The confusion in her eyes glinted a little brighter. “Bill, I just don’t understand any of this. Are you sure that you ... feel all right?”
“My own feelings don’t matter right now.” He scratched above his ear and tried to grin. “This is all coming even harder than I expected. I know how you feel about that business I went through in the morgue.”
For the first time, he sensed, she was actually beginning to fear him. She’d drawn back ever so slightly.
He made himself look at the suffering in her eyes, the struggle between the emotions she felt for him and the questions her mind was raising against him.
“Betty, for your own sake, during the next few minutes admit that the image in compartment B-three might have happened. I’m not asking you to believe it. Just don’t think of it as a tale told by a raving maniac.”
Sudden tears brimmed in her eyes. “Bill, I can’t stand to hear you carry on like this!”
Sharper than a knife, a wish cut through him, that he could put an arm around her and tell her the whole thing was a sad and sorry prank. But he had to get that dress. Whatever the cost to their feelings, he had to make sure she never put on the yellow dress.
“Betty, about the dress. . . .”
“Bill, please!”
“You bought a dress at Ann-Helen’s,” he said doggedly. “It’s yellow. Linen. It has a squarish neck and two rhinestones where the straps join.”
“Bill, I don’t see. . . .”
He wanted to shake her with rough, affectionate hands. “Aren’t you curious? Don’t you wonder how I know about the dress?”
“You’ve seen it, of course.”
“Where? When? Have you ever worn it?”
“No, but—” She broke off. She couldn’t dismiss his description of a dress he’d never seen. A subtle change came to the way she was looking at him. “Bill, just how did you know about the dress?” “The young, dark-haired image with the battered face in B-three is wearing it,” he said.
He saw the flash of shock through her face. “Betty,” he plunged on, “a strange mutant of a girl was the last to pass through B-three. She suffered a good part of her life, and maybe it gave her a kindness and compassion deeper than most of us ever attain.”
“You think you’ve received a warning through some sort of ESP force,” Betty said, a hollow note in her voice, “and nothing will convince you. . . .” “I don’t think I’m something special, Betty, ESP or clairvoyant,” Bill said. “I’ve never had any uncommon psychic powers—and I’ve a feeling that when this is over nothing else like it will ever happen to me again. But right now, in this one moment out of my lifetime, I know one thing. I know I can’t take the chance, Betty, and blindly rule out the possibility of what might happen to you if you wear that yellow dress.”
“You .. . you want me to destroy it?”
“Yes,” he said.
Her hand made a small movement toward him, then dropped in her lap. She pushed slowly to her feet. “All right, Bill. If it will make you feel better. Your feelings mean more to me than a shop full of dresses.”
He knew she was humoring him, trying to doctor a mental disturbance with the balm of pacification. The thought hurt, but he let it pass.
“Now,” he said. “I want the dress out of the way before your father or anyone else has a chance to talk you out of it.”
“If that’s what it takes to satisfy you.” Her words stifled. She turned away quickly, as if to deny herself a chance to think of what she was doing, and ran from the room.
She was back in a few moments, the dress crumpled in her hands. Without looking at Bill, she crossed to the fireplace. She threw the dress on the glowing embers. It began to smolder. She made one small movement with her hand as if she would snatch the dress out. Then it burst into flame. In an instant, it was a mass of hungry tongues of fire.
Standing close behind Betty, Bill watched the fire subside. The final little flame curled up, and the dress was a glowing ash.
“Thanks,” Bill murmured.
She didn’t turn, but stood looking at the ash that was turning from white-hot to gray. “I hope it helped you, Bill, that’s all.”
And I hope it helped you, he thought. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to realize it was all over. But what had he expected? A pronouncement from invisible trumpets?
“Well,” he said, “I guess I should get back to town.”
She turned then and said quietly, “I’ll walk with you to your car.”
They said little on the way out. He opened the car door but didn’t get in immediately.
“You’ve something else on your mind,” she said. “I think I know what it is.”
