The Couple Next Door: Collected Short Mysteries

Preface by Tom Nolan

Mystery expert Dilys Winn stated that Margaret Millar wrote “the greatest opening lines since ‘In the beginning...’”

Millar, said Winn, “hooks you in the first paragraph. You might just as well begin reading her with someone else, or you’re going to spend all your time chasing after friends saying, ‘Listen to this,’ and then reading out great chunks of books.”

“Mrs. Millar,” contended Ms. Winn (herself rather quotable), “doesn’t attract fans; she creates addicts.”

The first sentence of this shocker that follows seems a fine example of what Dilys Winn meant: “When I finally found him, it was by accident.” The next line tells us we’re in San Francisco, and every sentence that follows has the visual precision and dramatic inevitability that mark the work of a master.

Notes

“‘the greatest opening lines’”: Murderess Ink: The Better Half of the Mystery, perpetrated by Dilys Winn (Workman, 1979).

“‘hooks you in the first paragraph’”: Murder Ink: Revived, revised, still unrepentant, perpetrated by Dilys Winn (Workman, 1984)

“‘she creates addicts’”: Murderess Ink, ibid.

McGowney’s Miracle

When I finally found him, it was by accident. He was waiting for a cable car on Powell Street, a dignified little man about sixty, in a black topcoat and a grey fedora. He stood apart from the crowd, aloof but friendly, his hands clasped just below his chest, like a minister about to bless a batch of heathen. I knew he wasn’t a minister.

A sheet of fog hung over San Francisco, blurring the lights and muffling the clang of the cable cars.

I stepped up behind McGowney and said, “Good evening.”

There was no recognition in his eyes, no hesitation in his voice. “Why, good evening, sir.” He turned with a little smile. “It is kind of you to greet a stranger so pleasantly.”

For a moment, I was almost ready to believe I’d made a mistake. There are on record many cases of perfect doubles, and what’s more, I hadn’t seen McGowney since the beginning of July. But there was one important thing McGowney couldn’t conceal: his voice still carried the throaty accents of the funeral parlour.

He tipped his hat and began walking briskly up Powell Street toward the hill, his topcoat flapping around his skinny legs like broken wings.

In the middle of the block, he turned to see if I was following him. I was. He walked on, shaking his head from side to side as if genuinely puzzled by my interest in him. At the next corner, he stopped in front of a department store and waited for me, leaning against the window, his hands in his pockets.

When I approached, he looked up at me frowning. “I don’t know why you’re following me, young man, but—”

“Why don’t you ask me, McGowney?”

But he didn’t ask. He just repeated his own name, “McGowney,” in a surprised voice, as if he hadn’t heard it for a long time.

I said, “I’m Eric Meecham, Mrs. Keating’s lawyer. We’ve met before.”

“I’ve met a great many people. Some I recall, some I do not.”

“I’m sure you recall Mrs. Keating. You conducted her funeral last July.”

“Of course, of course. A great lady, a very great lady. Her demise saddened the hearts of all who had the privilege of her acquaintance, all who tasted the sweetness of her smile—”

“Come off it, McGowney. Mrs. Keating was a sharp-tongued virago without a friend in this world.”

He turned away from me, but I could see the reflection of his face in the window, strained and anxious.

“You’re a long way from home, McGowney.”

“This is my home now.”

“You left Arbana very suddenly.”

“To me it was not sudden. I had been planning to leave for twenty years, and when the time came, I left. It was summer then, but all I could think of was the winter coming on and everything dying. I had had enough of death.”

“Mrs. Keating was your last — client?”

“She was.”

“Her coffin was exhumed last week.”

A cable car charged up the hill like a drunken rocking horse, its sides bulging with passengers. Without warning, McGowney darted out into the street and sprinted up the hill after the car. In spite of his age, he could have made it, but the car was so crowded there wasn’t a single space for him to get a handhold. He stopped running and stood motionless in the centre of the street, staring after the car as it plunged and reared up the hill. Oblivious to the honks and shouts of motorists, he walked slowly back to the curb where I was waiting.

“You can’t run away, McGowney.”

He glanced at me wearily, without speaking. Then he took out a half-soiled handkerchief and wiped the moisture from his forehead.

“The exhumation can’t be much of a surprise to you,” I said. “You wrote me the anonymous letter suggesting it. It was postmarked Berkeley. That’s why I’m here in this area.”

“I wrote you no letter,” he said.

“The information it contained could have come only from you.”

