The Menace Within

by Ursula Curtiss

  AMANDA MORELY HAD A FLASH OF FEAR WHEN SHE WENT INTO HER AUNT’S EMPTY DARKENED HOUSE, UNREASONING FEAR BECAUSE SHE DID NOT SUSPECT THAT BELOW HER, IN A SECRET ROOM, ELLIE PEALE’S KILLER WAS PACING WITH ANGRY IMPATIENCE. IN FACT NEITHER AMANDA NOR HER AUNT, WHO HAD BEEN RUSHED TO THE HOSPITAL THAT AFTERNOON WITH A DISABLING STROKE, HAD KNOWN THE CLEVERLY CONCEALED BOMB SHELTER EXISTED. ONLY HARVEY SWEET, PETTY CRIMINAL AND PART-TIME HANDYMAN, REMEMBERED IT WAS THERE, THE PERFECT HIDING PLACE FOR THE KILLER, HIS HALF BROTHER CLAUDE.

  THE INEXPLICABLE DISAPPEARANCE OF ELLIE PEALE, A YOUNG SUPERMARKET CLERK, WAS WIDELY FEATURED IN THE NEWS. EVEN IF THE GIRL’S BODY WERE NOT FOUND, IT WOULD BE PRUDENT FOR HER MURDERER TO GET OUT OF ALBUQUERQUE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. IF ALL WENT AS HARVEY HAD ARRANGED, CLAUDE WOULD LEAVE THE SHELTER THAT NIGHT AND BE IN ANOTHER STATE BY MORNING. THEN AMANDA APPEARED, CUTTING OFF HIS ESCAPE. BECAUSE SHE WAS TAKING CARE OF A FRIEND’S TWO-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, SHE COULD NOT BE LURED FROM THE HOUSE. SOMEHOW THE FORMIDABLE BROTHERS WOULD HAVE TO PREVENT HER FROM WRECKING THEIR PLANS. BUT AMANDA, PREOCCUPIED WITH THE CRISES IN HER OWN LIFE, WAS BLIND TO THE SIGNS OF DANGER.

  THE MENACE WITHIN IS A SPELLBINDING NOVEL OF LOVE AND FEAR, OF THE TERRIFYING EXPERIENCES OF A YOUNG WOMAN AND OF THE PEOPLE WHO IN VARIOUS UNEXPECTED WAYS ARE CONCERNED WITH HER DESPERATE SITUATION.

  Copyright © 1979 by Ursula Curtiss

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Curtiss, Ursula Reilly.

  The menace within.

  I. Title.

  PZ3.C94875Me [PS3503.U915] 813’.5‘4 78–13361

  ISBN 0-396–07620–3

  For my sister, Mary McMullen

  Chapter 1

  No doubt because of her function here, the nurse on duty at the intensive-care unit desk had somewhat the appearance of a bulldog adorned with lipstick and glasses. “Are you a relative?”

  Amanda Morley had often wondered about the real usefulness of such a question, but in this atmosphere she only said obediently, “Yes. I’m Mrs. Balsam’s niece.”

  The nurse made a decisive tick on a list in front of her, presumably so as to exclude any other would-be visitors, and tipped her white-capped head indicatively. “Room six twelve, at the end of the corridor.”

  Apart from a policeman sitting on a straight chair outside a closed door midway along, there was none of the emergency atmosphere—doctors clustered in consultation, plasma-laden trolleys being pushed at speed —that Amanda had somehow expected in this part of the hospital, with the busy brilliance of the intensive-care unit behind her. Still, she tiptoed on the glossy black-and-white tile, gazing steadfastly ahead of her because somewhere nearby, surely visible if she looked, someone was crying quietly.

  Mixed with her own anxiety was a cowardly streak of dread, even though the doctor had warned her. She arranged her face consciously, trying for an expression of fond but brisk concern—nothing to be really alarmed about here—and tapped lightly on the partially open door of 612 and went in.

  It was a small room, scarcely more than a generous cubicle, filled with an indefinable aura which, if liquefied and bottled, would be labeled “Crisis.” Amanda didn’t know what measures had been taken nearly three hours earlier, when her aunt had been rushed here by ambulance; now, there was some kind of sinister apparatus under the bed and, at its head, a stand holding intravenous solution. The nurse who was checking its control, blocking the patient from view, turned at Amanda’s entrance.

  “Hi,” she said brightly and at normal pitch. “Isn’t it cold out? And that wind. I was just telling Mrs. Balsam she isn’t missing a thing in the way of weather.”

  She was young, but obviously knew what she was about; without winking or grimacing she had struck the note. She turned back to the bed. “Comfortable now? I’ll leave you alone with your company for a little while, okay?”

  Rhetorical questions, because since her sudden stroke Jane Balsam had been unable to speak.

  The nurse departed. Amanda walked the few steps to the bed, bent and kissed her aunt’s cheek, said as she unbuttoned her coat, “Well, this is a pretty kettle of fish.”

  It was a talisman kind of phrase—as a family, the Morleys had tended to avert tears by a near levity which frequently shocked other people—and the unparalyzed left corner of Mrs. Balsam’s mouth tried to acknowledge it. Her eyes could not.

  Amanda sat down and began to talk matter-of-factly. She would have been here earlier if she’d known, but of course Dr. Simms didn’t have her office number and hadn’t been able to reach her until she got home. “So I didn’t stop to pick up nightgowns and cologne and things. I’ll bring those in the morning.”

  The doctor had prepared her for the stony downpulling of the right side of her aunt’s face, and even the look of intense fear. She’s very frightened about her condition, and with good reason, I’m afraid. She’s sixty-seven, and I’ve been after her about her blood pressure for years. Of course, twelve hours or twenty-four may give us an entirely different picture. Reassure her, if you can. That’ll do more than anything else at this stage.”

  Reassure her—struck down, unable to communicate: the vocal and witty aunt, her father’s eldest sister, with whom she had spent her final growing-up years after her own parents had been killed in a sailing accident on a vacation with friends in California. Gerald Balsam had been alive then; he had been dead for a year now.

  It was astonishingly hard to maintain what was, in effect, a monologue; reflective little silences were comfortable only when the other person could break them at will. The December wind, icily cold as the nurse had said, pressed against the window in its stingy folds of institutional beige. Even with her coat off Amanda was uncomfortably warm. It crossed her mind that many people discharged from overheated hospitals in winter must fall instantly prey to pneumonia.

  But that would scarcely do as a topic of conversation. “Don’t worry about your plants,” said Amanda. Mrs. Balsam had a whole roomful of them in her recently acquired house, in pots and planters and on stands and benches, arid had plans of converting this area to purposes of solar heat. “I may not have quite your thumb, but I’ll water them.”

  The spiky-lashed, hazel-green gaze, very like Amanda’s own, burned back at her.

  I’m missing something here, thought Amanda, and remembered. “Oh, and don’t worry about Apple either. I’ll feed her and tuck her in for the night. Or I might take her home with me, just for a day or two, until we hear what the doctor says. I’ll feed and water Drougette too, so don’t concern yourself about that.” Apple, more formally Dreamspinner’s Golden Apple, was Mrs. Balsam’s cherished young Afghan hound, Drougette a palomino mare she was boarding for friends. The horse had escaped from its somewhat inadequate corral two nights earlier, causing Mrs. Balsam to roam the area for an hour before she caught it, and the dog was an occasional roamer, like most of her breed, so why, in answer to the assurance of their being taken care of, was a tear forming and then falling on Mrs. Balsam’s cheek—not felt, not brushed away?

  Because up until early that afternoon she had been a well and active woman, able to perform these chores herself, as well as a pretty one?

  “Aunt Jane,” began Amanda helplessly, “don’t—” Don’t what? Be terrified because she had had a stroke massive enough to paralyze her right side and deprive her of speech? Amanda was saved from any such ludicrous injunction by the entrance of the nurse, who took a glance at her patient and said at once, “I think Mrs. Balsam would like to rest now.”

  Amanda stood, buttoning her coat, ashamed that she was grateful. She said to the marred and flaring-eyed face on the pillow, “I’ll be back in the morning, with whatever you were reading as well as some other creature comforts
,” because in spite of the hooding of the right eye her aunt’s alertness did not seem to be at all impaired.

  There was a sudden small thrash from the bed. “There, now, we’re responding,” said the nurse, but the flip of her hand was dismissive, and Amanda left.

  Outside it was bitter indeed, with a wind that wrenched threateningly at the car door when she reached it, running, head down. As she had promised, Amanda set out for the house near the mesa twelve miles away.

  Strings of colored lights and tinsel dipped and swung over the streets, clogged with desperate, last-minute shopping traffic. As the city fell behind, Christmas trees on lawns or behind picture windows took over, and then Amanda was in luminaria territory: the lighted long-burning candles in brown paper bags partly filled with sand, tops neatly folded down, to guide the Christ Child. They made golden punctuations in the night by the thousands, outlining driveways and adobe walls and rooftops. Amanda had her own luminarias in place, but, a stern traditionalist in such matters, would not light them until tomorrow night, Christmas Eve.

  Which brought to mind the already-wrapped white coral earrings and vivid silk scarf which could almost literally be pulled through a ring. How long—Amanda could not phrase it to herself in any other way—before her aunt would wear either?

  There was no point in speculating upon how long she had lain immobilized a few yards from her front door, or the horrifying fact that except for the arrival of a United Parcel Service truck at about three o’clock she might still be lying there in the freezing dark. There were no immediate neighbors, and her car had shielded her from the view of what little traffic there was on the narrow climbing road.

  It was not one of the two afternoons a week she did volunteer work at the very hospital she was now in, but she had obviously been starting off on an errand when something had prompted her to get out of the car, leaving the key in the ignition, the driver’s door open, her handbag on the passenger seat. The stroke had felled her halfway along the flagstone walk.

  The girl driver of the truck, arriving on the scene, hadn’t wasted any time looking for the keys which turned out to be under Mrs. Balsam’s prone form, but sped off to the nearest house to call the emergency number. A police car had responded along with the ambulance, and Amanda hoped sincerely that they had made a routine check of all the doors and windows. This was a lonely spot, and the house was going to be a concentration of blackness.

  A rabbit leaped out of her headlights as she turned into the drive and parked behind her aunt’s car. Before leaving the hospital she had accepted and signed a receipt for Mrs. Balsam’s navy calf handbag—they were understandably not anxious to be in charge of cash or credit cards or other valuables—to which someone had restored the house keys, and as she approached the front door, leather case in hand, she listened for the Afghan’s surprisingly baritone bark. Apple was a shy dog, but as long as she remained invisible she might have been a reverting mastiff.

  Silence, except for the wind.

  Apple had been in the car, then, grown impatient when her mistress did not return to it, bounded out, perhaps nosed affectionately around the stricken woman under the delusion that this was a game of some kind, gotten bored with it, and wandered off. She had probably been back a number of times since, crying plaintively to be let in for her dinner.

  Amanda lit three matches with great difficulty before she was able to unite key with lock. Hand on the knob, she turned and called, “Apple?” but not very loudly, because she was curiously reluctant to pinpoint herself in this empty, windrushing dark, and opened the door.

  The interior was even blacker than she had expected, as if walls and furniture, unaccustomedly left to themselves in the company of unlit lamps, spun out eager webs. Amanda had been in the house a number of times since Mrs. Balsam had acquired it four months ago, but it was still essentially strange territory, and she had to fumble for a light switch. In the last second before she found it, she had a flash of pure fear—something connected with fires and cave mouths?—and then, in a click, the house was ordinary and warm.

  A tiny hall was suggested by low iron railings with eucalyptus massed in a stone jar at one side. The living room of which it was a part had overstuffed chairs in blue and violet and cream chintz and a tailored dark blue couch, pleasingly at home with the gray-blue shag rug which had come with the house and stretched up over a step to the small dining area which gave onto a see-through kitchen. It had somewhat the serenity of water.

  A miniature Christmas tree dressed in pink and rose and silver bulbs flashed from the top of a bookcase. There were gleams of brass at the fireplace in one wall —and, on the nearest of the small end tables, two letters stamped for mailing, the clear reason for her aunt’s intended return. Amanda glanced at them automatically. One was for the gas company, the other addressed to a nursery in Michigan.

  She proceeded through the house, switching on an occasional light as she went, and everything was locked. The peal of the telephone was shocking for some reason, and she ran back to pick up the receiver on a man’s voice, pleasant, low, instantly doubtful. “Mrs. Balsam?”

  It wasn’t a good idea to advertise a house empty for the foreseeable future. “Mrs. Balsam isn’t here right now, but this is her niece. May I take a message?”

  She had the odd and fleeting feeling that she had flabbergasted the man at the other end of the line before he said, “No, that’s all right, I’ll call again,” and, without further ado, hung up.

  Her aunt hadn’t mentioned the neighbors, if in fact they could even be called that, so this would be a friend from the Heights, where she had lived previously or else—she was included in the current telephone directory—someone like the Police Athletic League. Except that the caller had been unmistakably surprised at an alien voice on this line.

  Here, Amanda became simultaneously aware of two things: first, that she was almost wolfishly hungry, having lunched at her desk on an apple and a few slices of Cheddar cheese; second, that the shock of what had happened to her aunt had completely driven from her mind some plan or commitment for the evening. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be helped. It was certainly, thought Amanda, having to push down the familiar ache, nothing to do with Justin.

  (Who was fond of her Aunt Jane, and had a right to know that she was in the hospital in a precarious condition. Call him, with the full knowledge that this was a perfectly legitimate excuse for hearing his voice again? No, or not yet, anyway, because who might answer his telephone?)

  Amanda went into the kitchen. Unlike many widows living alone, her aunt kept a well-supplied larder, but although even at a glance the refrigerator offered stuffed olives and guacamole salad invitingly sealed under clear wrap she settled for a few cheese crackers, made herself a drink, and then, bold with the lighted house at her back, opened the door and called Apple ringingly and whistled.

  Icy air shot past her, carrying very distant canine sounds ranging from the deep utterance of a German shepherd to the sharp excited barking of a poodle. Had the Afghan, less than a year old and left to her own devices for so long, joined a pack?

  Keep calling at intervals; once Apple was within earshot she would come romping home. Amanda knew that she could not simply finish her drink, turn out the lights, lock the door, and drive away. She could and would lie to her aunt in the morning, if necessary— “Apple misses you but she’s putting up with me for the time being”—but if the dog were permanently lost or stolen or shot the truth would emerge eventually, and Amanda did not like to think about the consequences.

  Moreover, she was herself devoted to the silky, lightboned, glowing-faced Apple, who was given to sulking when she was scolded and toppling promptly over on her side if told that she was a pretty girl. Apart from wandering off for a period of two days during the first week in the new house, she had never stayed away from home before, according to Mrs. Balsam, and certainly not on a winter night which would be even colder before it was over.

  In terms of the dog, Amanda ref
used to think beyond tonight. The morning newspaper was loosely folded on the couch, and she picked it up idly. There were still no leads in the disappearance of Ellie Peale, a young clerk with a thin, appealing face who had been abducted at knife point from a convenience store two nights ago. A woman was suing a local cafe because she had come across the tip of the chefs thumb in her omelet; Amanda hoped she collected a mint, but could not help admiring a cook stoical enough to continue with his labors.

  The teachers were considering a strike. Two prisoners had escaped from the state penitentiary, but this happened with the regularity of schoolchildren going out to recess. Amanda turned the page, gazed at the woebegone face of an orphaned spider monkey in a Detroit zoo, remembered with a rush of guilt what she was supposed to be doing tonight.

  It was seven-fifteen, but she could at least call. She jumped up distractedly and went to the phone.

  Sixteen feet below her, in a steel-reinforced concrete room whose trapdoor was concealed by tranquil gray-blue shag rug, the man who had killed Ellie Peale was beginning to pace dangerously, and to rage at the pain in his hand.

  Chapter 2

  The MacWillies, building the house near the mesa almost twenty years earlier, had been remarkably quiet about the bomb shelter included in its plans.

  This secrecy was prompted by the moral question that accompanied such a structure: Who would they let in, if the shelter should actually be called into use, and who exclude? How would it be possible to say, “Sorry, no more,” in the face of frantic entreaties? Because word would certainly spread.

  As such places went, it was commodious, with bunk beds for the MacWillies and their two teenaged children, toilet, sink, shelves for a projected three weeks of supplies, an air filter system, a hydraulic jack as a hedge against entombment, and enough floor space for exercises. It was reached by means of a fixed fourteen-foot steel ladder under the floor just beyond the entrance to the kitchen.