The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™: 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

Refuge

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1968.

She had walked all the way to her father’s house, three miles across the town, and now she had been sitting alone in her old room for more than an hour. She knew that it was more than an hour because the clock in the front hall had said almost a quarter to four when she arrived, and the five o’clock whistle had just sounded up north at the roundhouse in the railroad yards. At the first shrill blast of the whistle, she had raised her eyes and cocked her head in an attitude of listening, as if she were hearing something new and strange that only she in all the world could hear, but when the sound had diminished and died away she had lowered her eyes again and sat staring, as before, at her hands folded in her lap. In all the time she had been here, except for the brief interval when the whistle blew, she had hardly moved. She wondered if she should get up and go into the kitchen and begin preparing supper for her father, who would soon be getting home from his job in the yards. No matter. She had burned all her energy in the simple and exhausting ordeal of getting here. She had come, indeed, only because there was no place else to go. Now that she was here, there was nothing else to do.

She was an intruder in the little room that she had known so intimately for so many years. She was not welcome here. The room wanted her to leave. She could feel the pervasive hostility in the still, stale air, the corrosive bitterness of the abandoned, the sad, sour lassitude of the lost. But this was just her imagination, of course. It was part of the encroaching terror she had brought with her across town. The room was no different. The room was the same. There was the desk at which she had written daily in her diary, the fanciful log of hopeful days, and there above the desk was the framed copy of Gauguin’s Yellow Christ, which she had admired and hung to appease some distorted hunger in her heart. There on the walls was the same pale blue paper, perhaps a little more faded and soiled, stained at one corner of the ceiling where the probing rain had seeped through from the attic below the low roof. And there against the wall between the room’s two windows was the long mirror that had reflected her imperceptible growth from day to day and year to year, and had told her all the while that she was a pretty girl and would be a lovely woman. She wanted suddenly to run away from the walls and the mirror and the Yellow Christ, but she sat and stared at her folded hands. She wanted to scream, but she was mute. She sat fixed and mute in the terror she had brought with her. Having fled from the fear of death, she wished irrationally that she could die.

She heard her father’s steps on the porch outside. She heard them in the hall, moving toward the rear of the house. For a while, after they were gone, she continued to sit quite still on the edge of her bed, her hands folded in her lap, and then she got up abruptly, as though prodded by sudden compulsion, and went out of the room and followed the footsteps into the kitchen. Her father, his back turned to her, was standing before the open door of the refrigerator. Hearing her behind him, he turned, holding a can of beer in one hand, pushing the refrigerator door closed with the other. He was a tall, lean man with stooped shoulders and long, lank hair grown shaggy over his ears and on the back of his neck. About him, like a miasma sensed but not seen, there was an air of stale accommodation to dismal years, the atmosphere of repeated frustrations. He peered at his daughter through the dim light of the kitchen.

“Ellen?” he said. “Is that you, Ellen?”

“You can see very well that it’s me,” she said.

He carried the can of beer to the kitchen table and sat down facing her. There was a metal opener on the table. He plugged the can and took a long drink of the beer.

“I was just surprised to see you here, that’s all.”

“Is it so surprising that I’d come to see my own father?”

“I didn’t see your car outside. Where’s your car?”

“I didn’t drive today. I walked.”

“All the way here?”

“All the way.”

“You shouldn’t have done that.” His voice thinned, took on an angry, querulous tone. “You know I don’t have a car. Now it will be late before you can get back.”

“That’s all right. I’m not going back.”

“You’ll have to call a taxi, that’s what you’ll have to do.”

“Listen to me. I said I’m not going back.”

He looked at her for a moment, now that he had listened and heard, as if he was unable to understand. He drank again from the beer can, wiping his lips afterward with the palm of his hand. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. If I can’t stay here, I’ll go somewhere.”

“You’ll go back, that’s where you’ll go. You’ll go right back where you belong.”

“Do you think so? I don’t.”

