The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories

Frederick C(lyde) Davis (1902–1977) was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, and graduated from Dartmouth College. The one word that is most conspicuously connected to his name as a pulp writer is prolific. In a career that covered more than forty years, he produced an astonishing one thousand short stories and fifty novels, under his own name and using several pseudonyms.

As Curtis Steele, he wrote the first twenty novels about James Christopher — Operator 5 (later Secret Service Operator 5), one of the great superheroes in pulp fiction. Virtually all novels in the series featured a massive invasion of America against pitifully small but brave forces led by Operator 5. The most popular stories under his own name featured Steve Thatcher, better known as the Moon Man — a policeman by day but a shady Robin Hood who wore a globe over his head to obscure his identity; fourteen of the stories were collected in The Night Nemesis (1984). As Stephen Ransome, he produced more than twenty semihard-boiled novels that many regard as his most accomplished work. A Ransome novel, Hearses Don’t Hurry (1941), was filmed as Who Is Hope Schuyler? (1942), starring Joseph Allen, Mary Howard, and Ricardo Cortez. A Davis short story, “The Devil Is Yellow,” was filmed as Double Alibi (1940), with Wayne Morris, Margaret Lindsay, William Gargan, and Roscoe Karns; another, “Meet the Executioner,” was filmed as Lady in the Death House (1944), with Jean Parker and Lionel Atwill.

“Flaming Angel” was published in the March 1949 issue.

Out of the burning flames of his ghastly crime came the searing realization that he would have to kill the same woman twice.

Chapter One Last Good-By

This is a day I will never forget, Rhea, my darling, because on this day I cremated you. Do you remember, Rhea, sweet, the night you whispered to me in a serious moment while I held you in my arms in the dark,

“When I die, Johnny, please don’t bury me. It makes me shiver to think of lying deep down in that heavy black earth, all alone through all eternity. Instead, let me rise off the earth in a glow of lovely dancing light. Make me what I’ve always yearned to become, Johnny — a shining, hot fire. Just a brief one, Johnny, but bright and beautiful before it goes out forever.”

It was that way today, my sweet Rhea — just the way you wanted it.

We stood with our heads bowed in the crematory chapel — the nicest crematory in the city, Rhea, the one out on Rendezvous Road, which direction you knew so well — and watched the attendants rolling your casket into the iron door of the great oven. I talked to you then, silently in my mind, just as I began to do the night you died and just as I am talking to you now.

I said, “Good-by, Rhea, my darling. You will never be really gone from me, never really gone. We will always be together in the keeping of our secrets — but good-by, good-by forever, my sweet. We will miss you so much, so terribly much — both of us.”

As I watched them rolling your casket into the great furnace, Rhea, I heard sobbing from your friends and neighbors who were present, and I saw tears glimmering in the eyes of our lovely daughter.

Bitter with deepest grief, our Darlene stood at my side, saying her own silent farewells to you, her mother. I could hardly look away from her and back to your coffin because Darlene, only eighteen, looked so very much like you, Rhea. It was almost as if you were not gone at all.

You would have been pleased to see how many attended your funeral, Rhea. Among the crowd in the chapel was one mourner you would have noticed especially. A man. A young man, very handsome — much handsomer than I ever was, Rhea, and very different also in his debonair manner, expensive suit and man-about-town reputation. Can you guess who? Of course, Bruce Dallas.

He was there to see the final flames consume you. I’m sure that most of the other mourners wondered why Bruce Dallas should turn up at the funeral services for Mrs. John Long. Most of them hadn’t even heard that the late Mrs. Long knew him. They seemed so unlike each other — he the smooth-operator type; and she, apparently, just a homebody... the quiet little wife of a salesman of religious books.

He was looking a little worried, Rhea, and a little surly, too, almost as if it was not his own choice to be present. And he was not alone. The man with him was named Jennings, a police detective. Possibly Bruce Dallas had been forced by Jennings to attend the funeral services of Mrs. Long — but no one knew for what reason.

No one but me, Rhea.

The attendants gently closed the massive double door of the furnace — they shut you in, Rhea, while an organ played and a soloist softly sang your favorite hymn.

Then we began to hear, behind the melody, the rumble of the growing fires inside the thick refractory walls. You attained your long-cherished dream of burning.

For the mourners, and for Darlene and me as well, the services soon ended, although the muted thunder of the consuming flames continued to fulfill your wish.

Bruce Dallas, closely accompanied by the detective named Jennings, was one of the earliest to leave. As the others quietly dispersed, I could tell from their faces that they felt I had given you a very nice funeral — one done in a proper manner, showing the grief of a bereaved husband over the untimely loss of the wife he had loved.

I could also tell from their faces, Rhea — to my great gratification — that not one of these mourning friends and neighbors had the faintest suspicion that I had murdered you.

First inside the chapel, then outside on the marble steps, I went through the wearing process of saying good-by to all the mourners and thanking them for their friendly solicitude. Not dreaming that I had actually killed you, they saw me as the same upright and thoroughly proper man they had always known — a fairly successful salesman of religious books who had suffered a bitter loss and been left the lonely responsibility of his pretty eighteen-year-old daughter.

While I was still shaking hands with my well-wishing friends, Darlene came to me.

“The Fraziers want to drive me back home with them,” she said, naming our nearest neighbors. “You won’t mind, will you, Johnny?”

It startled me, Rhea. Not the fact that Darlene preferred to end this ordeal as soon as possible. The poor child was taking your death very hard. No, I was struck a small blow of dismay because Darlene had never before called me “Johnny.” This was the first time she had ever called me anything other than Father.

