Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Nedra Tyre Locks Won’t Keep You Out

Leave me alone.

Terror of you paralyzes me, nails me to the threshold. My hands hesitate to open a door. I’m afraid you’re on the other side.

I can’t sleep. After short troubled naps I wake with the sensation you’ve been hovering over me. These last few days I’ve convinced myself it’s safe to walk only when the sun is shining so I’ll be warned of your presence by your shadow.

I don’t go to museums anymore. They have too many dark and secluded nooks where you could find me.

My concert tickets go unused; in the darkened auditorium when the music reaches a crescendo you could easily crush out my life while my shouts of protest are drowned by the percussion instruments.

My mail goes unanswered and I refuse invitations. I’ve lied out of attending committee meetings, pretending that minor illnesses keep me from dinners and parties.

I’ve never been a coward — what had to be faced I faced. Yet I can’t face your malice.

Perhaps you’re enraged because I have ignored you. No, ignored is too strong a word. Disdained would be a more accurate way of putting it. I suppose I do have some of Aunt Carrie’s arrogance. She wasn’t a snob. She just had a way of walking straight past some people without seeing them — she didn’t seem to know they were there. I honestly didn’t know you were there. I couldn’t believe it when you began to threaten me. When I realized your intentions were deadly, that it was my life you were after, I refused to believe it. I called myself an imaginative fool.

Why I despise you most of all — rather, why I despise my fear of you most of all — is that my fear makes me oblivious of everything else. I don’t even notice the weather. I have loved weather, no matter what form it takes. Its ridiculous caprices that can begin a morning at twenty degrees and a few hours later have the thermometer soaring to summer heat — those caprices have delighted me. Hot. Cold. No extreme mattered. I responded to it all with joy.

Now I don’t pay any attention to the weather, and since I don’t notice its vagaries the weather has turned into my enemy. I find myself shivering, not having put on warm enough clothing. I plunge into rain without an umbrella or sink ankle-deep in puddles without my boots.

One day my fear of you made me panic and I telephoned the police for protection. My damsel-in-distress, ladylike trills had an immediate effect. Within minutes a policeman arrived at my door.

But I had no crime to report, only your vague threats. I began to apologize for having summoned the policeman on a fool’s errand. Immediately he reassured me. I had reason to be afraid, he insisted, as he looked around at the paintings and the silver. He hoped I had good locks. And surely I wasn’t ever foolish enough to let anyone enter whom I didn’t know.

If only I could tempt you with the things I’ve accumulated, appease you with a minor Gauguin or a George III silver beaker.

The policeman went around appraising the security, suggesting a stronger lock here and there.

Locks won’t keep you out. You’re not interested in valuables. What you’re after is my life. I’m positive of that. Yet never before have I felt the inevitability of anything; life has always offered many paths and one could easily retreat from a path already begun. Trips to be taken always held as many choices as there were air routes and if one residence didn’t prove satisfactory there were dozens of houses and apartments — a planetful of locations — to select from. A jewel could be recut and reset and a joyless love affair ended. To be pleased was only a matter of making another and wiser choice.

But there is no choice now.

The paths have all converged and they lead straight to you. They lead to my death from you.

If only these last days were free of dread and the short time remaining to me were not ruined by constant apprehension. I should have thought that when one knows she is looking on something for the last time it would be with a heightened response. Flowers are blooming — roses and lilies-of-the-valley are bursting with beauty and fragrance. The shelves are heavy with books I’ve promised myself the pleasure of reading again.

But the flowers might as well be rank and the books printed in Sanskrit for all the delight they will ever give me.

It isn’t as if I haven’t made preparations for death. My last will and testament has been sensibly drawn. My daughter is well provided for; objets d’art are to go to museums; and there are legacies and keepsakes for my friends.

I detest myself for this cowardly preoccupation with my annihilation. Newspapers and TV and the radio should have hardened us all to death — hundreds dashed to death in tornadoes shown on the TV shortly before dinner, thousands demolished in a tidal wave in the paper read with the morning coffee, unnumbered victims crushed in earthquakes announced on the radio as one sips a cocktail before lunch.

Death and danger are everywhere and much closer home than the announced tragedy delivered with the morning paper along with the advertisements of month-end clearance sales or reported on TV between the detergent commercials. There can be a car out of control only a block away or a fire can devour a house on the next street.

But all those tragedies are dealt by destiny impersonally and without malice.

There’s nothing impersonal in your malice toward me.

Please — I beg you — leave me alone. I was a dutiful child. I obeyed my parents. I was polite to my elders. I was a loving wife and a conscientious mother. I’ve been committed to good causes.

