Seducer

by Flora, Fletcher

  Brad was a fair actor, having had much practice, and he managed a creditable expression of surprise.

  “She is a student of mine. A very bad one, I might add, and nothing more. Where on earth did you get the fantastic idea that there was something between us?”

  “I was told, and it’s the truth. Don’t lie to me, Brad, for it will do you no good.”

  “I suppose, then, that I’m not even going to be allowed to defend myself.”

  “You could only defend yourself by lying. It’s no good.”

  “In that case, I must ask you what you are going to do and what you expect me to do.”

  “What I’m going to do is something I’ll decide. What you do is your business. I don’t care. I no longer care. Do you know what I used to hope? I used to hope that you would lose your hair or your teeth or become crippled and ugly, anything like that, because I thought that then you might be reconciled to me and what I had to give you, that I might be enough for the man you might become. But I don’t suppose it would really have made any difference, or that you could have changed for any reason from what you are and what you have to be. No matter now, because I don’t care. I no longer care. Liar. Cheat. Profligate.”

  He retrieved his briefcase and stood up slowly, clutching the case tightly to control the trembling of his hands.

  “Thank you very much for your opinion,” he said, angry and embittered and also uneasy.

  “It’s not opinion. It’s truth.”

  “Then I must leave the house.”

  “Not unless you wish. I’ll leave myself in a few days. I’ll go away somewhere. Perhaps to Europe. In the spring I’ll return and sell the house and go away again for good. You are to be out by that time.”

  “So it’s all cancelled out. You and me. Our life and my career in this place.”

  “Yes. Cancelled out.” Madelaine’s tone was blunt and final.

  “I’ve no doubt that you could ruin me completely if you choose.”

  “I may choose. I’ll have to decide if the satisfaction would be worth the dirty publicity it would entail.” She stood up and walked without pausing to the library door. “Now I’m going upstairs to my room. I have a sick headache.” She pressed against her eyes with a thumb and finger, holding to the knob of the door and swaying a little on her feet. “I think I’ll take a sedative and go directly to bed. Wanda is leaving early this evening. You’ll have to manage dinner for yourself.”

  She was gone then, the door closed behind her. Brad sagged into the chair from which he had risen as if his bones had suddenly dissolved and left him limp. His face was gray and his lips were bloodless. For the first time in his life he looked old. Old and sick.

  14

  AT SEVEN O’CLOCK, Brad went upstairs and tried Madeline’s door. It was not locked, and he pushed it a few inches into darkness and stood listening intently to the sound of deep and languorous breathing.

  It seemed to him, standing in the dimly lighted hall at the threshold of the black room, that it was the whole house breathing, not merely Madelaine, the walls swelling and contracting to the rhythm of quiet breath against a quicker and barely perceptible drumming of a giant pulse.

  Pushing the door farther into the room, admitting a swath of light from the hall behind him, he stepped into the light and out of it into darkness and made his way silently, after standing still for a moment while the pupils of his eyes adjusted, to the bed where Madelaine lay.

  There was a tiny night lamp on her bedside table, and he turned this on with a soft click of the switch, the light fanning out to fashion in the darkness a small perimeter that encompassed the face of the sleeping woman.

  Madelaine did not stir. She lay on her back with her hair spread upon the pillow. Her mouth was slightly open. Her breasts rose and fell to the deep and languorous cadence of her breathing and the breathing of the house.

  She was heavily sedated, drugged in sleep and defenseless against all device. She would sleep this way for hours, and she had made in the end a fatal error. Having known her husband for what he was, she had failed to understand what he could, when driven, become.

  Switching off the night light, Brad turned and left the room, closing the door behind him and standing for a full minute leaning against it in the hall, his own pulse thundering in his heart and head now that a decision had been made.

  There had been no decision minutes before, when he had ascended the stairs compulsively. But he had known instantly, standing beside the bed in the dark room behind him, that Madelaine must die for his sake. It was not, he felt, so much a decision which he had made himself in that instant as a decision that had been made long ago without his connivance, and which he must now accept as part of an order of things he could not change.

  Pushing away from the door, he went downstairs and into the library, where he dialed a number that rang a bell in the littered little apartment where Maggie lived.

  The bell rang three times, bringing no response. He was about to hang up with a feeling of reprieve, the order of things having been changed after all, when suddenly, just after its beginning, the fourth ring was cut off, and Maggie’s voice came on. It had the lazy, mutilated sound that a voice has when it is heard through a yawn.

  “Hello.”

  “Maggie? This is Brad. Are you alone?”

  “Yes. All alone. I was lying and wondering what to do, and I went to sleep. Would you like to see me, darling? Do you want me to meet you?”

  “Not tonight. I have a departmental faculty meeting to attend.”