This wasn’t, of course, the place to rebuke her, particularly because she was so tired by the strain that she seemed hardly aware of what she was doing.

Somehow this grievous experience made her resemble you even more than before, Rhea. Her lovely oval face was pale, with vivid red touches on her cheeks; her full lips were parted a little, as if with an indefinable hunger, and there was a mist in her blue eyes — the same mist I used to see deep in your own lovely eyes, my sweet.

Only eighteen! You were so young-looking when you died that you might have passed for your daughter’s older sister, and on this unforgettably sad occasion Darlene seemed more like you than ever before.

“You won’t mind, will you, Johnny?” she had said.

Frowning slightly, I answered, “Of course, Darlene, run right along. I’ll join you in a few minutes.”

She went down to the Fraziers’ car. When I had nodded my farewell to the last mourner, I turned back into the chapel. It was deserted now, except for the crematory director, who was prowling among the chairs looking for lost articles.

He discreetly tip-toed out, leaving me entirely alone. There was no hush in this chapel, no reverent silence. The dull roar of the hellish flames continued inside the great furnace.

I had come to say a final farewell to you, Rhea. A moment that might bring tears easily to another new widower’s eyes, but it’s possible that, instead, there was a hard shine in mine as I said to you silently, “Again good-by, Rhea, my good and faithful wife — as people think. You’re finally being in fact the bright flame you always yearned to be. It will help you to keep our secrets together, my lovely. Good-by again. And may you go on burning longer than you expected — in hell.”

Night was settling when I drove back along Rendezvous Road. I don’t need to remind you, Rhea, darling, how that road looks when you’re driving it after dark with something better and cozier than just your thoughts for company.

Turning then toward our little home on Laurel Street, I found myself retracing the same course that I had taken every day for years when coming home from the office. In this same car, alone like this, I came exactly this same way every day, with expectations far different from today’s. In pleasantest anticipation, I used to know just what would happen.

I would leave the car in the garage and turn to the kitchen door for your greeting. You had your graceful, playful little way of popping out and piping, “Welcome home, Johnny!” Fresh and crisp in a bright flowered dress, you would throw your arms around my neck and kiss me full on the lips. You always seemed as happy to have me back home as if I’d been away for weeks rather than hours. Every time it was the same delightful routine. But today?

I was driving home in exactly the same way as always before, Rhea, but today you wouldn’t greet me at the kitchen door with your lively, laughing embrace. Today you were back there in the crematory, a bright, hot flame in the furnace.

I missed you sorely as I turned the car into the driveway, Rhea. I almost wished I hadn’t killed you — but only almost. You had destroyed all the goodness in yourself until only ugly sin was left. You deserved all the punishment I gave you, my little evil one. But before then my homecomings had been so pleasant — I felt a pang, thinking there would never be any more of them.

No more glad little greeting of “Welcome home, Johnny!” Your arms no more around me, your lips no more on mine. No more Rhea at all.

It had been such a trying day, seeing you cremated, my darling — I was utterly unprepared for the jolt that hit me next.

As I reached for the knob of the kitchen door it sprang open. Your voice — your voice, Rhea! — sang out in your old gay way, “Welcome home, Johnny!” Even more unnerving, Rhea, you actually appeared there before me — Rhea herself, alive, her eyes sparkling, her lips a happy smile. Rhea wearing her favorite flowered frock! You, Rhea!

Impossible? Yes, because you were back there in the crematory furnace, being devoured in the storming flames. Yet you were here with me, crying out my name. Calling to me as you always did.

A man doesn’t easily admit having been unmanly, Rhea. It isn’t easy for me to confess I fainted on the spot. But I did. Already overstrained, now suddenly overwhelmed, I simply dropped into a pit of blackness.

When the blackness swirled slowly out of my mind, I felt someone tugging at me. It was Darlene, asking breathlessly, “What happened, are you all right?” She helped me up to my knees, then into a chair at the kitchen table. I was still dizzy.

All I could say, when I found my voice, was, “Yes, what... what did happen, Darlene? Did you see?”

Darlene said, “I was in the living room, just sitting there, so tired, waiting for you to come home. Just as you came in the back door, you let out a hoarse kind of cry. I heard you fall. When I got to you, you were down on the floor in a dead faint. That’s all I can tell you about it.”

I looked hard at her — at her pretty face so much like yours, Rhea. She was still pale, except for the vivid spots on her cheeks. She was wearing the same black dress she had worn at the funeral — a simple dress snugly fitting a perfect figure. A figure the exact image of yours, Rhea.

I gazed at Darlene’s image in the mirror, chilled through, and asked softly, “Darlene — are you sure that what you told me is what actually happened?”

She smiled a little and answered, “Aren’t you sure? You couldn’t be fooled by a thing like that — could you, Johnny?”

Chapter Two She-Devil’s Daughter

After that I began watching Darlene closely, Rhea — with fear in my heart — the dread that had haunted me for years, that our lovely daughter had inherited the evilness of her mother.

You see, Rhea, I could not let myself be deluded into believing that you had supernaturally paid me a visit after death. I knew that could not be so. I was quite confident that you were destroyed as you deserved. Nor could I be such a fool as to imagine your ghost had begun to haunt me. So it came down to this, Rhea — either my senses had tricked me overwhelmingly — or I had reason to watch Darlene.

Watch Darlene! Isn’t it odd, Rhea? Do you remember the time, right after we met, when it was my task to keep a watchful eye on you?

