Blow Hot, Blow Cold

17

First there was Lila, Nancy thought, now Vera.

Were people to be forever disappearing from Shady Acres? It gave a person the creepiest feeling.

Of course, it was nonsense to think of Vera as having “disappeared.” She had merely gone out. Right now she was probably downtown shopping at Logan’s, or at the supermarket; or maybe she was at the beauty parlor. There were scads of places she could have gone for perfectly good reasons; certainly there was no cause to feel uneasy about her. It was that damned Lieutenant Masters’s fault. Every time he turned up he brought a whiff of doom with him. Vera was fine.

Nevertheless, in the first hour following Masters’s departure, Nancy found a dozen excuses for glancing over to the Richmond house. There was no sign of Vera. But one would hardly expect her to run up a flag to show she was back home. She might have returned at any time during the hour. If so, she had probably left her Volkswagen, the little second car she drove when Jack was off in the Corvette, parked in her drive.

Nancy went to the living room and looked out.

The Volkswagen was not in the Richmond drive or at the curb.

Vera could have run it into the garage, of course. Well, there was nothing to be gained from speculating about it, Nancy told herself. The sensible thing to do was to phone Vera on some pretext or other, just to make sure she was all right.

Nancy went to the phone in the hall and dialed the Richmond number.

She waited through eight rings. There was no answer. Nancy hung up.

Vera simply wasn’t at home. But then why did Nancy persist in having the nagging feeling that she was?

It could be that Vera, for her own reasons, just wasn’t answering the door or the phone. No, that wasn’t likely. Vera was a well-trained doctor’s wife; any call might be important...

Nancy’s feeling of uneasiness began to assume the shape of alarm. Call it unreasonable, call it absurd, call it anything, it had grown too disturbing to be tolerated. She would either have to put it out of her mind, which was impossible, or do something about it.

The first thing Nancy did was to run across the street to the Richmonds’ attached garage. The overhead door was closed, but there were three tiny windows that Nancy could just look through by standing on tiptoe. She stretched and looked, and there in the garage stood the Volkswagen. If Vera had gone somewhere, she had either walked or been driven there by Jack. But Vera hated walking, and Jack usually left for the hospital or his office long before Vera got out of bed...

Nancy went around to the back door. She hesitated only a moment. Then she turned the knob and, timidly, pushed. To her surprise the door swung inward. Unlocked, with Vera away?

Nancy stepped into Vera Richmond’s kitchen. The conditioned air was cool and delightfully dry, and it made her feel light and liberated. At the same time she was oppressed by a dragging dread that made every step an act of will.

She held her breath and, cocking her head, paused to listen. But there was nothing to hear. It sounded exactly like an empty house, soundless.

Nevertheless, Nancy called, “Ver-aaa?” and waited. “Vera! You home?”

There was no answer. Nancy forced herself to go into the entrance hall.

“Vera?”

No answer.

I wonder, Nancy thought, what I would say if the front door opened this minute and Vera walked in. How do you explain being caught in your neighbor’s house? She laughed with vexation. The hell with that. There was something wrong, and she knew it. Nancy went determinedly into the Richmonds’ sunken living room.

It was a beautiful room, which Nancy had secretly envied for a long time. But she felt no envy now. Her attention fixed on the massive bleached mahogany door at the other end. For some reason. For some reason.

Behind that door was Jack Richmond’s study.

Behind that door lay something dreadful. Nancy knew it. She did not know how she knew it, but she knew it.

Like a sleepwalker she moved across the living room and opened the heavy door and looked into Jack Richmond’s study and there was Vera Richmond as Nancy had known in her heart she would be. Vera Richmond was in a big high-backed leather chair facing the door, almost as if she were expecting someone to come in and was sitting there quietly, waiting. But she was dead.

She was dead, and Nancy was so sure she was dead that she did not advance one quarter-step into the study. She just stood there and looked at her friend with an odd sense of detachment, all urgency ended.

Vera had brushed her hair and touched up her lips and cheeks and got into a crisp bright summer frock in preparation for her death. She looked quite pretty, Nancy thought. And utterly serene. The drapes were drawn back from the picture window behind her, and the sunshine through the Venetian slats fashioned a stairway of light across the glowing parquet floor... a stairway from life to death. It was really a lovely room to die in.

Vera was dead.

