Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Joyce Harrington Blue Monday

She was dressed all in pink. As I hoarded the bus behind her, I couldn’t stop looking at her pink shoes. Up the high grimy steps they went. Cheap shoes. Flimsy sandals made to last for one summer, if that long. The feet inside them were long and lumpy, as if too many years of ill-fitting shoes had caused them to break out in bumps of protest.

I followed her into the bus, dropped my fare into the change box, and watched her walk up the aisle. The skirl of her pink dress was wrinkled. I tried to imagine where she had spent her day, all her days, the kind of office she worked in, the chair she sat in that had pressed wrinkles into the skirts of all her dresses.

Yesterday she had been all in lavender.

She sat in a window seat in the middle of the bus. As she slid into the seat her pink handbag, a long pouchy thing, swung and thumped against her hip. I walked past her, carefully averting my eyes so that she wouldn’t notice that I had been watching her, and chose a seat two rows behind her. From there I could see her shoulders, her neck and the back of her head. I opened my newspaper and settled down for the ride.

On her head she wore a scarf of some filmy material, probably nylon. It was folded into a triangle and tied under her chin. Pink. Through it her hair, arranged in some intricate and unfashionable manner, was visible as a series of knobby clusters of curls. The scarf was evidently intended to keep the knobs in place.

The bus started on its long haul to the suburbs. Normally I read the paper a little, doze a little, look out the window and take note of the small changes that occur along the familiar route and the things that remain the same.

But lately I find my eyes drifting away from the newspaper and from the window and fastening on the back of her head. I no longer doze. Each day the scarf is a different color.

She was talking to her seat companion. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Her head was turned slightly so I could see her lips moving. She wore a pink lipstick and her teeth protruded just enough to give her mouth a somewhat pouting appearance. Against her sallow skin, her mouth seemed to be a separate living organism. She spoke rapidly, interspersing her words with quick half-hearted smiles. When she did this, the side of her face creased into concentric cursed lines which would one day be permanent wrinkles. I guessed her age to be about forty.

The bus rattled on through the outlying part of town where ramshackle frame houses lean discouraged against each other down the slope toward the river. Normally I like to look out the window along this stretch of the ride. I was born in this part of town, although the house I grew up in was tom down long ago to make room for a new section of highway. If I feel a bit self-congratulatory as the bus carries me by this decayed remnant of my childhood, I feel I’ve earned it. I’ve worked long and hard to give my family a decent place to live.

Lately I have been distracted from even this pleasant satisfaction. I don’t quite understand why it should be so, but somehow her presence on the bus produces in me a vague irritability. She is a source of discomfort, and I wish she would take a different bus. I find myself watching for her at the bus stop each evening, waiting to see what her day’s color will be, and then, unconsciously at first, but quite deliberately now, taking a seat somewhere behind her so that she is never out of sight.

Let me explain that in twenty-five years of marriage I have never looked at another woman. My wife is small, quiet, and kind. She has never demanded more of me than I could give. I have worked for the same company all my life. I started as a messenger boy and now I am a division manager. A few years ago I realized that I would rise no higher in the company. But I am content.

My division runs smoothly. The typists come to me with their problems and my wife and I attend their weddings. The young men regard me as an old fogey, but they are eager to take advantage of my long experience. Some of them will rise above me in the company; others will leave. It no longer matters. In due time I will retire on full pension.

My life, like my division, has also run smoothly. My children, a boy and a girl, grew up respectful and well-mannered. My son is a science teacher in a high school on the other side of town, and my daughter is married and lives nearby. She is expecting her second child. My wife makes dresses for our three-year-old granddaughter. We have never been plagued with accident or illness, although my wife occasionally suffers from arthritis when the weather is damp.

Why, then, should I be irritated by this woman on the bus? She is nothing to me. If she chooses to dress one day entirely in pink and the next entirely in orange, and so on through the rainbow, surely that’s her affair. It needn’t concern me. Why do my thoughts persist in speculating on the probable contents of her closet? Particularly on the rows of shoes it must contain, neatly ranked in pairs of every conceivable color. I wonder if she’s married, and what her husband thinks of this color mania of hers.

The bus rolled through the belt of light industry that serves as a boundary between town and suburb. My newspaper lay forgotten in my lap. Soon she would be getting off. My own stop lay a half mile farther on. In a way we were neighbors, although I had never seen her anywhere but on the bus.