I find myself smiling at this romantic little reminiscence, Rhea. Our meeting was quite a romantic incident, you know. A meeting between a young book peddler and a young girl who was already losing her prettiness and her health, and her job as well, on a merry-go-round of sin — a kid skidding downhill fast. As you confessed yourself afterward, Rhea, you would have soon wound up in the gutter or in the river if I hadn’t saved you from yourself.

That day I had gone down to the old Bijou Theatre. A squalid den, that place. A burlesque showhouse — catering to men’s worst instincts.

When I went near that sinkhole, however, it was for reasons of business and high principle. Oddly, the burlesque people, especially the strippers, whom I usually saw in their dressing rooms between numbers, were ready buyers of the religious books I sold. Perhaps they never read the books but only bought them to salve their aching consciences. I liked to feel, though, that by going down into that vile valley of iniquity and leaving The Word among those misled people, I was doing good missionary work.

Just as I lifted my hand to the stage door, it opened. A girl was pushed out bodily, actually into my arms. Instinctively I held you. That was the first time we saw each other, Rhea — and your first glimpse of sweet salvation.

You huddled close to me, wearing almost nothing. You clung to me, Rhea, for the simple reason that you were almost unable to stand by yourself. You gave me a taunting smile. You were intoxicated — really staggering drunk. You had come to the theatre in that condition and had tried to get ready for the show, along with the other bare-skinned chorus “ponies.” The stage manager, fed up because you had done it too often before, had chosen this moment to fire you out — straight into my arms.

Snarling after you, the stage manager said, “Don’t bother holding her up, Reverend.” They liked to call me that — “Reverend” — because I took my books seriously, and I really considered it a compliment. “Let the no-good little tramp fall on her face right now. It’ll save time. She’s hell-bent on wheels, and the sooner she hits bottom the less trouble she’ll cause.”

You clung to me, your lovely young body starting to shake with sobs, your eyes full of teary pleading. In them I saw goodness, Rhea. Reeking with liquor though you were, I told myself there was womanly sweetness in you waiting only to be brought out. I knew then, at that moment, that I must do everything in my power to save you from the evil into which you had fallen.

So romantic, wasn’t it, Rhea, the way I hustled you into my car, then brought you your clothes from that filthy dressing room, and how I stood on the sidewalk to guard you from ogling passersby while you dressed yourself as best you could? Then I brought you hot, black coffee and gently forced you to drink it. Next came a decent meal in a good restaurant.

You were actually past the verge of alcoholism already, Rhea. Your pretty face was already developing haggard lines and sags — but in you I saw goodness. At least I believed I saw it and knew I must devote myself wholeheartedly to your salvation. And best of all you really wanted to be saved.

“I’ve been a crazy-fool kid,” you confessed. “All because of a guy I fell for too hard. Until I met him, I’d never taken a single drink. He taught me to like the stuff, and then I went overboard trying to keep up with him.”

“That man should be jailed, except that jail is too good for him,” I said. “What’s his name?”

“Dallas,” you said. “Bruce Dallas. There’s no use trying to punish him, because I went along with him willingly enough. Anyway, he’s left town now — went to Chicago where the pickings are richer. The worst part is the tough time I’m having, trying to get over him. Maybe I never will. I’ve drunk more and more just trying to get him burned out of me. I hate it — what drink does to me. Please tell me how I can quit.”

“I’ll do better than tell you,” I said, putting my hand over yours. “I’m going to be right there at your side, leading you every step of the way along the path of rightness. That’s the goal for both of us — to make you the good woman you can be.”

But it was not easy, Rhea, was it? We both struggled — you against the yearnings of temptation, I to give you the strength you needed to resist. There were little slips and relapses, but we both knew the long effort would win out. That was when I watched you, Rhea, to make sure you wouldn’t weaken, even to the small extent of sneaking a single drink — because we both knew that that one taste, if you ever took it, would send you skidding straight toward hell again.

But we did it. My moral strength kept you good. Your health returned. You became sweeter and lovelier than ever. Indeed, Rhea, you were an angel on earth to me.

Our happiness was complete when we were married. When we moved into our little home on Laurel Street — the same home where you were later to meet such a sudden and tragic death — all the evil in your past was left far behind you. None of our friends and neighbors there dreamed you had once been an all-but-lost soul — a little alcoholic burlesque girl. You and I almost forgot it too in our simple blissfulness — you were so beautifully changed and purified, a model wife and mother.

It even made no difference at all, to judge from your visible reactions, when we later heard the news that Bruce Dallas had come back to this city, richer, smoother, an even hotter operator than before.

When Darlene was born, in the first year of our marriage, I had stopped watching over you for a possible relapse into sin. It had become unnecessary, your salvation was so complete. Now and then I would feel a twinge of fear that the seeds of evil might be lying dormant in you, and might come out in some moment of stress.

At times too I wondered whether certain tendencies to evil had passed from you to your daughter...

Alone in our living room, I was casting about in my mind for an explanation of that incident at the kitchen door. Darlene had gone upstairs. I became aware of busy noises as she moved about. Puzzled, I went up the stairs and found her, not in her own room, Rhea, but in yours.

Darlene had gone into your room, Rhea, directly next to my own, with the connecting bath in between. She had seated herself at your vanity mirror and was quietly applying lacquer to her fingernails. She paused to gaze at me — looking so much like you, Rhea, that I felt my nerves squirming in my flesh.

“What are you doing, Darlene? Have you forgotten I’ve never permitted you to use paint on your nails? You’re still too young.”