“No. Somebody else knew as much about it as I did.”

“Who?”

“My — wife.”

“Your wife.” It was the most unexpected answer he could have given me. Mrs. McGowney had died, along with her only daughter, in the flu epidemic after World War I. The story is the kind that still goes the rounds in a town like Arbana, even after thirty-five years: McGowney, unemployed after his discharge from the Army, had had no funds to pay for the double funeral, and when the undertaker offered him an apprenticeship to work off the debt, McGowney accepted. It was common knowledge that after his wife’s death he never so much as looked at another woman, except, of course, in line of duty.

I said, “So you’ve married again.”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Six months ago.”

“Right after you left Arbana.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t lose much time starting a new life for yourself.”

“I couldn’t afford to. I’m not young.”

“Did you marry a local woman?”

“Yes.”

I didn’t realize until later that he had taken “local” to mean Arbana, not San Francisco as I had intended.

I said, “You think your wife wrote me that anonymous letter?”

“Yes.”

The street lights went on, and I realized it was getting late and cold. McGowney pulled up his coat collar and put on a pair of ill-fitting white cotton gloves. I had seen him wearing gloves like that before; they were as much a part of his professional equipment as his throaty voice and his vast store of sentimental aphorisms.

He caught me staring at the gloves and said, with a trace of apology, “Money is a little tight these days. My wife is knitting me a pair of woollen gloves for my birthday.”

“You’re not working?”

“No.”

“It shouldn’t be hard for a man of your experience to find a job in your particular field.” I was pretty sure he hadn’t even applied for one. During the past few days, I had contacted nearly every mortician within the Bay area; McGowney had not been to any of them.

“I don’t want a job in my particular field,” McGowney said.

“It’s the only thing you’re trained for.”

“Yes. But I no longer believe in death.”

He spoke with simple earnestness, as if he had said, I no longer play blackjack, or I no longer eat salted peanuts.

Death, blackjack, or salted peanuts — I was not prepared to argue with McGowney about any of them, so I said, “My car’s in the garage at the Canterbury Hotel. We’ll walk over and get it, and I’ll drive you home.”

We started toward Sutter Street. The stream of shoppers had been augmented by a flow of white-collar workers, but all the people and the noise and the confusion left McGowney untouched. He moved sedately along beside me, smiling a little to himself, like a man who has developed the faculty of walking out on the world from time to time and going to live on some remote and happy island of his own. I wondered where McGowney’s island was and who lived there with him.

I knew only one thing for sure: on McGowney’s island there was no death.

He said suddenly, “It must have been very difficult.”

“What was?”

“The exhumation. The ground gets so hard back East in the wintertime. I presume you didn’t attend, Mr. Meecham?”

“You presume wrong.”

“My, that’s no place for an amateur.”

For my money, it was no place for anyone. The cemetery had been white with snow that had fallen during the night. Dawn had been breaking, if you could call that meagre, grudging light a dawn. The simple granite headstone had read, ELEANOR REGINA KEATING, OCTOBER 3, 1899-JUNE 30, 1953. A BLESSED ONE FROM US IS GONE, A VOICE WE LOVED IS STILL.

The blessed one had been gone, all right. Two hours later, when the coffin was pulled up and opened, the smell that rose from it was not the smell of death, but the smell of newspapers rotted with dampness and stones grey-greened with mildew.

I said, “You know what we found, don’t you, McGowney?”

“Naturally. I directed the funeral.”

“You accept sole responsibility for burying an empty coffin?”

“Not sole responsibility, no.”

“Who was in with you? And why?”

He merely shook his head.

As we waited for a traffic light, I studied McGowney’s face, trying to estimate the degree of his sanity. There seemed to be no logic behind his actions. Mrs. Keating had died quite unmysteriously of a heart attack and had been buried, according to her instructions to me, in a closed coffin. The doctor who had signed the death certificate was indisputably honest. He had happened to be in Mrs. Keating’s house at the time, attending to her older daughter, Mary, who had had a cold. He had examined Mrs. Keating, pronounced her dead, and sent for McGowney. Two days later I had escorted Mary, still sniffling (whether from grief or the same cold, I don’t know), to the funeral. McGowney, as usual, said and did all the correct things.

Except one. He neglected to put Mrs. Keating’s body in the coffin.