“What’s the matter with you? Are you out of your head?”

“Don’t start that. I’ve heard enough of that.”

He apparently received some kind of warning from her words, for his attitude changed suddenly. He smiled, nodding his head, but the smile was more an expression of slyness than of understanding or affection. “Well, something has upset you, that’s plain. Come. Sit down and talk it over with your father. You’ll feel better then. You’ll see. Will you have a beer?”

Knowing him for what he was, recognizing from long experience another of his repeated efforts to deceive her, she sat down across the table from him, nevertheless, simply because she was tired and it was easier to sit than to stand. “No, thank you,” she said. “I don’t want a beer.”

“Well, then, tell me what’s wrong. You’ve had a foolish quarrel with Clay. Is that it?”

“Clay doesn’t quarrel with me. Clay doesn’t quarrel with anyone. He’s far too cold and contained. He has other methods.”

“Clay’s rich. A successful man. They say at the yards that he’s worth millions. The richest man in town. You can’t expect a man like that to be like other men.”

“He hates me. I can see it in his eyes. When we are alone, I can hear it in his voice.”

“Oh, hell! That’s crazy. He married you, didn’t he? Just two years ago, he came and took you away and married you. He didn’t have to do it, either. Don’t try to tell me he did, because I know better. I was here. I remember how you were. No crazy talk about hate then. He could have had whatever he wanted from you, marriage or nor, and he probably did.”

“That’s right. I sold myself. And you — because he was rich, you thought you were onto something big. You didn’t care about anything else.”

“You were lucky — lucky to be born with a face and body to rile a man’s blood and make him lose his head. How many poor girls from this part of town get a chance to marry a rich and powerful man liked Clay Moran?”

“They’re the lucky ones. The girls who don’t get the chance.”

“What kind of curse has been placed upon me? It’s almost more than a man can bear, and that’s the truth. I’ve never had any luck with my women. All those years I had your mother on my hands, and now I’ve got you.”

“Don’t start on Mother! Don’t start!”

“She was my wife, and I’ll say what I please. She was crazy — so crazy I had to put her away.”

“She wasn’t crazy. She had a nervous breakdown. Small wonder, being married to you.”

“She died in an institution. The same place you’ll die if you keep on.”

“It would be better than dying before my time in the house of Clay Moran.”

“What’s that: What did you say? You really must be crazy!”

“He wants me to die. He plans to murder me.”

His mouth hung open, his mind groping in darkness behind his eyes for some sense and sanity in her words. Then, stunned by the enormity of what she had clearly said, he pushed back from the table in his chair and stood up deliberately. “I knew it. I’ve been fearful of it. You’re crazy like your mother. Do you know what you’re saying?”

“I’ll say it again. He wants me to die. He murdered his first wife, and he plans to murder me.”

“His first wife drowned. It was an accident. What kind of hellish trouble are you trying to breed for yourself and for me? Clay Moran is a powerful man in this town. A rich and powerful man. What do you think he’s going to do if he hears his wife has been going around making such insane accusations? I won’t hear anymore. I won’t listen to you.”

“Don’t. I knew you wouldn’t. I should never have come here.”

“Be reasonable. Try to be sane for a minute. Has he ever tried to murder you?”

“Not yet. You don’t know Clay. He’ll only need to try once.”

“Has he ever threatened you?”

“He looks at me. He says sly things with double meanings. It’s not his way to threaten directly. He’s incredibly cruel and clever.”

“It’s in your mind. Can’t you understand that? You imagine these things.”

“He plans to murder me, as he murdered his first wife, because he hates me, as he surely hated her. I think he must hate anyone who marries him. It’s a kind of madness in him.”

“Now look who’s crazy! You ought to be right back where you came from, and that’s where you’re going. It’s not right for you to bring this kind of trouble into my house.”

He jerked his narrow shoulders, as if shaking off an intolerable burden, and started for the door. She could hear him in the hall, dialing the telephone. After a few seconds, she could hear his voice, angry and urgent.