She gazed at me with another of those new, quiet smiles. She had never smiled just that way before. Something in Darlene was changing. She seemed more knowing; she had grown a little bolder. There was an audacity, almost a challenging shine in her eyes as she answered:

“Perhaps you haven’t noticed, Johnny, how much older I really am now.”

She went on smiling and quietly applying the enamel to her nails, taking it from the bottle left on your vanity. She left me feeling strangely helpless. What could I do about it, Rhea? Darlene was quietly defying me and really there was no way I could force her to stop.

Moreover it was true, as she had just reminded me, that she was, somehow, suddenly grown up — too grown up.

“I really am older than you seem to realize, Johnny,” she said softly.

In a shaken but stern attempt at discipline I retorted, “That’s another thing, Darlene — your calling me Johnny. You never did that before this afternoon. Please don’t do it any more. It doesn’t show the proper respectful attitude which a daughter should feel toward her father.”

“But I liked so much the way Mother called you Johnny,” Darlene answered. “I thought that if I called you Johnny in the same nice way, it would help to make it seem that Mother isn’t really gone.”

“But she is gone,” I said flatly. “She’s gone never to come back. I will always love the memory of her, Darlene, and of course you are very dear to me, too, but in quite a different way... That blue dress you have on is another thing — it’s one of your mother’s. You shouldn’t have touched it, at least not so soon. And what do you mean by coming into her room like this? It should be kept closed out of proper respect—”

“But, Johnny, I’ve always wanted this room,” she broke in eagerly. “I love being amid Mother’s things because they’re all so very much like me and now they’re all mine.”

“Darlene!”

It struck me so deeply, Rhea, that my sense pinwheeled. Overstrained as my nerves were, I was hardly aware of leaving. Then I discovered that I was no longer in your room, Rhea, but in my own. I had a sleepless nightmare of a night...

When I came home early the next evening, Rhea — after an interminable day at the office — I brought the engraved silver urn containing your ashes.

With the urn in my hands I turned from the garage toward the house, and paused, staring apprehensively at the kitchen door. Then I went to it slowly, watching at every step. Thank heavens that the incident of yesterday was not repeated. Entering that door, in fact, I found the kitchen deserted. But there were sounds overhead, indicating that Darlene was upstairs, and her voice carried down gayly,

“Welcome home, Johnny!”

Unable to answer, I carried the urn into the living room and placed it on the center of the mantel. Left there in plain sight, I hoped it would serve as a constant reminder to our daughter that Rhea would continue to be present in this house only as a handful of gray dust reposing inside that silver vessel.

But only the next day I came home, numbly tired again, to find that in one more detail Darlene had caused herself to resemble you even more closely. She had had her hair bleached a shade or two, to the shade yours had been.

It was adding up tension toward the cracking point, Rhea. Darlene had also developed your trick of sneaking a smoke now and then, in just the way you used to do it, believing I didn’t know. Darlene was fully aware that I disapprove of women smoking, especially mere girls of her age — so she tried to hide her indulgence from me just as you used to hide it. But I could always smell the tobacco when I came into the house and I would find the butts stained with lip rouge, just like yours, in the trash basket.

This in itself was trivial, perhaps, except that Darlene had never before liked cigarettes. But now she was smoking in my absence, concealing it and undoubtedly becoming an addict.

Like mother, like daughter! Your evilness was your bequest to Darlene. Your sins were flowing in her blood, tainting it, cropping out of her now, more and more in hellish increase.

All these things were nerve-shattering. Darlene’s new way of waiting for me just inside the kitchen door, smiling at me, was almost the worst trial to endure.

But then came the worst of all, Rhea — the dereliction proving once and for all that Darlene was going the evil way of her mother. It came so soon that it left me dazed and appalled — inherited evil completely claiming Darlene. Almost before I was aware of it, it came so slyly, she was plunging into your own secretly fatal sin.

Chapter Three The Night You Died

I never told you in life, Rhea, just how I discovered your unforgivable secret. At the time I judged it best to use your own tactics of silence and craft. You didn’t even suspect that I had learned — and perhaps you do not know even yet how I brought a righteous punishment down upon you.

The first sign of it, Rhea, was a strange new tenseness in you. Your cheerful, content manner was gone. You had become on edge, anxious. When I asked you what was bothering you, your answer was evasive. “I just seem to be a little nervous, Johnny, that’s all — probably because the weather is so unsettled.”

But after the weather changed, you stayed agitated. Coming home from work these afternoons, I found your customary greeting strained. The stench of tobacco was stronger in the house and more butts than usual were discarded in the trash basket. At night, too, you were restless — you tossed and squirmed in bed so endlessly that neither of us could sleep. That was when you suggested it might be better if you had a room of your own, so you moved into the second bedroom on the other side of the bath.

It did seem to help some, for soon your nervous tensions relaxed somewhat. In fact, you took on a new loveliness — there was a brighter flash in your eyes, a happier shine on your lips, and as you worked around the house you sang softly to yourself.

And I didn’t suspect the reason, Rhea. Trusting my wife as a husband should, I didn’t dream...

The first inkling of it came, with bitter irony, as the result of my husbandly concern for you, Rhea.

That night in bed I was also restive. Usually I sleep the sound sleep of a man whose conscience is perfectly clear, but on this night something caused me to waken. My first thought was of you, Rhea. I rose, wanting to make sure you were all right, and without turning on any lights, stepped through the connecting bath into your room.

A light had been left burning inside your closet. Thinking you had overlooked it, I reached in to turn it out — and then I saw the bottle.

On the shelf, Rhea, just barely visible behind a hat-box — a liquor bottle. You were keeping it hidden there. Only a few ounces of whiskey remained in it.

I stood there too stunned to move, Rhea — staring at that bottle as if at the suddenly dead face of a loved one. In a soundless thunderclap of revelation, it told me that all my years of loving patience and guidance had gone in vain. You had secretly deceived me, Rhea. The sweet, good wife I had known was gone, for she had yielded again to sinful weakness.

Heartsick, I turned my unbelieving eyes to look at you, Rhea, and then an even more staggering blow rocked me.

Your bed was empty.

Just in the nick of time I choked off a cry of pain. Darlene was asleep just down the hall, and the Fraziers’ open bedroom windows were no farther away than the width of the driveway. I could not bear to let them learn of my discovery.

The condition of your bed showed you had been lying there for a while, Rhea, but now you had left it. And the clock on your vanity said the time was 4:20 a.m.

In a stunned turmoil of conjectures — unwilling to believe this thing until I had made doubly sure — I quietly went down the stairs. It took me only a few moments to search the house. It was horribly true. You were gone. You had risen from your bed in the middle of the night, while your trusting husband slept, to sneak out of the house and away.

Where had you gone? How many times before tonight had you slipped out like this without my slightest knowledge? Did Darlene suspect, or the neighbors? I hoped to heaven they were as ignorant of it as I had been. I prayed that I could remain alone in my wretched wonder.

These questions would remain a torture in my mind even after they were answered. I resolved on the spot, in my heartsick dismay, that whatever the ugly truth about you might be, it must, at any cost, remain always concealed from our daughter and from our friends who thought so well of us.

Of one other thing I was instantly sure, Rhea. Whatever you were doing, I must stop you. You must be punished for your sins already committed, and I must not permit you to hurt me so ungratefully and so grievously with more of them.

First I must learn the dreadful truth. I went quietly back up the stairs. I left the bottle untouched on your closet shelf, the light burning just as you had left it. I closed the connecting door, leaving it as I had found it, and fell back into my own bed.

I lay there in acute wakefulness, listening and waiting.

Almost an hour later, just before dawn, I heard the sound of a car pausing in the street, then quietly rolling on. The faint sound of hurrying feet came down the dark, hedge-bordered alleyway behind the houses. You came into our home with such sly quietness that I could well understand why your secret prowlings had not disturbed me before.

All the while I lay still in my own room, letting you believe you were deceiving me again. Even when I heard you finally return to your bed, I kept my wretched silence — and planned.

The next night, Rhea, I was grimly ready to find the answers to the dark questions rankling in my mind.

At breakfast, to my secret amazement, you looked so fresh and unaffected. It showed your fine natural talent for sin, Rhea. As for me, I must confess finding it surprisingly easy to act as if nothing was wrong.

A shameful thing, Rhea, this mutual deception — but on my part it was justified.

Again when I came home that evening to receive your usual cheery greeting, the warmth of your kiss seemed an expression of your duplicity. I suspected liquor on your breath, too. But I pretended to notice nothing and was ready with a small deception of my own — one you had forced upon me.

“I came home by bus, honey, because I had a little clutch trouble with the car. Left it at the garage. Pick it up tomorrow.”

That wasn’t quite the fact, Rhea. Actually I had left the car parked down in the next block. I expected to have a special use for it during the night.

It wrung my heart to observe you during the evening, Rhea. Now I understood your nervousness. You were suffering pangs of guilt and remorse. You were tense with fear that I might somehow learn too much. Yet in your weakness you could no longer resist temptation.

Our double pretense went on through the evening until our usual time to retire to our separate rooms — and then the deceit became double-edged with a vengeance.

This time it was I who sneaked out of the house. Of course you didn’t dream of such a move on my part, Rhea. While you lay awake or dozing in your room, giving me time to fall into my usual deep sleep, I slipped silently out of my room.

I managed it with great care and justified cunning, Rhea, and you never knew. You had no notion I had eased soundlessly out of the house and down the dark street to my waiting car.

Sitting behind the wheel, I pictured your covert actions. I could visualize you getting up very quietly. Perhaps before making a second move, you would fortify your evilness from the bottle hidden on the closet shelf. Then you might listen at my door, and, feeling sure I was sleeping as soundly as usual, you would sneak down the stairs and out the back door.

Then?

My intention tonight was to see for myself where my good and faithful wife went from there.

Sure enough, Rhea, you soon appeared. Having placed my car in the shadows of the maples to permit me to watch the mouth of the alleyway, I saw you hurry out. You turned to another car that was waiting there in the side street, a long convertible, gleaming new. I saw its door opened for you from inside. I watched you disappearing into it — and for moments of miserable suffering, I pictured you in the arms of the man you had met.

Finally the convertible lights gleamed on, its motor purred and it breezed into the boulevard.

You must not have noticed my car following you, or if you did you thought nothing of it. Many cars cruised that way, to the end of the boulevard, then along Rendezvous Road. I trailed you all the way, Rhea, until the shiny convertible pulled into a special parking space outside the Clover Club.

Yes, the Clover Club, that notorious road house. I saw you leave the car with the man who had met you — the man with whom you must have come to this noxious place night after night. I recognized his handsome face, Rhea — with a blinding flash of realization.

Bruce Dallas. The same man you had loved so eagerly and so evilly years ago. Now you had gone eagerly and evilly back to him. Abandoning all the sweetest things of your life, you had gone back.

How did it come about, Rhea? Where and when did your meeting with Bruce Dallas occur? Even now I don’t know the details, my sweet. But my own feeling is that he happened to see you again somewhere — to see how sweet and good you were, and how amazingly like the young girl you had been — and then he sought you out.

From the darkness I watched you going into this garish resort which Bruce Dallas himself operated. I saw you both appear at a window upstairs, in one of those private dining rooms. I saw a drink in your hand and heard shrill laughter on your lips before the venetian blinds were closed, mercifully to shut the sight of you, up there with Dallas, from my stinging eyes.

Then I turned back, Rhea, laden with a great sickness of the heart, fired with a resolve that a just punishment must be meted out to you.

Before you sneaked back home again that same night, I did something, Rhea, which you may never have realized.

Thinking and planning in my silent, anguished resolve, I closely inspected the head of the stairway. Darlene was asleep in her room then, also unaware of what I was about. As you have excellent reason to know, Rhea, those stairs are very steep — I was always careful to caution you about going down them.

The post on the one side of the landing, and the molding on the wall on the opposite side, were ornately carved. I saw how it would be possible to brace a rod of some sort firmly across the top of the steps, a few inches above the edge of the landing, so that anyone moving onto the stairs would surely trip over it.

I tried it then and there, Rhea, using a tool of a completely innocuous sort. Bringing an umbrella up from the stand in the vestibule directly below, I found it was of exactly the right length to be placed in position. A slight bit of forcing kept it firmly in place. Black, it would be completely invisible in the dark.

I replaced the umbrella in its vase, undressed, got into bed and actually dozed off without waiting to hear you sneak back in. Because now my plan was complete. I could be confident that guilt would be punished. Tomorrow night I would set the trap of a just vengeance...

I recall so clearly, Rhea, the night you died.

That evening, the normal course of incidents went along as it had on many other evenings. You didn’t imagine I had learned of your deceit, and much less could you dream I had definitely arranged that you would pay for it within a few hours. Nor did you realize, Rhea, that you would never see Bruce Dallas again — that you had already held your last mortal rendezvous with him.

At her usual time, Darlene went upstairs. I heard her close her door — that door which could be counted on to stick shut for a few minutes when she tried to open it again. Soon I heard her bed bounce and knew she would be sound asleep within minutes.

These were your last living hours, Rhea.

You were reading a women’s magazine, remember? — and waiting with secret impatience for me to go to bed.

I finished reading the paper, quite deliberately prolonging it a little. Finally I rose and said, “I’m turning in now, honey. Pretty sleepy. Good night.”

You may have thought it a little strange that I placed my good-night kiss on your forehead this time, not on your lips. I could not bear to think of kissing the once-sweet lips which Bruce Dallas had defiled.

You said, “I’m tired, too, Johnny. Be up in a minute.”

I climbed the stairs, entered my room, closed the hallway door, got ready for bed and lay down. All this was entirely routine, except that tonight I had no intention of sleeping. I waited until you came up to your room and went through the same process. Then, once you were settled down for a brief doze, I rose in silence.

I went down to the vestibule to get the umbrella, brought it up and wedged it across the edge of the landing, in just the right position, as I had tested it last night. Then I went back to bed and waited.

Waiting, scarcely breathing, I soon heard your furtive sounds. First a motion of your bed as you got up. Then a stealthy squeak from the cork of your hidden bottle. Then a few more moments while you got back into a dress. Next you were almost soundlessly leaving your room.

Then your scream, Rhea!

Next the thumping fall of your body to the very base of the stairs.

I saw a light come on in a bedroom window of the house next door. Your scream had been loud enough to waken our nearest neighbors. Seeing Marie Frazier putting her head out the window beside her bed to stare across, I made the clever move of turning on my bedroom light also and going directly to my own window to speak to her.

“What was that, Marie?” I asked quickly. “Something wrong over there?”

“It was a frightful scream, John,” she said. “But it didn’t come from here. It came from your own house. I thought it must be Rhea’s voice.”

“But it can’t be Rhea,” I answered. “She’s sound asleep.”

Through the windows Marie Frazier watched me hurrying first into your room, Rhea, then into the hall. Darlene had also been awakened by your shriek but she hadn’t yet appeared from her room. As I had expected it to do, her door was sticking shut.

I hastened to the head of the stairs, dislodged the umbrella, ran down, then snapped on the lights.

You were lying huddled on the floor on your back, your head oddly twisted over one shoulder. Your eyes were staring up into mine. You were not yet dead then, Rhea. Your neck was broken and you were paralyzed. The terrified light in your eyes seemed to show you knew what I had done — and why. I lifted you a little in my arms. At that moment Darlene succeeded in yanking open the door of her bedroom.

“Your mother’s had an accident, Darlene!” I gasped out. “Call a doctor!”

Then you died, Rhea. You died and I felt an exultation.

Chapter Four Another Is Claimed

Thinking back now, I can recognize that the disturbing change in Darlene showed itself the very first moment she learned her mother was dead.

I can bring back that moment very clearly, Rhea. Darlene had finished telephoning for the doctor. Hurrying back, she found me holding you in my arms.

I recall vividly that as she stood there she gazed wide-eyed not at her dead mother, but at me.

I made quite a convincing picture of a grief-stunned husband, I’m sure, Rhea, as I knelt there on the floor.

That was the way the Fraziers found me when they hurried in a few minutes later. I would not permit them to move you until after Dr. Kerwin arrived and pronounced you dead. I watched the good doctor solemnly filling out the death certificate — writing under the words Cause of Death his conclusion, Accidental fall.

The Fraziers and the other neighbors who came in all deplored the accident so sincerely, Rhea. “Such a terrible shame,” they said.

But questions were buzzing in their minds — not about me, but about you, Rhea — questions none of them dared put into words. Finally Marie Frazier worked up the courage to ask, “How did it happen that Rhea was up and dressed, John?”

“But why shouldn’t she be?” I said, sounding as if I hadn’t the faintest idea what she was implying. “Naturally she had just gotten up to make breakfast for me.”

“Poor John,” Marie murmured. “You’re so dazed you haven’t even noticed what time it is. Only four o’clock in the morning now, and it happened about two hours ago.”

I was the perfect picture of an unsuspecting husband, Rhea. Our friends privately wagged their heads. Not that they had any idea themselves of what an evil woman you really had been. But they did puzzle over the circumstances of that tragic little accident — never doubting that it was an accident — and marveled that I apparently could see nothing at all questionable about it.

It fell to the lot of the minister of our church, Matthew Parker, to break the disillusioning “news” to me.

“John — Darlene,” he said gently. “I’m sure you must appreciate the fact that in a sudden death of this kind certain doubts inevitably arise and must be cleared away. For your own peace of mind, I feel I must explain the apparent cause for Rhea’s fatal fall. When Marie Frazier and my wife were tidying up Rhea’s room today they found — brace yourself, John — they found a bottle of whiskey hidden on a closet shelf.”

I did not laugh in his solemn face, Rhea. Nor did I put up a pretense that this of course explained everything. Instead I simply stared at our old friend Matthew Parker and said flatly, “I don’t believe it.”

He insisted very gravely, “I’m afraid it’s true, John. We can’t help believing that Rhea had a secret addiction to alcohol. That accounts for her fall — she had over-imbibed. Probably she had dressed in order to sneak out for another bottle. I’m sincerely sorry, John, but at least this does clear up certain puzzling details.”

“Rhea was too sweet, too good,” I said. “I can’t believe it of her. I can’t.”

“Bless your trusting heart, John,” Matthew Parker said. “At least you may rest assured that the Fraziers and the Parkers won’t breathe a word of this.”

After he had gone I said to Darlene, “I’ll never believe it. Never let it change your own feeling for your mother, Darlene.”

She smiled at me. “Mother and I always understood each other.”

That was the first of Darlene’s disturbing cryptic remarks, Rhea — the first hint of evil forces rising in her as they had risen to claim you. But at that time I was more concerned with other dangers. For example — Jennings.

He came to the door soon after the minister had left, a small man with sharp, darting eyes and a notebook. I put on a disturbed and puzzled look when he announced he was from police headquarters.

“The homicide law requires us to look at every case of violent death, including accidents, Mr. Long,” Jennings began. “So this is just routine. Except for one angle. How-come your wife was acquainted with Bruce Dallas?”

“Bruce Dallas?” I echoed. “Who’s he?”

Jennings explained to me briefly.

I kept a puzzled frown on my face. “And what makes you imagine my wife was acquainted like that?”

Jennings said slowly, “I’ve heard a report on the grapevine that she was seen once or twice with him at a place called the Clover Club.”

“It’s incredible,” I said. “This man — what’s his name, Dallas? — may have been seen there with a woman resembling my wife, but it couldn’t possibly have been Rhea.”

He rose, apologizing for having bothered me. I smiled at his back as he left. He had come with a vague suspicion of murder — but the suspicion pointed at Bruce Dallas, not at me. That was his reason, of course, for later jockeying Dallas into your funeral service — to watch his reactions as the flames consumed you.

So then, Rhea, nothing was left but the ceremonies of cremating you, and after that the tragic little event would begin fading from all our minds.

It would have done so, Rhea, except for Darlene.

Every night when I came home from work, dreading the moment as profoundly as I had once welcomed it, you met me. It was becoming such a hair-trigger thing, Rhea, that I was fast reaching the point where I could no longer endure it.

But what could I do? Order Darlene out of the house?

No, I must stay and cope with it. I must come home every evening to hear your greeting — “Welcome home, Johnny!” — and to find a duplicate of you waiting for me in the kitchen.

It was getting to be more than my shaken nerves would stand. It was becoming a nightmare, Rhea. But then came even more — the worst thing of all — the proof that your heritage of evil was now claiming Darlene.

As before, the whole house was silent. For a while I lay listening in a silent torment of tension. Then, almost as in a dream, telling myself that somehow, somehow this insufferable situation must be ended, I rose, opened the door.

A light had been left burning in Darlene’s closet. Stunned by the repetition of this incident, I reached in to turn it out — and then I saw the bottle.

Staring at that bottle, I realized it stood hidden at almost the same spot where you had hidden yours. Darlene had been sneaking drinks exactly as you had done, for only a few ounces of whiskey remained in it. Then I turned my stinging eyes to Darlene’s bed.

Like your bed on that other night of terrifying discovery, it was empty.

Chapter Five Paid in Full

The next evening was also much like another I had had with you, Rhea — casual and commonplace on the surface, while underneath a grim plan was being acted out.

Darlene and I sat together in the living room, both reading. I could sense the impatience in her and feel her covert glances. At the usual time and in my usual way I said, “I’m turning in now, Darlene. Good night.”

She answered, “Good night, Johnny; I’ll go up in a minute.”

I could feel her senses quickening as I went up the stairs. I closed and locked my door and lay on the bed without undressing. Presently I heard Darlene’s sounds on the stairs, then in the room next to mine. Quiet followed.

Then, just as it had occurred with you, Rhea, I heard a motion of Darlene’s bed as she rose. Next a squeaking sound from the cork of her hidden bottle. A few more moments of quiet followed while she dressed. After that she left her room.