Time had passed. No one had particularly mourned Mrs. Keating. She had been an unhappy woman, mentally and morally superior to her husband, who had been killed during a drinking spree in New Orleans, and to her two daughters, who resembled their father. I had been Mrs. Keating’s lawyer for three years. I had enjoyed talking to her; she had had a quick mind and a sharp sense of humour. But as in the case of many wealthy people who have been cheated of the privilege of work and the satisfactions it brings, she had been a bored and lonely woman who carried despair on her shoulder like a pet parakeet and fed it from time to time on scraps from her bitter memories.

Right after Mrs. Keating’s funeral, McGowney had sold his business and left town. No one in Arbana had connected the two events until the anonymous letter arrived from Berkeley shortly before Mrs. Keating’s will was awaiting admission into probate. The letter, addressed to me, had suggested the exhumation and stated the will must be declared invalid since there was no proof of death. I could think of no reason why McGowney’s new wife wrote the letter, unless she had tired of him and had chosen a roundabout method of getting rid of him.

The traffic light changed and McGowney and I crossed the street and waited under the hotel marquee while the doorman sent for my car.

I didn’t look at McGowney, but I could feel him watching me intently.

“You think I’m mad, eh, Meecham?”

It wasn’t a question I was prepared to answer. I tried to look noncommittal.

“I don’t pretend to be entirely normal, Meecham. Do you?”

“I try.”

McGowney’s hand, in its ill-fitting glove, reached over and touched my arm, and I forced myself not to slap it away. It perched on my coat sleeve like a wounded pigeon. “But suppose you had an abnormal experience.”

“Like you?”

“Like me. It was a shock, a great shock, even though I had always had the feeling that someday it would happen. I was on the watch for it every time I had a new case. It was always in my mind. You might even say I willed it.”

Two trickles of sweat oozed down behind my ears into my collar. “What did you will, McGowney?”

“I willed her to live again.”

I became aware the doorman was signalling to me. My car was at the curb with the engine running.

I climbed in behind the wheel, and McGowney followed me into the car with obvious reluctance, as if he was already regretting what he’d told me.

“You don’t believe me,” he said, as we pulled away from the curb.

“I’m a lawyer. I deal in facts.”

“A fact is what happens, isn’t it?”

“Close enough.”

“Well, this happened.”

“She came back to life?”

“Yes.”

“By the power of your will alone?”

He stirred restlessly in the seat beside me. “I gave her oxygen and adrenalin.”

“Have you done this with other clients of yours?”

“Many times, yes.”

“Is this procedure usual among members of your profession?”

“For me it was usual,” McGowney said earnestly. “I’ve always wanted to be a doctor. I was in the Medical Corps during the war, and I picked up a little knowledge here and there.”

“Enough to perform miracles?”

“It was not my knowledge that brought her back to life. It was my will. She had lost the will to live, but I had enough for both of us.”

If it is true only a thin line separates sanity and madness, McGowney crossed and recrossed that line a dozen times within an hour, jumping over it and back again, like a child skipping rope.

“You understand now, Meecham? She had lost all desire. I saw it happening to her. We never spoke — I doubt she even knew my name — but for years I watched her pass my office on her morning walk. I saw the change come over her, the dullness of her eyes and the way she walked. I knew she was going to die. One day when she was passing by, I went out to tell her, to warn her. But when she saw me, she ran. I think she realized what I was going to say.”

He was telling the truth, according to his lights. Mrs. Keating had mentioned the incident to me last spring. I recalled her words: “A funny thing occurred this morning, Meecham. As I was walking past the undertaking parlour, that odd little man rushed out and almost scared the life out of me...”

In view of what subsequently happened, this was a giant among ironies. As we drove toward the Bay Bridge and Berkeley, McGowney told me his story.

It was midday at the end of June, and the little backroom McGowney used as a lab was hot and humid after a morning rain.

Mrs. Keating woke up as if from a long and troubled sleep. Her hands twitched, her mouth moved in distress, a pulse began to beat in her temple. Tears squeezed out from between her closed lids and slithered past the tips of her ears into the folds of her hair.

McGowney bent over her, quivering with excitement. “Mrs. Keating! Mrs. Keating, you are alive!”

“Oh — God.”

“A miracle has just happened!”

“Leave me alone. I’m tired.”

“You are alive, you are alive!”

Slowly she opened her eyes and looked up at him. “You officious little wretch, what have you done?”

McGowney stepped back, stunned and shaken. “But — but you are alive. It’s happened. My miracle has happened.”