Vera dead? It was unthinkable. Vera had always been there, quiet, smiling, efficient, self-effacing; “my third arm,” as Jack used to say. Vera was the kind of person who just went on forever.

But here she was, suddenly, impossibly, inexplicably dead in her husband’s chair. And the question, after all, was why. Surely she hadn’t brushed her hair and got into a freshly ironed dress and made her face up just to sit down and die on a beautiful summer morning. Surely she hadn’t! But she had. She had died for a reason of her own, in her own way and time.

Turning violently, Nancy saw the desk of rubbed mahogany, its matching chair pushed back as if someone had just risen from it and walked away. And someone had. Vera. For on the desk, under a blue glass weight, lay two sheets of white paper filled with Vera’s bold script. She had sat down there to write something before dying, perhaps while waiting to die; and there it was, under the weight...

With some surprise Nancy found herself at the desk. She was not aware of having crossed the study; suddenly she was there. And pushing the glass weight aside with the tips of her fingernails, and stooping over the desk without touching the papers, and reading what Vera had written.

That was not the end of the letter, but Nancy stopped reading. She turned away with a whimper that froze in her throat.

Jack Richmond was standing in the doorway. He was not looking at Nancy; he seemed hardly aware that she was there. He was looking at his wife in the chair with the lusterless eyes of an old man. His face was gray, and his voice, when he finally spoke, was without inflection or, indeed, any human character.

“She’s dead,” he said.

It was not a statement that called for a reply, and Nancy was wordless. Then she looked up, and there, behind Jack Richmond, stood Lieutenant Masters. He had been there all the time.

But it was not the presence of Masters that made Nancy come to life and run blindly from the room. It was something Jack Richmond said.

Vera’s husband looked up at Nancy, and he said in the most chillingly courteous way, “I’m sure you will excuse us now?”

Afterward, when Masters came out of the study, he went over to where he had asked Nancy to sit and wait in the living room, and he said to her, “I’m sorry I asked you to wait, Mrs. Howell. You look like death yourself. I can take your statement later. Can you get home all right?” He was a little stooped in her direction, in an attitude of deference, or supplication, as if mutely pleading his innocence.

But Nancy said, “Is it true?”

“Is what true, Mrs. Howell?”

“That when you came here this morning you were really coming for Vera?”

“Yes,” Masters said.

Nancy was silent. Then she said, “How did you know?”

“It occurred to me that Larry Connor might have tried to commit suicide after all and that, having tried, he might have had a change of mind and attempted to get help — it’s a common reaction among many would-be suicides. I checked with the telephone company and located the operator he had dialed. She remembered putting the call through for him. It was to the Richmond residence, to Dr. Jack Richmond. Connor, of course, knew nothing of the emergency call that had taken Dr. Richmond to the hospital.

“The conclusion was obvious. Since Jack Richmond wasn’t home when the operator got the Richmond home for Connor, the phone must have been answered by Richmond’s wife. It was Vera Richmond, then, who had talked to Larry Connor, heard what he had done to himself, heard him plead for help. It was obviously an emergency, and she had been a trained nurse; she knew her husband was at the hospital for another emergency and time was important; it was logical to suppose that she responded to Larry Connor’s plea for help herself. If so, she was the one in Connor’s office, not her husband. She was the one who found Larry dead — or let him die, as we now know — and who manipulated everything afterward, including killing Lila Connor.”

Nancy found herself full of tremors, cold and trembling. She hugged her knees to her chest for warmth. But she was still cold.

“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Vera... Vera is the last one I would have suspected.”

Masters said, “She’s the last one I suspected, Mrs. Howell.”

“Jack must have known what he would find here. He seemed to — to accept it.”

“He was afraid of something of the sort. For that matter, so was I. That was why I went looking for him.” Masters hesitated. “In a case like that, a husband has the right to be the first to know.”

“How understanding of you, Lieutenant.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Are you?” Nancy set her little jaw and cried, “I don’t believe you. You’re a — a scavenger! Larry and Lila and Vera — all dead. I hope you’re satisfied!”

Masters did not protest the injustice of it.

He followed Nancy Howell through the hall and across the kitchen, and he stood in the Richmonds’ back door watching her run across the yards in the fierce sunlight. He continued to stand there after she disappeared in her own house. He felt drained, empty, a fat and ugly husk. Masters was not satisfied with many things in his life, and it was long past the time for trying to do anything about it, and she smelled so nice, and tomorrow might be better for him than today, but he doubted it.