Suddenly I yearned to know where she lived. I folded my newspaper — my wife likes to read it in the evening after dinner — and felt an unaccustomed quickening of my heartbeat.

She always pulled the signal cord for the bus to stop — even if someone else had pulled it before her, even though the bus always stopped at her corner. Perhaps she was afraid that if she personally did not pull the cord, the bus would go on and on forever and she would never be able to change into her next day’s outfit, red or gray or purple, whatever it might be. Five or six people stood and lurched down the aisle while the bus was still moving. I was among them.

On the corner the people fanned out in all directions. She crossed the main road in front of the bus and headed north. I stood on the corner feeling slightly displaced and watched the bus drive away. I instantly regretted having gotten off. There was nothing for me to do but walk. I could follow the bus down the road to my usual stop. Or I could follow her.

At the first gap in the stream of traffic I hurried across the road. She was about half a long block ahead of me. She walked with a stiff-legged jouncy stride and the pink handbag swung rhythmically from her arm. Her pink dress had some kind of ruffled collar and this flapped up and down as she walked. The tail of the pink scarf fluttered and at one point flew up, exposing the back of her head. I could not distinguish the exact color of her hair, although it seemed to be dark, a kind of dusty brown.

She turned the corner and I hurried to catch up. My heart pounded and I was having trouble drawing breath. My legs were trembling from the effort not to run. When I reached the corner, she was nowhere in sight but the door of the third house from the corner was just closing. There was no one else on the street.

I walked on casually, taking in as much of the house as I could without stopping. It was a small house, as most of the houses were in this area, and it sat back from the street on a small plot of lawn. It was painted pale green with darker green trim. There was a wide front window with green drapes hanging open at the sides, and in the middle a green ceramic lamp with a green shade. I could see no more without stopping to stare. It was a house like all the others on the block, unrelenting in its greenness, but in no way out of the ordinary. With one exception.

The house was surrounded with flower beds. The flowers tumbled against each other with no regard for order: orange marigolds, purple petunias, stiff zinnias of many colors, daisies and delphinium, nasturtium and portulaca, all thrown in together in heaps and huddles of every kind and color. It was a surprise.

I walked on down the block. My eyes still tingled with the shock of those tumultuous flower beds. My heart slowed to its normal steady pace and I breathed more freely. My legs, however, were extremely tired and I longed for a place to sit down and rest.

Could she be the gardener? The creator of that flamboyant atrocity? Indeed, I suppose she could, although I would have expected something else. A garden of many kinds of flowers all chosen for a uniformity of color would have been my guess.

It became more and more necessary for me to sit down and pull myself together before going home. My way took me through the small shopping area of the village: a few shops, a beauty salon, the post office, and a small cocktail lounge. I had never been inside the cocktail lounge. I knew that some of the bus riders stopped off there occasionally before going home. I hoped that none would be there to see me — or at least none with whom I had a nodding acquaintance. I was not in the mood for conversation.

I found myself standing at the bar before my eyes had accustomed themselves to the gloom. The bartender was attentive. I have never been much of a drinker and ordered the first thing that came into my head.

“A whiskey sour, please.”

I laid my newspaper on the bar and noticed that my hands were stained with ink. The paper was damp where I had clutched it.

“The men’s room?” I murmured.

The bartender pointed to a glowing sign at the rear of the long room.

As I made my way down the room I became aware that my hands were not the only part of me that had been sweating. My clothes felt limp and sodden, and in the air-conditioned chill I began to shiver uncontrollably. It had been warm outdoors, but not uncomfortably hot. I wondered if I were coming down with something, a summer cold or a touch of the flu.

I let the hot water run over my hands until the shivering stopped, then washed with the gritty powdered soap from the dispenser. As the ink ran away down the drain, I glanced into the mirror. I was shocked by what I saw.

Instantly I blamed it on the distortion of the glass, the fact that the mirror was old and flaked. But for a split second the face I saw was not my own — or rather it was my own, but with a subtle difference. The features were those I’d known for many years, the face I shaved each morning, the face whose lines and pouches and discolorations I’d accepted as badges of respectable seniority. But the mouth had an unpleasant downward quirk, the nose was pinched, and the eyes — the eyes were worst of all.

