Don't Open the Door

by Ursula Curtis

  Was Celia often made to feel like this, the mistress of a misbehaving puppy at the obedience trials? “Probably,” said Eve, and added with restraint, “On the other hand, a doctor would want him dressed and driven sixteen miles to the Clinic, where we would wait forever without a scheduled appointment, so maybe . .

  That was one facet of the day. Another was that Eve, a victim of her own impulsive tale about Ambrose’s imminent departure, was forced to employ the time not spent at his beck and call in emptying bureau drawers and closets for every last stitch of his clothing. In this she was spurred on by Iris’s memory: “Didn’t he have a blue sweater, hon? . . . I can only find one of these striped socks . . . This little shirt is perfectly good if you can find me two white buttons.”

  The television set went tirelessly on, Ambrose croaked various demands, Eve toiled away in search of socks and buttons and was called back intermittently for a decision as to whether this or that garment was worth mending. At one point, feeling enormously guilty, she retreated into her bedroom and read the morning paper, turning the pages as noiselessly as a burglar.

  In view of the lack of developments, it was not surprising that the Pulliam and Morley murders had been relegated to an inside page, under “Continue Investigation in Valley Slayings” and “Vandals Strike at Home of Victim’s Husband.” What did surprise Eve was the curiously palliative tone that emanated from the front-page account of the suspect’s apprehension in the candy-store affair. He had been in a Flagstaff jail when Molly Pulliam died, and yet in some manner what emerged from the careful, factual story was that three women had been killed within a short period of time and a fingerprint had finally been left behind. It created the kind of atmosphere in which even sensible people said, “I don’t care, there’s something awfully fishy about it.”

  Eve laid the paper down and gazed at the massed cottonwood leaves, now crisped and browning from the rapidly chilling nights, that still pressed against her window. Was it possible that the murder of the two sisters would ultimately remain unsolved? Yes; you had only to read any newspaper to know that it was eminently possible. Certainly the police inquiries in Colorado, where both Molly and Jennifer had grown up, seemed to have produced nothing.

  . . . Colorado, and the school where a woman related to Richard Morley had sat down to write, but had not completed, a suicide note. Was Henry Conlon aware that this carefully guarded piece of information had been tossed casually to Nina Earl, and in turn to Eve?

  He was, Eve found when he telephoned in midafternoon. He did not say in so many words that he had talked to Nina; he wanted to know, in a voice that sounded both tired and queerly relieved, if he could come by possibly as late as ten o’clock because there was an Advertising Awards dinner.

  “Yes, I’ll be up. I hope Cox-Ivanhoe wins a lot of awards.”

  “Thank you,” said Henry bleakly. “I suppose you know that Mrs. Ivanhoe will be there, and I’ll be in charge.”

  Clara Ivanhoe, widow of the founding partner and a large shareholder in the firm, presented a problem in this annual affair which she insisted on attending. In her seventies, not certifiable but noticeably erratic, she sometimes got so carried away with indignation about awards to rival firms that she thumped her salad plate, with a resultant flying about of slippery greens, and on one terrible occasion she had risen to her feet to begin a denunciatory speech.

  Someone always had to police her, and this year it was Henry. “Good luck,” said Eve.

  Ambrose was unmanned by fever and aspirin and slept peaceably, and the day finally ended. “Thanks as usual, Iris, for repairing us again,” said Eve at five o’clock, the folded check already handed over. She was filled with sudden compunction at the older woman’s drawn look: for the first time in their acquaintance, the wistful little girl inside seemed to have given up and died. “You did much too much today. I never realized that Ambrose and I had so many hems and buttons between us. Things will be better next week, I promise.”

  “Don’t be silly. I don’t know what I’d do without you, in more ways than one,” said Ms, her face fighting briefly. “Say goodbye to the little boy for me, will you, as I probably won’t see him again? I hope he’ll be feeling better in the morning.”

  “I’m sure he will be. I know he’s had measles, so ;t isn’t that, and it doesn’t look like what I remember of mumps.”

