The bride wore black

by Cornell Woolrich

  “Oh, what’s the difference? We’ll get another pack for tomorrow night.”

  “Yes, and don’t forget it’s your turn to bring them in next. I supplied this one.”

  “All right, here goes. We’ll have to open the window again. If the smoke gets out in the hall and old Fraser comes along—”

  The one in the chair gave a deep sigh that buckled her in the middle momentarily. “Why do you have to be old before you meet anyone thrilling, before anything exciting happens to you?”

  “She’s still thinking about him:”

  “How do you know he isn’t married, and with about thirty-two kids?”

  “I know he isn’t, he couldn’t be.”

  “Why couldn’t he?”

  “Because it wouldn’t be fair.”

  “Poor thing, I hate to see her suffer so.”

  The one on the bed said impatiently, “Oh, all she does is talk about it, and it ends there. If she ever met him face to face she wouldn’t know what to do, she’d probably drop through the floor.”

  The chair sprawler reared defiantly. “Is that so? I’d show you a thing or two. I’d have him eating out of the hollow of my hand in no time.”

  Her detractor on the bed taunted, “I bet you wouldn’t even get past the front door.”

  “I bet I would, if I ever made up my mind to! How much do you want to bet?”

  “How much do you want to bet?”

  “IT! bet you my whole next month’s allowance from home!”

  The one on the bed eyed her vindictively. “All right, mine against yours. And you either go through with it or keep still about him from now on. I’m sick of hearing about him.”

  “Yes, get it out of your system once and for all,” one of the more sympathetically inclined listeners suggested. “It’s no use just going on pining like this.”

  The skeptic on the bed said, “How’ll we know she’s telling the truth when she gets back?”

  “in bring proof back with me.”

  “Bring one of his neckties,” one of them suggested jocularly.

  “No, that’s no good, I know something better. She has to bring a snapshot of the two of them standing together.”

  “And his arm has to be around her,” crowed the windowsill sitter. “We want our money’s worth!”

  “Huh!” snorted the man killer in the chair self-confidently. “That’ll be putting it mild; the best parts 11 never get on the snapshot. If I ever really go to work on him, hell probably follow me back here on the end of a leash.”

  “How’ll you get away from here?”

  “I’ve got everything thought out. I’ve been daydreaming about it for the longest time, in French class and places like that, so I know just what to do. You

  know how scared stiff Miss Fraser is of epidemics—if you show two red dots on your face she can’t get rid of you fast enough. And my people are away right now—”

  “You better see that you win,” one of the neutrals commiserated, “or you’ll be broke for thirty days straight —and don’t expect us to lend you any pocket money.”

  The one bunched on the floor flew apart suddenly. “Fraser!” she hissed warningly. “I hear her step in the hall!”

  The room dissolved into a flux of flurried motion, in which they all darted at cross angles to one another. Two of them made for the communicating door to the adjoining room and fled back to their own quarters. The one who had been on the windowsill dove for the recently vacated bed and disappeared with a great welling up of covers.

  The one who had been in the chair was left stuck with the cigarette. She snapped out the light and its red ember made hectic spirals around in the dark, in search of a landing place.

  “Take this! Take this!” she whispered frenziedly.

  “Kow take it!” the unfeeling reply came back. “You were the last one holding it.”

  It described a parabola out the open window, the bedcovers billowed up a second time, and then there was a sort of heaving silence. An instant later a grimly vigilant head was outlined against the insidiously opened hall door. It sniffed the air suspiciously, remained poised an uncertain moment or two, then finally withdrew, defeated but unconvinced.

  When it had inspected the adjoining room, as well, and gone on from there, a whispered conversation in the latter was eagerly resumed.

  “Don’t you think there’s something funny about her? I mean, she’s not like the rest of us, she seems older.”

  “Yes, I’ve noticed that, too.”