  “Couldn’t we meet afterward? I want so much to meet you.”

  “No. Not tonight. Listen to me, Maggie. We’re in trouble.”

  “Trouble? Did you say trouble? Why are you talking so softly? I can hardly hear you.”

  He became aware then that he had been whispering into the mouthpiece, not because it was a necessary precaution in a house that was empty, except for himself and the sleeping Madelaine, but only because he was reacting instinctively to the abortive influence of guilt. This struck him as being a dangerous sign, and he made a conscious effort to speak normally. His voice, however, in spite of the effort, was still conspiratorially low.

  “Madelaine knows about me. Someone told her.”

  “Knows? Did you say she knows? How could that be, darling, when we’ve been so careful and clever?”

  “As I said, someone told her. She had a visitor this afternoon.”

  She was silent, the open wire singing softly between them. There was in the singing sound of the wire a kind of incongruous deadliness, like a murderer humming in the midst of his work. She was apparently thinking at the other end of the wire, drawing a conclusion from what he had said. Finally, after almost half a minute, she expressed the conclusion succinctly.

  “That God-damn Buddy!” she said.

  “Just how much does Buddy know? Have you told him anything?”

  “Certainly not. Buddy doesn’t need to be told things. He finds them out by being a sneak and a spy.”

  “Well, he has put us in a vulnerable position. What are we going to do about him?”

  “Don’t worry about Buddy. I know how to handle him. What’s more important is what we’re going to do about Madelaine.”

  “Whatever it is, it will have to be done quickly. She’s going away in a few days.”

  “For good?” Maggie queried.

  “Until spring. She intends to have a divorce when she returns.”

  “Really? That would be too bad.”

  “Yes, it would. It would be disastrous.”

  “Are you calling from home? Is she there now?”

  “She’s upstairs asleep,” Brad informed her. “She’s under sedation.”

  “You mean she’s taken something to make her sleep?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Will she sleep soundly for quite a long time?” Maggie asked, sudden eagerness in her voice.

  “For hours. Until morning at least.”

 
The wire sang softly again between them, the murderer humming, and each of them knew what was in the other’s mind, although neither expressed it directly — the understanding of what must be done now or never, thanks to Buddy, the necessary disposition of Madelaine which might, even tomorrow, be too late to be any longer necessary or beneficial.

  “Did you say you’re going to some kind of meeting?” Maggie asked.

  “Yes. A departmental faculty meeting.”

  “When are you going?”

  “The meeting’s for eight. I’ll leave here a little earlier.”

  “Will you be late returning?”

  “Some of us will stop off somewhere for coffee and a snack,” Brad told her. “It’s routine. I’d guess that I won’t be home before eleven. Possibly after.”

  “Maybe it would be helpful if I were to call on Madelaine while you’re gone. Do you think so?”

  “I did think so, but now I’m not sure. What about Buddy?”

  “Nothing about him. He’ll be sorry for the trouble he’s caused, and I know how to prevent him from causing any more.” Maggie’s voice was grim and controlled.

  “He’ll certainly suspect the truth,” Brad warned.

  “I doubt it. He’s too stupid. I keep telling you not to worry about him.”

  “Nevertheless, perhaps we’d better wait a while.”

  “Perhaps. If you want to lose everything that you might otherwise have. After you have given her time to make different arrangements about her money, there will be little purpose, as I see it, in doing anything whatever.”

  “Are you sure you can manage it?” Brad asked nervously, a cold sweat starting from the skin of his forehead.

  “Of course I’m sure. I can manage practically anything I set my mind to. There’s simply no use in talking about it. You do as I say, and I’ll do the rest.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Simply leave the house dark and the back door unlocked. You had also better leave something for me to use. Leave it just inside on the floor. A hammer or something. It will be necessary to avoid making noise. Besides I don’t believe I’m strong enough to manage without using something.

  “Good God!” Brad exclaimed. “It sounds horrible when you put it like that.”

  “Well, it isn’t exactly pleasant when you face up to it, but I don’t see why you should be so squeamish when I’m the one who will do all the work,” Maggie told him with a terrible and frightening practicality.

  “All right. I suppose it must be done. I’ll do as you say.”

  “Good. As you see, there’s hardly anything for you to do. You must try very hard, however, not to seem nervous or disturbed at your meeting. It might be recalled as odd in view of what will be known later.”

  “I’ll do my part all right.”

  “Of course you will. I’m sure you’ll behave admirably. But now we must stop talking. You will need to leave soon to get to your meeting. Good-by, darling.”

  Brad said good-by and hung up. His hands were shaking again, and he laced the fingers together to stop the shaking. It was almost seven-thirty-five, and he would have to hurry.

  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 t
o 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.