I dried my hands on the roller towel. Imagination, I thought. No sense in feeling guilty over stopping for a quick drink, even though I’d never done it before. Nothing wrong in taking a walk through the quiet suburban streets. I would have to come up with some reason for getting home late, but there would be no need to lie. I had never lied to my wife.

“It was such a nice evening, I took a walk and then stopped off for a drink.”

Back at the bar my whiskey sour was sitting in a circle of wetness. I sat on the barstool and glanced around the room. It was a pleasant enough place, running heavily to wood paneling and beamed ceiling. There were perhaps five or six other customers. A man and a woman sat at a table lost in an earnest whispered conversation. The others were congregated at the end of the bar chatting raucously with the bartender. Politics or baseball, most likely. I sipped my drink. Oh, it tasted good. It was just what I needed. Strength flowed back into my legs, and the evil vision in the men’s-room mirror faded from my mind.

My wife accepted my explanation without question, but she was a little disappointed that I had forgotten to bring her the newspaper. I had left it on the bar. I offered to walk down to the stationery store after dinner to get her one. I detoured past the green house with the flower beds, but saw no one.

The next evening I left the office a few minutes early and hurried to the bus stop. I wanted to get there before she did, so that I could determine from which direction she came. Things had gone badly in my division. A report that was due in the president’s office the following morning had been badly botched by a new typist. She came to me in tears, claiming she had not been given adequate instructions and she couldn’t read Mr. Pfister’s handwriting anyway and there was no need for him to be insulting.

“He called me a dumb little idiot,” she sobbed.

Normally I can settle these upheavals with a few words. Mr. Pfister was ambitious, ingratiating with those above him and overbearing with those below. The girl probably had some justification. But as she poured out her woes, I found my eyes wandering to her thin summer blouse. It had no sleeves and its round neck was cut low. It quivered with her sobs. As she bent into her handkerchief I could see that she wore no brassiere.

My thighs trembled in the kneehole of my desk. Beneath my jacket my shirt grew suddenly clammy. I wondered if my face had changed into the face I had seen in the men’s-room mirror the night before. I swung my chair around to face the window.

“Go back to your desk,” I said. “Do the report over and see that you get it right, even if it takes you all night.”

I heard her gasp and mumble, “Yes, sir.” Her soft footsteps receded. Before she reached the door, I said, “Miss — um,” I couldn’t remember her name. “In the future see that you dress more suitably.”

She ran down the hall. A few minutes later I left and went to the bus stop.

The sky was the color of tarnished brass. The air was hot and heavy, and little whirlpools of wind lifted bits of scrap paper from the gutter, flapped them about, and dropped them abruptly. We would have rain. I stood on the corner and tried to look in all directions at once. I wanted to see where she came from, to find out, if I could, which building she worked in. There was still five minutes before the bus was due.

I was watching the entrance to the new glass-fronted office building across the street and might have missed her had not a screaming siren called my attention back down the street to the entrance of my own building. The police car sped past me bound for some emergency or other, but my eyes remained riveted on the high arched doorway of the building where I had invested all the working years of my life. She stood just outside the revolving doors, scanning the livid skies. Then she turned and walked with her stiff jouncing stride toward the bus stop.

I faded back into the doorway of a shop. Could it be possible she worked for my company? I had never seen her in the elevators or in the lobby. The company employed hundreds of people. It occupied the entire building. There were many divisions and sections. I suppose there were many people working there whom I didn’t know. That she should be one of them seemed a bad joke on me.

As she neared the bus stop, I saw that she carried a red umbrella. Had she worn red today because she knew it would rain and she wanted her costume to match her umbrella? Or had she an umbrella as well as scarf, shoes, and handbag to match every dress in her wardrobe?

Today’s red dress was tightly cinched with a red plastic belt. I had not noticed before how small her waist was, nor that she was very tall. Below the gleaming belt her haunches flared and filled the red cloth. The red shoes seemed even more hurtful than yesterday’s pink ones. I was impatient for the bus to appear.

At last it came, and she was among the first to get on. Have I said that the riders of this bus are extremely well-mannered? That among this small crowd of homeward-bound suburbanites, it is customary for the gentlemen to stand back and allow the ladies to board first? I consciously violated that rule. Pretending absorption in some deep mental problem, I elbowed my way to the door of the bus and chose a seat immediately behind her. There were a few shocked murmurs, but I ignored them. She was joined by the same woman who had shared her seat before.

It is truly amazing how much you can learn about a person simply by listening in on fragments of conversation. For instance, I learned that she was a widow.

“... when poor Raymond was alive...”

That she didn’t sleep well.

“... and those pills didn’t help a bit...”

That she lived with her invalid sister.

“... so I said, my sister needs that ramp for her wheel chair, so it’ll just have to stay...”

That she didn’t have a dog.

“... I’d like to, but she’s allergic to animal dander...”

And that she would be alone in the house over the weekend.

“... I have to take her back to the hospital on Saturday for another series of tests. It may take a week...”

And all the while I watched her red mouth swimming in the placid pudding of her face. Yes, she had changed her lipstick from pink to red. I noticed, too, that at close range her cheeks were covered with a fine down and there were patches of skin where the pores had coarsened. I wondered how she failed to notice my scrutiny, but she seemed oblivious.

About halfway home the rain started. It fell straight down at first, heavy blinding sheets of water. Lightning flickered on the hilltops and the streets were quickly swamped. The bus ground slowly on, its windshield wipers barely able to cope with the deluge. She scarcely noticed the storm, but continued chatting with her neighbor. Her voice, now that I was close enough to hear it, was jarring and nasal. She was so very different from my wife.

The rain had slackened off before we reached her stop, but it was still coming down in a fine slanting spray when we got off. She was safe beneath her red umbrella. I had no protection but my newspaper. It seemed ridiculous to hold it over my head. However I held it, the paper would be soaked before I got home. I tossed it into a trash can and followed her from the bus stop.

This time I followed quite close behind her. She was engrossed in managing her umbrella, her large red handbag, and a shopping bag from a downtown department store. (Had she shopped in that store today because its shopping bags were red?) Besides, it seemed to me that she was one of those semiconscious people, only becoming aware of others when they had a direct effect on herself. I had no meaning in her life.

I saw her go to the door of the green house, search in her red bag for a key. I passed by as she was struggling to close her umbrella, then heard the door slam shut as I walked on. By the time I reached the cocktail lounge I was drenched and shivering.

“Whiskey,” I said to the bartender and went straight to the men’s room. I toweled my head on the roller towel and then quite deliberately stood before the mirror. This time I did not look away, but examined my reflection closely as if by doing so I could force my features back into their usual aspect of gentleness and benevolence. I was able to manage a compromise — a mask of bland indifference.

A shot glass was waiting for me on the bar, with a water chaser. I drained it and gestured for another. Tonight I would not have the excuse of taking a walk on a fine evening.

“The bus was delayed. I got soaked, so I stopped for a drink.”

No use lying. My wife would smell the whiskey on my breath. When I left the cocktail lounge, I remembered to stop at the stationery store to buy another paper. The rain was only a fine mist now, but I tucked the paper under my jacket and went home.

After dinner, while my wife read the newspaper and I pretended to watch television, I thought about the woman on the bus. Why was it I never saw her in the mornings? Perhaps she took an earlier bus and had breakfast in a coffee shop downtown. Or maybe she took as late a bus as she could so as to spend more time with her invalid sister. How long had she been widowed? Did she have men friends? Did she perhaps go off on weekends with them? Did she have drawers full of underwear of many colors to match her dresses?

“Don’t you feel well? You look a bit off-color.”

“No, fine. I’m fine. I think I’ll go to bed.”

My wife had accepted my excuse, only frowned a little over my drinking, and had made me change out of my wet clothes.

“Would you like some hot tea with lemon?”

“Nothing. I’m just tired.”

The next evening was Friday. She wore brown, a sad color and one that made her look unhealthy. I’d had a bad day. The vice-president in charge of marketing had named my division as one suffering from antiquated methods, and I had been called on to justify my procedures. Business was bad all over and my results did not look good. Rumors flew in and out of cubicles all afternoon.

I still had not been able to find out where in the company she worked. I didn’t even know her name. When I followed her from the bus stop it was without the usual excitement, and my two drinks at the cocktail lounge seemed more a matter of habit than of need. I didn’t go into the men’s room. As I sat at the bar I thought about my retirement plans.