  “After all, there’s nobody here really knows anything about her. Her parents didn’t even bring her here when she registered; I heard Miss Eraser say her application was received by mail and she was enrolled on the strength of a recommendation. Who is she? Where did she come from? She suddenly plops down in the middle of us from nowhere and in the middle of the term, too.”

  “Well, she was transferred.”

  “Oh, that’s what she says.”

  “Nobody’s ever seen her people. And she never gets letters from home like the rest of us.”

  “Why is she so insane about that silly writer? I don’t see anything so wonderful about him.”

  “He has a country place not far from here; maybe that’s why she came here—to be near him.”

  “Maybe she’s not a schoolgirl at all.”

  There was a moment of silent, shivery conjecture.

  “Then what is she?”

  HOLMES

  HOLMES’S ROADSTER WAS CRAWLING along at his usual snail’s pace, hugging the extreme outside of the road, German shepherd stiffly erect in the seat beside him, when the taxi flashed by, going the same way he was. He habitually drove in low like that, to help his thinking. He found he could get quite a lot of it done when he was out alone in the car for an airing, just drifting along aimlessly.

  He couldn’t be positive, of course, but the cab had seemed to him to have just the one girl sitting in the back of it. The reason he figured it that way was the back of her head occupied the exact center of the small oval glass insert in the rear, and when there are two or more passengers they are usually more evenly distributed on the seat than that.

  By the time he neared the cutoff that led into his own place, the cab should have been long out of sight, at the clip it had been going, but to his surprise it was still in view ahead as he crested the last rise. It was dawdling along erratically now, as though experiencing a contradiction of orders on its passenger’s part.

  Just as it came opposite the cutoff, with its warning, T. Holmes, Private Road, No Thoroughfare, stretched across it, three acoustically perfect screams winged up from it. The next moment, the door flung outward and the figure of a girl either jumped or was flung bodily onto

  the soft turf edging the road. She rolled over once in a complete somersault, then came to a stop right side up. The taxi put on speed and spurted down the road, red tail glowering vindictively.

  Holmes glided to a stop opposite her a moment later and got out. She was in a sideways sitting position now, clutching her instep with both hands. The German shepherd undutifully remained in the car, as though that was his first love, rather than his master.

  “Hurt yourself?” Holmes bent over her, took her below the arms and helped her to her feet. She immediately teetered against him.

  “I can’t stand up on one of them. What’ll I do?”

  “Better come into my place a minute. It’s right down the way there.”

  He helped her into the car, drove the short distance down the private road, helped her out again in front of a typical remodeled-for-city-occupancy farmhouse. The dog didn’t have sense enough to follow even then, until Holmes had turned and growled at it, “Come on in, you fool. What do you want to do, stay out all night?” The dog leaped over the side of the car and approached the door independently, with an air of not belonging to anyone.

  A manservant opened to the clomp of the Colonial knocker affixed to the door. He greeted Holmes with the familiarity bred of long yea
rs of association. “Well, did you get a bang-up finish for that chapter troubling your mind?”

  “I did have one,” said Holmes somewhat moodily, “but it was knocked right out of my head again. This young lady’s had a mishap. Help me get her to a chair, then go out and put the car in.”

  The two of them helped her down a long pine-paneled living room that ran the entire depth of the house, with a gigantic conical fireplace of cobbled stones set into one side, from floor to ceiling. That is, the trim was ceiling high; the aperture itself was about shoulder height or a little less.

  She attempted to stop and sink down when she had reached a large overstuffed chair standing out before it, with its back to the salmon-pink glow. The manservant quickly gave her a little hitch onward, toward another a few paces away. “Not that one—that’s his inspiration chair.”

  Seated, Holmes studied her by the firelight, aided by the watery glow of light from the ceiling. The electricity was obviously generated on the premises, judging by its insufficiency.

  She was young, and the mere fact that everything about her tried to convey the exact opposite impression showed how young she really was. Eighteen; nineteen at the very outside. Her hair had probably been golden when she was a child, it was darkening to chestnut now, but with golden overtones still lingering in it. Her eyes were blue.

  She had acquired, if nothing else, a generous coating of leaves and twigs in her roll by the roadside just now. She brushed at them sketchily, almost as though she hated to efface them until she was sure he had taken note of what bad shape she was in.

  “What happened?” he said as soon as Sam had left to see about the car.

  “The usual thing. Whenever you see a girl come out of a car without waiting for it to stop, you can draw your own conclusions.”

  “But it was a city cab, wasn’t it?” It occurred to him it was a little far out for that sort of thing.

  “And the ideas in it were city ideas.” She didn’t seem to want to talk about it any further.

  “I guess we’d better have a doctor in to look at that foot of yours.”

  She didn’t show any particular eagerness at the suggestion. “Maybe it’ll go down if I just stay off it.”

  “It hasn’t gone up any, from what I can see,” he pointed out.

  She withdrew it a little behind the first one, so that its outline wasn’t so distinct.

  Sam had come back. ”Sam, who’s the nearest doctor to us?”

  “Doc Johnson, I reckon. He don’t know us. I can try him if you want.”

  “It’s pretty late—maybe he won’t want to come,” she mentioned.

  Sam returned to report, “Hell be here in half an hour.”

  She said, “Oh,” sort of flatly.

  After a while, while they were waiting, she said, “I’ve always wondered what you were like.”

  “Oh, then you know who I am?”

  “Who doesn’t? I’ve read you from A to Z.” She sighed soulfully. “Imagine sitting here in the same room with you!”

  He turned away. “Cut that stuff out.”

  “And at least you’re like you should be,” she went on, undeterred. “I mean so many of these people that write red-blooded outdoor stuff are skinny anemic little runts wrapped in blankets. You at least cut a figure that a girl can get her teeth into.”

  “You oughta be poured over waffles,” he let her know disgustedly.

  Her eyes roamed the raftered ceiling, flickering with flame reflections like sea waves. “You live in this big place all alone?”

  “I come out here to work.” If there was a gentle hint in that, it glanced off her.

  “What a fireplace; I bet you could stand up on the inside of it.”

  “They used to smoke whole hams and turkeys inside it in the old days; the hooks are still set into the inside of the chimney. It’s almost too big, takes it too long to draw and get heat up. I tried to cut it down by relining it, putting in a dummy top and sides of zinc.”

  “Oh, yes, I see that chink that seems to border it all around; I thought it was a fault in the stones.”

  Sam was thrusting at the fire with a heavy iron poker when the doctor’s knock sounded at the door. He stood it up against the stone facing, went out to admit him. Holmes followed him into the hall to greet the doctor. He thought he heard her give a sobbing little moan of excruciation behind him, but the doctor’s noisy ingress drowned it out.

  When they came in a moment later, her face was contorted and all the color seemed to have left it. The iron poker lay horizontal on the floor, as though it had toppled down of its own weight.

  “Let’s have a look,” the doctor said. He felt gently with his fingers, and she winced, gave an inarticulate little cry. The doctor clicked his tongue. “You’ve got a bad contusion there, I should say so! But it’s not a sprain, more like one of the little cartilages is smashed, from something heavy dropping on it. Wrap it up in cotton wool. You’ll have to spare that foot for a day or two, give it a chance to mend.”

  Even while the overflow wrung from her by pain slowly trickled out of the comer of each eye, the look she gave Holmes seemed to hold something of triumph in it.

  Afterward, when the doctor had gone, he said, “I don’t know how we’re going to do it. The station’s a forty-minute pull from here, and I don’t even know if there are any more trains in tonight. I could drive you all the way in to the city myself, but we’d get there about daylight.”

  “Can’t I stay?” she said wistfully. “I won’t bother you.”

  “It isn’t that. I’m single and I’m alone in the house. Even Sam sleeps out over the garage.”

  “Och.” She tossed that off like a puffball. “The dog’ll be chaperon enough.”

  “Well, er, won’t your people worry about you if you stay away overnight?”

  Something like a choked laugh sounded in her throat. “Oh, sure, three days from now. They’re in New Mexico. By the time they hear I wasn’t home, HI be home all over again.”

  He gave Sam a look and Sam gave him one. “Fix up that ground-floor room that has the cot in it for the lady, Sam,” he said finally.

  “Freddy Cameron’s the name,” the childish-looking figure ensconced in the chair supplied. “Short for Frederica, you know.”

  They sat there in silence, waiting for Sam to get the room ready. Holmes sat staring down at the floor, she sat staring at him with all the unconcealed candor of a child.

  “Why do you keep all those rifles and shotguns stacked up in the corner?”

  “Because I do a lot of hunting when I’m not working.”

  “Are they loaded?”

  “Sure they’re loaded.” He waited a moment and then he added, “They give a terrible kickback when they’re fired.”

  “G’night, Mr. Holmes and lady,” Sam called on his way out. The front door closed after him.

  The silence became almost cottony, the sort of thing that can be tasted in the mouth.

  “Why don’t we say something?” she suggested after about a quarter of an hour.

  His eyes flicked over her, then down to the floor again, for answer. There was something wary about the slight deflection.

  She bunched her shoulders defensively, looked behind her. “Something about this place, it gets you. It’s like— something was going to happen.”

  “It’s like,” he concurred curtly, and got up and left her without anything further. He moved up the stairs to the upper floor with almost painful deliberation, head bowed as though he were listening intently.

  A cooling log ash exploded in the fireplace; his shoulders squared off, then relaxed again. Then the heavy, oily stillness came rolling back again and obliterated the momentary sound. His door closed, up above somewhere.

  * * *

  Sam CAME IN and found them sitting at the table together.

  “What’s this?” he cried with mock outrage that had an undercurrent of pique to it.

  “The Number-Two Boy rustled it up for him this morning.
But she has no luck, he won’t eat.”

  “He’s thinking of a plot,” Sam suggested.

  Holmes gave him a startled look, as though the remark was disconcertingly shrewd. He filled a saucer from his cup, put it on the floor. The German shepherd came over and noisily siphoned it up.

  “Well, is the plot finished yet?” she wanted to know presently.

  “Incomplete,” Holmes said. He had been watching the dog. “But I’ll get it later.” He took up his cup, drained it, held it out to her for more.

  He got up, threw her a brief, “See you tonight,” and went into the living room.

  “What does he mean, ‘See you tonight’?” she asked Sam blankly. “What am I supposed to be, invisible until then?”

  “He’s going to produce now.” Sam went in after him, as though his presence was required to set things in order. She watched from the doorway. Sam shifted the “inspiration chair,” cocked his head at it, readjusted the chair with haidine precision.

  “Does that have to be in the exact same place each time?” she asked incredulously. “I suppose if it was two inches out of line he couldn’t think straight.”

  “Shh!” Sam silenced her imperiously. “If it ain’t even with that diagonal pattern of the carpet, it distracts him.”

  Holmes was standing looking out the window, already lost to the world. He made an abrupt backhand gesture of dismissal. “Get out! Here it comes now.”

  Sam tiptoed out with almost ludicrous haste, frenziedly motioning her before him. She stood there a moment outside the closed door, unabashedly eavesdropping. Holmes’s voice filtered through in a droning singsong, talking into the dictating machine: “Chinook mushed on through the snow wastes, face a mask of vengeance under his fur parka—”

  Sam wouldn’t leave her in peace even there. “Don’t stand this close, you’re liable to make the floor creak.”

  She turned away reluctantly, limping on her one slippered foot. “So that’s how it’s done. And there must never be the slightest variation in detail, not even in the way his chair stands.”

  Sam poised himself, watch in hand, outside the door, one fist upraised in striking position. He waited until the sixtieth second had ticked off, then brought his fist down. “Five o’clock!” he called warningly.