figure. And then, as his fingers were about to part the hedge, to aid him in crashing through, the still form shifted a little, and the uncertain light struck a glint from a little wedge on its chest. At the same instant Bliss caught the outline of a visor above the profile. A cop!

One hand behind him, Bliss ebbed back again on his heels, thrown completely off balance by the unexpected revelation.

His own front door opened just then and two men came out, one behind the other. Without visors and without metallic gleams on their chests. But the cop turned and flipped up his nightstick toward them in semi-salute; so, whatever they were, they weren’t burglars, although one was unmistakably carrying something out of the house with him.

They carefully closed the front door behind them, even tried it a second time to make sure it was securely fastened. A snatch of guarded conversation drifted toward him as they made their way down the short front walk to the sidewalk. The uniformed man took no part in it, only the two who had been inside.

“He’s hot, all right,” Bliss heard one say.

“Sure, he’s hot, and he already knows it. You notice he wasn’t on that bus when it got in. I’ll beat it down and get the Teletype busy. You put a case on this place. Still, he might try to sneak back in again later.”

Bliss had been crouched there on his heels. He went forward and down now on the flats of his hands, as stunned as though he’d gotten a rabbit punch at the back of the neck.

Motionless there, almost dazed, he kept shaking his head slightly, as though to clear it. They were after him; they thought he’d— Not only that, but they’d been tipped off what bus he was supposed to show up on. That could mean only one person, Joe Alden.

He wasn’t surprised. He could even understand his doing a thing like that; it must seem suspicious to them up there the way she’d disappeared, and Bliss’s own complete lack of any plausible explanation for it. He’d probably have felt the same way about it himself, if he’d been in their place. But he did resent the sneaky way Alden had gone about it, waiting until he was gone and then denouncing him the minute his back was turned. Why hadn’t he tried to have him held by the locals while he was right up there with them? He supposed, now, that was the esoteric meaning in her invitation to him to stay over; so Alden could go out and bring in the cops while he was asleep under their roof. It hadn’t worked because he’d insisted on leaving.

Meanwhile, he continued watching these men before him who had now, through no fault of his own, become his deadly enemies. They separated. One of them, with the uniformed cop trailing along with him, started down the street away from the house. The other drifted diagonally across to the opposite side. The gloom of an overshadowing tree over there swallowed him, and he failed to show up again on the other side of it, where there was a little more light.

There was hardly any noise about the whole thing, hardly so much as a footfall. They were like shadows moving in a dream world. A car engine began droning stealthily, slurred away, from a short distance farther down the street, marking the point of departure of two out of the three. A drop of sweat, as cold as mercury, toiled sluggishly down the nape of Bliss’s neck, blotted itself into his collar.

He stayed there where he was, on all fours behind the hedge, a few minutes longer. The only thing to do was go out and try to clear himself. The only thing not to do was turn around and slink off — though the way lay open behind him. But at the same time he had a chill premonition that it wasn’t going to be so easy to clear himself; that once they got their hands on him—

“But I’ve got to,” he kept telling himself over and over. “They’ve got to help me, not go after me. They can’t say I — did anything like that to Smiles! Maybe I can hit one of them that’s fair minded, will listen to me.”

Meanwhile he had remained in the crouched position of a track runner waiting for the signal to start. He picked himself up slowly and straightened to his full height behind the hedge. That took courage, alone, without moving a step farther. “Well, here goes,” he muttered, tightened his belt, and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. It was a crawly sort of feeling. He knew, nine chances to one, his freedom of movement was over the minute he stepped out from behind this hedge and went over toward that inky tree shadow across the street that was just a little too lumpy in the middle. He didn’t give a rap about freedom of movement in itself, but his whole purpose, his one aim from now on, was to look for and find Smiles. He was afraid losing it would hamper him in that. She was his wife; he wanted to look for her himself. He didn’t want other guys to do it for him whether they were professionals or not.

He lighted the cigarette when halfway across the street, but the tree shadow didn’t move. The detective evidently didn’t know him by sight yet, was on the lookout for someone coming from the other direction on his way to the house.

Bliss stopped right in front of him and said, “Are you looking for me? I’m Ed Bliss and I live over there.”

The shadow up and down the tree trunk detached itself, became a man. “How’d you know anyone was looking for you?” It was a challenge, as though that were already an admission of guilt in itself.

Bliss said, “Come inside, will you? I want to talk to you.”

They crossed over once more. Bliss unlocked the door for him, with his own key this time, and put on the lights. They went into the living-room. It was already getting dusty from not being cleaned in several days.

He looked Bliss over good. Bliss looked him over just as good. He wanted a man in this, not a detective.

The detective spoke first, repeated what he’d asked him outside on the street. “How’d you know we’d be looking for you when that bus got in?”

“I didn’t. I just happened to take a lift down instead.”

“What’s become of your wife, Bliss?”

“I don’t know.”

“We think you do.”

“I wish you were right. But not in the way you mean.”

“Never mind what you wish. You know another good word for that? Remorse.”

The blood in Bliss’s face thinned a little. “Before you put me in the soup, just let me talk here quietly with you a few minutes. That’s all I ask.”

“When she walked out of here Tuesday night, what was she wearing?”

Bliss hesitated a minute. Not because he didn’t know — he’d already described her outfit to them when he reported her missing — but because he could sense a deeper import lurking behind the question.

The detective took the hesitancy for an attempt at evasion, went on: “Now, every man knows his wife’s clothes by heart. You paid for every last one of them; you know just what she owned. Just tell me what she had on.”

There was danger in it somewhere. “She had on a gray suit — jacket and skirt, you know. Then a pink silk shirtwaist. She threw her fur piece back at me, so that’s about all she went out in. A hat, of course. One of those crazy hats.”

“Baggage?”

“A black valise with tan binding. Oh, about the size of a typewriter case.”

“Sure of that?”

“Sure of that.”

The detective gave a kind of soundless whistle through his teeth.

“Whe-ew!” he said, and he looked at Bliss almost as if he felt sorry for him. “You’ve sure made it tough for yourself this time! I didn’t have to ask you that, because we know just as well as you what she had on.”

“How?”

“Because we found every last one of those articles you just mentioned in the furnace downstairs in this very house, less than twenty minutes ago. My partner’s gone down to headquarters with them. And a guy don’t do that to his wife’s clothes unless he’s done something to his wife, too. What’ve you done with her, Bliss?”

The other man wasn’t even in the room with him any more, so far as Bliss was concerned. A curtain of foggy horror had dropped down all around him. “My God!” he whispered hoarsely. “Something’s happened to her, somebody’s done something to her!” And he jumped up and ran out of the room so unexpectedly, so swiftly, that if his purpose had been to escape, he almost could have eluded the other man. Instead, he made for the cellar door and ran down the basement steps. The detective had shot to his feet after him, was at his heels by the time he got down to the bottom. Bliss turned on the light and looked at the furnace grate, yawning emptily open — as though that could tell him anything more.

He turned despairingly to the detective. “Was there any blood on them?”

“Should there have been?”

“Don’t! Have a heart,” Bliss begged in a choked voice, and shaded his eyes. “Who put them in there? Why’d they bring them back here? How’d they get in while I was out?”

“Quit that,” the headquarters man said dryly. “Suppose we get started. Our guys’ll be looking all over for you, and it’ll save them a lot of trouble.”

Every few steps on the way back up those basement stairs, Bliss would stop, as though he’d run down and needed winding up again. The detective would prod him forward, not roughly, just as a sort of reminder to keep going.

“Why’d they put them there?” he asked. “Things that go in there are meant for fuel. That’s what you came back for, to finish burning them, isn’t it? Too late in the year to make a fire in the daytime without attracting attention.”

“Listen. We were only married six weeks.”

“What’s that supposed to prove? Do you think there haven’t been guys that got rid of their wives six days after they were married, or even six hours?”

“But those are fiends — monsters. I couldn’t be one of them!”

And the pitiless answer was: “How do we know that? We can’t tell, from the outside, what you’re like on the inside. We’re not X-ray machines.”

They were up on the main floor again by now.

“Was she insured?” the detective questioned.

“Yes.”

“You tell everything, don’t you?”

“Because there’s nothing to hide. I didn’t just insure her, I insured us both. I took out twin policies, one on each of us. We were each other’s beneficiaries. She wanted it that way.”

“But you’re here and she’s not,” the detective pointed out remorselessly.

They passed the dining-room entrance. Maybe it was the dishes still left on the table from that night that got to him. She came before him again, with her smiling crinkly eyes. He could see her carrying in a plate covered with a napkin. “Sit down there, mister, and don’t look. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

That finished him. That was a blow below the belt. He said, “You gotta let me alone a minute.” And he slumped against the wall with his arm up over his face.

When he finally got over it, and it took some getting over, a sort of change had come over the detective. He said tonelessly, “Sit down a minute. Get your breath back and pull yourself together.” He didn’t sound like he meant that particularly, it was just an excuse.

He lighted a cigarette and then he threw the pack over at Bliss. Bliss let it slide off his thigh without bothering with it.

