The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow

by Patrick Quentin

  Having endured so much, then, he viewed murder, this final gesture of rebellion, as almost heroic, certainly as courageous and manly.

  And the courage would never have come if it hadn’t been for Frances. He realized that. It had been that chance, wonderful meeting with Frances on the bus which had released the true, virile Harry Lund from convention’s slavery. Frances was young, dainty, submissive, everything that Norma wasn’t. Frances was the type of girl that Harry Lund had deserved from life. And he was almost sure, if he played his cards right, he could get her.

  A pleasurable tingle shivered his thickening body when he thought of Frances.

  His plans were without flaw. He had gone over and over them in his mind, simplifying, perfecting, like an artist. From the beginning he had rejected drugs as too dangerous for a pharmacist. There were other ways.

  “Harry!” Norma’s voice, perpetually husky from a smoker’s cough, rasped up the stairs.

  “Coming, dear.” He was surprised at the cordial, almost saccharine tone of his own voice. He must be careful about that. He lumbered to his feet, water streaming off him. More crossly, more convincingly, he added, “Hold your horses, can’t you?”

  As he dried himself, he studied his reflected body in the steam-stained mirror. Not bad for a man of forty-five. Bit of a paunch, maybe. But a gymnasium would soon fix that up. He concentrated on his face. Harry Lund had always been pleased with his face. Good teeth. Distinguished little moustache. Plenty of hair. Strong eyebrows over eyes that looked straight back at you.

  Frances had remarked on his eyes only last week when he had snatched a few hours with her in a restaurant halfway between the city and the outlying suburb where she worked as librarian.

  “It was your eyes I liked first. I noticed them right away when you picked up my books in the bus. They’re so sincere.”

  A tiny chill of apprehension came. What would Frances think if she knew he was a married man? How fortunate that, on an adventurous whim, he had introduced himself under an assumed name. Frances was as trusting as she was innocent. She believed his story that he was a widowed salesman from upstate. She would go on believing him. After the thing was over, he could sell the house, the store. He could take Frances away, start a new life.

  She need never know.

  “For Pete’s sake,” called Norma. “What are you doing up there? Admiring yourself in the mirror?”

  “Coming,” called Harry.

  He smiled at his reflection so that he could see his firm white teeth.

  Neatly dressed, he descended the stairs, thinking: In a few hours how different everything will be. The thought was so heady that he wanted to do something youthful, gay, whistle maybe, or slide down the banisters. He moved through the untidy little dining room into the kitchen. Norma, in the old pink robe, was hunched over frying eggs that hissed on the range. She turned, the cigarette drooping from her mouth, giving him that look of keen appraisal which always made him feel transparent.

  “My, isn’t he beautiful this morning? How about being useful, too, and getting on to those dishes?”

  Last night they had not washed the supper dishes. Usually Harry resented the unmanliness of having to work at a sink, but that sunny winter morning it almost pleased him for, as he started to rinse plates, he could look through the window and actually see the place where It Was Going to Happen.

  The house was situated in a suburb, half developed before the war and still raw and unfinished, on top of a steep, barren hill. The house was completely his own. He had bought it with money surprisingly bequeathed by an obscure aunt. It was small, inconvenient, and he hated it. But real estate brought large prices these days. He would have no trouble in selling it for a profit.

  As the dishes clattered, his study of the view outside was almost covetous. The snowfall of last week still clung to the landscape. It had frozen again during the night. He could just see the elbow of the sharp S-bend where the road swerved down the hillside to the city. Its surface was smooth with ice. An almost sheer drop slid away to the right. Suicide Bend, they called it. Every Sunday afternoon Norma took the car into town to visit with her married sister. A skid on that curve would mean certain death. Especially if the brakes on the ancient sedan were not too good.

  Harry Lund was sure that, this particular Sunday afternoon, the brakes would not be too good.

  In his mind he saw himself in becoming black, palely acknowledging the sympathy of the neighbors. “It’s terrible…. like losing my right hand … I’m going to sell everything … start again somewhere else.”