“Alive. Miracle.” She mouthed the words as if they were lumps of alum. “You meddling idiot.”

“I— But I—”

“Pour me a glass of water. My throat is parched.”

He was trembling so violently he could hardly get the water out of the cooler. This was his miracle. He had hoped and waited for it all his life, and now it had exploded in his face like an April-fool cigar.

He gave her the water and sat down heavily in a chair, watching her while she drank very slowly, as if in her short recess from life her muscles had already begun to forget their function.

“Why did you do it?” Mrs. Keating crushed the paper cup in her fist as if it were McGowney himself. “Who asked you for a miracle, anyway?”

“But I— Well, the fact is—”

“The fact is, you’re a blooming meddler, that’s what the fact is, McGowney.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Now what are you going to do?”

“Well, I... I hadn’t thought.”

“Then you’d better start right now.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He stared down at the floor, his head hot with misery, his limbs cold with disappointment. “First, I had better call the doctor.”

“You’ll call no one, McGowney.”

“But your family — they’ll want to know right away that—”

“They are not going to know.”

“But—”

“No one is going to know, McGowney. No one at all. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“Now sit down and be quiet and let me think.”

He sat down and was quiet. He had no desire to move or to speak. Never had he felt so futile and depressed.

“I suppose,” Mrs. Keating said grimly, “you expect me to be grateful to you.”

McGowney shook his head.

“If you do, you must be crazy.” She paused and looked at him thoughtfully. “You are a little crazy, aren’t you, McGowney?”

“There are those who think so,” he said, with some truth. “I don’t agree.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Can’t afford to, ma’am.”

The windows of the room were closed and no street sounds penetrated the heavy frosted glass, but from the corridor outside the door came the sudden tap of footsteps on tile.

McGowney bolted across the room and locked the door and stood against it.

“Mr. McGowney? You in there?”

McGowney looked at Mrs. Keating. Her face had turned chalky, and she had one hand clasped to her throat.

“Mr. McGowney?”

“Yes, Jim.”

“You’re wanted on the telephone.”

“I... can’t come right now, Jim. Take a message.”

“She wants to talk to you personally. It’s the Keating girl, about the time and cost of the funeral arrangements.”

“Tell her I’ll call her back later.”

“All right.” There was a pause. “You feeling okay, Mr. McGowney?”

“Yes.”

“You sound kind of funny.”

“I’m fine, Jim. Absolutely first-rate.”

“Okay. Just thought I’d ask.”

The footsteps tapped back down the tile corridor.

“Mary loses no time.” Mrs. Keating spoke through dry, stiff lips. “She wants me safely underground so she can marry her electrician. Well, your duty is clear, McGowney.”

“What is it?”

“Put me there.”

McGowney stood propped against the door like a wooden soldier. “You mean, b-b-bury you?”

“Me, or a reasonable facsimile.”

“That I couldn’t do, Mrs. Keating. It wouldn’t be ethical.”

“It’s every bit as ethical as performing unsolicited miracles.”

“You don’t understand the problems.”

“Such as?”

“For one thing, your family and friends. They’ll want to see you lying in— What I mean is, it’s customary to put the body on view.”

“I can handle that part of it all right.”

“How?”

“Get me a pen and some paper.”

McGowney didn’t argue, because he knew he was at fault. It was his miracle; he’d have to take the consequences.

Mrs. Keating predated the letter by three weeks, and wrote the following:

She folded the paper twice and handed it to McGowney. “You are to show this to Mary and Joan and to Mr. Meecham, my lawyer.” She paused, looking very pleased with herself. “Well. This is getting to be quite exciting, eh, McGowney?”

“Quite,” McGowney said listlessly.

“As a matter of fact, it’s given me an appetite. I don’t suppose there’s a kitchen connected with this place?”

“No.”

“Then you’d better get me something from the corner drugstore. A couple of tuna-salad sandwiches, on wheat, with plenty of coffee. Lunch,” she added with a satiric little smile, “will have to be on you. I forgot my handbag.”

“Money,” McGowney said. “Money.”

“What about it?”

“What will happen to your money?”

“I made a will some time ago.”

“But you, what will you live on?”

“Perhaps,” Mrs. Keating said dryly, “you’d better perform another miracle.”

When he returned from the drugstore with her lunch, Mrs. Keating ate and drank with obvious enjoyment. She offered McGowney a part of the second sandwich, but he was too disheartened to eat. His miracle, which had started out as a great golden bubble, had turned into an iron ball chained to his leg.