“Is Mr. Moran at home? Let me speak with him, please. It’s important.”

She didn’t hear anymore. She isolated herself in silence, hearing nothing, sitting still and mute. She had wasted her strength and will. Having fled this short way to no good end, she could flee no farther.

Sitting so, futile and spent, she thought of Roger. She had not thought of him for a long time, and now that she did, after all this while, she was filled with regret and fruitless pain.

She awoke with a start and was instantly attuned to the sounds of the day, perception hypersensitized by apprehension. She could hear the soft whirring sound of the electric current driving the delicate mechanism of the little ivory clock on her bedside table. She could hear the remote and measured drip of a lavatory tap in the bathroom between her room and the next. She heard the gimping footsteps of the upstairs maid, who had suffered as a child from poliomyelitis, pass by her door in the hall. She heard from a tree outside her window the clear, repeated call of a cardinal. She thought that she could hear, deep below her in the bowels of the house, the deadly, definitive closing of a door.

It was about eight o’clock. She could tell by the slant of the sun through a window in the east wall of the room. She could measure time by the distance the sunlight reached into the room. Not exactly, of course, not with the precision of the little ivory clock she could hear on her bedside table, for the distance was longer or shorter at any given time of the morning as the sun rose earlier or later in the course of the season, but she was, nevertheless, surprisingly accurate in spite of having to make minute adjustments from time to time to the inflexible schedule of the universe. It was, like her keen perception of almost indiscernible sounds, a part of her hypersensitive attunement to everything around her. Her senses had been refined and directed by persisting danger.

She turned her head and looked at the other bed, the twin of her own, across an intervening aisle. It was empty. Neatly made. Clay had not slept in it last night. It gave her an exorbitant sense of relief, the empty bed, although she had known perfectly well, before turning her head, that no one was in it. If Clay had been there, she would have been aware without looking. She would have been aware in the instant of waking even if he had lain as still as stone and made no sound whatever. She would have known through the cold, instinctive shrinkage of her flesh. She would have smelled him, the aura of him, the sickening, sweet, pervasive scent of death.

He was in the other room, beyond the bath. She could not hear him. She sensed him through her infallible senses. He was standing in utter and deliberate silence, motionless, his head canted and his eyes watching her through double walls, waiting to detect through his own acute senses the slightest movement of her body, the merest whisper of her bated breathing. Slowly she closed her eyes in an effort to preserve the secret of her wakefulness. No use. He knew her secret. He was coming. She heard him in the bathroom. She heard him crossing the room to her bed. She heard his voice.

“Good morning, Ellen,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

Knowing the futility of simulation, she opened her eyes and looked at him. He was, she had to admit, very deceptive. He did not look at all like a man, a devil, who had murdered his first wife and was planning to murder his second. His body was slender and supple, just under six feet, and his expensive and impeccable clothes hung upon it with an effect of casual elegance. His smooth blond hair fitted his round skull like a pale cap. His mouth was small, the lips full, prepared to part unpredictably, at the oddest times, in an expression of silent laughter. His eyes were azure blue, brimming with a kind of candid innocence, a childlike wonder, as if he were listening always to a private voice telling an interminable fairy tale. Oh, he was deceptive, all right. He was deceptive and deadly.

“I’m feeling quite well, thank you,” she said.

“Improved from last night, I hope.”

“Wasn’t I feeling well last night? I can’t remember that I wasn’t.”

“Well, never mind. A good sleep will sometimes work wonders. Did you sleep well?”

“I slept quite well, thank you.”

“You see? It was the work of the sedative I gave you. You were a bad girl to try to avoid taking it. They have done some remarkable things in drugs these days. It’s absolutely amazing what can be done with them.”

What did that mean? Why did he suddenly, when you least expected it, say such disturbing things? Why did his words, so overtly innocent, have so often under the surface a sinister second meaning?

“I don’t like to take drugs,” she said quietly. “I’m afraid of them.”

“Well, one must be cautious with them, of course, but it’s foolish to avoid them when they’re needed. I was very careful not to give you too much. Did you imagine for an instant that I would be careless where you were concerned?”

There! There! Did you hear that?

“They make you vulnerable,” she said.

“Vulnerable? Nonsense. Vulnerable to what?”

“Who knows? Who knows what the effects may be?”

“My dear, you sound like a Christian Scientist. Or do you? I’m afraid I don’t know just what Christian Scientists believe.” He revealed his small white teeth in the unpredictable expression of silent laughter. “Anyhow, I assure you that you were sleeping like a baby when I looked in on you later last night. I didn’t want to risk rousing you, so I slept in the next room. Did you miss me this morning?” There he had stood. There he had stood in the dark and dangerous hours of the night, surrounded by the silent, waiting house, watching her and watching her as she slept a drugged sleep, and death had stood at his side.

“Your bed hadn’t been slept in,” she said. “I saw that when I awoke.”

He sat clown and took one of her cold hands and held it in both of his. “Tell me, Ellen,” he said, “why did you run away yesterday?”

“I didn’t run away. I went to see my father.”

“Your father was disturbed about you. He said you didn’t want to come home again.”

“My father is a foolish man. He says foolish things.”

“He seemed to be concerned about your mother — or about you, rather, as your mother’s daughter.”

“What do you know about my mother?”

“I know that she died in a mental institution. I knew it when I married you. After all, it was no secret.”

“There was nothing wrong with my mother that my father didn’t cause.”

“It’s all right, Ellen. Everything will be all right. I was just wondering about something, that’s all. Would it make you feel better to see a good doctor?”

“A psychiatrist, you mean?”

“If you wish.”

“I don’t wish. I don’t wish at all.”

“It might be the best thing for you. To tell the truth, I’ve been concerned about you myself the past year or so. I don’t know what it is, exactly. You changed somehow. You seem to be more imaginative. Confused about things.”

“I’m not confused.” In a moment of defiance, she looked squarely into the wonder of his childlike eyes. “I see everything quite clearly.”

“Well, I only want to help if I can. You know that, my dear.” He leaned forward from his position on the side of the bed and brushed his lips across her forehead. “Now I must be off to the office. You had better stay in bed and rest. Would you like me to have your breakfast brought up?”

“No. I can’t just lie here. I’ll go down.”

“As you wish. I suggest, however, that you stay in the house today.”

“Is that an order?”

He had stood up and turned away, and now he turned back, his eyebrows rising in surprise. “Certainly not. Whatever made you say such a thing?”

“I thought perhaps I was being put under a kind of house arrest to keep me from running away again.”

“Run away? Nonsense. You are my wife, not my prisoner. You are free to go whenever and wherever you please.”

“Thank you.”

He walked to the door and turned to look back at her once more. Blue, candid eyes. The sudden unpredictable expression of silent laughter. “You are my wife, my dear. Remember that. Whatever your trouble is, if there is trouble at all, we will work it out together, you and I. There is a cure for everything, you know. One balm for many fevers.”

He opened the door and went out, leaving his words hanging in italics in the breathless air of the room.

One balm for many fevers! Hadn’t she heard that before? Had she read it somewhere? It meant death. Death was the balm. Death was the only cure for all ills and troubles.

Her thoughts acted on her like a catalyst. She got out of bed immediately and started for the bathroom, but on the way, between her bed and the bathroom door, she caught an oblique glimpse of herself in a full-length mirror on the wall. She halted abruptly, as if fixed and held static in the flow of action by cataleptic trance, turned her head slowly and looked at her reflection directly. Then, drawn magnetically by what she saw, she moved toward the mirror and stood in front of it. Slowly she turned this way and that, assuming positions as a model assumes them on display, and her slim body in her sheer nightgown was the body of a dryad rising in a cloud of cool blue mist from the floor of an ancient forest.

Oh, she was lovely! She was all gold and old rose and loveliness. She felt for her lovely body a fierce pride and an agony of tenderness. She enclosed herself in her own arms, in love and apprehension. It was incredible that the passing years would destroy her. It was a monstrous and unholy crime that anyone should want to do now what the years would surely do soon enough.

She must delay no longer in a narcissistic spell, entranced before her mirror by the vision of herself. She had made precipitately the decision to do what must be done, the last desperate measure she must take to save herself, and now was the time, now if ever, to do it.

Wrenching herself away from the mirror with a feeling of dreadful urgency, she went on, hurrying now, into the bathroom.

His name was Collins. He was an old man, tired. With a small treasure of petty graft which he had tucked away over the years, he had bought five acres in the country, and when he retired next year he was going to build a nice house on the acreage to die in. He had a coarse thatch of grizzled hair growing low on the forehead of a worn leather face. The approach of retirement had made him cautious, inclined to act slowly if he acted at all, but at least he was the chief. That, anyhow, was hopeful. It was a special concession to her, of course, because she was the wife of Clay Moran. The wife of the richest and most powerful man in town, majority stockholder of its only steel plant and chairman of the board of directors of its most prosperous bank was entitled, after all, to every courtesy and consideration. If she had been someone other than who she was, she would surely have been forced to talk with a sergeant or someone like that.

The chief looked at her blankly, wondering if his hearing, like his sight, was becoming impaired.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Moran,” he said. “I don’t believe I heard you correctly. Would you mind repeating that?”

“My husband,” she repeated deliberately, “intends to murder me.”

Crazy, he thought. Crazy as all hell. Hadn’t her mother had trouble that way? He seemed to remember that she had. Anyhow, what do you do with a crazy woman when she walks into your office and throws a bomb into your lap? Well, in the first place, you understand that the bomb is a dud.

Don’t get excited. In the second place, you humor her. You play along. In the third place, after you’ve got rid of her, you protect your pension by reporting to her husband. From there on, it’s his baby, and welcome to it he is!

“That’s a startling accusation, Mrs. Moran,” he said.

“It’s true.”

“It seems incredible. Your husband is a very prominent man. One of the most respected citizens of this community.”

“I know how he’s regarded. I’m telling you what he is.”

“No breath of scandal has ever touched his name.”

“He’s very clever.”

“Well, let’s look at this thing objectively. Without emotion.”

“It is somewhat difficult to be unemotional about your own murder.”

“Yes. I understand that. Tell me exactly what makes you think your husband plans to murder you.”

“The way he looks at me. The things he says to me when we’re alone.”

“Oh, come, Mrs. Moran. That’s tenuous evidence at best.”

“You don’t understand my husband. You don’t know him. He’s clever and cruel. It gives him pleasure to taunt me. He likes to terrify me and watch me suffer.”

“Has he ever threatened directly to kill you?”

“He is much too devious and subtle for that.”

“Even if he had, it wouldn’t necessarily mean much. I’ve been married for forty years, Mrs. Moran. Hard to tell how many times I’ve threatened to brain my wife. Maybe, sometimes, I’ve even felt like doing it. But I never have, and I never will.”

“That’s different. You are not my husband. If something isn’t done to save me, he will surely murder me.”

“Has he ever made any attempt to murder you?”

“There will be no attempts. There will only be, if he is not prevented, the accomplished murder.”

“Until he makes an attempt on your life, or at least commits a chargeable offense against your person, I don’t see how the police can help you.”

“It will be too late for help then. His first attempt will be successful.”

“Surely you understand that we can take no action on so grave a charge as this when there is nothing to support it but questionable interpretations of words, gestures, looks. An assumption of intent without proof.”

“I see. I see that you won’t help me.”

The dull despair in her voice, hopeless submission to what he was convinced was an imaginary danger, pricked his leathery heart for a moment and incited a rare flicker of genuine pity. She was hot, this one. She had smoke and flame coming out her ears. She needed help, all right, but not the kind of help the police could give.

“Look at it this way, Mrs. Moran,” he said. “What reason could your husband possibly have for murdering you? You are a beautiful woman. I’m sure you are a faithful wife. You and your husband have been married for how long? Two years? The honeymoon is hardly over yet. There is no reason at all to believe that he has the slightest interest in another woman, is there? I thought not. If he did have, seeing you, I’d have to say he was nuts. You see what I mean? There’s no motive for him to murder you.”

“He wants to murder me because he hates me.”

“Oh, please. Frankly, I find that impossible to believe,” he argued.

“He hates all women. Especially the women he marries. I can’t explain it. It’s something inside him, something sick, insane. You’ll believe me when it’s too late. He will murder me, just as he murdered his first wife.”

“What? What’s that?”

“His first wife. He murdered her.”

“Stop it, Mrs. Moran! His first wife drowned. It was an accident. As an accident, it had to be investigated, of course. Your husband and his first wife were out on the lake west of town. They were in a motorboat, fishing. Your husband is a dedicated fisherman, as you must know. The first Mrs. Moran was not, although she apparently made an effort to share your husband’s enthusiasm. It was late in the evening of this particular day, almost dark. According to testimony, they were about to come back to shore. Mrs. Moran was wearing her swimming suit, and she decided, before coming back, that she would take a dip in the lake. She went over the side of the boat. It was the end of a hot day, and the water there was deep and cold. She took a cramp and drowned. She was quite a distance from the boat. Your husband tried to save her, but he couldn’t reach her in time. She drowned, that’s all. She just accidentally drowned.”

“Are you so sure?”

“I’ve just told you what happened.”

“Did anyone see the accident?”

“No.”

“You had to depend on my husband’s version.”

“There was no reason to doubt it.”

“On the other hand, there was no way to verify it.”

“He was heartbroken. His grief was genuine. Anyone who saw him could tell.”

“Clay is very clever.”

“He had no reason to murder her, no more to murder her than to murder you. There was absolutely no evidence that he murdered her. All the evidence, circumstances and possible motivation and method, all considered together, pointed clearly to an accident.”

“He killed her because he hated her, as he hates me.” She stood up abruptly, clutching her purse with both hands in front of her. Her face in defeat was composed, touched by sadness and despair. “You will remember what I have told you when I’m dead.”

The door had hardly closed behind her before he was reaching for the telephone on his desk.

Outside, she stood with her head bowed, crushed by the monstrous burden of her hopelessness. She had neither the strength to run nor the cleverness to hide. In any event, even if she had the strength and cleverness, running and hiding were clearly impossible. Clay was too rich. His power reached too far. Wherever she went, he would find her. Whatever she did, he would kill her. No one would believe her. No one on earth would help her.

Then, for the second time on the second day after not thinking of him at all for a long while, she thought of Roger.

She listened to the ringing of the telephone at the other end of the line. In her ears, the ringing was converted by the wire into a series of angry, waspish sounds. She counted the sequence of sounds, one, two, three, four, five. After the fifth, she hung up the receiver and stepped out of the telephone booth in the drugstore where she had gone to call. She stood for a minute outside the booth with her head bowed, as if she was trying intensely to remember something that she had forgotten. She had now reached, in fact, the nadir of her despair. Roger was not at home. Even if he had been at home, she conceded dumbly, there was no good reason why he should want to talk with her or see her or lift a hand to help her. Even if he were willing to help her, which he probably would not be, there was surely nothing that he could do. There was nothing anyone could do, and there was nothing now to be done. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. Nothing and nowhere on earth.

Yet it was necessary, absolutely necessary, to go somewhere and do something. One simply could not, after all, stand forever motionless outside a phone booth in a drugstore. At the rear of the store, across from the booth, there was a lunch counter with a row of unoccupied stools in front of it and a girl in a starched white dress behind it. As a beginning, the lunch counter would be a place to go, and drinking a cup of coffee would be a thing to do. Having made this decision, or having had it thrust upon her by circumstances, she walked across to the counter, sat down on one of the stools and ordered the cup of coffee from the girl in the starched white dress.

What day was it? Was it Saturday or was it Friday? She thought about this question for a moment, frowning with concentrated effort into her cup of coffee, and finally she was certain, although previously she had somehow felt that it was Saturday, that the day was in fact Friday. She had, for some reason or other, the impression that this was enormously important, making a vast difference to something significant, and she began now to try to think of whatever it was that was significant and different because it was Friday instead of Saturday. Then it came to her suddenly, accompanied by such an agony of relief and resurgent hope that she was forced to clutch her throat to choke back a burst of frantic laughter.

Friday was a school day, that was what was important, and Roger was a school teacher, and school teachers on school days are at school and not at home. If one wanted to call a school teacher, then, one could wait until school was out and the teacher was home, or one could, if the matter was urgent, call the office of the school and have the teacher summoned to the phone there, which was, she understood, a procedure generally frowned upon by the administration. Well, her need was urgent, desperately urgent, but she was reluctant, nevertheless, to resort to the emergency procedure of calling Roger at school. Having injured him cruelly already, she could not now impose upon him the slightest inconvenience. Besides, if she called him at school, it would be difficult for her to say what needed saying, and for him, in return, to say what she wanted to hear.

What, precisely, did she want to hear him say? What, if anything, did she want him to do? Save her from Clay, somehow give her sanctuary from death, yes, but most of all, she realized with a searing flash of insight, whatever was said and if nothing was done at all, she wanted him to recognize the truth.

He must believe, she thought. If only he believes!

Looking at her watch, she saw that it was almost noon. Did school let out at three-thirty or four? She tried to remember from her own years there as a student, and she thought that it was four, but she wasn’t positive, and schedules, besides, are sometimes changed. No matter. She would call Roger again at four-thirty, after he had had time to get home, and she would keep calling him at intervals, if necessary, until he answered. In this resolution she was supported at last by the blind, unreasoned faith that he was her last good hope.

There at this instant was the remote, shrill sound of the noon whistle in the railroad yards. There were four hours and a half that must be spent somewhere, and it was impossible to return to the house of Clay Moran. She could never, after today, go there again. Neither could she sit indefinitely at a lunch counter in a drugstore.

Wondering where to go and what to do, she remembered seeing her checkbook when digging in her purse for a dime for her coffee. She opened her purse again and looked in the checkbook and saw that her account showed a balance of slightly more than a thousand dollars. Well, there was one more place to go and one more thing to do, one place and one thing at a time and in turn.

She went to the bank and cashed a check for an even thousand dollars. After leaving the bank, she went to a restaurant and ordered lunch. She wasn’t hungry and couldn’t eat, but over food and coffee, growing cold, she was able to spend almost an interminable hour. Then, walking down the street from the restaurant, she saw the unlighted neon sign of a cocktail lounge and turned in, although it was something she would not ordinarily have done, and spent a second hour over two martinis, only the first of which she drank. It was then almost two o’clock. Spent piecemeal, a fragment here and a fragment there, time crept. It was an unconscionable drag from one hour to the next. She must somehow find a way to hurry the hour she wanted it to be, or to make less laggard the hours between then and now. Outside the cocktail lounge she saw, across the street and down a block, the marquee of a movie theater. She walked to the theater, hurrying as she wished time to hurry, bought a ticket and went in.

She never knew what the movie was. She did not read the posters outside, and inside she did not watch the screen. Sitting in cool and blessed darkness in the back row of seats, she closed her eyes and tried not to think, but this was impossible, she discovered, and so she began deliberately to think of the days and years before Clay, the tender time of sweet sadness when she had loved Roger and Roger had loved her. In the end she had rejected his enduring love with cruel contempt when Clay, much older and immensely richer, had seen her and wanted her. That was before the smell of death crept in. She had sold herself for wealth and security and enviable status. Good-bye, Roger. Forget me if you can. Here’s stone for bread and vinegar for wine.

Time passed in darkness before the silver screen, and it was four-thirty. She read her watch and left the theater and walked down the street until she came to a sidewalk telephone booth. She deposited her dime and dialed Roger’s number, but again there was no answer. She dialed three times more, waiting outside the booth for ten minutes between each attempted call, and then, on the fourth attempt, he answered at last. His voice, speaking after two years with the sound of yesterday, brought into her throat a hard knot around which she forced her response with a sensation of physical pain.

“Hello, Roger,” she said. “Do you know who this is?”

There was a silence so long that she had a bad moment of incipient panic, thinking that he had simply put down the phone and walked away, but then his voice came back, interrogative and listless, as if he were asking a question with an answer he did not really wish to hear.

“Ellen? Is it Ellen?”

“I’ve been trying and trying to call you, Roger.”

“I was at school. I just got home.”

“I know. I remembered. Listen to me, Roger. I want to see you again. Will you meet me somewhere?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Please, Roger. Please do.”

“I don’t think so.”

“All right, then. There’s no use. No one will help me, and there’s nothing I can do.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“If you don’t help me, I’m going to die.”

“What? What did you just say?”

“Nothing. It’s no use. Good-bye, Roger.”

“Wait a minute. Did you say you were doing to die? Is that what you said?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I can’t tell you over the phone. What does it matter? No one else will help me, and neither will you.”

“How can I help you?”

“I don’t know. I only know there’s no one else.”

“I see. When there’s no one else, ask Roger.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Never mind. Where are you?”

“Downtown. In a phone booth.”

“Do you have a car?”

“Yes. It’s parked in a lot.”

“Come out here. I’ll wait for you.”

“To your apartment?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure it would be wise. Maybe we had better meet somewhere else.”

“Come or not. I’ll wait here.”

“You don’t understand. It might be dangerous for you.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“All right. I’ll come. Oh, Roger, it will be good to see you and talk with you again.”

“Yes,” he said, “it will be good.” She hung up. She had now, after a long time of terror, a blessed feeling of security and peace. Roger would believe. Roger would help. He would be her refuge and her strength, and it was time, past time, for her to go to him. First, before going, she leaned her head against the telephone in the little booth and began silently to cry.

Roger had been sitting, when the phone rang, on the edge of his bed holding a revolver. It was an old revolver that he had acquired from his father at the time of his father’s death. He did not like guns, and had never fired this one, although he longed to fire it, just once, and it gave him comfort sometimes to sit and hold it. He was holding it again now, having returned after the telephone call to his place on the bed.

It had been a bad day at school. He’d had discipline problems. He was not good at discipline, and he often had problems of that kind. The principal had talked with him seriously about the problems several times. It was unlikely that he would be rehired next year, but he didn’t care. It was just another failure in his life. His life was full of failures. All his days were bad.

His headache was back. It always came back. In fact, it rarely left. There was a contracting steel band around his head, slowly crushing his skull.

Ellen was coming. Coming here. She would be here soon. Ellen had been the most beautiful thing in his life, and he had loved her, but in the end she had deserted him. Another failure for him. After Ellen, his life had been sick, and all his days were bad. It had been wrong of Ellen to make him sick with hate instead of love. Now she might die. She had said so herself.

He broke the revolver in his hand. Because of a kind of inherent petty meanness in his nature which would not permit him to provide for any effort in excess of what was needed to complete it, there was only one cartridge in the cylinder. One bullet for one death.

Carrying the revolver over to a chest of drawers where other cartridges were, he loaded a second chamber.