  They were both, by now, listening openly and vainly for the clatter of Ned Saxon’s old car. “I wonder if I’d better call?” said Iris presently, when the tall windows had turned a deep steel color against the lamplight. “That darned car—”

  But Ned Saxon arrived while she was at the telephone. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, smiling ruddily on the threshold and rubbing his gloved hands together. “I had a little trouble getting started—I guess the old buggy’s feeling the cold.” His mouth quirked at Eve. “I have half a mind to turn it in and get a Cadillac.”

  “That’s a thought,” said Eve, smiling back, and Iris said with unaccustomed tartness, “Don’t let’s stand here with the cold coming in, the little boy’s sick. Did you ever find out what he was looking for, Eve—his racket, or whatever it was?”

  It was by now a familiar contradiction in Iris that in spite or perhaps because of her lack of enthusiasm for Ambrose, she was scrupulously attentive to all details concerning him. “Oh, his rockles,” said Eve. Aware of the prickly sensitivity of both the Saxons, she avoided looking at Ned. “Yes, it turned out to be an old cloth with a colored patch that he—lost somewhere.”

  “Kids,” commented Ned with an indulgent chuckle. He was obviously feeling the chill in the dark-pearl air; his massive shoulders had moved in a quick shudder. He took his wife’s arm protectively, and after a polite hope that Eve would not contract Ambrose’s malady and a final “See you next week” they were gone.

  Eve brought Ambrose his dinner in bed and sat with him while he consumed it by infinitesimal degrees and only when reminded. His thoughts had reverted, but in a contented way, to the airplane under construction. Even when he inquired, “Is it made yet?” he was not really impatient; he seemed, if anything, a little reluctant to relinquish this drama so soon. Eve assured him that the workers were keeping busy, left him with some marbles to pour noisily back and forth into two plastic cups, and prepared her own dinner.

  Her inner flutteriness was, she informed herself, purely a state of suspense over Jennifer Morley’s involvement with the affair at the Lockwood School years ago; it had nothing to do with Henry Conlon himself. She had seen him two or three times since the afternoon when he had gazed at her with such total familiarity across the failing light in her living room, and each time they had been like two particles on a laboratory slide which, out of some imposed chemical reaction, move delicately about each other but never touch.

  The trouble was that along with the new formality came a new awareness, all the stronger for being concealed. Which was natural enough, thought Eve. He had been through one disastrous experience with marriage, she had been through one disastrous engagement. Neither wanted to be involved so soon again, and both recognized the threat of involvement.

  . . . The rattling of marbles slowed to a trickle and finally stopped. Eve tiptoed into Ambrose’s room, removed the marbles and cups from his bed with infinite care, and switched off the light. It only occurred to her then that it had been a considerable time since she had closed the front door behind the Saxons, and that she had not bolted it.

  She did that now and drew the curtains everywhere, but not with the urgency of a few nights ago. She was not foolish enough to think that the apprehension of a young panic-stricken killer had anything to do with the savagery that had invaded the Valley, but in some subtle way the pressure had relaxed.

  The passage of time was reassuring in itself. Alone with a three-year-old child, Eve must have been vulnerable on countless occasions since hearing the click of the receiver in the Morley house. The very lack of any menace did not suggest to her a deliberate lulling, a
false all-clear while an attack was being mounted.

  Pushing aside a fold of toile, she saw that blackness had descended completely around the little house. Like Molly Pulliam, like Jennifer Morley, she was not, at this particular time, afraid.

  19

  . . . HAD the child seen the shaft of the hammer in the twinkling before it was engulfed in the snatched-up rag—or seeing it, recognized it for what it was? And if he had, what was the word of a three-year-old? He couldn’t read, obviously, and it was unlikely that anyone would have filled him in on the details of a woman bludgeoned to death with a hammer.

  But he was a queer little kid, abnormal in Ned Saxon’s cold judgment, and he had certainly told Eve Quinn at least some of the details of the incident in the tool shed, when he had fastened his attention on the cloth and wanted it back. “You’re not supposed to be in here at all, boy,” Ned had told him, “and if you don’t want the seat of your pants warmed you’ll get out right now.”