  He began to hum under his breath as he piled wet dishes into the rack.

  “Listen to him,” commented Norma. “Humming. So handsome, so happy this morning. What’s happened? Found yourself a beautiful girl friend?”

  She laughed her hoarse laugh that was half a cough. There was sarcasm in the laugh, letting him know that she realized how improbable it was that any girl could be interested in a man of his age. An edge of the old hatred pushed up. Norma slammed a plate of fried eggs on the table.

  “Come and get it, Don Juan. I guess someone has to feed that body beautiful.”

  He left the sink and sat down obediently. She sat down opposite him, still smoking, stabbing at her eggs with a fork. She got up again for a house organ issued by some pharmaceutical firm and read while she ate. Norma studied all the new drug literature and, since she had written a couple of articles for The Pestle and Mortar, never tired of implying how little he did to keep up with modern medicine.

  That was another reason …

  Harry Lund’s hand was trembling slightly as he lifted his coffee cup. It wasn’t fear. It was excitement.

  After they had cleaned up the kitchen, Norma settled in the living room with her house organ. Under the pretense of chopping wood, Harry slipped out to the garage. He had a knack for tinkering with the car and enjoyed it. He kept an old pair of denim overalls in the garage. He put them on and wormed his way under the car’s decrepit chassis. It took very little time to file the brake cable almost through. One violent application of the pedal would snap it. Almost certainly. And he knew Norma’s driving as well as his own—and the road. There was no need for brakes until the corner before Suicide Bend and there Norma always jammed them full on.

  He took off his overalls, washed his hands in icy water from the faucet, picked up an armful of logs from the woodpile, and went back to the house.

  Norma watched him from black, alert eyes over her magazine. “Domestic, too. All the virtues this morning.”

  He crossed to the fireplace and stooped to lay down the logs. Behind him Norma’s voice came: “The roads are terrible, aren’t they? Think I should skip Ella?”

  One of the logs clattered to the floor. He said with an evenness that made him proud of himself: “She’ll be expecting you, won’t she? You can’t get in touch with her by phone. If you don’t show up, she’ll be afraid you’ve had an accident.”

  “I guess you’re right.” Norma laughed again, facetiously. “I might as well go, anyway. It’ll give you a chance to sneak in a date with your new girl friend….”

  Harry Lund stood at the kitchen window. Cautiously he had eased the car out of the garage for Norma and left it headed down the road. He had seen her, in her old blue tweed coat, step into the car and drive away. He had run back to the kitchen. Any second now the car would come into view from the window, approaching Suicide Bend. His stomach was fluttering. A curious sensation. Almost as if he was drunk.

  The afternoon sunlight beat down on the empty twist of road. Suddenly a car gleamed, Norma’s car. He saw it sweep into the bend, topple grotesquely for a second on the brink of the drop, and then plunge over. The sound of wrenched, rattling metal split the silence. A roar, a rumble, fainter as the car hurtled down, down.

  He turned away from the window. He wanted to shout, to clap his hands, absurdly to call the boarding house where Frances lived and say: Marry me, darling. Marry me.

  But he
satisfied himself with a smile, the little curled sophisticated smile of an artist who knows that his job was well done.

  He went into the living room and turned on the radio loud so that it would seem reasonable he had not heard the crash. He picked up the house organ Norma had been reading. Soon the neighbors would be coming. He would be ready for them.

  The front-door buzzer rang shrilly. Harry Lund straightened his handsome red and blue tie and went to answer the door. Mrs. Grant, who lived down the street, stood on the threshold. She was panting.

  “Mr. Lund, your wife … something happened to the car. It went over Suicide Bend.”

  Harry Lund put up a hand to cover his fine eyes. “God, no. It’s not possible. I thought I heard something, but the radio …”

  “All the way down,” panted Mrs. Grant. “I saw it. Right from the living-room window. Come.”

  He was running after her through the snowy streets. At Suicide Bend a little group of neighbors was huddled at the roadside. Moaning his wife’s name, Harry Lund pushed through them and looked down. Far below in the bed of the valley he saw the car in flames, a twisted wreck of metal. He also saw two men stooped over some blue, half-visible object a little way down the sharp sloping side of the hill. A third man was scrambling away from them up the grade. He came to Harry and pumped his hand.