The detective said, “I’ve been a dick going on eight years now, and I never saw a guy who could fake a spell like you just had, and make it so convincing.” He paused, then went on: “The reason I’m saying this is, once you go in you stay in, after what we found here in the house tonight. And, then, you did come up to me outside of your own accord, but of course that could have been just self-preservation. So I’m listening, for just as long as it takes me to finish this cigarette. By the time I’m through, if you haven’t been able to tell me anything that changes the looks of things around, away we go.” And he took a puff and waited.

“There’s nothing I can tell you that I haven’t already told you. She walked out of here Tuesday night at supper time. Said she was going to her mother’s. She never got there. I haven’t seen her since. Now you fellows find the things I saw her leave in, stuffed into the furnace in the basement.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and kept it pinched.

The detective took another slow pull at his cigarette. “You’ve been around to the morgue and the hospitals. So she hadn’t had any accident. Her things are back here again. So it isn’t just a straight disappearance, or amnesia, or anything like that. That means that whatever was done to her or with her, was done against her will. Since we’ve eliminated accident, suicide, voluntary and involuntary disappearance, that spells murder.”

“Don’t!” Bliss said.

“It’s got to be done.” The detective took another puff. “Let’s get down to motive. Now, you already have one, and a damned fine one. You’ll have to dig up one on the part of somebody else that’ll be stronger than yours, if you expect to cancel it out.”

“Who could want to hurt her? She was so lovely, she was so beautiful—”

“Sometimes it’s dangerous for a girl to be too lovely, too beautiful. It drives a man out of his mind; the man that can’t have her. Were there any?”

“You’re talking about Smiles now,” Bliss growled dangerously, tightening his fist.

“I’m talking about a case. A case of suspected murder. And to us cases aren’t beautiful, aren’t ugly, they’re just punishable.” He puffed again. “Did she turn anyone down to marry you?”

Bliss shook his head. “She once told me I was the first fellow she ever went with.”

The detective took another puff at his cigarette. He looked at it, shifted his fingers back a little, then looked at Bliss. “I seldom smoke that far down,” he warned him. “I’m giving you a break. There’s one more drag left in it. Anyone else stand to gain anything, financially, by her death, outside of yourself?”

“No one I know of.”

The detective took the last puff, dropped the buff, ground it out. “Well, let’s go,” he said. He fumbled under his coat, took out a pair of handcuffs. “Incidentally, what was her real name? I have to know when I bring you in.”

“Teresa.”

“Smiles was just your pet name for her, eh?” The detective seemed to be just talking aimlessly, to try to take the sting out of the pinch, keep Bliss’s mind off the handcuffs.

“Yeah,” Bliss said, holding out his wrist without being told to. “I was the first one called her that. She never liked to be called Teresa. Her mother was the one always stuck to that.”

He jerked his wrist back in again.

“C’mon, don’t get hard to handle,” the detective growled, reaching out after it.

“Wait a minute,” Bliss said excitedly, and stuck his hand behind his back. “Some things have been bothering me. You brought one of them back just then. I nearly had it. Let me look, before I lose it again. Let me look at that letter a minute that her mother sent her yesterday. It’s here in my pocket.”

He stripped it out of the envelope. Smiles, dear, it began.

He opened his mouth and looked at the other man. “That’s funny. Her mother never called her anything but Teresa. I know I’m right about that. How could she? It was my nickname. And I’d never seen her until last night and — and Smiles hadn’t been home since we were married.”

The detective, meanwhile, kept trying to snag his other hand — he was holding the letter in his left — and bring it around in front of him.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Bliss pleaded. “I’ve got one of those things now. There was like a hitch in the flow of conversation, an air pocket. She said, ‘I’m Smiles’ mother,’ and he said, ‘You’re Teresa’s mother,’ like he was reminding her what she always called Smiles. Why should he have to remind her of what she always called Smiles herself?”

“And that’s supposed to clear you of suspicion, because her mother picks up your nickname for your wife, after she’s been talking to you on the phone two or three days in a row? Anyone would be liable to do that. She did it to sort of accommodate you. Didn’t you ever hear of people doing that before? That’s how nicknames spread.”

“But she caught it ahead of time, before she heard me call it to her. This letter heading shows that. She didn’t know Smiles had disappeared yet, when she sent this letter. Therefore she hadn’t spoken to me yet.”

“Well, then, she got it from the husband, or from your wife’s own letters home.”

“But she never used it before; she disliked it until now. She wrote Smiles and told her openly it sounded too much like the nickname of a chorus girl. I can prove it to you. I can show you. Wait a minute, whatever your name is. Won’t you let me see if I can find some other letter from her, just to convince myself?”

My name is Stillman, and it’s too small a matter to make any difference one way or the other. Now, come on Bliss; I’ve tried to be fair with you until now—”

“Nothing is too small a matter to be important. You’re a detective; do I have to tell you that? It’s the little things in life that count, never the big ones. The little ones go to make up the big ones. Why should she suddenly call her by a nickname she never used before and disapproved of? Wait, let me show you. There must be one of her old letters upstairs yet, left around in one of the bureau drawers. Just let me go up and hunt for it. It’ll take just a minute.”

Stillman went up with him, but Bliss could tell he was slowly souring on him. He hadn’t changed over completely yet, but he was well under way. “I’ve taken all the stalling I’m going to from you,” he muttered tight-lipped. “If I’ve got to crack down on you to get you out of here with me, I’ll show you that I can do that, too.”

Bliss was pawing through his wife’s drawers meanwhile, head tensely lowered, knowing he had to beat his captor’s change of mood to the punch, that in another thirty seconds at the most the slow-to-anger detective was going to yank him flat on the floor by the slack of the collar and drag him bodily out of the room after him.

He found one at last, almost when he’d given up hope. The same medium-blue ink, the same note paper. They hadn’t corresponded with any great frequency, but they had corresponded regularly, about once every month or so.

“Here,” he said relievedly, “here, see?” And he spread it out flat on the dresser top. Then he spread the one from his pocket alongside it, to compare. “See? ‘Dearest Teresa.’ What did I tell—”

He never finished it. They both saw it at once. It would have been hard to miss, the way he’d put both missives edge to edge. Bliss looked at the detective, then back at the dresser again.

Stillman was the first to put it into words. An expression of sudden concentration had come over his face. He elbowed Bliss a little aside, to get a better look. “See if you can dig up some more samples of her writing,” he said slowly. “I’m not an expert, but, unless I miss my guess, these two letters weren’t written by the same person.”

Bliss didn’t need to be told twice. He was frantically going through everything of Smiles’ he could lay his hands on, all her keepsakes, mementos, accumulated belongings, scattering them around. He stopped as suddenly as he’d begun, and Stillman saw him standing there staring fixedly at something in one of the trinket boxes he had been plumbing through.

“What’s the matter? Did you find some more?”

Bliss acted scared. His face was pale. “No, not writing,” he said in a bated voice. “Something even— Look.”

The detective’s chin thrust over his shoulder. “Who are they?”

“That’s evidently a snapshot of her and her mother, taken at a beach when she was a girl. I’ve never seen it before, but—”

“How do you know it’s her mother? It could be some other woman, a friend of the family’s.”

Bliss had turned it over right while he was speaking. On the back, in schoolgirlish handwriting, was the notation:

Bliss reversed it again, right side forward.

“Well, what’re you acting so scared about?” Stillman demanded impatiently. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Because this woman on the snapshot isn’t the same woman I spoke to as her mother up at Denby tonight!”

“Now, wait a minute; hold your horses. You admit yourself you had never set eyes on her before until tonight; eight years is eight years. She’s in a bathing-suit in this snapshot. She may have dyed or bleached her hair since, or it may have turned gray on her.”

“That has nothing to do with it! I’m not looking at her hair or her clothes. The whole shape of her face is different. The bone structure is different. The features are different. This woman has a broad, round face. The one in Denby has a long, oval one. I tell you, it’s not the same woman at all!”

“Gimme that, and gimme those.” Stillman pocketed letters and snapshot. “Come on downstairs. I think I’ll smoke another cigarette.” His way of saying: “You’ve got yourself a reprieve.”

When they were below again, he sat down, with a misleading air of leisure. “Gimme your wife’s family background, as much of it as you can, as much of it as she told you.”

“Smiles was down here on her own when I met her. Her own father died when she was a kid, and left them comfortably well off, with their own house up in—”

“Denby?”

“No, it was some other place; I can’t think of it offhand. While she was still a youngster, her mother gave Smiles her whole time and attention. But when Smiles had finished her schooling, about two years ago, the mother was still an attractive woman, young for her years, lively, good-hearted. It was only natural that she should marry again. Smiles didn’t resent that; she’d expected her to. When the mother fell for this mason, Joe Alden, whom she first met when they were having some repairs made to the house, Smiles tried to like him. He’d been a good man in his line, too, but she couldn’t help noticing that after he married her mother, he stopped dead, never did a stroke of work from then on; pretending he couldn’t find any — when she knew for a fact that there was work to be had. That was the first thing she didn’t like. Maybe he sensed she was onto him, but anyway they didn’t rub well together. For her mother’s sake, to avoid trouble, she decided to clear out, so her mother wouldn’t have to choose between them. She was so diplomatic about it, though, that her mother never guessed what the real reason was.