  “I want my rockles,” the child had said, scarlet and stubborn and frightened—at the threat of a spanking, Ned had thought at the time.

  “Your what? Oh, this thing. Let me tell you, young fellow, you’re lucky I found it, it’s crawling with deadly germs. Tell you what, we’ll leave it locked up in here and it’ll die all by itself.” Ned had made a swift feinting throw with the rag, restored it to his pocket while the child was still staring round-eyed into a corner, bustled him out of the tool shed.

  And the child had tumbled off in the sunlight with considerable speed. Ned knew from Iris of his preoccupation with germs; what he did not know was the peculiar horror of the other concept he had planted—the solitary sickening, and death in darkness, of a piece of cloth.

  The cloth which was to shroud the hammer head from any traces that washing might miss.

  Obviously Ambrose had not forgotten, and Eve Quinn, speaking of the incident tonight, had carefully averted her glance from Ned. Was she asking in her mind why a man who so conscientiously accounted for his every footstep on her property (and she had never guessed at the iron malice behind all that forelock-tugging) had made an independent visit to the tool shed? Would she ultimately connect that with the vain police search for the weapon that had killed Molly Pulliam?

  No, because she would not be allowed the time.

  In spite of his relatively short acquaintance with her, Ned Saxon hated Eve Quinn with all the ferocity of his hatred for the Pulliam and Morley women, with some added embellishments.

  There was the galling matter of her youth—he guessed her, correctly, to be about twenty-five—while she was in a position to hand out work and careless checks to a woman old enough to be her grandmother.

  There was the fact of her single state: in a region of severe economic stress, while older men like Ned Saxon haunted employment offices for jobs in order to support their wives, Eve Quinn had contrived a very good salary on the strength of her looks and the glib products of a typewriter.

  And there was the child, whom his wife was expected to toady to and tidy up after, a boy who thought it entertaining, as an especially cruel taunt, to throw horned toads into Iris’s lap. Even then, such were Eve Quinn’s powers of deceit that Iris said thoughtfully, “She doesn’t seem to spank him very often, but somehow or other she’s able to handle him . . .”

  Now, driving to the supermarket as usual on this day of the week, Ned reflected that he had been given another omen in that parting exchange on Eve Quinn’s doorstep. It was as if she had been delivered into his hands.

  The Saxons had dinner early, as usual, and Iris forewent her frequent wry apology for their being so unfashionable. She seemed to have aged ten years in a few days, and Ned, washing and drying the dishes, saw superimposed on her strained face an image of Eve Quinn, young and erect, lamplight from the comfortable pretty room behind her fringing her fair hair with gold as she stood in the doorway . . .

  A half carton of milk went crashing and spilling into the sink. Iris glanced, and said as though close to tears, “Oh, no. That’s the last of the milk.”

  “I’ll go get some, it won’t take me ten minutes.” Ned hung up the dishtowel, rolled down his sleeves.

  “We can do without it till morning,” said Iris—sternly, for her, because it was Ned who occasionally woke in the night and could only calm his stomach with milk. “We have some soda crackers.”

  “Nonsense.” Ned was by now into his half-respectable topcoat, which had last been aired at Jennifer Morley’s funeral. “Damp out tonight, I really feel the cold,” he explained, taking the car keys from his customary old jacket.

  “I don’t think you should go out,” said Iris with a peculiar fixity. “I really don’t, Ned. You had trouble with the car, coming to get me—”

  “The engine was just cold,” said Ned, who had had no trouble at all; a terrible suspicion that had flashed all through him ebbed comfortably away. “I’ll give it a try, and if it doesn’t start up at once I won’t go.”

  Iris heard the stumble and catch of the motor, the rattle of the car as it moved away. She put her flattened hands hard against her cheeks, staring at nothing, and presently, like a woman under hypnosis, she walked to the telephone and dialed.

  “Eve? Sorry to bother you, and you’ll think I’m an idiot, but we passed a couple of police cars with their lights flashing in your area, and I wondered if—you know, you’re all locked and bolted and so on.”

  “Yes, I am,” said Eve Quinn’s voice, “as of a few minutes ago, but thanks for reminding me.”

  “What I’d do, and what Ned advises,” said Iris, her tone sharpening, “is turn off maybe a few of your lights—after all, you’re known to be alone there—and don’t open the door tonight to anyone. I mean that, Eve, because it gave me the funniest feeling, seeing those police cars . . .”

  Ned Saxon walked briskly away from his car, its hood up and illuminated by a street light, familiar to most of the people in this neighborhood. Three blocks south, on one of the main streets, he entered a used-car lot.

  He had been here yesterday, wearing a soft hat, as he did tonight, which did not entirely conceal his hair but made it less noticeable. He had inspected a modest dark blue Ford with lukewarm interest and the disparaging comment that he could get a comparable model for forty dollars less at—

  Here he had produced his wallet and opened it in apparent search for a notation. The bills from Molly Pulliam’s purse, exhumed from the chair with the broken spring and converted into ones except for a ten allowed to show its corner, made a respectable bulge. The salesman grew more affable at once, whisking the door open with an unabashed flourish on an interior which had been ill-treated. Would Mr. Turner care to take the Ford out for a run?

  Ned Saxon had said that he hadn’t time this afternoon but might very well be back with his sister, for whom the car was intended. He departed with the conviction that here, if he should want it in the next few days, was free anonymous transportation while his own car was visibly elsewhere.

  Business was brisker tonight at the used-car lot; the salesman greeted Ned as Mr. Turner, handed over the keys to the Ford, and hastened back to a couple interested in a station wagon. Three minutes after that Ned was in the little market where they occasionally bought emergency items; having borrowed the phone he told Iris ruefully that he should have taken her advice about the car. “It’s at the comer of Melrose and Sixth. I’ll have another try at it and then see if I can get someone to give me a push—if I leave it there all night there won’t be a single tire on it by morning. I just didn’t want you to worry.”

  The young clerk at the counter rang up the sale of a quart of milk and shook his head in sympathy. “They could carry away the chassis they’d do it, some of these kids around here,” he said, and then, “Getting real cold out, I hear.”

  Ned made a mock gesture of wiping his forehead. “Maybe if you’re not hiking it is.” He felt so elated at the smooth running of things, and so drawn to this spotty lad who could bear out his
story in the unlikely event that it ever needed bearing out, that he was actually reluctant to leave. But once he was in the Ford again, the dark, modest, secret-keeping Ford, he had to watch his speed.

  Improvisation was best; he knew that now with the absolute and dazzled certainty of a novice gambler. His watch, held briefly close to the dashboard, said eight twenty-five.

  Eve came away from the telephone faintly, unfairly indignant at Iris Saxon. The other woman was only being kind and overanxious, as usual, but to someone alone with a sick child the well-meant warning had the effect of a stone flung shatteringly into a pond which had just managed to piece its reflections together again.

  It should have been just the opposite—surely patrol cars made a reassuring presence—but it was not. Eve found herself listening edgily to a stillness which now, thanks to Iris, seemed false instead of tranquil.

  Even Ambrose, sleeping snorelessly, seemed part of the conspiracy. What was called for here was either an extremely good book or something really engrossing on television. It was far too early to expect Henry Conlon; although Eve had never been to the awards dinner, she suspected that the speeches were barely under way. And it was not a function from which Henry could slip unobtrusively away; he had to keep an eye on aberrant Mrs. Ivanhoe.

  For reasons which she would not have dreamed of divulging openly to herself, reasons connected with a cunning mask of sound, Eve did not go near the television set. Instead, although she knew from past rereadings that the only pleasant character in it was shortly to be felled by an elm tree, she picked up her English novel and settled herself in a corner of the couch.

  Instantly, as though she had been watched and patiently waited for to do just this, there was an echoing thud from outside.

  Eve was violently on her feet, frozen there with her book in an iron grip so as not to betray her position by so much as the whisper of a page. In one compartment of her mind she was trying to assure her own panicked senses that the thud had been an impersonal accident and was nothing to do with her; in another she thought wildly, If it happens again I’ll call the Sheriff. (And tell him what? That I hear noises outside? And even if they come, which they probably won’t, how long—?)