  “She must have opened the door and thrown herself free. She’s unconscious, maybe hurt a little. But Doc Peterson’s down there and he says she’s all right, Mr. Lund. It’s a miracle. A miracle …”

  It was a miracle. Norma had escaped with only a sprained ankle and a shock to her nervous system. The injury was not serious enough for the hospital, but Dr. Peterson confined her to bed for some weeks.

  There was no suspicion of a fixed accident. Harry was almost sure of that. At first immense relief kept him from thinking of anything else. But gradually he began to realize that his whole life had become worse. Norma was a difficult patient, demanding constant attention. Her sister Ella, with four children, could offer no assistance. Harry had to hire an expensive day nurse. Without his wife to relieve him, he was obliged to stay all day at the drug store, snatching a sandwich lunch behind the counter. With his evenings enforcedly dedicated to Norma, there was no chance to see Frances.

  He had called her once, feebly ascribing his elusiveness to a succession of business trips. For the first time, Frances’ voice had been chilly.

  And to make matters worse, he had lost the car and the amount of insurance was much too small to buy a new one, even if a new one had been available. Each morning he had to get up two hours earlier to cook Norma’s breakfast before the nurse arrived, and then to trudge down the snow-slushy hill to take the trolley to the store.

  But of all the resultant miseries, the new, inescapable intimacy with Norma was the most gruelling. The little house had only one bedroom. Constantly smoking, propped up in bed in the pink quilted robe, his wife bossed him, questioning, directing store policy, like a tart-tongued old empress. Something, maybe a half-realized sense of guilt, maybe a tacit admission of her greater strength of character, made him obey meekly. She developed a perverse habit of waking in the early dawn hours and sending him, sleep-stupefied, aching with cold and hatred, to the kitchen for orange juice or a glass of hot milk.

  Christmas came, and in a burst of seasonal sentimentality, Norma insisted upon a tree in the bedroom. Harry had to drag it all the way up the icy hill and decorate it with colored balls and pretty little old-fashioned candles under a barrage of sarcastic criticism. The nurse demanded Christmas off. Harry Lund closed the drug store, cooked a turkey with the reluctant, neighborly help of Mrs. Grant, and served a meal, with gift-wrapped presents, to Norma in the bedroom. Norma was vivacious and, after domestic champagne, almost flirtatious.

  That night Harry Lund knew that, however dangerous it might be, he was going to try to kill her again.

  A trivial incident gave him his second idea. Norma was still in bed a few days after Christmas, but she could hobble around with the help of a cane. When she was in the bathroom, Harry came up from the kitchen to find that one of her inevitable cigarettes had rolled, still alight, from the ashtray and was smouldering perilously close to the low, tinder-dry branches of the tree.

  Instinctively he stubbed it. But, as he did so, the idea sprang full-born into his mind.

  The Retail Druggists’ Convention was giving a banquet in two days’ time. Norma knew about it and, always conscientious where anything professional was at stake, expected him to go. What if Norma, under the influence of a sedative, should drop asleep and leave a cigarette alight? What if a fire, a sudden, concentrated blaze in the bedroom, should break out while he was at the banquet? The house was insured. He had planned to sell it anyway.

  Some sort of time-clock device was all he needed. His tinkerer’s mind solved that problem easily. He brought home a couple of cans of lighter fluid from the drug store. All he had to do was to stand one of the Christmas candles under the tree on some of the artificial moss saturated with lighter fluid. The candle would burn down and ignite the moss. The moss would ignite the tree.

  Harry Lund felt his manhood returning. That night he smiled at his reflection in the mirror.

  It smiled back, reassuringly handsome and decisive.

  Half an hour before he was due to leave for the banquet, Harry Lund, spruce in a freshly pressed blue suit, heated milk in the kitchen and dissolved into the glass three strong hypnotic tablets. He carried the glass up to the bedroom.