He looked from the car keys in his hands to her face.
“You’re wondering how much things have changed between us,” she said.
“Yes.” He nodded. “I was thinking about that.” “Well, I don’t feel quite the same about you, Bill.” A slow smile softened her face. The mountain breeze brushed the purple-black hair at her temples. A deep calm had come to her eyes. “Maybe I’ve grown up a little. Yesterday, last week, I guess the relationship was the kind of thing our parents used to call puppy love. But today I know that when you really like a person, it means sharing. The lumps, as well as the fun.”
His feeling for her was a quiet warmth inside Bill. His mouth formed a crooked grin as he asked,
“Lunch tomorrow, beautiful?”
“Lunch,” she said. “And you be on timel”
“Yes, ma’am.” Bill laughed as he got in the car. He followed the circular driveway while she stood beside the house and watched. He thrust out his hand and waved a cheerful good-bye as a twist in the road slipped the house out of sight.
The drive back to the city was a breeze. The autumn colors had lost their psychedelic overtones. The mountains were beautiful. He drove with the car radio turned low, whistling accompaniment to the music.
Inside the city limits, he spotted an outdoor phone booth beside a filling station.
He turned in and drew to a stop when he was clear of the gas pumps. Still whistling, he walked to the phone booth and slid inside.
In five more minutes he was talking to Patrick Connell.
“Where in thunderation have you been?” Pat demanded. “I got a message that you wouldn’t meet me at eleven. I assumed you had located the seller of the dress. But that was hours ago.”
“It’s okay, Pat. Everything is fine.”
“Then you did run the dress down?”
“Sure. A little shop right near school sold it— to Betty Atherton.”
“What!”
“She was at their lake place. I had to drive up there. She’d never worn the dress, Pat—and she wont. It lasted all of a minute in that nice, hungry fireplace.”
Pat was enfolded with a flabbergasted silence. He broke it with a shaky laugh. “You want to know something, Bill? Right up until this minute, I don’t think I really believed in B-three myself. But all this . . . the dress actually existing, purchased by someone close to you...
“And safely destroyed,” Bill finished. He laughed suddenly. “Hey, I should get an A in parapsychology this semester!”
“You’ve done some unusual homework,” Pat admitted. “Are you coming by my office?”
“I guess not.” Bill looked out at the slanted rays of the sinking sun. “I’ve killed most of the day. I think I’ll clock in early and have a happy look at an empty morgue compartment.”
“You deserve it, at that.”
Bill hung up and came from the booth with a friendly smile for the station attendant and anybody else who crossed his path.
When Bill breezed into the morgue after a long skirmish with crosstown traffic, Mrs. Wennington was draping the cover over her typewriter. In her placid, comfortably plump personage she combined the multiple roles of receptionist, filing clerk, typist, and taker of Dr. Hornaday’s dictation. She looked over the rim of her glasses at Bill, then toward the wall clock.
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“Hmmm. At first I wondered if I had actually worked that long after four-thirty.”
“Nope.” Bill grinned. “I’m just popping in bright and early so the taxpayers who foot the bill for my salary will get their money’s worth.”
Mrs. Wennington crossed to the closet and lifted out her coat. “An honest politician, no less.” “Sure,” Bill said, taking her coat and holding it for her. “There are a few of us around.”
She buttoned her coat, tossed a scarf about her feathery salt-and-pepper hair, and tweaked his nose in parting.
The moment the front door closed behind her, Bill hurried along the hallway, slid open the door, and stepped down into the huge silence of the boneyard.
He walked directly to B-3, rubbed his palms in anticipation, and yanked the compartment open.
That’s when his knees buckled, and all the light seemed to dim.
She was still there.
13
Last-Minute Purchase
VICTORIA LATHAM rode a crowded elevator down to the lower-level parking area of the store where she’d spent a large part of her life since graduation from college.
She was the last of several people to spill out when the elevator doors slid open. She experienced a pensive moment as she walked to her car. She looked at the details about her—the cement walls, the steel beams, the pipes and cables that clung to the ceiling overhead like huge spaghetti.
Behind her were moments she’d always treasure, culminating in the send-off her fellow employees had just now given her. No party. No break in the routine, really. But they’d all managed to drop by as she was cleaning out her desk and wish her the best. She’d laughed and told them she was going for an interview, remember; she might be back, begging at the personnel director’s door. They’d said it would never happen that way; they were giving her up for good.
And she knew that was true. She would make the grade at Fortesque. She had no false, egotistical notions about herself. She knew she was young and had a lot to learn. But she knew also that she was capable and ready for the step.
She tossed the package of odds and ends she’d taken from her desk into the car. Reaching in her coat pocket for her car keys, she touched the ten-dollar bill that her brother had pushed into her hands just a few short hours ago.
She slid under the wheel. She was going to miss them all—the gang here at the store, Mrs. Hofstetter, Dad—very much. But most of all she was going to miss Bill. She was nagged with concern for him. He certainly hadn’t looked well for the last two or three days. Was he upset because this was the first time, since Mom, the family wouldn’t be together?
I'll spend his tenner on phone calls, Vicky decided.
Then she had to concentrate on driving. Her car moved up the exit ramp, leaving behind the continual hum of the powerful exhaust fans that kept the lower level free of exhaust fumes.
The sun, beginning its westering journey, smote her eyes as she joined the movement of traffic on the one-way street behind the store.
Lunchtime, she thought. And I could maybe manage a chicken-salad-on-white down in the butterfly cage.
But there was a stop she wanted to make first, and she was there in twenty minutes, luckily finding a metered parking space almost in front of Ann-Helen’s smart little shop.
Vicky went in and browsed until Ann-Helen had finished with another customer, a young woman with creamy skin and red-gold hair.
Ann-Helen’s smile brightened the already cheerful shop as she came to the dress cabinet where Vicky was lingering.
The two were by no means strangers. They lunched together sometimes at a restaurant favored by buyers and department heads.
“Well, Vicky, did Fortesque come through?” “Like Santa Claus—only they have to put me over the griddle first.”
“You’ll fry quite well,” Ann-Helen said with a laugh, “or they wouldn’t fly you all the way to New York. When are you leaving?”
“This afternoon, if the reservation agent can double-cross somebody for me.”
“And you’ve decided to take off in glory, in an Ann-Helen dress. Smart girl. It’ll bolster your morale to leave like that.”
“So let me treat myself to a good-bye splurge.” Vicky smiled.
The proprietress reached up and lifted out a soft gray wool.
“It’s beautiful,” Vicky said. “But how about something with more color? Real sunny— say, that yellow one.”
“Size ten. A neat, slim pattern. Should fit you perfectly.” Ann-Helen withdrew the yellow dress and handed it to Vicky.
Holding the dress against herself, Vicky said, “I think I’ll try it on.”
“Help yourself to a dressing room,” Ann-Helen said.
Vicky reappeared in a few minutes wearing the yellow dress.
Ann-Helen nodded appreciatively. “You know me, dear. I wouldn’t try to move a dress with flattery. But that one was made for you. It does wonders for you. Maybe it’s the other way around. It’s just been hanging here, waiting for you to do wonders for it.”
Smiling, Vicky moved into the alcove of mirrors. She turned this way and that, looking at herself.
Ann-Helen was right. The two little rhinestones at the collar straps matched her twinkling mood today. The shade of yellow highlighted her coloring, bringing out the dark sheen of her hair and suggesting mysterious shadows about her eyes.
“I had two of those,” Ann-Helen said.
“Who bought the other?”
“Betty Atherton, a student at Crownover. Her father is Atherton Construction.”
“Oh, yes, I knew.” Vicky nodded. “As a matter of fact, my brother Bill dates her.”
“Well, he’s got a good eye for women,” Ann-Helen gossiped comfortably. Then a slight frown crinkled her face. “Speaking of males .. . sort of funny thing happened in here this very morning. A young fellow came in and described that very dress. Then immediately dashed out of here.” She shrugged. “I guess the all-girl bailiwick was too much for him.”
“He should have put his money on the line, or brought his wife or girl friend with him. She won’t get this one. I’m buying—if you’ll break the price to me gently.”
“Smart girl. You won’t have to worry about running into yourself on the street, with Betty Atherton here and you in New York.”
Vicky enjoyed a final appraisal of herself in the crystal mirrors. “You know, I think I’ll wear it.”
“I’ll de-tag while you’ve got it on. I’ll bet the flight captain will be asking you up front to help him fly the plane!”
They joined in friendly laughter. Ann-Helen boxed the dress Vicky had worn while Vicky wrote out a check.
Ann-Helen walked with her to the front door. “All the luck in the world, Vicky. I wish I had an operation big enough here to employ a smart young advertising woman like you.”
“Your taste in buying is all the advertising you need.” Vicky crossed the sidewalk with a good-bye wave and got in her car.
She struggled homeward through traffic, stopping on the way to munch a sandwich in a luncheonette.
She parked in the driveway. With her hands still resting on the steering wheel, she looked at the house, the lawn, the trees. Everything looked so sharp and vivid today. She remembered Bill wobbling his first bike across the lawn, and the capable movements of her father’s sensitive hands when he’d sewn a tear in a Raggedy Ann doll a long time ago.
Her throat was thick with nostalgia. Golly, she was homesick already! But everybody went through it—if they came from a home like this one.
“Vickeee!”
Vicky’s face snapped around. Mrs. Hofstetter was standing framed in the open front door.
Vicky rolled down the car window. “What is it, Mrs. Hofstetter?”
“Thought I heard you drive up. Better quit mooning. A gentleman called from the airport. He wants you to call him back, soon as you get in. I think you have a reservation.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Hofstetter.” Vicky squirmed around to pick up he
r packages, struggled from the car with her arms loaded, and closed the door with her heel.
Mrs. Hofstetter stepped down to relieve her of part of her load. They walked into the house.
“Just drop those things on the table,” Mrs. Hofstetter said. “I’ll put them in your room. I wrote the reservation agent’s name on the phone pad.”
Vicky had made her call by the time Mrs. Hofstetter came downstairs.
“You were right, Mrs. Hofstetter. They had a cancellation.” Vicky glanced at the pad sheet on which she jotted the information. “I’m on flight seventy-one. It’s the big New Orleans to New York jet and only touches down here long enough to let passengers on and off.”
“What time do we get rid of you?” Mrs. Hofstetter kidded. Her eyes were suddenly moist.
“Five fifty-eight this afternoon,” Vicky said. “Then we’d better get cracking, as the British say.” Mrs. Hofstetter stopped short as Vicky peeled off her light coat.
“That is a lovely dress, Vicky.”
“I got it at Ann-Helen’s,” Vicky said. “I was just wondering if I should have spent so much money.” “You deserve it, Vicky. You’re the hardest-working, steadiest girl I know. And if you ever tire of writing ad copy, you could model dresses like that one.” Mrs. Hofstetter's snappish nod was final approval. “But if we keep standing around here, that plane will leave without you. Better call your father first. He’ll want to take you to the airport. And how about shoes? Did you decide which pairs you’ll take?”
The afternoon fled, filled with last-minute details.
A blouse to press. A run detected in a stocking about to be packed. A change in the small assortment of costume jewelry that would go along.
Before she realized the time had come, Vicky heard her father’s footsteps coming up the stairs.
“Ready, Dad,” she called from her bedroom. She bent at her dressing table mirror to give her lips a last touch.
She saw his reflection from behind her. He was looking at her with a depth of love that gently warmed her.
Then he was crossing to pick up the twin pieces of luggage waiting beside her bed.
He picked up the bags and glanced around the room, hesitant for a moment. She guessed what he was thinking, that this room was going to feel mighty empty for a while.
The Thing in B-3 Page 13