Somehow he got through the day. Leaving Mrs. Keating in the lab with some old magazines and a bag of apples, McGowney went about his business. He talked to Mary and Joan Keating in person and to Meecham on the telephone. He gave his assistant, Jim Wagner, the rest of the afternoon off, and when Jim had gone, he filled Mrs. Keating’s coffin (the de luxe white-and-bronze model Mary had chosen out of the catalogue) with rocks packed in newspapers, until it was precisely the right weight.

McGowney was a small man, unaccustomed to physical exertion, and by the time he had finished, his body was throbbing with weariness.

It was at this point Mary Keating telephoned to say she and Joan had been thinking the matter over, and since Mrs. Keating had always inclined toward thrift, it was decided she would never rest at ease in such an ostentatious affair as the white and bronze. The plain grey would be far more appropriate, as well as cheaper.

“You should,” McGowney said coldly, “have let me know sooner.”

“We just decided a second ago.”

“It’s too late to change now.”

“I don’t see why.”

“There are — certain technicalities.”

“Well, really, Mr. McGowney. If you’re not willing to put yourself out a little, maybe we should take our business somewhere else.”

“No! You can’t do that — I mean, it wouldn’t be proper, Miss Keating.”

“It’s a free country.”

“Wait a minute. Suppose I give you a special price on the white and bronze.”

“How special?”

“Say, twenty-five per cent off?”

There was a whispered conference at the other end of the line, and then Mary said, “It’s still a lot of money.”

“Thirty-five?”

“Well, that seems more like,” Mary said, and hung up.

The door of McGowney’s office opened, and Mrs. Keating crossed the room, wearing a grim little smile.

McGowney looked at her helplessly. “You shouldn’t be out here, ma’am. You’d better go back and—”

“I heard the telephone ring, and I thought it might be Mary.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Yes, it was, McGowney. I heard every word.”

“Well,” McGowney cleared his throat. “Well. You shouldn’t have listened.”

“Oh, I’m not surprised. Or hurt. You needn’t be sorry for me. I haven’t felt so good in years. You know why?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Because I don’t have to go home. I’m free. Free as a bird.” She reached over and touched his coat sleeve. “I don’t have to go home, do I?”

“I guess not.”

“You’ll never tell anyone.”

“No.”

“You’re a very good man, McGowney.”

“I have never thought I wasn’t,” McGowney said simply.

When darkness fell, McGowney got his car out of the garage and brought it around to the ambulance entrance behind his office.

“You’d better hide in the back seat,” he said, “until we get out of town.”

“Where are we going?”

“I thought I’d drive you into Detroit, and from there you can catch a bus or a train.”

“To where?”

“To anywhere. You’re free as a bird.”

She got into the back seat, shivering in spite of the mildness of the night, and McGowney covered her with a blanket.

“McGowney.”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“I felt freer when I was locked in your little lab.”

“You’re a bit frightened now, that’s all. Freedom is a mighty big thing.”

He turned the car toward the highway. Half an hour later, when the city’s lights had disappeared, he stopped the car and Mrs. Keating got into the front seat with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, Indian style. In the gleam of oncoming headlights, her face looked a little troubled. McGowney felt duty-bound to cheer her up, since he was responsible for her being there in the first place.

“There are,” he said firmly, “wonderful places to be seen.”

“Are there?”

“California, that’s the spot I’d pick. Flowers all year round, never an end to them.” He hesitated. “I’ve saved a bit throughout the years. I always thought someday I’d sell the business and retire to California.”

“What’s to prevent you?”

“I couldn’t face the idea of, well, of being alone out there without friends or a family of some kind. Have you ever been to California?”

“I spent a couple of summers in San Francisco.”

“Did you like it?”

“Very much.”

“I’d like it, too, I’m sure of that.” He cleared his throat. “Being alone, though, that I wouldn’t like. Are you warm enough?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“Birds... well, birds don’t have such a happy time of it that I can see.”

“No?”

“All that freedom and not knowing what to do with it except fly around. A life like that wouldn’t suit a mature woman like yourself, Mrs. Keating.”

“Perhaps not.”

“What I mean is—”

“I know what you mean, McGowney.”

“You... you do?”

“Of course.”

McGowney flushed. “It’s... well, it’s very unexpected, isn’t it?”

“Not to me.”

“But I never even thought of it until half an hour ago.”

“I did. Women are more foresighted in these matters.”

