Death Is Her Bridegroom

Chapter II

When the bus was thirty-five miles from Darrowville and still ten miles out of Hogan, it began to rain. Water fell from an inky sky in a deluge that threatened to wash all traffic, including the clanking bus, off the highway. Sitting in his seat at the rear, Jeff Pitt looked out the window on his right and saw no farther than the streaming glass.

In his seat of authority, the driver hunched forward over the steering wheel, peering intently through the half-circle of windshield that was swept by the flapping wiper. Rain flooded in behind the rubber-edged blade, obscuring vision. The bus crept cautiously, the light of its headlamps beaten back. After about twenty minutes, there was a sharp downward tilt. For a moment, at the bottom, the ugly sound of rushing water swept under and around the bus, then the tilt was upward, the sound receding. Flash flood, Jeff thought.

Two rows forward and on the opposite side, Cleo Constance sat stiffly. He seemed a remote, self-isolated figure, forbidding approach. The gray homburg rode his head with unimpeachable correctness. His shoulders were rigid, square, under boxed blue tailoring. Most of the time his pale eyes were directed carefully ahead in a blind stare, but now and then his head turned briefly, showing a hard, flat cheek, a thin acquiline nose.

Pride, Jeff thought. Pride and arrogance to the degree of cruelty, sharpened by ambition and frustration. Well, one thing’s certain. He’s made no contact. Not yet. It’ll be at Hogan or Darrowville. Unless, of course, it’s made on the bus. And that isn’t likely. The kidnapper would have to expose himself openly that way. It isn’t at all likely. It’ll be arranged in a way to protect the kidnapper. I wonder if he’s waiting at Hogan? Or at Darrowville? Or is he on the bus? Besides Constance and me, four passengers. Could it be one of the four? Two men and two women. Could it be a woman? And why not? Not alone, of course. There’s a man in it somewhere. One or more. But a woman could make the contact. It’s been done before.

Across the aisle from Constance sat the fat little man who announced to Constance in a wheezy voice that he was Dr. Elliot Newman. Constance had responded with a cold nod and nothing more. A doctor. That explained the small brown bag he carried.

At the moment, Jeff could see only the back of Dr. Newman’s head. A brown felt hat was placed precisely level on the head. Between the hat and a thin ragged edge of gray hair was a strip of naked scalp. The little doctor had made no more gestures of friendliness after Constance’s obvious rebuff. Maybe he was sulking.

Up front, a couple of rows behind the driver, the young couple sat in heavy silence. If they had exchanged more than a dozen words during the ride, Jeff hadn’t noticed. The girl sat on the inside, next the window. Jeff could see only the top of her head over the high back of the seat. Her hair was mouse colored, stringy. It badly needed the benefits of one of the new shampoos. The new shampoos could work miracles, even with mouse-colored hair. Lady, you can be glamorous. Which side received the magic action? But probably it would be just as well to leave the hair as it was. Why take the mouse out of the hair when obviously nothing could be done for the mouse-like face, the gray little mouse-like soul?

The girl seemed to be sleeping. Jeff knew that she wasn’t. At the last stop he’d got off the bus for a stretch. Boarding it again, he’d noticed that the girl hadn’t moved. Her head was lying back against the seat, and he’d seen with a shock and a quick surge of compassion the open misery of her staring eyes. He’d seen also the indicative swell under her thin coat.

Married? he thought. I doubt it. Just trapped. Just trapped in one of life’s nasty little predicaments. How about the kid beside her? Papa? Probably, but fighting it. Trying to get out. He has the look. The sulky, trapped, resentful look. He hates her guts for looking like a mouse and acting like a woman. He’s a nasty little hunk. Slack mouth; could be vicious. The kind to use a shiv in a dark alley. But a kidnapper? It’s a hundred to one against, but you never can tell.

It’s dangerous to fall back on the old myth that you can tell a criminal, or his quality, just by the look of him. The same goes for the girl, if it happened to be the pair of them. What a beautifully classic case that would make for the records. The whole thing engineered by a pregnant mouse.

There was nothing mousy about the fourth passenger. The other woman. On the contrary, a bit brassy. Natural good looks underscored a little too heavily by cosmetics. Too lean, too tense and overdrawn, perhaps, for some tastes. But there was vitality in her bones and breath. In every glance and movement. Not contrived, either. Natural as sleeping. “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look. Such men are dangerous.” Shakespeare, yet. How about a lean and hungry woman? Also dangerous? Kidnapper’s contact, maybe?

She sat hugging herself, directly across the aisle from Jeff. A peculiar mannerism, that. Her arms crossed in front of her body, one elbow fitted inside the other, her hands clutching her shoulders. Periodically, her body would shake visibly, and the forearms would press in against her breast, fingers digging into the shoulders like claws. Once he heard her teeth grinding. As if she were cold. But it wasn’t cold in the bus. Too hot, rather. Steamy hot. A chill, maybe. Fever and chills. Like Jeff had once had on an island he wanted to forget. She was a looker, all right, but not exactly in the chips. Fur coat ratty. Heels, if you bothered to notice, a bit run over. He wondered if she needed help. He wondered if he should offer.

With a start of surprise, he noticed that they had stopped. The bus had been crawling so slowly that the change was barely apparent. Leaning over to peer more closely out the streaming glass, he saw a watery yellow blur of light and knew that they had crept into Hogan.

Up front, the driver slipped out from under the wheel and turned.

“This is Hogan, folks. We’ll be here about five minutes.”

The doors folded back with a soft, pneumatic hiss, and he dove out, vanishing into the gray downpour. No one else made a motion to leave the bus. The mouse sat beside her companion, her head back, the dull misery in her eyes. The little doctor turned once to look over his shoulder and then settled a little lower, with obvious resignation, in his seat. The naked strip of scalp between hair and hat had a kind of subtle obscenity about it. Across the aisle, the lean and hungry and pretty woman hugged herself and shivered and ground her teeth.

Cleo Constance sat militarily erect with fifty thousand dollars in his pocket. Cold and remote. Spiritually exiled. Don’t touch me, peasants.

It was nearer ten than five minutes when the driver returned. He climbed in soaked, water running out of his shoes and clothes onto the rubber mat on the floor.

“Sorry, folks,” he announced. “We can’t go on tonight. The highway’s flooded between here and Darrowville. It’s a flash flood and will recede in a hurry when the rain stops. By morning, traffic should be going through.”

His voice had a relieved sound, and he was openly happy to escape the responsibility of more blind driving. In the bus, following his words, there was a hiatus of suspended sound and motion, and then the pretty woman jerked violently, as if she’d had a sharp, excruciating pain. An abbreviated cry of anguish burst from her lips.

“I must get to Darrowville. I must get to Darrowville tonight.”

The driver lifted his shoulders in an expansive shrug. One man’s meat is another man’s poison. Himself, he was damned happy.

“Sorry, lady. Nothing’s moving on the highway.”

She huddled in her seat, hugging herself. Across the aisle, Jeff could hear her whimpering like a hurt pup.

Dr. Newman straightened. His voice was querulous.

“Are we expected to stay in this bus all night?”

“Not at all.” The driver gestured at the yellow blur outside. “This is the hotel. Only one in Hogan. It’s nothing fancy, folks, but there’s accommodation for everyone. If you’ll all unload, please. I’ll have to move the bus away from here.”

Another hiatus. Sullen reluctance to face the occasion. Then the little doctor got up briskly, retrieving his bag and moving up to the door. The rain swallowed him. The young guy up front followed, leaving the mouse on her own. She went down the steps into the rain slowly, clinging to the handrail with one hand, clutching her thin coat over the beginning swell of her belly with the other. Cleo Constance moved in behind her with measured precision and filled the exit briefly with his broad blue shoulders. The pretty woman whimpered in her seat, and Jeff stood beside her.

“May I help you off?”

She looked up with furtive, anguished eyes, and he saw that her teeth had brought blood to her lips. Staring down into the eyes, he understood finally that it was neither cold nor fever that fed her anguish, and he felt a vast compassion and a sickness that filtered through his guts.

She struggled for control. “No, thanks, I’m all right. I’m perfectly all right.”

Wrenching herself up and forward, she fled down the aisle as if she feared his pursuit. But it was more than him that she fled. Far more than a man.

Run, run, he thought. Run from the monkey. But it’s always there. Always on your shoulder.

And he was thankful, stepping from the bus, for the clean, cold wash of rain.

The lobby had a worn carpet on the floor and a sickly rubber plant growing in a wooden tub in a corner. The carpet still displayed, between large patches where the fiber backing was exposed, a pattern of roses that had once been florid and were now faded and dirty. A solitary and lethargic elevator served the three floors up.

Jeff arranged for a room with an adolescent clerk who was plainly stimulated by the unexpected influx of guests. He spun the register and extended a pen with a flourish. Jeff signed and received his key. Turning away, he saw across the room an entrance to a small and dimly lighted taproom. The light was not the calculated soft stuff that goes for romance in better places. It was only the result of low wattage. A short bar and a few tables and chairs were visible in the dusk. At the bar, separated by three vacant stools, were Dr. Newman and Cleo Constance. The other three passengers from the bus had vanished, presumably up the shaft in the reluctant elevator.

Jeff threaded his way through the litter of tables and chairs and chose the center one of the three vacant stools. Right in the middle, he thought. If these are the two, right in the middle. He ordered a bourbon with water, and was grateful for the warm diffusion through his insides. He relaxed a little.

“Tough luck,” he said.

Dr. Newman nodded curtly. “Damned nuisance.”

Cleo Constance said nothing. He lifted his glass and drained it, setting it empty on the bar and standing with that damned clipped motion of his. He left without speaking.

Jeff finished his bourbon. “Think I’ll turn in,” he said.

Dr. Newman shrugged, irritation manifest in his plump twitch. “Might as well. Be along myself shortly.”

Since he was only one up, Jeff walked. Coming off the stairs into the hall, he saw Constance unlock a door and disappear. Checking the tab on his key against door numbers, he discovered that he was beyond Constance about half the length of the hall. The door across from his was slightly ajar. He could hear, within the room, the desperate cadence of pacing footsteps, broken at brief intervals for the time it took to reverse direction. Back and forth, back and forth, across the trap of a room. Listening more closely, he detected with the sound of pacing the soft accompaniment of tortured animal whimpering.

Abruptly, on impulse, he crossed the hall and, without knocking, entered the room and closed the door behind him.

She had taken off the ratty fur coat and the jacket of her wool gabardine suit. She held herself, even walking, in that cross-armed embrace, and the pointed red nails of her fingers had ripped the thin stuff of her blouse where it stretched tight over her shoulders. When he entered, she stopped, twisting around from the hips to face him, her eyes bright and terrible, her lower lip fastened between her teeth.

“Go away,” she said. “Go away from me.”

He shook his head, wishing he could free himself of the compulsion to pity. Wishing he could always use the other side of the road and never give a damn. Knowing he never could.

“You need help,” he said. “Maybe I can supply it.”

She started her pacing again. “I just need to be let alone. Get away from me, I said. Get the hell away.”

He stood watching her. Her black hair looked soft and clean, shining under the light. Right now it was in a tangle from the frantic combing of her fingers. She rubbed her hands up and down her forearms, shivering. Her teeth began to chatter.

As she swung around from a wall, he said, “How long since you had one, baby?”

She was motionless, her eyes devouring him. “Who the hell are you?”

He smiled and didn’t answer. She leaned against the wall, her head thrown back, the embrace of her arms locking tighter. Tears seeped from under her lids and ran down her cheeks. After a few seconds, she began to sob. The sobs were deep upheavals, tearing at her chest. He stood waiting until they ceased.

“There’s a doctor downstairs,” he said.

“Doctors,” she said. “Damned doctors.”

“It’s a doctor’s business to relieve suffering. Did anyone ever suffer more than you are right now?”

She didn’t reply. The sobbing was ended, but the silent tears still ran down her cheeks.

“I’ll be back,” he said, and turned and went out.

Downstairs, Dr. Newman was just coming out of the taproom with his bag in his hand. Jeff waited for him to come even, turning back up the stairs at his side.

“You got morphine in your bag, Doctor?”

The little medico shot an oblique glance at him from under a cocked brow. “The pretty woman in the fur coat?”

“Yes. She’s tearing herself to pieces.”

“I suspected it.”

They went on up the stairs and stopped at the head. Dr. Newman looked down at the floor, pursing his lips. He looked, Jeff thought, remarkably like a toad.

“I’m not supposed to do it, you know.” He stood without moving a moment longer, and then said abruptly, “To hell with it. Which room?”

They went down and in without bothering to knock. The little doctor dropped his bag on a chair and snapped it open, barely glancing at the woman who stood pressed against the wall.

“Roll up the sleeve of your blouse,” he said.

Jeff turned back into the hall, waiting there until Newman came out a few minutes later.

“Thanks, Doctor,” he said. “For her, I mean.”

The ugly medico looked up with a twisted smile. His right hand crept over in a gesture of which he seemed unaware, to rub gently his left forearm. His eyes, turned inward, were characterized by an odd vacuity.

“You ever read Whitman?” he said. “If you don’t, you should. He wrote something once; I am the man. I suffered. I was there. Greatest line of poetry ever written. Good night, son.”