“She came on down here, and not long ago Alden and her mother sold their own house and moved to a new one in Denby. Smiles said she supposed he did it to get away from the gossipy neighbors as much as anything else; they were probably beginning to criticize him for not at least making a stab at getting a job after he was once married.”

“Did they come down when you married Smiles?”

“No. Smiles didn’t notify them ahead; just sent a wire of announcement the day we were married. Her mother had been in poor health, and she was afraid the trip down would be more than she could stand. Well, there’s the background.”

“Nothing much there to dig into, at first sight.”

“There never is, anywhere — at first sight,” Bliss let him know. “Listen, Stillman. I’m going back up there again. Whatever’s wrong is up at that end, not at this.”

“I was detailed here to bring you in for questioning, you know.” But he didn’t move.

“Suppose I hadn’t gone up to you outside in the street just now. Suppose I hadn’t shown up around here for, say, another eight or ten hours. Can’t you give me those extra hours? Come up there with me, never leave me out of your sight, put the bracelet on me, do anything you want, but at least let me go up there once more and confront those people. If you lock me up down at this end, then I’ve lost her sure as anything. I’ll never find out what became of her — and you won’t either. Something bothered me up there. A whole lot of things bothered me up there, but I’ve only cleared up one of them so far. Let me take a crack at the rest.

“You don’t want much,” Stillman said grudgingly. “D’ya know what can happen to me for stepping out of line like that? D’ya know I can be broken for anything like that?”

“You mean you’re ready to ignore the discrepancy in handwriting in those two letters, and my assurance that there’s someone up there that doesn’t match the woman on that snapshot?”

“No, naturally not; I’m going to let my lieutenant know about both those things.”

“And by that time it’ll be too late. It’s already three days since she’s been gone.”

“Tell you what,” Stillman said. “I’ll make a deal with you. We’ll start out for headquarters now, and on the way we’ll stop in at that bus terminal. If I can find any evidence, the slightest shred, that she started for Denby that night, I’ll go up there with you. If not, we go over to headquarters.”

All Bliss said was: “I know you’ll find out she did leave.”

Stillman took him without handcuffing him, merely remarking, “If you try anything, you’ll be the loser, not me.”

The ticket-seller again went as far as he had with Bliss the time before, but still couldn’t go any further than that. “Yeah, she bought a ticket for as far as the money she had on her would take her, but I can’t remember where it was to.”

“Which don’t prove she ever hit Denby,” Stillman grunted.

“Tackle the bus driver,” Bliss pleaded. “No. 27. I know he was holding out on me. I could tell by the way he acted. She rode with him, all right, but for some reason he was cagey about saying so.”

But they were out of luck. No. 27 was up at the other end, due to bring the cityward bus in the following afternoon.

Stillman was already trying to steer his charge out of the place and on his way over to headquarters, but Bliss wouldn’t give up. “There must be someone around here that saw her get on that night. One of the attendants, one of the concessionaires that are around here every night. Maybe she checked her bag, maybe she drank a cup of coffee at the counter.”

She hadn’t checked her bag; the checkroom attendant couldn’t remember anyone like her. She hadn’t stopped at the lunch counter, either; neither could the counterman recall her. Nor the Negro that shined shoes. They even interrogated the matron of the restroom, when she happened to appear outside the door briefly. No, she hadn’t noticed anyone like that, either.

“All right, come on,” Stillman said, hooking his arm around Bliss’s.

“One more spin. How about him, over there, behind the magazine stand?”

Stillman only gave in because it happened to be near the exit; they had to pass it on their way out.

And it broke! The fog lifted, if only momentarily, for the first time since the previous Tuesday night. “Sure I do,” the vendor said readily. “How could I help remembering? She came up to me in such a funny way. She said, ‘I have exactly one dime left, which I overlooked when I was buying my ticket because it slipped to the bottom of my handbag. Let me have a magazine.’ Naturally, I asked her which one she wanted. ‘I don’t care,’ she said, ‘so long as it lasts until I get off the bus. I want to be sure my mind is taken up.’ Well, I’ve been doing business here for years, and it’s gotten so I can clock the various stops. I mean, if they’re riding a long distance, I give them a good thick magazine; if they’re riding a short distance, I give them a skinny one. I gave her one for a medium distance — Denby; that was where she told me she was going.”

All Stillman said was: “Come on over to the window while I get our tickets.”

Bliss didn’t say “Thanks.” He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The grateful look he gave the detective spoke for itself.

“Two to Denby, round,” Stillman told the ticket-seller. It was too late for the morning bus; the next one left in the early afternoon.

As they turned from the window, Bliss wondered aloud:

“Still and all, why was that driver so reluctant to admit she rode on the bus with him that night? And the ticket man claims she didn’t buy a ticket to Denby, but to some point short of there.”

“It’s easy to see what it adds up to,” Stillman told him. “She had a ticket for only part of the distance. She coaxed the driver into letting her ride the rest of the way to Denby. Probably explained her plight to him, and he felt sorry for her. That explains his reluctance to let you think she was on the bus at all. He must have thought you were a company spotter and naturally what he did would be against the regulations.”

Tucking away the tickets in his inside coat pocket, the detective stood there a moment or two undecidedly. Then he said, “We may as well go back to your house. I might be able to turn up something else while we’re waiting, and you can catch a nap. And, too, I’m going to call in, see if I can still make this detour up there and back legitimate while I’m about it.”

When they got back to his house Bliss, exhausted, fell asleep in the bedroom. He remained oblivious to everything until the detective woke him up a half hour before bus time.

“Any luck?” Bliss asked him, shrugging into his coat.

“Nope, nothing more,” Stillman said. Then he announced, “I’ve given my word to my lieutenant I’ll show up at headquarters and have you with me, no later than nine tomorrow morning. He doesn’t know you’re with me right now; I let him think I got a tip where I could lay my hands on you. Leaving now, we will get up there around sunset, and we’ll have to take the night bus back. That gives us only a few hours up there to see if we can find any trace of her. Pretty tight squeeze, if you ask me.”

They boarded the bus together and sat down in one of the back seats. They didn’t talk much during the long, monotonous ride up.

“Better take another snooze while you’ve got the chance,” Stillman said.

Bliss thought he wouldn’t be able to again, but, little by little, sheer physical exhaustion, combined with the lulling motion of the bus, overcame him and he dropped off.

It seemed like only five minutes later that Stillman shook him by the shoulder, rousing him. The sun was low in the west; he’d slept through nearly the entire trip. “Snap out of it, Bliss; we get off in another couple of minutes, right on time.”

“I dreamed about her,” Bliss said dully. “I dreamed she was in some kind of danger, needed me bad. She kept calling to me, ‘Ed! Hurry up, Ed!’ ”

Stillman dropped his eyes. “I heard you say her name twice in your sleep: ‘Smiles, Smiles,’ ” he remarked quietly. “Damned if you act like any guilty man I ever had in my custody before. Even in your sleep you sound like you were innocent.”

“Denby!” the driver called out.

As the bus pulled away and left them behind at the crossroads, Stillman said, “Now that we’re up here, let’s have an understanding with each other. I don’t want to haul you around on the end of a handcuff with me, but my job is at stake; I’ve got to be sure that you’re still with me when I start back.”

“Would my word of honor that I won’t try to give you the slip while we’re up here be worth anything to you?”

Stillman looked at him square in the eye. “Is it worth anything to you?”

“It’s about all I’ve got. I know I’ve never broken it.”

Stillman nodded slowly. “I think maybe it’ll be worth taking a chance on. All right, let me have it.”

They shook hands solemnly.

Dusk was rapidly falling by now; the sun was already gone from sight and its afterglow fading out.

“Come on, let’s get out to their place,” Bliss said impatiently.

“Let’s do a little inquiring around first. Remember, we have no evidence so far that she actually got off the bus here at all, let alone reached their house. Just her buying that magazine and saying she was coming here is no proof in itself. Now, let’s see, she gets off in the middle of the night at this sleeping hamlet. Would she know the way out to their house, or would she have to ask someone?”

“She’d have to ask. Remember, I told you they moved here after Smiles had already left home. This would have been her first trip up here.”

“Well, that ought to cinch it for us, if she couldn’t get out there without asking directions. Let’s try our luck at that filling-station first; it would probably have been the only thing open any more at the hour she came.”

The single attendant on duty came out, said, “Yes, gents?”

“Look,” Stillman began. “The traffic to and from here isn’t exactly heavy, so this shouldn’t be too hard. Think back to Tuesday night, the last bus north. Did you see anyone get off it?”

“I don’t have to see ’em get off; I got a sure-fire way of telling whether anyone gets off or not.”

“What’s that?”

“Anyone that does get off, at least anyone that’s a stranger here, never fails to stop by me and ask their way. That’s as far as the last bus is concerned. The store is closed before then. And no one asked their way of me Tuesday night, so I figure no strangers got off.”