McGowney was silent a moment. “This hasn’t been a very romantic proposal. I ought to say something a bit on the sentimental side.”

“Go ahead.”

He gripped the steering wheel hard. “I think I love you, ma’am.”

“You didn’t have to say that,” she replied sharply. “I’m not a foolish young girl to be taken in by words. At my age, I don’t expect love. I don’t want to—”

“But you are loved,” McGowney declared.

“I don’t believe it.”

“Eventually you will.”

“Is this another of your miracles, McGowney?”

“This is the important one.”

It was the first time in Mrs. Keating’s life she had been told she was loved. She sat beside McGowney in awed silence, her hands folded on her lap, like a little girl in Sunday school.

McGowney left her at a hotel in Detroit and went home to hold her funeral.

Two weeks later they were married by a justice of the peace in a little town outside Chicago. On the long and leisurely trip West in McGowney’s car, neither of them talked much about the past or worried about the future. McGowney had sold his business, but he’d been in too much of a hurry to wait for a decent price, and so his funds were limited. But he never mentioned this to his bride.

By the time they reached San Francisco, they had gone through quite a lot of McGowney’s capital. A large portion of the remainder went toward the purchase of the little house in Berkeley.

By late fall, they were almost broke, and McGowney got a job as a shoe clerk in a department store. A week later along with his first pay cheque, he received his notice of dismissal.

That night at dinner, he told Eleanor about it, pretending it was all a joke, and inventing a couple of anecdotes to make her laugh.

She listened, grave and unamused. “So that’s what you’ve been doing all week. Selling shoes.”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t tell me we needed money that badly.”

“We’ll be all right, I can easily get another job.”

“Doing what?”

“What I’ve always done.”

She reached across the table and touched his hand. “You don’t want to be a mortician again.”

“I don’t mind.”

“You always hated it.”

“I don’t mind, I tell you.”

She rose decisively.

“Eleanor, what are you going to do?”

“Write a letter,” she said with a sigh.

“Eleanor, don’t do anything drastic.”

“We have had a lot of happiness. It couldn’t last forever. Don’t be greedy.”

The meaning of her words pierced McGowney’s brain. “You’re going to let someone know you’re alive?”

“No. I couldn’t face that, not just yet. I’m merely going to show them I’m not dead so they can’t divide up my estate.”

“But why?”

“As my husband, you’re entitled to a share of it if anything happens to me.”

“Nothing will ever happen to you. We agreed about that, didn’t we?”

“Yes, McGowney. We agreed.”

“We no longer believe in death.”

“I will address the letter to Meecham,” she said.

“So she wrote the letter.” McGowney’s voice was weary. “For my sake. You know the rest, Meecham.”

“Not quite,” I said.

“What else do you want to know?”

“The ending.”

“The ending.” McGowney stirred in the seat beside me and let out his breath in a sigh. “I don’t believe in endings.”

I turned right at the next traffic light, as McGowney directed. A sign on the lamppost said, LINDEN AVENUE.

Three blocks south was a small green-and-white house, its eaves dripping with fog.

I parked my car in front of it and got out, pleasantly excited at the idea of seeing Mrs. Keating again. McGowney sat motionless, staring straight ahead of him, until I opened the car door.

“Come on, McGowney.”

“Eh? Oh. All right. All right.”

He stepped out on the sidewalk so awkwardly he almost fell.

I took his arm. “Is anything wrong?”

“No.”

We went up the porch steps.

“There are no lights on,” McGowney said. “Eleanor must be at the store. Or over at the neighbours’. We have some very nice neighbours.”

The front door was not locked. We went inside, and McGowney turned on the lights in the hall and the sitting room to the right.

The woman I had known as Mrs. Keating was sitting in a wing chair in front of the fireplace, her head bent forward as if she was in deep thought. Her knitting had fallen on the floor, and I saw it was a half-finished glove in bright colours. McGowney’s birthday present.

In silence, McGowney reached down and picked up the glove and put it on a table. Then he touched his wife gently on the forehead. I knew from the way his hand flinched that her skin was as cold as the ashes in the grate.

I said, “I’ll get a doctor.”

“No.”

“She’s dead?”

He didn’t bother to answer. He was looking down at his wife with a coaxing expression. “Eleanor dear, you must wake up. We have a visitor.”

“McGowney, for God’s sake—”

“I think you’d better leave now, Mr. Meecham,” he said in a firm, clear voice. “I have work to do.”

He took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves.