The Seducer

15

The night was cold and overcast. The dead moon reflected the light of the hidden sun sporadically and briefly in the intervals between black cumulus clouds. The thin light filtered, such times, through a rough lacery of bare branches to form tremulous patterns of shadow on the concrete walk.

Maggie’s flat heels on the same walk were barely audible in brisk tempo to Maggie’s own ears. Her shadow, when the moon was out, fell across the patterns of shadow. Through her teeth, a companionable hiss, she whistled off-tune the Londonderry Air.

She crossed an intersection, and there ahead was Brad’s house, the middle one of three on that side of the street from corner to corner.

Houses were not built close together, of course, in a fine residential area, and it suited Maggie’s purpose tonight that they weren’t. The lots were deep, moreover, with high hedges between houses for privacy, and the more privacy there was, she thought, the better.

She passed the house, slowing her pace slightly. At first she thought it was completely dark, but then she saw through a small pane set high in the front door that a dim light was burning in the lower hall. No others were visible up or down.

Passing the boundary hedge, she quickened her pace again, her flat rubber heels picking up their previous tempo. Less than a minute later, at the next corner, she turned left to the alley that divided the block, then left again without hesitation into the alley and down it to a rear gate, set in a rough stone wall, that opened into the Cannon back yard.

Through the gate, she found herself on a flagstone walk. She went up the walk toward the rear of the dark house. Midway, in an interval of thin light when the moon broke free, she noticed to her left, in the center of a circular dais of ground, a concrete basin with a kind of stone bowl on a pedestal standing up in the middle.

The basin was a fish pool, obviously, although there was neither water nor fish in it now, and the stone bowl was actually part of a fountain, which was now dry. She had always admired pools and fountains, and she stopped for a moment or two on the flagstone walk to observe this one. It was easy to imagine how pretty it would be in a summer night when the moon and stars were near and warm in an uncluttered sky and the light struck smaller stars from the flowing fountain and the overflowing bowl.

She could even hear the slight, musical ripple of water falling in drops into the basin. She stopped whistling through her teeth to listen to the music, but then the moon was overtaken by another cloud, and the fountain went dry again, and the music stopped. Moving on up the flagstone walk, resuming her off-key hissing of the Londonderry Air, she reached a door to a back porch at the head of three steps. Quickly she went up the steps and inside.

Across the porch was a door to the kitchen. At this door, Maggie hesitated for the first time, as if the way hereto had been familiar but was strange from here on, so that she had to stop and study and recall directions.

She was, in fact, hesitating because she was reluctant to test a sudden depressing conviction that the door would be locked. If it were locked, it would mean that Brad had changed his mind in fear and guilt, and then there would be nothing left for her to do but turn and go away and give up for good and all the last hope of everything she had so carefully planned.

She had again stopped whistling in the brief period of her hesitation. Now she reached out and turned the knob all at once, to get it over with. The door swung silently inward, and she slipped through into the dark kitchen with a sigh of relief.

She lowered her body carefully in the darkness, bending at the knees and holding herself erect from the hips. With one gloved hand she groped blindly near the floor where the jamb met it, and her fingers touched and grasped something hard and round, like a handle.

When she had taken the object into both hands, standing again, she could tell by touch that it was not a handle at all, but a short length of pipe such as might have been left by a plumber and put away to meet a possible future contingency which had not then included in anyone’s mind, certainly, the present one of murder.

Maggie’s eyes were becoming accustomed to the thick darkness that seemed to stir silently all around her. She could make out across the room two closed doors, widely separated, and she went across and opened one to discover the dining room on the other side.

Turning away, she moved to the other and passed through into a central hall running past a staircase to the front door. Burning on a table near the foot of the stairs was the shaded lamp whose light she had seen from the street through the small pane in the door.

She walked along the hall, carrying the pipe, and turned up the stairs, ascending through the light into upper darkness. The Londonderry Air was now the merest whisper of breath between her teeth.

Standing at the head of the stairs in the upper hall, Maggie realized that she had neglected to get precise directions to Madelaine’s door. This was an example of the inexcusable kind of carelessness that could cause difficulties and create dangers that ought to be avoided. As it was, however, she must do the best she could as quietly as possible, although it was unlikely, if Madelaine was heavily sedated, that a little noise would disturb her.

The hall crossed the house from side to side, perpendicular to the hall downstairs, and Maggie moved left from the head of the stairs. She had decided that Madelaine would certainly have a front corner room, that being a choice location, and she was heading for the appropriate door to try it, but she stopped on the way and tried another door first.

The room beyond was large and very dark, drapes drawn across windows in the opposite wall. From the pocket of her coat, Maggie took a small flashlight, hardly bigger than a pocket cigarette lighter, and turned it on. The narrow, bright beam played back and forth, showing her that the room was regularly used, and that it was used regularly by a man. Brad’s room.

She stepped inside and closed the door behind her. The playing beam picked out another door, leading to a closet or a bathroom. If to a bathroom, there was probably a way to the room beyond, which must be Madelanie’s. Following the beam across the floor, Maggie tried the door, opening it into the bathroom she expected.

A moment later she was standing between the closed door behind her and the closed door ahead of her, confined briefly in a small tiled room between intention and action.

Quickly now, she opened the door to action and paused at the threshold listening, the flashlight off. She could hear clearly in almost total darkness the sound of Madelaine breathing so deeply and rhythmically that it resembled the breathing of someone under the effect of ether.

The beam of the flashlight, renewed, crept from Maggie’s feet across a pastel carpet and found the bed. In the bed it found Madelaine, who did not move. Maggie, following the beam again, stood beside the bed.

In her right hand she held the length of pipe. She stood there for several seconds, looking down at the sleeping woman with an effect of detached appraisal. Suddenly Madelaine made a harsh, strangled sound, as if her breath had clotted in her throat. The harsh sound was followed instantly by a whispering cry, terror striking through sleep from some strange sense of danger, and she reared up in the bed on the verge of waking.

Maggie struck savagely with the length of pipe. With all her strength she struck again. After the second sodden sound, she stepped back and waited, alert and listening, but there was no further sound or movement, and so, after a minute, she turned on the bedside lamp.

Madelaine lay twisted aside in the bed, her arms spread wide. Her body was still covered to the hips by a sheet and a nylon comforter, but they had been jerked awry by the threshing of her legs between blows. There was a ruddy seepage in her hair, just above the hairline, and already the beginning of swelling. She was clearly dead.

Maggie examined her dispassionately, her head cocked. She seemed almost to be listening for something inside herself, a voice or sound. In fact, in a way, she was. She had never killed anyone before, and she had been curious to learn how she would feel after the act.

Now, the act completed, she was not really surprised that she felt very little at all. Long ago, as a child, she had discovered that she did not respond to the claims of pity and remorse as other children did. The deaths of pets and friends left her unmoved to any more than a cursory wonder as to the apparent vagaries of death, and she was unfamiliar with genuine grief. She had once thought that this indicated a grave deficiency in character, but later she had come to consider it an advantage in many ways, for it left her free from the effects of crippling emotion.

Madelaine’s position in the bed was exactly right. It implied clearly that she had been struck while trying to rise in bed, having wakened to surprise an intruder. This was precisely the implication Maggie had intended to accomplish, even if it had meant arranging the body after death, which would have been a disagreeable task, to say the least. Now this was not necessary, thanks to Madelaine. Things had worked out beautifully with no extra effort.

Laying the length of pipe on the table beside the lamp, Maggie walked over to Madelaine’s dressing table and examined with intense interest a silver comb and silver-mounted brush and mirror, members of a set, and several jars and bottles of creams and lotions and scents.

Opening a drawer, she found a quilted jewel box. She took it out and opened it and fingered covetously the costume jewelry it contained — pins and ear-rings mostly — letting the pieces roll off the tips of her fingers and back into the box. They were of no great value, but they were very pretty. She would have liked to take a few away for her own use and pleasure, but she decided that it would not be wise.

Turning away, she saw the sliding doors of a huge closet. Crossing to the doors, she pulled one back on its runners over the other, exposing part of a long row of dresses on hangers, all kinds and colors and materials, and she took one of the dresses down, a black wool sheath, and held it against her for size.

It was much too large, which pleased her and made her feel somehow superior, and she moved over in front of the mirror of the dressing table, still holding the dress against her, and examined her reflection in detail, trying to imagine how she would look in the dress if it were cut down to fit. She tried several other dresses in the same way, holding each against her in front of the mirror, and she had to admit that they were all very nice and in the best of taste Even the least of them was, moreover, far more expensive than any dress she had ever owned.

Closing the closet at last, Maggie returned to the bedside table and retrieved the length of pipe. She had been quite curious about Madelaine, and out of curiosity had enjoyed seeing and handling some of Madelaine’s personal things, but now she had lingered long enough, she thought, and had better go. Without looking at Madelaine again, she turned off the light and went out directly into the hall and downstairs.

She threw the length of pipe into the dead weeds of a vacant lot on the way home.