Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 43, No. 4. Whole No. 245, April 1964

One Drink Can Kill You by David Alexander

Perhaps you will think this story has a strange or unorthodox inner balance — that its proportions are askew. And perhaps you would be right. But — and if s a big “but” — the story also has an irresistible narrative pull. You will simply want to know: What is going to happen to Melton, self-judged murderer and confirmed alcoholic? And we don’t think you’ll put the story down until you’ve found out...

“The high priest,” Melton told himself as he watched the doctor shuffling papers. “Now he will render his benediction. He should be wearing robe and mitre instead of an expensively tailored, three-button worsted.”

Nothing made much difference to Melton any more. He seemed incapable of experiencing emotion, or reacting to his surroundings or to other people. He thought of himself as an ambulatory dead man.

He had come to the sanitarium after his wife’s death for the same reason he had bought the house on an old road near a New England village. It was the easiest thing to do. His friends — the very few he had left from the old days — had prevailed on him to spend a month at Dr. Frazier’s hospital because the doctor was supposed to be especially good with alcoholics. He wasn’t, of course, Melton thought. He knew no more about alcoholics than alcoholics knew about themselves — and that was precisely nothing.

In a way, Melton did feel something. He was relieved that this was his last day at the sanitarium, his final formal audience with the doctor. He would pretend to listen to Frazier as the doctor made pontifical phrases that were meaningless, realty, but were meant to justify his large bill.

Melton admitted he felt a mild sense of elation — or, at least, of relief — because the probing, the senseless questions to which there were no answers, the interminable blood counts, urine analyses, and all the other tribal ceremonies peculiar to the medical priesthood would be ended now in minutes. Then he could drive to the little house in the country that he had bought sight-unseen. He wondered idly what it looked like, although he didn’t care much, not really.

The doctor was saying:

“...remarkably good physical condition for a man well into his forties considering the abuse you’ve given your body for so many years. The heart is strong. The blood pressure has receded almost to normal during your stay here...”

(The systolic reading is down about forty points, Melton reflected. This miracle has cost me approximately fifty dollars a point.)

“...there is some liver damage, of course. All heavy drinkers develop fatty livers. However, it is not too advanced. It can be controlled with regular injections of B-12. The blood-sugar count was high-normal when you arrived, near the danger point, but there has been no spilling. It is perfectly normal now. Down ten points, to be exact...”

(Two hundred dollars a point, Melton reckoned wryly.)

“...all in all, a most encouraging picture, I should say, from the physical standpoint. Good, strong pulse. A quite remarkable digestive system. Normal weight. The duodenum is slightly spastic, but we found no ulcer crater. You should have a long life in front of you, Mr. Melton, and a useful one if you live it wisely...”

(I’ve paid him two thousand dollars for thirty nights’ lodging and ninety meals and X-rays and needles and pills and bright young men with bedside manners asking questions that can’t be answered, Melton thought. And now he tells me this. I was willing to pay him, eager even, because I had hope. I hoped he would tell me I am dying, that I wouldn’t need to find the guts to kill myself. Now he’s destroyed even that hope. That’s what I’ve bought myself — the end of hope.)

“...your mental condition, your uncooperative attitude, is of most concern to us. Your refusal to try the proven therapy of Alcoholics Anonymous, for instance...”

Melton spoke for the first time. “I told you,” he said. “I tried it. A long time ago. It didn’t work.”

“Why didn’t it work, Mr. Melton? It has worked for tens of thousands. Have you tried to analyze the reason it didn’t work for you?”

“The religious aspect,” Melton answered. “The God-angle.”

“You don’t believe in God?”

“Not in the kind of God that people who go to church believe in. Not the kind of God that keeps AA’s sober. I can believe in a power, perhaps, or in a force, if you wish to get semantic. My God makes a great tree grow from a small seed, then sends a hurricane to blow it down. He’s a God with a sense of irony, perhaps, but not one who interests himself in the foolish little codes that pious little men call morality.”

The doctor shook his head sadly. “And there is this fixation of yours, of course — this insistence that you killed your wife. A guilt complex like that can destroy you, Mr. Melton. It borders on psychosis. We have hardly had time to investigate the cause of it. In so short a period we can deal only with surface matters. Perhaps it might be removed by deep analysis.”

“I have no need for deep analysis,” Melton said shortly. “I don’t need a Freudian practitioner to apply mythological terms to my guilt. I am a murderer. I killed my wife.”

“This is mere masochism, Mr. Melton. You are wallowing in guilt for some perverse motivation of your own. It is a form of mental illness, and it can only lead to the most unpleasant consequences, I assure you. You could not possibly have killed your wife. You had not seen her in months. You were miles from the scene of her death. She was crossing Madison Avenue at the noon hour. The brake fluid in a man’s car had leaked out, so that he could not stop for a red light. His car knocked your wife down and she died instantly. There is nothing at all to connect you with her death. The insurance company paid you a large sum without the slightest question, enough to give you at least minimum security for the rest of your life. No suspicion of guilt — none whatever — attached to you. And I don’t have to remind you that insurance companies investigate the circumstances of such accidents thoroughly before they pay out such large sums.”

“I killed her,” Melton repeated stubbornly. “I had a choice two years ago. If I had quit drinking then, she would have stayed with me. We loved each other. But I chose to keep on drinking and she left me. If she had stayed, she would not have been on that corner on that day when that car ran out of brake fluid.”

“Nonsense, Mr. Melton! You might as well say that the salesman who sold that particular car was the one who killed your wife, that he is a murderer. If he had not sold that car, the accident would not have occurred.”

“No,” said Melton. “No. You don’t understand at all.”

The doctor glanced at his watch and rose from his desk. “There is one thing you must remember despite your stubborn adherence to your own guilt feelings,” he said. “You must remind yourself of it every day, several times a day, every hour on the hour. You must remember that one drink can kill you.”

The doctor was amazed by the look that came into Melton’s face. It was the first time the patient had shown any real emotional reaction. Oddly enough, it was not a look of fear, or even of concern. It was a look of pure, almost holy exaltation.

“Do you mean that, Doctor?” Melton asked. “Do you really mean it?”

The patient’s unexpected reaction unsettled Dr. Frazier. His world of science was a well-ordered realm of stimulus and response, of premeditated cause and anticipated effect. Melton was not playing the game. His reaction was all wrong, and the doctor was at a complete loss to explain the look on his patient’s face, the eager question he had asked, as if Melton were begging for confirmation of a dreadful diagnosis.

The doctor chose his words carefully. “I am not speaking literally, of course,” he said. “No one quite understands the anatomy and psyche of alcoholism. In cases like yours we do not know for sure what peculiar chemistry an ounce of alcohol sets up in the body, what overwhelming compulsion it engenders in the mind. We do know the first ounce opens the floodgates, that its effects are as predictable as the effects of the potion that Dr. Jekyll swallowed.

“You were very close to a stroke when you arrived here. You would certainly have suffered a stroke had you continued to drink, and the stroke most probably would have killed you. It can happen again. It will happen again if you continue to drink. The first drink may not actually kill you, of course. It may be the hundredth or the thousandth — but if you take the first drink, it will inevitably lead to the fatal dose. That is why I am stating a positive fact when I say that one drink can kill you.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” said Melton warmly. “Thank you very much.” He started for the door.

The doctor was disturbed by Melton’s mood. Suddenly the patient seemed to have emerged from an almost cataleptic state into one that bordered on euphoria.

“Mr. Melton,” the doctor called, “you must try to believe in something. All of us must believe in something. In life. In ourselves, if nothing else. You say you cannot believe in an orthodox God, but you must try to believe in something, Mr. Melton.”

Melton turned and actually smiled at Dr. Frazier.

“I believe in something,” he declared. “I believe in something now.”

Five years before, Tom Melton had been a good newspaperman, one of the best and one of the highest paid. His column about politics and foreign affairs was syndicated by the most respected newspapers and was widely quoted. It was read by Presidents and Senators and the heads of foreign states.

He had drunk all his adult life. He had even considered whiskey to be his greatest friend during his days as a war correspondent, for he had hated the senseless killing, the unremitting horrors of the time, and he had found his only refuge from unbearable tensions in a bottle. But he had continued to function brilliantly. The war he hated had made him famous.

When the horrors ended, the bottle was still there — a part of him like his typewriter and his English raincoat and the sweat-stained hat his wife always wanted to throw away. He had no idea of when or how it had happened. There seemed to be no specific point in time when he had ceased to be merely a drinker, like scores of other men in his profession, and had become a hopeless alcoholic. Twice his column had contained disastrous inaccuracies. The first time, the desk had caught his reckless and unfounded statements in time and the piece had been killed. The second time, the libel had been printed and his paper had paid a fortune in damages without even going to court.

They had retained him on the staff because in those days his name was still big, his following still large. His reaction to disaster and near-disgrace was simply to drink more. Now fear came into his life and ruled it. Bottled courage was not enough. His writing had once been challenging, lucid, keenly analytical. Now he feared another mistake and his columns became inoffensive, dull, lifeless. There were complaints. Readers wrote to the editor. Newspapers throughout the country cancelled his syndicated column.

Melton drank more heavily.

The final crackup had come two years ago. Melton was a big man and a gentle one. He hated violence. The war had given him a bellyful of that, and he could no longer even hunt wild things as he had once done during vacations in the North Woods. He could not stand the thought of killing. Yet one night in some gin mill he had never frequented before, he fought and almost killed a smaller man as a result of a foolish, drunken argument.

Melton had been arrested and jailed. Newspapers throughout the country spread the story over their front pages. His own paper had kept the matter out of court by paying off the small man who had suffered contusions, lacerations, and a broken arm. But Melton was through.

He could not explain the thing that had happened to him. He had thought he was happy. He loved his wife. He was glad he had no children because he thought another and even more awful carnage was coming. Certainly he had been comfortable and financially independent. He had had status and recognition. Yet shortly before his wife’s death had shocked him into sobriety of a sort, he had been washing dishes in a Bowery cafeteria and sneaking drinks from a bottle of cooking wine whenever the boss’s back was turned.

His wife had given him the choice two years before. He had gone from job to job, each worse and lower paid than the last, but that was not the reason for the choice he had to make.

His wife could stand poverty. But she could not stand the thing he had become.

Against his will, against all the instincts that had motivated him for a lifetime, he made his choice, and he chose the bottle.

His wife never applied for a divorce, hoping, perhaps, that time would bring a miracle. She merely left him. She returned to the advertising agency she had worked for when she married him fourteen years before, and began to live her own life in her own sane world.

Melton sank completely into his own insane existence — the terrifying, haunted realm of the alcoholic. He was no longer employable, and he knew it, and did not even seek a job. His savings were soon gone and he supported himself after a fashion by writing pieces under another name for lurid magazines. In time, he could no longer write even such hack stuff as this, and he pawned his typewriter.

He lived in rooming houses and cheap hotels and he was on skid row when his friends found him to tell him that his wife was dead.

He knew at once that he had murdered her. He had murdered her the moment he had made his choice.

When he realized that his wife was dead, he became suddenly and sickeningly sober, for even drinking had lost all meaning for him. Only one thing held meaning for him now — death. He knew that men who took their lives were not cowards. They possessed a grim moral courage that he completely lacked. He had tried to commit suicide before, and he had failed at the final moment to swallow the required number of pills or to slash his wrists deeply enough.

Now he prayed to his own God to let the ravages of drink kill him. He had heard it was often fatal for a drunkard to be suddenly deprived of alcohol. He might suffer convulsions or a stroke and die horribly. He was a murderer, and he wanted punishment — but most of all he wanted the great dark nothingness of death.

That was why it was easy for his few remaining friends to persuade him to go to Dr. Frazier’s sanitarium “to rest and recuperate from the shock.” He did not go to be cured. He went to be condemned. The pains in his body and the sickness in his soul made him think he might be dying, and he wanted to be assured that he would not have to endure life much longer.

There was plenty of money for the sanitarium, of course. The adjuster for the casualty company which had insured the car that had killed his wife virtually pressed a check for a huge amount on Melton, for he feared the extravagant awards juries were making in such cases whenever they got to court. Melton did not want the money. It was blood money. It was a murderer’s reward.

But his wife had no living relatives, and he could see no point in increasing the corporate assets of an insurance company by refusing to take it. Perhaps, he thought, he could find some good way of spending it before he died. If his wife had died of cancer or heart disease, the problem would have been simple: he would have made a gift to one of the medical research foundations. But there was no foundation to prevent brake fluid from leaking out of a car.

He spent some of the money. He paid $2000 to the sanitarium and a thousand or so more for a secondhand station wagon and several thousands more as a down payment on Bert Gravson’s little house that stood remote beside a rutted dirt road in a thinly populated section of New England. Bert and his wife Ethel had used the house as a summer retreat and sometimes they had gone there for what they called a Grandma Moses Christmas.

But Bert had just been transferred to the Paris bureau of the same paper for which Melton once had worked, and he wanted to get rid of the house, completely furnished. He thought it would be a fine place for Melton to live while he tried to pull the threads of his life together again. He said Melton could finally write the book he had been planning for so many years. Melton himself thought that Bert, who had been kind when most of the others had forgotten him, could use the money — and that the house would be as good a place as any in which to die.

Now that Melton had been condemned to live he had no thought of writing a book. He did intend to do more of the hack writing he had done before, for he knew the markets and he could earn enough to support himself modestly in the little house. He did not wish to make further use of the blood money. In time, he thought, he would devise some fitting way of ridding himself of it...

Melton reached the house late on an early autumn afternoon. Rain began to fall as he turned off the highway onto the dirt road and he remembered that Bert had said the road often became impassable in mud or snow.

The house was at least a century old, a New England saltbox with clapboards silvered by generations of rain and snow and sun. Melton passed a ruined barn and a vine-grown smokehouse on the road, but there was no other structure of any kind in sight. At this gray hour, when rain fell softly, the little house with silvered shingles seemed bleak and pathetically alone.

Melton had his clothing and meager personal possessions packed in a single suitcase. His only other baggage was a portable typewriter, but the rear of the station wagon was filled with cartons containing his books. His wife had taken the furniture and pictures and rugs and books when they had separated because he could no longer afford to live in the gracious apartment they had occupied so long, nor did he wish to live there. When she died, Melton had given everything but the books to the Salvation Army. He had thought the books might prove a mild antidote to the pain of existence if he were condemned to live.

He steered the car up the gravel driveway and into a garage that was a converted woodshed. He unloaded the car and presently he found the key and unlocked the door of his little house.

As he switched on lamps, the house seemed to greet him with an uncertain smile — like that of a timid child who meets a stranger.

This was northern New England and despite the fact that summer had barely passed, the rain had made the empty house damp and chilly. He lighted the oil heater in the kitchen, then piled logs in the fireplace and nursed them to flame.

Bert and Ethel had been there very recently and had made the place habitable for him. It was scrubbed and shining. They had even left the phone connected. Ethel had bought captain’s chairs and rockers and old pine tables at country auctions when she originally furnished the place. A set of Currier and Ives prints in wormy frames hung on the walls beside a naive sampler that some Victorian maiden had stitched to pass the winter evenings.

There were hooked rugs on the wide-board floors. There was fresh linen under a crazy quilt on the bed upstairs, and clean towels hung in the bathroom, and chintzy curtains, freshly laundered, covered all the windows. They had left food in the refrigerator and on the cupboard shelves, knowing he would forget to buy supplies en route. There were even partially filled containers of washing powders and detergents and weed killer and insecticide stacked neatly beside the gaily checked tea towels.

They had wanted a man condemned to life to feel comfortable and at home, he thought bitterly. After he put away his clothes and placed his books on the shelves beside the fireplace, he sat down by the fire and suddenly a sense of guilt assailed him because he felt strangely peaceful, and peace should be forbidden a man like him.

That night he slept well and long and he did not take one of the green capsules they had given him when he left the sanitarium.

When he awakened to a sun-drenched morning he knew guilt again, for he was refreshed and a sense of physical well-being flowed through him, and he felt strongly that such pleasant sensations should be denied a drunkard who had killed his wife.

As the New England autumn flamed from red to gold and finally burned itself to brittle parchment-brown, Melton developed small routines, and they became his way of life.

He arose and bathed and shaved and cooked his breakfast. Then he cleaned his house and made what repairs were needed, for he had always been handy with tools. After that, he devoted a few hours to his writing and most of what he wrote eventually found a publisher and brought in the few dollars that were enough for his modest needs.

At nights he sat by the fire and read old books. Most of them were novels that had excited him when he was a boy, for unconsciously he sought to make the impossible journey back to his age of innocence and hope. He rode to Paris on d’Artagnan’s buttercup-hued pony, and shivered with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in the cave of Injun Joe, and wept for Sidney Carton on the guillotine, and climbed worn steps to an ancient tower with David Balfour on a storm-wild night.

He read late into the night, until his eyes were burning and the last log split and sputtered out. Fear and guilt were always there, just below the level of his consciousness. He walked always on the edge of darkness but the path he trod grew familiar to him. He was like a man who lives beside a dark and fetid swamp where primeval nightmare creatures lurk in silence. He kept his mind and his eyes on the narrow path he walked and was careful not to plunge into the sucking horrors, that he knew were waiting if his step should falter.

He lived almost entirely alone. Sometimes the rural delivery carrier stopped by to leave a card from Bert in Paris or a check from some publisher of an unimportant magazine. Sometimes he went to the little village called Bryceville, two miles away, which had hardly changed since the days when old Sam Adams had blustered about the countryside preaching sedition and mustering troops to fight the tyrant king.

He bought his supplies at Larkin’s General Store and got to know Will Larkin, who was both the storekeeper and the local sheriff. In time, he also met the village doctor, an old man named Chisholm, who wore half-moon glasses and a shiny serge suit that was always dusted with dandruff from his thinning hair. He could not explain why he went to the doctor for the B-12 shots that Frazier had prescribed. He wondered vaguely if he had begun to want to live again.

But he dwelt always on the borderland of fear.

When Halloween came, it was a proper day for witches. Wind gusted and it was the breath of winter. The wind played unearthly music that stirred the dry and withered leaves to flutter in a funeral dance. It rattled the bare and bony branches of the trees and it shook the little house angrily, as a malevolent scold might shake a frightened child.

Fittingly enough, it was on this day of goblins that the panic he had been expecting and had so far managed to avoid finally gripped him. The creatures of the dark place had surfaced at last and they watched him with their lizard-lidded eyes, sublimely sure of their final triumph.

His body shook and he wanted desperately to scream. He remembered Dr. Frazier’s words: One drink can hill you.

A drink, he thought. I’ll have a drink and that will be the end of it — the end of a man who made his choice and killed his wife.

It was then he realized how utterly vulnerable he had left himself. There was no drink in the house. New Englanders are individualists and their counties and towns are individualistic in their liquor laws. You could not obtain a drink or a bottle in the village of Bryceville. He would have to drive thirty miles to the mill city of Walton.

He ran from the house without a coat or hat, heedless of the knife-cold, gale-force wind. He started his car and it bumped over the ruts and ridges of the old dirt road. At Bryceville he turned off onto the paved highway, and the wind was behind him, a devil’s lash that sped him on. The force of the wind rocked the heavy station wagon, but he drove steadily and fast, a man possessed with a purpose.

Like so many New England mill cities, Walton was a depressing spectacle. It had become virtually a ghost town. The woolen-makers long ago had moved south where they could obtain cheaper labor. The high brick walls of deserted mills stood brooding vacantly, their black and broken windows sightless eves. Men and women shuffled over the streets that had been littered by the wind. Like Melton, they seemed hopeless as they braced themselves against the gale.

It was now mid-afternoon, but there was no sun and the business houses had turned on their neon signs. Many of the twisted tubes spelled BAR. Men without hope spend all they have for whiskey, Melton thought.

He found a package store and parked his car in front of it. The first thing he saw inside was a fancy package containing three ornate decanters of a fine bourbon he had once preferred. The three bottles were offered as a special at a ridiculously low price. Melton doubted that many people in the town could afford so expensive a brand. The fancy gift package had probably been standing on the shelves since the previous Christmas.

He bought it and took it to the car and placed it on the seat beside him.

Suddenly he was calm again — not happy or contented, but grimly calm. His weapon was beside him. The monsters of the dismal swamp had submerged again to the darker depths. When they reappeared, he would be armed against them; he would know what to do.

One drink can kill you.

As if according to his mood, the wild wind died. He drove slowly and carefully back to the little house he had left deserted and unlocked.

He carried his package into the kitchen. He uncorked one of the three bottles and poured a small amount of whiskey from it. He did not pour it into a glass. He poured it down the drain in the sink.

He repeated the process with the other two bottles. Then he went through a small ceremony that took several minutes. When he was finished, he recorked the bottles and found a roll of cellophane tape and sealed them. He placed the three bottles on a shelf of the cupboard, side by side.

They seemed to wink at him as the lamp glinted on them. They were plump and benign, like oriental household gods squatting in their small shrine. My winking, girthy gods, he thought. They will protect me. Now I am secure.

He found a padlock and a key in a chest of tools. He attached the padlock to the cupboard door and snapped it shut. A man’s household gods are private deities. He does not want intruders to place their hands upon them.

After that his life resumed its normal routine. He worked and ate and slept. Occasionally he would unlock the door of the small shrine in the kitchen and smile almost contentedly at his girthy gods. They winked back reassuringly.

By mid-November, when the foliage from the trees was soft, deep leaf-mold on the frosted earth, and the skies were pale with the ghostly touch of winter, he had finished most of the books on his shelves. He had just reread John Buchan’s tales of adventure and intrigue and he had discovered that the cloak-and-dagger literature of escape held a strong appeal for him. That was when he went to the Joshua Bryce Memorial Library and made a friend. The library was a remarkable place and the librarian was a remarkable person.

A latter-day Bryce had made windfall profits selling Army uniforms to the government during the first World War and he had sought to honor his ancestor who had founded the village by endowing the library. Its endowment was far more than that of libraries in towns many times the size of Bryceville, and Miss Amelia Abbott, who had been the librarian for forty years, had made good use of the money. Its fine collection of books was housed in a gracious old building of native stone. Its reading room was a pleasant retreat where a coal fire crackled in the grate and silk-shaded lamps cast rosy light. Even the stern, steel-engraved faces of New England poets and long-dead Bryces that stared down from the pastel walls did not. detract from the room’s chintzy comfort.

Miss Amelia herself reminded Melton of a small gray squirrel. She was a slight, fragile-looking woman of 75, but her eyes were bright and they darted about with the inquisitiveness of a child’s and seemed to take pleasure from everything they saw. She was delighted to have a new reader and to learn that Melton shared her own delight in suspense romances. She loaded him down with books by Eric Ambler and Geoffrey Household and Manning Coles, then she insisted that he must stay for tea in the reading room, a pleasant four o’clock custom she had inaugurated years before.

Melton went back for books and tea every few days after that. He came to know Miss Amelia well and he felt more at ease with her than he had ever felt with any human being except his wife.

Later he began to visit her in her small, neat cottage on Sunday afternoons and finally he invited her to his house for an evening meal.

Mis Amelia was something of a local heroine as well as a village institution. As his friendship with her ripened Melton’s own horizons widened. Miss Amelia had doubtless spoken of him to other villagers who had kept their distance in the past because they sensed he wanted it that way. Until his arrival, Miss Amelia, who had written a privately printed history of Bryceville, had been the town’s only literary light.

Now Melton found that even the potboilers he was turning out for cheap magazines gave him a certain status in the village. Old Dr. Chisholm invited him on a hunting trip. He refused, because he could not stand the thought of killing, but he was almost foolishly grateful for the invitation. Will Larkin, the sheriff and storekeeper, drove to his house one day and presented him with a six-months-old pup ironically named Popeye after the muscular comic-strip character because he’d been the runt of the litter.

“He ain’t pedigreed,” Larkin said. “He’s just plain dog. Doubt he’ll be worth a damn to you scaring off burglars, but he’ll be company. Real friendly little cuss.”

Melton wanted to refuse the gift but the pup was snuffing at his trousers and wagging its stubby tail and looking up at him with beseeching eyes, and he felt the gruff Larkin might be offended if he disdained the gift. He had not wanted the pup, partly because he did not want responsibility of any sort, partly because he felt it might grow sick and die, since he had destroyed all the things he ever loved or valued. But he came to love the pup in no time at all, and now he had a deep affection for two things — the frisky young pup and the sprightly old lady. He had not believed that could happen.

One night Miss Amelia drove out to see him in her Ford coupe that was old enough to be valued by a collector, and as they sat by the fire he impetuously did something else he had never thought he could do. He told her of himself — all of it.

He told her of his drunkenness and his despair and of his wife and how he had murdered her when he had made the choice. He told her of the dark place in his mind and how the fearful, lizard-lidded monsters were waiting there for him, menacingly silent, knowing that their time would surely come.

He told her of the panic he had felt and of the bottles he had bought and of the insane little ceremony he had performed before placing them in their household shrine and locking them away from the eyes and hands of strangers. He even showed her where he kept the key to the little shrine.

When he finished his story, Miss Amelia’s eyes were misty, but she smiled at him. “You are not evil,” she declared. “You could never have murdered your wife. You are a fine and gentle young man. I know you better than you know yourself. Why, Fred Chisholm told me you wouldn’t even go out with him to kill rabbits!”

She tried to comfort him. She accused herself of small meannesses and selfishness and then she confessed the one scarlet sin in her blameless life. Soon after she was graduated from college — a very proper New England woman’s college — she had gone to New York to visit a former schoolmate who played small parts in the theater. She had met a “fast” set of people and she had been fascinated by them. Her father was a strict man, an ardent prohibitionist, and she had never tasted an alcoholic beverage. One night she and her friend and their escorts had eaten in a small, candlelit Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village, and there had been wine and she had drunk it and gotten disgracefully “tiddly,” she said.

“It was such wonderful wine! Such a beautiful bottle, all wrapped in straw. I’ve often wondered what it was.”

He smiled and told her it had been Chianti.

He agreed to have Christmas dinner at her house, for she lived utterly alone, as he did. A few days before Christmas he drove again to the liquor store in Walton and he was delighted to find a huge plump bottle of Chianti weskited in straw — a whole jeroboam. He bought it and when he gave it to her on Christmas day she was delighted.

“I can stay tiddly for the rest of my life!” she exclaimed ecstatically. “And when it’s gone, I’ll make a lamp of the lovely bottle.”

The months passed and Popeye the pup grew and became an increasingly delightful nuisance. When spring came, Melton made a ridiculously inept attempt to grow roses and when he failed, he wrote an amusing piece about his bachelor gardening and sold it to an important Sunday magazine that paid its writers well. He was amazed to find he had rediscovered a sense of humor.

Miss Amelia taught him to grow flowers and to make a rock garden of small and colorful shrubs. They saw each other almost every day now. The pup took to sleeping across his legs at night. After the wasted years he was close to warm and human things again.

Yet he knew that he was existing in a fool’s contentment. The world was full of vileness, and evil and violence were sure to seek him out in the end. He did not know what form they would take. It might come as drunkenness or madness or suicide — but it would come, he was sure of that. He devoutly hoped the evil and violence would not intrude on the tranquil twilight of Miss Amelia’s life, too.

It was summer when the thing he feared finally arrived.

The evil was human.

It was a summer evening, fretful with lightning and querulous with the growl of thunder. Despite the threatening weather that might turn the old road into an impassable morass once the rain came, Miss Amelia had driven her ancient Ford to Melton’s little house. She had just read a new thriller by an English author and she wanted him to have the book at once. She stayed for dinner.

As they were washing the dishes, the storm broke. Water cascaded from the roof in torrents and Miss Amelia exclaimed, “Oh, my! I’ll be compromised for sure now. My old car can never make it back if this keeps up. I’m already marked as the town tippler because of that enormous bottle of wine you gave me, and now they’ll think I’m a loose woman as well if I have to stay overnight at a man’s house.”

Melton walked to the living room and switched on the radio for a weather report. A newscaster was hoarsely hysterical with tidings of a bank robbery in Boston. Three men wearing rubber masks had entered the bank and killed three people, one of them an elderly guard, another a teller who managed to set off an alarm. The third victim was a teen-rage girl who had been drawing money from her savings account to purchase a new dance frock for her vacation; one of the robbers had fired a wild shot that had ricocheted and killed her instantly.

The newscaster gave details of description. One robber was fat, another tall and very thin, the third barely jockey-sized. The three wanted men had thus far eluded pursuit, but they were believed to be penetrating farther and farther north into New England. Road blocks had been set up on all the major highways, and it was thought the criminals were proceeding by a network of seldom used country roads.

“If they try this one they won’t get far,” Miss Amelia commented. “They’ll be mired down in no time at all.”

The rain fell harder and, of course, the storm was at its most torrential when the perverse Popeye whined and scratched urgently at the front door.

Melton sighed resignedly and opened the door. Popeye hesitated a moment, offended by the downpour, but the needs of nature overcame his reluctance and he scuttled out into the yard.

At that moment there was a sound of squealing brakes, and headlights made a wild circling pattern as they came round a curve in the road. A car skidded, crashed through the rail fence of the yard, and finally stopped within a few feet of the frightened and bristling pup.

The car door flew open as it jolted to a stop and a tall, thin man jackknifed out of it. He moved forward and the headlights picked him out. He had a gun in his hand. Behind him two other men got out of the car: one was fat, the other was as small as a jockey.

Popeye went yapping at the man with the gun. Before Melton could call the dog back, the gun exploded. The bullet blew the pup a foot in the air. Then he lay on the ground and quivered once and his blood flowed into the soft mud.

The shot brought Miss Amelia to the door. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” she screamed.

The thin man advanced toward Melton, stuck the gun in his belly. He shoved Melton back and hit him a vicious, back-handed blow across the face. Melton staggered against Miss Amelia, almost knocking her down.

The jockey-sized man was examining the damage to the car. Presently he reached inside and switched off the headlights.

“Inside,” the thin man ordered. He followed Miss Amelia and the dazed Melton into the house and the fat man came in behind him. The eyes of the two men darted about the softly lighted room. The tall man was scarecrow-thin and obviously very sick. His face was dirty-gray and there were crinkled yellow splotches like chicken-skin beneath his eyes. He began to cough convulsively.

The fat man had thick moist lips and very small eyes with reddened lids. He looked at his companion disapprovingly.

“You and that damned cough,” he said. “You damned near queered it in the bank with that stinking cough of yours. You started coughing and that’s why your shot went wild and killed the girl. Why the hell don’t you buy some cough drops?”

The fat man saw the telephone. He walked to it and gripped the cord in a meaty paw. He was about to pull the cord from the wall connection when the jockey-sized man entered, dripping water on the floor.

“Don’t do that, Pete!” he called in alarm. “We gotta have the phone. We gotta call Charley or we’re stuck here forever. Our axle’s broke and we won’t get far in that old heap in the yard. You see it? It belongs in one of them museums. Charley’s gotta send us another car — he’s just gotta.”

They had seen Miss Amelia’s ancient coupé in the driveway and had not realized there was another car in the garage.

The man called Pete nodded to the small man and released his grip on the telephone cord. “Upstairs,” he said. “Search the joint. See if there’s anybody but this jerk and the old bag here.”

The small man scampered up the stairs, still dripping water.

Presently he returned. He searched the kitchen. Then he came back into the living room. He shook his head, and said, “Nobody. But we’re up the creek without a paddle just the same. Charley can’t make it up this road tonight. Nothing could make it in that mud. Not even a tank.”

The thin man said, “You worry too much. The sun will dry the road out enough by tomorrow and Charley can come and pick us up. This is as good a place as any to spend the night. Remember, if Charley can’t make it, the cops can’t either. They can’t tie the car to us. And nobody saw our faces in the bank. We had the masks.”

The small man nodded toward Melton and Miss Amelia.

“They seen us,” he said.

The thin man made a sound that was half laugh and half cough.

“They won’t be talking to anybody,” he said grimly.

Miss Amelia stood straight and proud, facing them defiantly, her eyes contemptuous.

Melton, still numbed by the blow, had sunk down into a chair, his head lowered. It had come at last. He knew he should have shunned human beings, because he carried the plague of disaster with him. He had murdered his wife. He had destroyed everything that loved him — even the little pup had met a brutal death because of him. And now Miss Amelia, who had lived a long, long span of quiet and peaceful years, would end them violently and horribly.

Because of him.

Miss Amelia said, “You’re going to kill us, aren’t you?”

The fat man laughed unpleasantly. “Now there’s a real smart old broad,” he said. “But don’t worry, grandma. It won’t hardly hurt at all. It’ll be just like with the dog. You didn’t even hear him holler, did you?”

The short man seemed very young and at the same time very old. His wizened face was that of an evil child. He said plaintively, “I’m hungry. We ain’t eat since breakfast. Why not make the old bag cook us some supper, Pete? They ain’t no use in chilling her before we eat.”

The fat man said, “He’s hungry, grandma. You hear that? He’s a growing boy and he wants to eat.”

The thin tall man coughed and said, “I want a drink. I need some whiskey.”

Melton jerked erect, suddenly tense.

One drink can hill you.

He wet his dry mouth, tried to speak, but no sound came out. His head ached unbearably and it was hard to think.

Miss Amelia, incredibly, was speaking almost cheerfully. Her face was strangely bright.

“There’s plenty of whiskey in the house if that’s what you want. Three bottles of fine bourbon. My nephew here locks it up and he hides the key, but I know where it is.”

“Well, now,” said the fat man grinning. “You just get that key, grandma. We’re soaking wet and my friend here’s got a cough.”

Miss Amelia shook her head vigorously. “No,” she said. “I won’t get the key unless you promise something.”

“You trying to bribe us with a drink for not chilling you, grandma?” Pete asked, amused.

“No,” said Miss Amelia. “I’m reconciled to the fact that I’m going to die. I want you to promise you won’t let my nephew have a drink if I get the whiskey. He’s sick. He’s an alcoholic and he shouldn’t touch a drop.”

The fat man threw back his head and roared with laughter. “This old doll is a real card!” he exclaimed. “She wants her nephew to die without no liquor on his breath! You get that key, grandma. Quick. Then you can start cooking us some supper — something nice and tasty.”

Miss Amelia crossed to the mantelpiece and picked up a china Staffordshire dog. A small key was beneath it. She walked calmly to the kitchen, the fat man following closely, still grinning. Miss Amelia opened the cupboard and the three girthy glass gods winked amiably at them.

“Say, now, this is something,” said Pete, grasping one of the bottles in a fat fist. “Bonded stuff — the McCoy.”

He plunged the fingers of his other hand into three tumblers that were on the sink and returned to the living room. He set the glasses on the pine table. He twisted the cap and seal from the bottle. He poured each of the water glasses half full of bourbon.

“Remember, now,” Miss Amelia warned. “You mustn’t give my nephew a drink, no matter how much he begs. Not a single drop.”

Melton watched them, fascinated.

The three men picked up the glasses.

“Bottoms up,” the fat man said greedily.

They put the glasses to their lips and drank.

They had called Sheriff Larkin and, miraculously, he had managed to get his Jeep over the mired dirt road. He had brought along Doc Chisholm, who was also the local coroner.

The three bodies were decently covered now by clean sheets that Miss Amelia had brought from a linen closet.

“I don’t get it at all,” the sheriff said to Melton. “You say you poured weed killer into the three bottles of booze months ago. Why in tarnation would you ruin good drinking whiskey that way, man? Were you expecting something like this to happen sometime?”

Melton shook his head. “No, I wasn’t expecting that,” he said.

“Then why?”

“Because a man has to believe in something,” Melton said.

“Just what did you believe in to make you do a thing like that?”

“In a doctor. In something he told me.”

“And just what did this doctor tell you?” Doc Chisholm asked.

“He told me one drink can kill you,” Melton answered softly.