Only listen to that — you have me whining — I’ve been degraded by you. I’m trying to cash in my chits of good behavior. I’m sniveling for mercy, sucking up to you for leniency.

The telephone is ringing. I’m not going to answer it. I know it’s you. I know what you’ll say.

The ringing goes on and on and on. Finally it stops. After a while there’s a harsh knock on the door. Then two hands are pounding. The bell works perfectly. Yet the person outside is too excited to use the bell. It can’t be you. You’re much too sneaking to knock and ask for admission.

I open the door and my daughter is standing outside. I am always amazed by her beauty and her lack of knowledge of it or at least of her refusal to take advantage of it. How lovely to have a child like her.

“Mama,” she says, “what on earth’s the matter?” Not even a frown of worry can disturb her beauty. “I telephoned and there was no answer and suddenly I realized that it’s been a week since you’ve called. I know how busy you are but you’ve never gone this long before without phoning me. Darling, come home with me now. It would be such a pleasure to have you. Please?”

I love my daughter and her husband and her children, but I can’t infect their house with my fear. I can’t spoil their happiness. I can’t have you following me there. I beg off with a promise to come as soon as I can manage.

When she has kissed me and left I begin to work compulsively.

I polish silver. I tidy the broom closet. I arrange pots and pans in neat rows and realign the already regimented rows of canned food on the pantry shelves.

Mollie won’t like this. She hates for me to tidy the kitchen or to polish the silver. Again and again she has said she ought to be out working for a woman who needs her more than I do. She says it makes her feel I no longer trust her to do the job I pay her to do.

But I must occupy myself. I must somehow black out my terror of you.

The shelves are in meticulous order and the silver glistens. The kitchen is spotless.

There’s nothing else to do.

Yet I must occupy myself.

I can play solitaire.

There’s something infinitely soothing in knowing that the cards may all be played one upon the other, black and red in descending order. At least there’s a possibility that they may all find their prescribed places.

I don’t often win. Still it’s possible. And when I do win there’s such a feeling of exuberance. Once I even won twice in succession. I wonder how often that has happened. I’m sure the probability of winning twice in succession in solitaire is most unlikely.

I take the cards from the second drawer of the red lacquered desk and then sit down at the fruitwood card table. I like the feel of the cards. As I riffle them they flutter like a bird beating its wings in my hands.

I play the first card.

It’s the ace of spades.

Death.

I won’t believe it. I refuse to believe it.

Somehow my fear of you has infected the cards.

Yet I know the cards can’t respond to my fear. There is no such thing as inanimate objects responding to human moods and emotions. My terror cannot have summoned up the card that signifies death.

Perhaps my fear did infect the cards.

If the mind can influence cards, then I will influence them. I pick the cards up from their various small stacks and shuffle them again. I must concentrate on a good luck card. The nine of hearts or the ten of diamonds — or, best of all, the ace of diamonds.

I shuffle and riffle the cards. Again, against my palms there is that feeling of the heartbeat of a bird or some small caged animal. I distribute the cards and prissily take time to make the seven stacks symmetrical.

I turn the first card face upward.

The ace of spades.

I push the ace of spades from me, then grasp it and try to tear it. It remains intact and blood oozes from the thin cut the card has made on my right forefinger.

I need reassurance — not reassurance from a wise professional or a dear friend but from a very particular source.

The walls of my large apartment seem to contract. I must escape before they crush me.

I go outside and hail a taxi, and as I enter it I repress my fear. I insist to myself that I’m on a lark, a small diversion, something foolish, but forgivable; any bored housewife could understand my action.

When I’ve ridden several miles I dismiss the taxi and tip the driver lavishly as if he’s done me a special favor or service. I have not been let out at my real destination and must walk four blocks to my goal.

Outside there is a sign of a large hand marked like a road map, but its routes are the life line, the heart line, the line of destiny, and beneath it in small letters there is a legend; Madame Sybil — the Past, Present, and Future.

I have teased my friends who have come here and have smiled over their insistence that they don’t believe a word of what Madame Sybil says; but going to her is fun, like getting a new hairdo or finding an unexpected bargain in an antique shop. But I had no such feeling now. I was here from absolute necessity.

I pushed the bell.

There was a long wait and the door was jerked open.