As soon as she was outside the house, I went into my own plan. Down the stairs and out the front door, I ran along the tree-shaded sidewalk toward the next corner.

I saw Darlene, halfway down the cross-street, hurrying out of the alley way. She ran to a car waiting nearby. A long convertible, Rhea — the same flashy car that had waited for you!

I went back into the house almost blindly — resolved that the evil of you, Rhea, as it was living again in the body of Darlene, must be destroyed once and for all.

I would have it exactly as before. The normal course of incidents would go along this evening just as it had on previous evenings. Darlene and I would be in the living room, reading. I would finally rise and say, “Pretty sleepy. Good night now. Better get some rest yourself.”

Then I would go into my room.

Presently Darlene would come up to her room. She would lie down and doze. Making no noise at all, I would then silently go down to the vestibule for the umbrella. I would bring it up, wedge it in place just above the edge of the landing; then go noiselessly back to my bed.

I would wait to hear Darlene getting up. She would first sneak a drink, slip into a dress, then pad out in her stocking feet. I would follow the slight sound of her every step to the trap at the head of those steep stairs. Then—

At my first move, however, a small deviation occurred. When I finished reading the evening paper in the living room and said, “Well, I’m going up now, Darlene,” she did not respond as I had expected.

Instead she said, “I feel sort of jittery for some reason, Johnny. I think I’ll take a little walk, just down to the corner store and back.”

I asked with concealed grimness, “Want me to come along?”

“Oh, no,” she said quickly.

“All right, but hurry back, Darlene.”

I told myself that the slight delay she was causing would not matter at all. I went up to my room to wait.

I lay in bed, fully dressed, waiting. It seemed to me that Darlene was taking too long a walk, and then, after I heard her coming back into the house, I felt she was remaining downstairs unusually long. But finally there were noises on the stairs. And presently an early-morning quiet pervaded the whole house.

I rose, making no sound, and went down the stairs. Coming back with the umbrella, I braced it firmly in the same place that had proved so effective with you, Rhea. Then I returned to my bed to wait for a just wrath to destroy the guilty.

Soon I heard furtive sounds in the hall. They rustled along the hallway to the top of the stairs.

Suddenly there was the thump of a foot catching under the barrier and a sharp, long scream from Darlene.

Next the thudding fall of a body to the very base of the stairs — followed by a terrible silence.

I sprang up from my bed. Again I saw lights appear in the bedroom windows of the house next door. Just as your scream had done, Rhea, Darlene’s had wakened the Fraziers. This time I did not wait to speak to Marie. She had apparently seen me aroused from a sound sleep by the shriek, so now I let her watch me hurrying from my room in high alarm.

At the top of the stairs, seeing nothing else so far in the dark, I snatched the umbrella from its place. I ran down the flight hearing groans of mortal pain below. In the vestibule I put the umbrella in the stand with one hand and reached to the wall-switch with the other. The light brought a revelation that struck paralysis into my every fiber.

The victim of my trap lay huddled, helpless and bleeding at the base of the stairs.

But it was not Darlene, Rhea. It was Bruce Dallas.

What followed, Rhea, stays with me like a series of flashes from a nightmare.

Suddenly I found myself beating at Dallas with my fists, in a wild desire to destroy the last flicker of life in him. He lay limp and lifeless as I hit him, able neither to strike back or to feel the power of my blows. Then I looked up and saw Detective Jennings hurrying in the front door.

Darlene?

She was standing on the stair landing above, dressed as I had last seen her, held still by horror, both her hands pressed over her lips to stifle her cries.

In a moment of unfeeling selflessness, even of wonder, I watched her as she came slowly down the stairs. She moved past the dead body of Bruce Dallas — she seemed not to give me a glance — into the living room, gazing at the shining silver urn on the mantel, and her lips spoke.

I thought I heard her speaking to you, Rhea. She said, “Now both of them are paid, Mother, for what they did to you.”

They didn’t bring out the real truth at my trial, Rhea. They tried to prove that I had furiously quarreled with Bruce Dallas, and had deliberately thrown him down the stairs because I had caught him upstairs with Darlene.

Darlene testified — falsely, for your sake — that she’d known Dallas for some time, but hadn’t told me about it — that it was she who had been seen dancing with him at the Clover Club, and not you. She said that Dallas had had a flat tire down the street a ways that night and had come in and gone upstairs merely to wash his hands. That was when I had found him, had misunderstood and had flown into a rage.

We know better than this, Rhea, much better. I doubt that they could have convicted me on this story if Jennings, having suspiciously kept an eye on Dallas, hadn’t been waiting outside the house for Dallas to come out again. And then, hearing the scream—

Darlene?

I hadn’t dreamed how much Darlene had observed and planned. A deep one, that girl, Rhea, one needing to be watched. When she came here to the death house to visit me I accused her.

“You knew all along what had really happened to Rhea. Did you notice the umbrella was slightly bent? Did you find that the tip of it had left a scratch in the woodwork at the top of the stairs?”

She just gazed at me, Rhea, not smiling, not speaking. She was not so much like you anymore. She had stopped using your cosmetics and your perfume; her hair had returned to its own natural tint and her new clothes were her own.

No, she was not like Rhea at all now. And I could feel her thinking again as she sat there in silence gazing at me through the thick wire screen, Now both of them are paid back, Mother, for what they did to you.

She went away then, Rhea, and she has not come back since. I am sitting alone here in my cell, waiting for the sentence of death to be executed upon me within an hour, and I have stopped wondering whether Darlene will return to visit me for one last time. In my heart I know she will not come. I’m sure instead that tonight she is at home, alone there — except that she is with you.