  “Thought you might like your milk before I left.”

  “Why, how considerate he is.” Norma’s sharp black eyes studied him with mock admiration. “And doesn’t he look dashing tonight!”

  She tossed her cigarette down on an ashtray and drank great draughts of the milk. He kept himself from watching her. He moved around the room pretending to tidy up.

  “Want the window open, dear?”

  “On a night like this? You might help me to the bathroom, though.”

  When she came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, she was already staggering from sleep. She mumbled confusedly as he half-carried her back to the bed and tucked her in. Soon she turned over on her side and began to breathe deeply.

  Carefully Harry Lund arranged his death-trap under the tree, the candle, just the right amount of artificial moss soaked in lighter fluid, at just the right position under a dry limb.

  He lit the candle. Half an hour, maybe. Or more. An hour. The tree would flare up. The curtains would catch. In a matter of moments the room would be an inferno.

  The little candle flame flickered as he tiptoed out of the room.

  While he trudged down the hill to the trolley stop, Harry Lund thought of Frances’ young face flushed with love and gratitude as she unwrapped a prettily packed package.

  “So you didn’t forget my Christmas present after all! Oh, Spring Lilac. My favorite perfume. You shouldn’t have done it. So expensive….”

  The telephone call came just after the banquet had begun. That morning he had casually mentioned the banquet to Mrs. Grant so that the neighbors would know where to find him. It was Grant himself, announcing excitedly: “Come back at once, Lund! Your house is on fire!”

  Feeling important from the drama around him, Harry Lund made breathless excuses and raced for a taxi. As it slithered up the icy hill, he saw fire engines and a milling crowd outside his house. He also saw that, though the flames seemed to be almost extinguished, the upper floor had been completely gutted.

  Warm with dangerous excitement, he got out of the taxi. Someone grabbed his arm and started to pull him across the lawn to the next-door neighbor’s house. He found himself in a brightly lit living room. Norma was lying on a couch.

  Someone was saying: “The smoke woke her up. She managed to crawl out just in time.”

  Norma’s black eyes were fixed on his face, solemn with contrition.

  “Harry, I’m so terribly ashamed. My vile habit of smoking in bed. I fell
asleep and the cigarette must have set fire to the tree….”

  The top floor of the house had been demolished, but downstairs there had been little or no damage. The agent from the insurance company did not question the legitimacy of the fire but let Harry know that the condition of the building warranted payment of less than a third of the total policy. With the increased cost of materials and labor, it would take almost all Harry’s savings to make his home habitable again.

  Owing to the housing shortage, it was impossible to find another place to live. For a short, dismal period, Harry and Norma led a squalorous camping existence on the lower floor of the burnt-out house. Then, by a stroke of luck, their tenants above the drug store moved to another city and they were able to settle in the tiny two-room apartment there.

  Norma could still walk only with difficulty and Dr. Peterson warned that the added shock of the fire should be neutralized by a long rest. But, taking on herself the full blame for the loss of their home, Norma refused to go away or stay in bed. As if in atonement she worked absurd hours in the store, hobbling around with a cane. A few weeks later she collapsed. Dr. Peterson diagnosed a heart condition, prescribed epinephrine, and put her back to bed.

  For Harry Lund life had become grey and sour as the ashes of his destroyed bedroom. Twice, when Norma’s sister Ella dropped in, he was able to slip away and call Frances, but his excuses were even less convincing and her acceptance of them even more frigid. This was very different from his rosy dreams of Spring Lilac and the girl’s flushed gratitude.

  Vain though he was of his attraction to women, Harry Lund realized that, unless something happened soon, he would lose Frances forever.

  As disaster closed in from all sides, Harry Lund’s picture of himself as a martyr took on an immense vividness. Life was pummelling him with blows whose strength was out of all proportion to his deserts. And, in consequence, his determination to finish what he had started grew out of all proportion also. No scheme was too reckless for him to consider. Once, at the poison safe in the store, he made up a capsule of potassium cyanide. Only the weak vestiges of a self-preservation instinct kept him from spilling it that night into Norma’s bouillon.