Madame looked like someone caught unaware. She had the petulance of someone aroused needlessly from sleep. Grease was smeared around her mouth beyond the splotched and spotted lipstick. Her tongue explored her teeth, as if for bits of food, and I realized I must have surprised her at a meal. She had the ruffled, somewhat annoyed air of someone summoned to an emergency; there was nothing about her of a sybil who could foretell the future or divine the past or give me sage counsel on how to act. But with a commanding motion that contradicted her disheveled appearance, she waved me down the hall to a doorway, then swept past me.

In a room cluttered with furniture she squinted against the sun eking through the slats of some dirty and disjointed Venetian blinds, and with theatrical flicks of her wrist she adjusted the blinds so that we were in darkness.

Then from somewhere behind me a thin light wavered and a candle projected unsteady shadows on the walls. There was another flickering of a match and almost immediately I began to smell incense of such stifling intensity that I coughed. Madame slid into a chair across from me at the heavily draped table and said, “Ten dollars.” Her voice was as bland and impersonal as that of a checkout clerk at a supermarket counter demanding the amount to be paid for a cart of groceries.

I fumbled in my pocketbook. I shuffled through credit cards and dry-cleaning tickets and at last found some money. A lizard’s tongue could not have been as quick as her hand darting for the money and there was a detour into her large bosom to bank the fee before her hands came to rest in her lap.

I waited for her to speak, to ask me why I was here, what I wanted to know. But there was only silence. After a while I was about to question her when she said angrily, “I can’t tell you anything.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You tell other people things. You’ve talked to a number of my friends and acquaintances. Last week you told Eloise Smithson she was going to get a legacy.”

“I can’t tell you anything,” she said again, as if I hadn’t heard her the first time. “Take your money and leave.” Her right hand dived inside her bodice and then my bill sailed across the table and lighted like a crippled moth on the sleeve of my coat. “Take the money and go.” Her voice was shrill.

I did not move. Then she screamed at me. She was like a very poor actress overplaying a scene. Her mouth curled in anger. “Leave this house at once,” she ordered.

I left with as much dignity as I could muster. Even as she shrieked at me to leave I got up slowly and smoothed my skirt and tucked the money back into my bag and snapped the fastener and walked down the dim hall with composure, but once I was on the street I began to run.

I thrust people aside. I scrambled onto a bus, then got off. I took another bus in the direction from which I had just come. I was like a spy in a third-rate film who is trying to shake pursuers. I ran down an alley. I lost myself in the crowds of a department store.

I was trying to evade you.

Then I took a taxi home, to be swallowed up by the lobby of the apartment house where I live. Far beyond me, as unapproachable as an astronaut in orbit, was the receptionist behind the shield of a heavy glass partition. Nearer was the bank of elevators. I knew that none of my dodges or detours had worked and that you were in one of the elevators waiting for me.

I dared not risk taking an elevator. I left the elevators and skirted the gigantic plants in their huge cachepots that lined the passage to the stairway. I pulled at the door beneath the discreet sign marked STAIRS and scurried up the steps. I was tempted to stop at each landing to rest but fear of you made me race to my floor and terror forced me to brush so close against the wall of the corridor that paint scaled off onto my sleeve.

I had to stop for breath and I looked through one of a long row of tall windows hung with full thick draperies. I knew you were hiding somewhere in that endless line of heavily swathed windows. I looked down on the lawn with its neatly clipped boxwood hedges and rosebushes bulging with blooms, and then I ran down the gantlet of windows expecting you to grab me.

At my door I pawed through my bag for the key. My trembling hand made it clatter outside the lock. I finally inserted the key and entered my apartment.

With the double-locked door at my back I whimpered with relief, but fear had drained me. I stood as still as an autistic child, as if any movement from me might arouse your wrath.

At last I fell across the bed in exhaustion and went to sleep, and then, after a while I awoke. My bed was a grave. I couldn’t move. Wind blew through the windows. The curtains fluttered, swirled — one reached out and stroked my cheek. I had left the windows beside my bed open and the fire escape was just outside. It was an invitation to you to enter, an oven sign of welcome. I was like a virgin who invites rape. I was like a miser who entices thieves.

I glanced at the clock. Another night is over. There is some small comfort in the precise and orderly ticking of the clock, but only dread in the prospect of another day that will wither and become rancid by my fear of you.

Suppose I were to surrender. I’m weary of suspense. I’m tired of being wary.

But I won’t surrender. Keep away from me. Mollie will be here soon. She’ll protect me from you. I think that’s her key in the lock now. Don’t touch me. Keep away—

“I think she was afraid of you, Doctor.”

“No, Mollie, she wasn’t afraid of me. We’ve known each other since childhood. There was only one thing in the world for her to be afraid of — death.”