Years ago I had bought an old farmhouse on an isolated lake in the southeastern part of the state. We always spent our vacations there and many weekends, and I had tinkered it into passably modern condition. When I thought about the time when I would finally leave the company, it was always with the farmhouse in mind. There would be time to read — I had always promised myself that I would one day make up for my lack of a college education by reading all the world’s great literature. The fishing was good, and my wife could grow a vegetable garden.

When I got home I didn’t bother to make an excuse for my lateness. My wife didn’t demand any.

“Would you like to go to the farm this weekend?” she asked.

“No, I don’t think so. Maybe next week.”

On Saturday I took a walk. There didn’t seem to be anyone at home in the green house. No doubt she was with her sister at the hospital.

On Sunday I took the car. I drove past the house twice in the early afternoon. On my third circuit of the block I saw her coming down the drive with her hands full of gardening tools. She wore faded green slacks and a green smock. Her gardening gloves were green and her head was covered with a green scarf. I couldn’t see her shoes.

I parked the car around the corner and walked back. The street was deserted except for the two of us.

“What a lovely garden,” I called out, hovering on the sidewalk and hoping that my face was safely keeping to its usual unremarkable lines.

“Oh,” she said. “Why, thank you. It’s a lot of hard work.”

“Must be. I never have much luck with flowers. I guess I must be lazy.”

“Oh, now,” she tittered. “It’s not that difficult. But people do say I have a green thumb.”

“Now, tell me,” I said, taking the liberty of crossing the lawn to where she stood. “How do you get such good results with carnations? Mine are always so spindly and have hardly any blooms at all.”

I listened to a long harangue on fertilizers, bone meal, and the efficacy of good drainage, nodding wisely all the while, my eyes fixed on her green sneakers. At the conclusion she giggled girlishly and said, “Well, I’ve talked your car off and myself into a fine thirst. Would you care for a glass of iced tea?”

“That’s very kind of you. It’s pretty hot out here in the sun.”

“Well, come on inside. It’s always nice to meet a fellow gardener. Someone who understands.”

I understood. I’d seen her sharp glance at the third finger of my left hand. I’ve never worn a wedding band.

We went round to the back door. Across half of the back steps lay a sturdily braced wooden ramp.

“My sister,” she explained. “She’s confined to a wheel chair. She’d be much happier in a nursing home, but after my husband died she insisted on living with me. To keep me company, she says. To keep an eye on me, I say. But don’t worry. She’s not here today.”

We entered the kitchen. It was yellow. Yellow wallpaper, yellow cabinets, yellow cloth on the table. Even a yellow refrigerator. She poured tea into tall yellow glasses.

“Do you live around here?” she asked.

“Not far. I have to confess, I saw your flowers a few days ago and came back in the hope of meeting the person responsible.”

“You must be married.” She certainly believed in coming to the point.

“I have been.” Sometimes a little lie is unavoidable.

“Come into the living room. We can be comfortable there.”

The house was small. I stood in the kitchen doorway and looked into the green living room, the magenta dining room, a rose-colored bedroom. On the open door of a closet in the bedroom hung a blue dress. On the floor a pair of blue shoes stood ready. Tomorrow was Monday.

“May I trouble you for another napkin? I’ve slopped my tea a little.”

She obligingly went across the kitchen to a cupboard. I picked up her green gardening gloves. She had large hands. I picked up the knife with which she had sliced a lemon for the tea...

Afterward I was really thirsty. I drank the tea. It was slightly warm. My clothes were damp. I left the green gardening gloves on the yellow counter. I went out by the back door and drove home.

On Monday morning the office was agog. One of the telephone operators had been brutally murdered in her home. The police came and interviewed everyone who had known her. They ignored my division. The rumor that went the rounds had it that she had been stabbed twenty-seven times. It seemed a bit exaggerated to me. My division ran smoothly that day.

In the evening I went to the bus stop. I looked for her in her blue dress, but she didn’t come. Maybe she had taken an earlier bus. Or perhaps she was working late. She could even be on vacation.

I settled down on the bus and opened my newspaper. The woman sitting in front of me had the most irritating way of shaking her head as she talked to her seat companion. She wore long dangling earrings and they distracted me from my newspaper, from the view out the bus window.

Perhaps I’ll take the early retirement option.