“This don’t look so good,” murmured Stillman in an aside to Bliss. Then he asked the attendant, “Did you hear it go by at all? You must have, it’s so quiet here.”

“Yeah, sure, I did. It was right on time, too.”

“Then you could tell if it stopped to let anyone down or went straight through without stopping, couldn’t you?”

“Yeah, usually I can,” was the disappointing answer. “But just that night, at that particular time, I was doing some repair work on a guy’s car, trying to hammer out a bent fender for him, and my own noise drowned it out. As long as no one stopped by, though, I’m pretty sure it never stopped.”

“Damn it,” Stillman growled, as they turned away, “she couldn’t have been more unseen if she was a ghost!”

After they were out of earshot of the filling-station attendant, Bliss said, “If Alden, for instance, had known she was coming and waited to meet her at the bus, that would do away with her having to ask anyone for directions. She may have telephoned ahead, or sent a wire up.”

“If she didn’t even have enough money to buy a ticket all the way, she certainly wouldn’t have been able to make a toll call. Anyway, if we accept that theory, that means we’re implicating them directly in her disappearance, and we have no evidence so far to support that. Remember, she may have met with foul play right here in Denby, along the road to their house, without ever having reached it.”

It was fully dark by the time they rounded the bend in the road and came in sight of that last house of all, with the low brick wall in front of it. This time not a patch of light showed from any of the windows, upstairs or down, and yet it was earlier in the evening than when Bliss himself had arrived.

“Hello?” the detective said. “Looks like nobody’s home.”

They turned in under the willow arch, rang the bell, and waited. Stillman pummeled the door and they waited some more. This was just perfunctory, however; it had been obvious to the two of them from the moment they first looked at the place that no one was in.

“Well, come on. What’re we waiting for?” Bliss demanded. “I can get in one of the windows without any trouble.”

Stillman laid a restraining hand on his arm. “No, you don’t; that’s breaking and entering. And I’m out of jurisdiction up here to begin with. We’ll have to go back and dig up the local law; maybe I can talk him into putting the seal of official approval on it. Let’s see if we can tell anything from the outside, first. I may be able to shine my torch in through one of the windows.”

He clicked it on, made a white puddle against the front of the house, walked slowly in the wake of that as it moved along until it leaped in through one of the black window embrasures. They both edged up until their noses were nearly pressed flat against the glass, trying to peer through. It wouldn’t work. The blinds were not down, but the closely webbed net curtains that hung down inside of the panes effectively parried its rays. They coursed slowly along the side of the house, trying it at window after window, each time with the same results.

Stillman turned away finally, but left his torch on. He splashed it up and down the short length of private dirt lane that ran beside the house, from the corrugated tin shack at the back that served Alden as a garage to the public highway in front. He motioned Bliss back as the latter started to step out onto it. “Stay off here a minute. I want to see if I can find out something from these tire prints their car left. See ’em?”

It would have been hard not to. The road past the house was macadamized, but there was a border of soft, powdery dust along the side of it, as with most rural roads. “I want to see if I can make out which way they turned,” Stillman explained, strewing his beam of light along them and following offside. “If they went in to the city, to offer their cooperation to us down there, that would take them off to the right; no other way they could turn from here. If they turned to the left, up that way, it was definitely a lam, and it changes the looks of things all around.”

The beam of his light, coursing along the prints like quicksilver in a channel, started to curve around toward the right as it followed them up out of sight on the hard-surfaced road. There was his answer.

He turned aimlessly back along them, light still on. He stopped parallel to the corner of the house, strengthened the beam’s focus by bringing the torch down closer to the ground. “Here’s something else,” Bliss heard him say. “Funny how you can notice every little thing in this fine floury dust. His front left tire had a patch on it, and a bad one, too. See it? You can tell just what they did. Alden evidently ran the car out of the shed alone, ahead of his wife. She got in here at the side of the house, to save time, instead of going out the front way; they were going down the road the other way, anyway. His wheel came to rest with the patch squarely under it. That’s why it shows so plain in this one place. Then he took his brake off and the car coasted back a little with the tilt of the ground. When he came forward again, the position of his wheel diverged a little, missed erasing its own former imprint. Bet they have trouble with that before the night’s over.”

He spoke as though it were just a trivial detail. But is anything, Bliss was to ask himself later, a trivial detail?

“Come on,” Stillman concluded, pocketing his light, “let’s go get the law and see what it looks like on the inside.”

The constable’s name was Cochrane, and they finally located him at his own home. “Evening,” Stillman introduced himself, “I’m Stillman of the city police. I was wondering if there’s some way we could get a look inside that Alden house. Their — er — stepdaughter has disappeared down in the city; she was supposed to have started for here, and this is just a routine check. Nothing against them. They seem to be out, and we have to make the next bus back.”

Cochrane plucked at his throat judiciously. “Well, now, I guess I can accommodate you, as long as it’s done in my presence. I’m the law around here, and if they’ve got nothing to hide, there’s no reason why they should object. I’ll drive ye back in my car. This feller here your subordinate, I s’pose?”

Stillman said, “Um,” noncommittally, favored Bliss with a nudge. The constable would have probably balked at letting a man already wanted by the police into these people’s house, they both knew, even if he was accompanied by a bona fide detective.

He stopped off at his office first to get a master key, came back with the remark: “This ought to do the trick.” They were back at the Alden place once more inside of ten minutes, all told, from the time they had first left it.

Cochrane favored them with a sly grimace as they got out and went up to the house. “I’m sort of glad you fellers asked me to do this, at that. Fact is, we’ve all been curious about them folks ourselves hereabouts for a long time past. Kind of unsociable; keep to themselves a lot. This is as good a time as any to see if they got any skeletons in the closet.”

Bliss shuddered involuntarily at the expression.

The constable’s master key opened the door without any great difficulty, and the three of them went in.

They looked in every room in the place from top to bottom, and in every closet of every room, and not one of the “skeletons” the constable had spoken of turned up, either allegorical or literal. There wasn’t anything out of the way, and nothing to show that anything had ever been out of the way, in this house.

In the basement, when they reached it, were a couple of sagging, half-empty bags of cement in one corner, and pinkish traces of brick dust and brick grit on the floor, but that was easily accounted for. “Left over from when he was putting up that wall along the roadside a while back, I guess,” murmured Cochrane.

They turned and went upstairs again. The only other discovery of any sort they made was not of a guilty nature, but simply an indication of how long ago the occupants had left. Stillman happened to knuckle a coffeepot standing on the kitchen range, and it was still faintly warm from the residue of liquid left in it.

“They must have only just left before we got here,” he said to Bliss. “Missed them just by minutes.”

“Funny; why did they wait until after dark to start on a long trip like that? Why didn’t they leave sooner?”

“That don’t convict them of anything, just the same,” Stillman maintained obdurately. “We haven’t turned up a shred of evidence that your wife ever saw the inside of this house. Don’t try to get around that.”

The local officer, meanwhile, had gone outside to put some water in his car. “Close the door good after you as you come out,” he called out to them.

They were already at the door, but Bliss unaccountably turned and went back inside again. When Stillman followed him a moment later, he was sitting there in the living-room raking his fingers perplexedly through his hair.

“Come on,” the detective said, as considerately as he could, “let’s get going. He’s waiting for us.”

Bliss looked up at him helplessly. “Don’t you get it? Doesn’t this room bother you?”

Stillman looked around vaguely. “No. In what way? What’s wrong with it? To me it seems clean, well kept, and comfortable. All you could ask for.”

“There’s something about it annoys me. I feel ill at ease in it. It’s not restful, for some reason. And I have a peculiar feeling that if I could figure out why it isn’t restful, it would help to partly clear up this mystery about Smiles.”

Stillman sliced the edge of his hand at him scornfully. “Now you’re beginning to talk plain crazy, Bliss. You say this room isn’t restful. The room has nothing to do with it. It’s you. You’re all tense, jittery, about your wife. Your nerves are on edge, frayed to the breaking point. That’s why the room don’t seem restful to you. Naturally it don’t. No room would.”

Bliss kept shaking his head baffledly. “No. No. That may sound plausible, but I know that isn’t it. It’s not me, it’s the room itself. I’ll admit I’m all keyed up, but I noticed it already the other night when I wasn’t half so keyed up. Another thing: I don’t get it in any of the other rooms in this house; I only get it in here.”

“I don’t like the way you’re talking; I think you’re starting to crack up under the strain,” Stillman let him know, but he hung around in the doorway for a few minutes, watching him curiously, while Bliss sat there motionless, clasped hands hanging from the back of his neck now.

“Did you get it yet?”

Bliss raised his head, shook it mutely, chewing the corner of his mouth. “It’s one of those things; when you try too hard for it, it escapes you altogether. It’s only when you’re sort of not thinking about it that you notice it. The harder I try to pin it down, the more elusive it becomes.”

“Sure,” said Stillman with a look of sympathetic concern, “and if you sit around in here brooding about it much more, I’ll be taking you back with me in a straitjacket. Come on, we’ve only got ten more minutes to make that bus.”

Bliss got reluctantly to his feet. “There it goes,” he said. “I’ll never get it now.”

“Ah, you talk like these guys that keep trying to communicate with spirits through a ouija board,” Stillman let him know, locking up the front door after them. “The whole thing was a wild-goose chase.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Well, what’d we get out of it?”

“Nothing. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t around here waiting to be seen. It’s just that we’ve missed seeing it, whatever it is.”

“There’s not a sign of her around that house. Not a sign of her ever having been there. Not a sign of violence.”

“And I know that, by going away from here, we’re turning our backs on whatever there is to be learned about what became of her. We’ll never find out at the other end, in the city. I nearly had it, too, when I was sitting in there. Just as I was about to get it, it would slip away from me again. Talk about torture!”

Stillman lost his temper. “Will you lay off that room! If there was anything the matter with it, I’d notice it as well as you. My eyes are just as good, my brains are just as good. What’s the difference between you and me?” The question was only rhetorical.

“You’re a detective and I’m an architect,” Bliss said inattentively, answering it as asked.

“Are you fellows going to stand there arguing all night?” the constable called from the other side of the wall.

They went out and got into the open car, started off. Bliss felt like groaning: “Good-bye, Smiles.” Just as they reached the turn of the road that would have swept the house out of sight once they rounded it, Stillman happened to glance back for no particular reason, at almost the very last possible moment that it could still be seen in a straight line behind them.

“Hold it,” he ejaculated, thumbing a slim bar of light narrowed by perspective. “We left the lights on in that last room we were in.”

The constable braked promptly. “Have to go back and turn them off, or they’ll—”

“We haven’t time now, we’ll miss the bus,” Stillman cut in. “It’s due in six more minutes. Drive us down to the crossroads first, and then you come back afterward and put them out yourself.”

“No!” Bliss cried out wildly, jumping to his feet. “This has a meaning to it! I’m not passing this up! I want another look at those lights; they’re asking me to, they’re begging me to!” Before either one of them could stop him, he had jumped down from the side of the car without bothering to unlatch the door. He started to run back up the road, deaf to Stillman’s shouts and imprecations.

“Come back here, you welsher! You gave me your word of honor!”

A moment later the detective’s feet hit the ground and he started after his prisoner. But Bliss had already turned in through the opening in the wall, was flinging himself bodily against the door, without waiting for any master key this time. The infuriated detective caught him by the shoulder, swung him violently around, when he had reached him.

“Take your hands off me!” Bliss said hoarsely. “I’m going to get in there!”

Stillman swung at him and missed. Instead of returning the blow, Bliss threw his whole weight against the door for the last time. There was a rendering and splintering of wood, and it shot inward, leaving the whole lock intact against the frame. Bliss went flailing downward on his face into the hallway. He scrambled erect, reached the inner doorway, put his hand inside, and put the lights out without looking into the room.

“It’s when they go on that counts,” he panted.

The only reason Stillman wasn’t grappling with him was that he couldn’t locate him for a minute in the dark. The switch clicked a second time. Light flashed from the dazzingly calcimined ceiling. Bliss was standing directly in the middle of the opening as it did so, just as he had been the first night.

Stillman was down the hall a few steps, couldn’t see his face for a minute. “Well?” he asked.

Bliss turned to him without saying anything. The look on his face answered for him. He’d gotten what he wanted.

“Why, they’re not in the center of the ceiling! They’re offside. That’s what made them seem glaring, unexpected. They took my eyes by surprise. I’ve got professionally trained eyes, remember. They didn’t go on where I expected them to, but a little farther over. And now that I have that much, I have it all.” He gripped Stillman excitedly by the biceps. “Now I see what’s wrong with the room. Now I see why I found it so unrestful. It’s out of true.”

“What?”

“Out of proportion. Look. Look at that window. It’s not in the center of that wall. And d’you see how cleverly they’ve tried to cover the discrepancy? A thin, skinny, up-and-down picture on the short side; a big, wide, fat one on the longer side. That creates an optical illusion, makes both sides seem even. Now come over here and look this way.” He pulled the detective in after him, turned him around by the shoulder. “Sure, same thing with the door frame; that’s not dead center, either. But the door opens inward into the room, swings to that short side and partly screens it, throws a shadow over it, so that takes care of that. What else? What else?”

He kept pivoting feverishly, sweeping his glance around on all sides. “Oh, sure, the rug. I was sitting here and I dropped some ashes and looked down at the floor. See what bothered me about that? Again there’s an unbalance. See the margin of polished woodwork running around on three sides of it? And on the fourth side it runs right smack up against the baseboard of the wall. Your eye wants proportion, symmetry; it’s got to have it in all things. If it doesn’t get it, it’s uncomfortable. It wants that dark strip of woodwork on all four sides, or else the rug should touch all four baseboards, like a carpet—”

He was talking slower and slower, like a record that’s running down. Some sort of tension was mounting in him, gripping him, Stillman could tell by looking at him. He panted the last few words out, as if it took all his strength to produce them, and then his voice died away altogether, without a period.

“What’re you getting so white around the gills for?” the detective demanded. “Suppose the room is lopsided, what then? Your face is turning all green—”

Bliss had to grab him by the shoulder for a minute for support. His voice was all furry with dawning horror. “Because — because — don’t you see what it means? Don’t you see why it’s that way? One of these walls is a dummy wall, built out in front of the real one.” His eyes were dilated with unbelieving horror. He clawed insensately at his own hair. “It all hangs together so damnably! He was a mason before he married her mother; I told you that. The storekeeper down at the crossroads said that Alden built a low brick wall in front of the house, ‘just to keep in practice,’ he guessed. No reason for it. It wasn’t high enough for privacy, it didn’t even run around all four sides of the plot.

“He didn’t build it just to keep in practice! He did it to get the bricks in here from the contractor. More than he needed. He put it up just to have an excuse to order them. Who’s going to count— Don’t stand there! Get an ax, a crowbar; help me break this thing down! Don’t you see what this dummy wall is for? Don’t you see what we’ll find—”

The detective had been slower in grasping it, but he finally got it, too. His own face went gray. “Which one is it?”

“It must be on this side, the side that’s the shortest distance from the window, door, and light fixture.” Bliss rushed up to it, began to pound it with his clenched fists, up and down, sounding it out. Sweat flew literally off his face like raindrops in a stiff wind.

The detective bolted out of the room, sent an excited yell at the open front door:

“Cochrane! Come in here, give us a hand, bring tools!”

Between the two of them they dug up a hatchet, a crowbar, cold chisel, and bung starter. “That wall,” the detective explained tersely for the constable’s benefit, without going into details. Cochrane didn’t argue; one look at both their faces must have told him that some unspeakable horror was on the way to revelation.

Bliss was leaning sideways against it by now, perfectly still, head lowered almost as though he were trying to hear something through it. He wasn’t. His head was lowered with the affliction of discovery. “I’ve found it,” he said stifledly. “I’ve found — the place. Listen.” He pounded once or twice. There was the flat impact of solidity. He moved farther over, pounded again. This time there was the deeper resonance of a partly, or only imperfectly, filled orifice. “Half bricks, with a hollow behind them. Elsewhere, whole bricks, mortar behind them.”

Stillman stripped his coat off, spit on his hands. “Better get out of the room — in case you’re right,” he suggested, flying at it with the hatchet, to knock off the plaster. “Wait outside the door; we’ll call you—”

“No! I’ve got to know, I’ve got to see. Three of us are quicker than two.” And he began chipping off the plaster coating with the cutting edge of the chisel. Cochrane cracked it for them with the bung starter. A cloud of dust hovered about them while they hacked away. Finally, they had laid bare an upright, coffin-shaped segment of pinkish-white brickwork in the plaster finish of the wall.

They started driving the chisel in between the interstices of the brick ends, Stillman steadying it, Cochrane driving it home with the bung starter. They changed to the crowbar, started to work that as a lever, when they’d pierced a big enough space.

“Look out. One of them’s working out.”

A fragment of brick ricocheted halfway across the room, dropped with a thud. A second one followed. A third. Bliss started to claw at the opening with his bare nails, to enlarge it faster.

“You’re only impeding us; we can get at it faster this way,” Stillman said, pushing him aside. A gray fill of imperfectly dried clayey mortar was being laid bare. It was only a shell; flakes of it, like dried mud, had begun dropping off and out, some of their own weight, others with the impact of their blows, long before they had opened more than a “window” in the brickwork façade.

“Get back,” Stillman ordered. His purpose was to protect Bliss from the full impact of discovery that was about to ensue.

Bliss obeyed him at last, staggered over to the other end of the room, stood there with his back to them as if he were looking out the window. Only the window was farther over. A spasmodic shiver went down his back every so often. He could hear the pops and thuds as brick fragments continued to drop out of the wall under the others’ efforts, then a sudden engulfing silence.

He turned his head just in time to see them lowering something from the niche in the wall. An upright something. A rigid, mummified, columnar something that resembled nothing so much as a log covered with mortar. The scant remainder of bricks that still held it fast below, down toward the floor, shattered, spilled down in a little freshet as they wrenched it free. A haze of kindly concealing dust veiled them from him. For a minute or two they were just white shadows working over something, and then they had this thing lying on the floor. A truncated thing without any human attributes whatever, like the mold around a cast metal statue — but with a core that was something else again.

“Get out of here, Bliss,” Stillman growled. “This is no place for you!”

Wild horses couldn’t have dragged Bliss away. He was numbed beyond feeling now, anyway. The whole scene had been one that could never again be forgotten by a man who had once lived through it.

“Not with that” he protested, as he saw the crouching Stillman flick open the large blade of a penknife.

“It’s the only thing I can use! Go out and get us some water, see if we can soften this stuff up a little, dissolve it.”

When Bliss came back with a pail of it, Stillman was working away cautiously at one end of the mound, shaving a little with the knife blade, probing and testing with his fingers. He desisted suddenly, flashed the constable a mutely eloquent look, shifted up to the opposite end. Bliss, staring with glazed eyes, saw a stubby bluish-black wedge peering through where he had been working — the tip of a woman’s shoe.

“Upside down at that,” grunted Cochrane, trying not to let Bliss overhear him. The latter’s teeth were chattering with nervous shock.

“I told you to get out of here!” Stillman flared for the third and last time. “Your face is driving me crazy!” With as little effect as before.

Fine wires seemed to hold some of it together, even after he had pared it with the knife blade. He wet the palms of his hands in the pail of water, kneaded and crumbled it between them in those places. What had seemed like stiff wires were strands of human hair.

“That’s enough,” he said finally in a sick voice. “There’s someone there; that’s all I wanted to be sure of. I don’t know how to go about the rest of it, much; an expert’ll have to attend to that.”

“Them devils,” growled Cochrane deep in his throat.

Bliss suddenly toppled down between them, so abruptly they both thought he had fainted for a minute. “Stillman!” he said in a low throbbing voice. He was almost leaning across the thing. “These wisps of hair— Look! They show through dark, bluish-black! She was blond! Like an angel. It’s somebody else!”

Stillman nodded, held his forehead dazedly. “Sure, it must be. I don’t have to go by that; d’you know what should have told me from the beginning? Your wife’s only been missing since Tuesday night, three days ago. The condition of the mortar shows plainly that this job’s been up for weeks past. Why, the paint on the outside of the wall would have hardly been dry yet, let alone the fill in back of it. Apart from that, it would have been humanly impossible to put up such a job single-handed in three days. We both lost our heads; it shows you it doesn’t pay to get excited.

“It’s the mother, that’s who it is. There’s your answer for the discrepancy in the handwriting on the two notes, the snapshot, and that business about the nickname that puzzled you. Come on, stand up and lean on me, we’re going to find out where he keeps his liquor. You need a drink if a man ever did!”

They found some in a cupboard out in the kitchen, sat down for a minute. Bliss looked as if he’d been pulled through a knothole. The constable had gone out on wobbly legs to get a breath of fresh air.

Bliss put the bottle down and started to look alive again.

“I think I’ll have a gulp myself,” Stillman said. “I’m not a drinking man, but that was one of the nastiest jobs in there just now I’ve ever been called on to participate in.”

The constable rejoined them, his face still slightly greenish. He had a drink, too.

“How many of them were there when they first moved in here?” Stillman asked him.

“Only two. Only him and his wife, from first to last.”

“Then you never saw her; they hid her from sight, that’s all.”

“They’ve been kind of standoffish; no one’s ever been inside the place until tonight.”

“It’s her, all right, the real mother,” Bliss said, as soon as he’d gotten his mental equilibrium back. “I don’t have to see the face; I know I’m right. No, no more. I’m O.K. now, and I want to be able to think clearly. Don’t you touch any more of it, either, Still. That’s who it must be. Don’t you see how the whole thing hangs together? Smiles did show up here Tuesday night, or rather in the early hours of Wednesday morning; I’m surer than ever of it now. You asked me, back at my house, for a motive that would overshadow that possible insurance one of mine. Well, here it is; this is it. She was the last one they expected to see, so soon after her own marriage to me. She walked in here and found an impostor in the place of her own mother, a stranger impersonating her. They had to shut her up quick, keep her from raising an alarm. There’s your motive as far as Smiles is concerned.”

“And it’s a wow,” concurred Stillman heartily. “The thing is, what’ve they done with her, where is she? We’re no better off than before. She’s not around here; we’ve cased the place from cellar to attic. Unless there’s another of those trick walls that we’ve missed spotting.”

“You’re forgetting that what you said about the first one still goes. There hasn’t been time enough to rig up anything that elaborate.”

“I shouldn’t have taken that drink,” confessed Stillman.

“I’m convinced she was here, though, as late as Thursday night, and still alive in the place. Another of those tantalizing things just came back to me. There was a knock on one of the water pipes somewhere; I couldn’t tell if it was upstairs or down. I bet she was tied up someplace, the whole time I was sitting here.”

“Did you hear one or more than one?”

“Just one. The woman got right up and went out, I noticed, giving an excuse about getting a fresh handkerchief. They probably had her doped, or under some sedative.”

“That’s then, but now?”

“There’s a lot of earth around outside, acres of it, miles of it,” Cochrane put in morbidly.

“No, now wait a minute,” Stillman interjected. “Let’s get this straight. If their object was just to make her disappear, clean vanish, as in the mother’s case, that would be one thing. Then I’m afraid we might find her lying somewhere around in that earth you speak of. But you’re forgetting that her clothes turned up in your own furnace at home, Bliss — showing they didn’t want her to disappear; they wanted to pin her death definitely on you.”

“Why?”

“Self-preservation, pure and simple. With a straight disappearance, the investigation would have never been closed. In the end it might have been directed up this way, resulted in unearthing the first murder, just as we did tonight. Pinning it on you would have not only obviated that risk, but eliminated you as well — cleaned the slate for them. A second murder to safeguard the first, a legal execution to clinch the second. But — to pin it successfully on you, that body has to show up down around where you are, and not up here at all. The clothes were a forerunner of it.”

“But would they risk taking her back to my place, knowing it was likely to be watched by you fellows, once they had denounced me to you themselves? That would be like sticking their own heads in a noose. They might know it would be kept under surveillance.”

“No, it wouldn’t have been. You see, your accidental switch to that hitchhike from the bus resulted in two things going wrong. We not only went out to your house to look for you when you didn’t show up at the terminal, but, by going out there, we found the clothes in the furnace sooner than they wanted us to. I don’t believe they were meant to be found until — the body was also in position.”

“Then why make two trips, instead of just one? Why not take poor Smiles at the same time they took her clothes?”

“He had to make a fast trip in, the first time, to beat that bus. They may have felt it was too risky to take her along then. He also had to familiarize himself with your premises, find some way of getting in, find out if the whole thing was feasible or not before going ahead with it. They felt their call to us — it wasn’t an accusation at all, by the way, but simply a request that we investigate — would get you out of the way, clear the coast for them. They expected you to be held and questioned for twenty-four, forty-eight hours, straight. They thought they’d given themselves a wide enough margin of safety. But your failure to take the bus telescoped it.”

Bliss rose abruptly. “Do you think she’s — yet?” He couldn’t bring himself to mention the word.

“It stands to reason that they’d be foolish to do it until the last possible moment. That would increase the risk of transporting her a hundredfold. And they’d be crazy to do it anywhere else but on the exact spot where they intend her to be found eventually. Otherwise, it would be too easy for us to reconstruct the fact that she was killed somewhere else and taken there afterward.”

“Then the chances are she was still alive when they left here with her! There may still be time even now; she may still be alive! What are we sitting here like this for?”

They both bolted out together, but Bliss made for the front door, Stillman headed for the phone in the hall.

“What’re you doing that for?”

“Phone in an alarm to city headquarters. How else can we hope to save her? Have them throw a cordon around your house—”

Bliss pulled the instrument out of his hands. “Don’t! You’ll only be killing her quicker that way! If we frighten them off, we’ll never save her. They’ll lose their heads, kill her anywhere and drop her off just to get rid of her. This way, at least we know it’ll be in or somewhere around my house.”

“But, man, do you realize the head start they’ve had?”

“We only missed them by five or ten minutes. Remember that coffeepot on the stove?”

“Even so, even with a State police escort, I doubt if we can get in under a couple of hours.”

“And I say that we’ve got to take the chance! You noticed their tire treads before. He has a walloping bad patch, and he’s never going to make that bad stretch on the road with it. I saw his car last night when it raced past, and he had no spares up. There’s no gas station for miles around there. All that will cut down their head start.”

“You’re willing to gamble your wife’s life against a flat tire?”

“There isn’t anything else I can do. I’m convinced if you send an alarm ahead and have a dragnet thrown around my house, they’ll scent it and simply shy away from there and go off someplace else with her where we won’t be able to get to her in time, because we won’t know where it is. Come on, we could be miles away already, for the time we’ve wasted talking.”

“All right,” snapped the detective, “we’ll play it your way! Is this car of yours any good?” he asked Cochrane, hopping in.

“Fastest thing in these parts,” said the constable grimly, slithering under the wheel.

“Well, you know what you’ve got to do with it: cut down their head start to nothing flat, less than nothing; you’ve got to get us there five minutes to the good.”

“Just get down low in your seats and hang onto your back teeth,” promised Cochrane. “What we just turned up in there happened in my jurisdiction, don’t forget — and the law of the land gives this road to us tonight!”

It was an incredible ride; incredible for the fact that they stayed right side up on the surface of the road at all. The speedometer needle clung to stratospheric heights throughout. The scenery was just a blurred hiss on both sides of them. The wind pressure stung the pupils of their eyes to the point where they could barely hold them open. The constable, luckily, used glasses for reading and had happened to have them about him when they started. He put them on simply in order to make sure of staying on the road at all.

They had to take the bad stretch at a slower speed in sheer self-defense, in order not to have the same thing happen to them that they were counting on having happened to the Alden car. An intact tire could possibly get over it unharmed, but one that was already defective was almost sure to go out.

“Wouldn’t you think he’d have remembered about this from passing over it last night, and taken precautions?” Stillman yelled above the wind at Bliss.

“He took a chance on it just like we’re doing now. Slow up a minute at the first gas station after here, see if he got away with it or not.” He knew that if he had, that meant they might just as well turn back then and there; Smiles was as good as dead already.

It didn’t appear for another twenty minutes even at the clip they had resumed once the bad stretch was past. With a flat, or until a tow car was sent out after anyone, it would have taken an hour or more to make it.

“Had a flat to fix, coming from our way, tonight?” Stillman yelled out at the attendant.

“And how!” the man yelled back, jogging over to them. “That was no flat! He wobbled up here with ribbons around his wheel. Rim all flattened, too, from riding so long on it.”

“He?” echoed Stillman. “Wasn’t there two women or anyway one, with him?”

“No, just a fellow alone.”

“She probably waited for him up the road out of sight with Smiles,” Bliss suggested in an undertone, “to avoid being seen; then he picked them up again when the job was finished. Or if Smiles was able to walk, maybe they detoured around it on foot and rejoined the car farther down.”

“Heavy-set man with a bull neck, and little eyes, and scraggly red hair?” the constable asked the station operator.

“Yeah.”

“That’s him. How long ago did he pull out of here?”

“Not more than an hour ago, I’d say.”

“See? We’ve already cut their head start plenty,” Bliss rejoiced.

“There’s still too damn much of it to suit me,” was the detective’s answer.

“One of you take the wheel for the next lap,” Cochrane said. “The strain is telling on me. Better put these on for goggles.” He handed Stillman his reading-glasses.

The filling-station and its circular glow of light whisked out behind them and they were on the tear once more. They picked up a State police motorcycle escort automatically within the next twenty minutes, by their mere speed in itself; simply tapered off long enough to show their badges and make their shouts of explanation heard. This was all to the good; it cleared their way through such towns and restricted-speed belts as lay in their path. Just to give an idea of their pace, there were times, on the straightaway, when their escort had difficulty in keeping up with them. And even so, they weren’t making good enough time to satisfy Bliss. He alternated between fits of optimism, when he sat crouched forward on the edge of the seat, fists clenched, gritting: “We’ll swing it; we’ll get there in time; I know it!” and fits of despair, when he slumped back on his shoulder blades and groaned, “We’ll never make it! I’m a fool; I should have let you phone in ahead like you wanted to! Can’t you make this thing move at all?”

“Look at that speedometer,” the man at the wheel suggested curtly. “There’s nowhere else for the needle to go but off the dial altogether! Take it easy, Bliss. They can’t possibly tear along at this clip; we’re official, remember. Another thing, once they get there, they’ll do a lot of cagey reconnoitering first. That’ll eat up more of their head start. And finally, even after they get at it, they’ll take it slow, make all their preparations first, to make it look right. Don’t forget, they think they’ve got all night; they don’t know we’re on their trail.”

“And it’s still going to be an awful close shave,” insisted Bliss through tightly clenched teeth.

Their State police escort signed off at the city limits with a wave of the arm, a hairpin turn, and left them on their own. They had to taper down necessarily now, even though traffic was light at this night hour. Bliss showed Stillman the shortcut over, which would bring them up to his house from the rear. A block and a half away Stillman choked off their engine, coasted to a stealthy stop under the overshadowing trees, and the long grueling race against time was over — without their knowing as yet whether it had been successful or not.

“Now follow me,” Bliss murmured, hopping down. “I hope we didn’t bring the car in too close; sounds carry so at an hour like this.”

“They won’t be expecting us.” One of Stillman’s legs gave under him from his long motionless stint at the wheel; he had to hobble along slapping at it until he could get the circulation back into it. Cochrane brought up at the rear.

When they cleared the back of the house next door to Bliss’s and could look through the canal of separation to the street out in front, Bliss touched his companions on the arm, pointed meaningly. The blurred outline of a car was visible, parked there under the same leafy trees where Stillman himself had hidden when he was waiting for Bliss. They couldn’t make out its interior.

“Someone in it,” Cochrane said, breathing hard. “I think it’s a woman, too. I can see the white curve of a bare arm on the wheel.”

“You take that car, we’ll take the house; he must be in there with her long ago at this stage of the game,” Stillman muttered. “Can you come up on it quietly enough so she won’t have time to sound the horn or signal him in any way?”

“I’ll see to it I do!” was the purposeful answer. Cochrane turned back like a wraith, left the two of them alone.

They couldn’t go near the front of the house because of the lookout, and there was no time to wait for Cochrane to incapacitate her. “Flatten out and do like I do,” Bliss whispered. “She’s probably watching the street out there more than this lot behind the house.” He crouched, with his chin nearly down to his knees, darted across the intervening space to the concealment provided by the back of his own house.

“We can get in through the kitchen window,” Bliss instructed, when Stillman had made the switch-over after him. “The latch never worked right. Give me a folder of matches, and make a footrest with your hands.”

When he was up with one foot on the outside of the sill, his companion supporting the other, Bliss tore off and discarded the sandpaper and matches adhering to it, used the cardboard remainder as a sort of impromptu jimmy, slipping it down into the seam between the two window halves, and pushing the fastening back out of the way with it. A moment later he had the lower pane up and was inside the room, stretching down his hands to Stillman to help him up after him.

They both stood perfectly still there for a minute in the gloom, listening for all they were worth. Not a sound reached them, not a chink of light showed. Bliss felt a cold knife of doubt stab at his heart.

“Is he in here at all?” He breathed heavily. “That may be somebody else’s car out there across the way.”

At that instant there was the blurred but unmistakable sound that loose, falling earth makes, dropping back into a hollow or cavity. You hear it on the streets when a drainage ditch is being refilled. You hear it in a cemetery when a grave is being covered up. In the silence of this house, in the dead of night, it had a knell-like sound of finality. Burial.

Bliss gave a strangled gasp of horror, lurched forward in the darkness.

“He’s already — through!”

The sound had seemed to come from somewhere underneath them. Bliss made for the basement door. Stillman’s heavy footfalls pounded after him, all thought of concealment past.

Bliss clawed open the door that gave down to the cellar, flung it back. For a split second, and no more, dull-yellow light gleamed up from below. Then it snuffed out, too quickly to show them anything. There was pitch blackness below them, as above, and an ominous silence.

Something clicked just over Bliss’s shoulder, and the pale moon of Stillman’s torch glowed out from the cellar floor below them, started traveling around, looking for something to center on. Instantly a vicious tongue of flame spurted toward the parent orb, the reflector, and something flew past Bliss, went spat against the wall, as a thunderous boom sounded below.

Bliss could sense, rather than tell, that Stillman was raising his gun behind him. He clawed out, caught the cuff of the detective’s sleeve, brought it down. “Don’t! She may be down there somewhere in the line of fire!”

Something shot out over his shoulder. Not a gun or slug, but the torch itself. Stillman was trying to turn it into a sort of readymade star shell, by throwing it down there still lighted. The light pool on the floor streaked off like a comet, flicked across the ceiling, dropped down on the other side, and steadied itself against the far wall — with a pair of trouser legs caught squarely in the light, from the knees down. They buckled to jump aside, out of the revealing beam, but not quickly enough. Stillman sighted his gun at a kneecap and fired. The legs jolted, wobbled, folded up forward toward the light, bringing a torso and head down into view on the floor. When the fall ended, the beam of the torch was weirdly centered on the exact crown of a bald head surrounded by a circular fringe of reddish hair. It rolled from side to side like a giant ostrich egg, screaming agonizedly into the cellar floor.

“I’ll take him,” Stillman grunted. “You put on that light!”

Bliss groped for the dangling light cord that had proved such a hindrance to them just now by being down in the center of the basement instead of up by the doorway where they could get at it. He snagged it, found the finger switch, turned it. Horror flooded the place at his touch, in piebald tones of deep black shadow and pale yellow. The shovel Alden had just started to wield when he heard them coming lay half across a mound of freshly disinterred earth. Near it were the flat flagstones that had topped it, flooring the cellar, and the pickax that had loosened them. He must have brought the tools with him in the car, for they weren’t Bliss’s.

And on the other side of that mound — the short but deep hole the earth had come out of. Alden must have been working away down here for some time, to get so much done single-handed. And yet, though they had arrived before he’d finished, they were still too late — for in the hole, filling it to within an inch or two of the top, and fitting the sides even more closely, rested a deep old-fashioned trunk that had probably belonged to Smiles’ mother and come down in the trunk compartment of the car. And four-square as it was, it looked ominously small for anyone to fit into — whole.

Bliss pointed down at it, moaned sickly. “She — she—”

He wanted to fold up and let himself topple inertly across the mound of earth before it. Stillman’s sharp, whiplike command kept him upright. “Hang on! Coming!”

He had clipped the back of Alden’s skull with his gun butt, to put him out of commission while their backs were turned. He leaped up on the mound of earth, and across the hole to the opposite side, then dropped down by the trunk, tugging at it.

“There’s no blood around; he may have put her in alive. Hurry up, help me to get the lid up! Don’t waste time trying to lift the whole thing out; just the lid. Get some air into it—”

It shot up between the two of them, and within lay a huddled bulk of sacking, pitifully doubled around on itself. It was still moving feebly. Fluttering spasmodically, rather than struggling any more.

The blade of the penknife Stillman had already used once before tonight flew out, slashed furiously at the coarse stuff. A contorted face was revealed through the rents, but not recognizable as Smiles’ any more — a face black with suffocation, in which the last spark of life had been about to go out. And still might, if they didn’t coax it back in a hurry.

They got her up out of it between them and straightened her out flat on the floor. Stillman sawed away at the short length of rope cruelly twisted around her neck, the cause of suffocation, severed it after seconds that seemed like centuries, unwound it, flung it off. Bliss, meanwhile, was stripping off the tattered remnants of the sacking. She was in a white silk slip.

Stillman straightened up, jumped for the stairs. “Breathe into her mouth like they do with choking kids. I’ll send out a call for a Pulmotor.”

But the battle was already won by the time he came trooping down again; they could both tell that, laymen though they were. The congested darkness was leaving her face little by little, her chest was rising and falling of its own accord, she was coughing distressedly, and making little whimpering sounds of returning consciousness. They carried her up to the floor above when the emergency apparatus arrived, nevertheless, just to make doubly sure. It was while they were both up there, absorbed in watching the Pulmotor being used on her, that a single shot boomed out in the basement under them, with ominous finality.

Stillman clapped a hand to his hip. “Forgot to take his gun away from him. Well, there goes one of Cochrane’s prisoners!”

They ran for the basement stairs, stopped halfway down them, one behind the other, looking at Alden’s still form lying there below. It was still face-down, in the same position as before. One arm, curved under his own body at chest level, and a lazy tendril of smoke curling up around his ribs, told the difference.

“What a detective I am!” Stillman said disgustedly.

“It’s better this way,” Bliss answered, tight-lipped. “I think I would have killed him with my own bare hands, before they got him out of here, after what he tried to do to her tonight!”

By the time they returned upstairs again, Cochrane had come in with the woman. They were both being iodined and bandaged by an intern.

“What happened?” Stillman asked dryly. “Looks like she gave you more trouble than he gave us.”

“Did you ever try to hang onto the outside of a wild car while the driver tried to shake you off? I’d gotten up to within one tree length of her, when the shots down in the basement tipped her off Alden was in for it. I just had time to make a flying tackle for the baggage rack before she was off a mile a minute. I had to work my way forward along the running-board, with her swerving and flinging around corners on two wheels. She finally piled up against a refuse-collection truck; dunno how it was we both weren’t killed.”

“Well, she’s all yours, Cochrane,” Stillman said. “But first I’m going to have to ask you to let me take her over to headquarters with me. You, too, Bliss.” He looked at his watch. “I promised my lieutenant I’d be in with you by nine the latest, and I’m a stickler for keeping a promise. We’ll be a little early, but unforeseen circumstances came up.”

At headquarters, in the presence of Bliss, Stillman, Cochrane, the lieutenant of detectives, and the necessary police stenographer, Alden’s accomplice was prevailed on to talk.

“My name is Irma Gilman,” she began, “and I’m thirty-nine years old. I used to be a trained nurse on the staff of one of the large metropolitan hospitals. Two of my patients lost their lives through carelessness on my part, and I was discharged.

“I met Joe Alden six months ago. His wife was in ill health, so I moved in with them to look after her. Her first husband had left her well off, with slews of negotiable bonds. Alden had already helped himself to a few of them before I showed up, but now that I was there, he wanted to get rid of her altogether, so that we could get our hands on the rest. I told him he’d never get away with anything there, where everybody knew her; he’d have to take her somewhere else first. He went looking for a house, and when he’d found one that suited him, the place in Denby, he took me out to inspect it, without her, and palmed me off on the agent as his wife.

“We made all the arrangements, and when the day came to move, he went ahead with the moving van. I followed in the car with her after dark. That timed it so that we reached there late at night; there wasn’t a soul around any more to see her go in. And from then on, as far as anyone in Denby knew, there were only two of us living in the house, not three. We didn’t keep her locked up, but we put her in a bedroom at the back, where she couldn’t be seen from the road, and put up a fine-meshed screen on the window. She was bed-ridden a good part of the time, anyway, and that made it easier to keep her presence concealed.

“He started to make his preparations from the moment we moved in. He began building this low wall out in front, as an excuse to order the bricks and other materials that he needed for the real work later on. He ordered more from the contractor than he needed, of course.

“Finally it happened. She felt a little better one day, came downstairs, and started checking over her list of bonds. He’d persuaded her when they were first married not to entrust them to a bank; she had them in an ordinary strongbox. She found out some of them were already missing. He went in there to her, and I listened outside the door. She didn’t say very much, just: ‘I thought I had more of these thousand-dollar bonds.’ But that was enough to show us that she’d caught on. Then she got up very quietly and went out of the room without another word.

“Before we knew it, she was on the telephone in the hall — trying to get help, I suppose. She didn’t have a chance to utter a word; he was too quick for her. He jumped out after her and pulled it away from her. He was between her and the front door, and she turned and went back upstairs, still without a sound, not even a scream. Maybe she still did not realize she was in bodily danger, thought she could get her things on and get out of the house.

“He said to me, ‘Go outside and wait in front. Make sure there’s no one anywhere in sight, up and down the road or in the fields.’ I went out there, looked, raised my arm and dropped it, as a signal to him to go ahead. He went up the stairs after her.

“You couldn’t hear a thing from inside. Not even a scream, or a chair falling over. He must have done it very quietly. In a while he came down to the door again. He was breathing a little fast and his face was a little pale, that was all. He said, ‘It’s over. I smothered her with one of the bed pillows. She didn’t have much strength.’ Then he went in again and carried her body down to the basement. We kept her down there while he went to work on this other wall; as soon as it was up high enough, he put her behind it and finished it. He repainted the whole room so that one side wouldn’t look too new.

“Then, without a word of warning, the girl showed up the other night. Luckily, just that night Joe had stayed down at the hotel late having a few beers. He recognized her as she got off the bus and brought her out with him in the car. That did away with her having to ask her way of anyone. We stalled her for a few minutes by pretending her mother was fast asleep, until I had time to put a sedative in some tea I gave her to drink. After that it was easy to handle her; we put her down in the basement and kept her doped down there.

“Joe remembered, from one of her letters, that she’d said her husband had insured her, so that gave us our angle. The next day I faked a long letter to her and mailed it to the city, as if she’d never shown up here at all. Then when Bliss came up looking for her, I tried to dope him, too, to give us a chance to transport her back to his house during his absence, finish her off down there, and pin it on him. He spoiled that by passing the food up and walking out on us. The only thing left for us to do after that was for Joe to beat the bus in, plant her clothes ahead of time, and put a bee in the police’s bonnet. That was just to get Bliss out of the way, so the coast would be left clear to get her in down there.

“We called his house from just inside the city limits when we got down here with her tonight. No one answered, so it seemed to have worked. But we’d lost a lot of time on account of that blowout. I waited outside in the car, with her covered up on the floor, drugged. When Joe had the hole dug, he came out and took her in with him.

“We thought all the risk we had to run was down at this end. We were sure we were perfectly safe up at the other end; Joe had done such a bang-up job on that wall. I still can’t understand how you caught onto it so quick.”

“I’m an architect, that’s why,” Bliss said grimly. “There was something about that room that bothered me. It wasn’t on the square.”

Smiles was lying in bed when Bliss went back to his own house, and she was pretty again. When she opened her eyes and looked up at him, they were all crinkly and smiling just as they used to be.

“Honey,” she said, “it’s so good to have you near me. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll never walk out on you again.”

“That’s right, you stay where you belong, with Ed,” he said soothingly, “and nothing like that’ll ever happen to you again.”