I shuddered and covered my face with my manacled hands. “I’m—I’m sorry. Well, you’ve got me, and maybe it’s all for the best—I’m ready to take what’s coming to me—”
“Don’t worry, you’re going to,” said the chief of police. “Take him over to headquarters and book him. Take her back to the cooler.”
As we were leaving, one of the detectives said: “All for ten grand! If you’da just hung on a little while longer, you’da gotten it without lifting your finger—like that!” He took out a cablegram from his pocket.
It was addressed to me, at the old address. It had come in only a couple days before. It was from London, from some attorney I’d never heard of. It informed me my first wife, Florence, had died two months before and left me a legacy of more than three thousand pounds.
Ten thousand dollars!
I didn’t show any emotion at all. Just turned to them and asked them if they’d do me a favor.
“Give you a swift kick, I suppose,” one of the detectives sneered.
“It’s mine to do with as I want, isn’t it, this dough? Turn it over to Sherrill, will you, for me? Maybe it’ll help to get him fixed up so he can walk again.”
They all looked at me in surprise, as though this was out of character, coming from me. It really wasn’t, though. None of us are one hundred percent bad and none of us are one hundred percent good—we’re all just kind of mixed, I guess. Maybe that’s why the Judge, the Higher One, feels sorry for us. A whole row of black marks and then a single white mark at the very end. Which cancels which? I’ll find out for sure pretty soon now. . . .
YOU’LL NEVER SEE ME AGAIN
It was the biscuits started it. How he wished, afterward, that she’d never made those biscuits! But she made them, and she was proud of them. Her first try. Typical bride-and-groom stuff. The gag everyone’s heard for years, so old it has whiskers down to here. So old it isn’t funny any more. No, it isn’t funny; listen while it’s told.
He wasn’t in the mood for playing house. He’d been working hard all day over his drafting-board. Even if they’d been good he probably would have grunted, “Not bad,” and let it go at that. But they weren’t good; they were atrocious. They were as hard as gravel; they tasted like lye. She’d put in too much of something and left out too much of something else, and life was too short to fool around with them.
“Well, I don’t hear you saying anything about them,” she pouted.
All he said was: “Take my advice, Smiles, and get ’em at the corner bakery after this.”
“That isn’t very appreciative,” she said. “If you think it was much fun bending over that hot oven—”
“If you think it’s much fun eating them—I’ve got a blueprint to do tomorrow; I can’t take punishment like this!”
One word led to another. By the time the meal was over, her fluffy golden head was down inside her folded arms on the table and she was making broken-hearted little noises.
Crying is an irritant to a tired man. He kept saying things he didn’t want to. “I could have had a meal in any restaurant without this. I’m tired. I came home to get a little rest, not the death scene from Camille across the table from me.”
She raised her head at that. She meant business now. “If I’m annoying you, that’s easily taken care of! You want it quiet; we’ll see that you get it quiet. No trouble at all about that.”
She stormed into the bedroom and he could hear drawers slamming in and out. So she was going to walk out on him, was she? For a minute he was going to jump up and go in there after her and put his arms around her and say: “I’m sorry, Smiles; I didn’t mean what I said.” And that probably would have ended the incident then and there.
But he checked himself. He remembered a well-meaning piece of advice a bachelor friend of his had given him before his marriage. And bachelors always seem to know so much about marriage rules! “If she should ever threaten to walk out on you, and they all do at one time or another,” this sage had counseled him, “there’s only one way for you to handle that. Act as though you don’t care; let her go. She’ll come back fast enough, don’t worry. Otherwise, if you beg her not to, she’ll have the upper hand over you from then on.”
He scratched himself behind one ear. “I wonder if he was right?” he muttered. “Well, the only way to find out is to try it.”
So he left the table, went into the living-room, snapped on a reading-lamp, sprawled back in a chair, and opened his evening paper, perfectly unconcerned to all appearances. The only way you could tell he wasn’t, was by the little glances he kept stealing over the top of the paper every once in a while to see if she was really going to carry out her threat.
She acted as if she were. She may have been waiting for him to come running in there after her and beg for forgiveness, and when he didn’t, forced herself to go through with it. Stubborn pride on both their parts. And they were both so young, and this was so new to them. Six weeks the day after tomorrow.
She came bustling in, set down a little black valise in the middle of the room, and put on her gloves. Still waiting for him to make the first overtures for reconciliation. But he kept making the breach worse every time he opened his mouth, all because of what some fool had told him. “Sure you’ve got everything?” he said quietly.
She was so pretty even when she was angry. “I’m glad you’re showing your true colors; I’d rather find out now than later.”
Someone should have pushed their two heads together, probably. But there wasn’t anyone around but just the two of them. “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. Well, pick a nice comfortable hotel while you’re at it.”
“I don’t have to go to a hotel. I’m not a waif. I’ve got a perfectly good mother who’ll receive me with open arms.”
“Quite a trip in the middle of the night, isn’t it?” And to make matters worse, he opened his wallet as if to give her the money for her fare.
That put the finishing touch to her exasperation. “I’ll get up there without any help from you, Mr. Ed Bliss! And I don’t want any of the things you ever gave me, either! Take your old silver-fox piece!” Fluff. “And take your old diamond ring!” Plink. “And take your old pin money!” Scuff-scuff-slap. “And you can take back that insurance policy you took out on me, too! Simon Legree! Ivan the Terrible!”
He turned the paper back to where the boxscores were. He only hoped that bachelor was right. “See you day after tomorrow, or whenever you get tired playing hide-and-seek,” he said calmly.
“You’ll never see me again as long as you live!” It rang in his ears for days afterwards.
She picked up the valise, the front door went boom! and he was single again.
The thing to do now was to pretend he didn’t care, and then she’d never try anything like this again. Otherwise, his life would be made miserable. Every time they had the least little argument, she’d threaten to go back to her mother.
That first night he did all the things he’d always wanted to do, but they didn’t stack up to so much after all. Took off his socks and walked around in his bare feet, let the ashes lie wherever they happened to drop off, drank six bottles of cold beer through their mouths and let them lie all over the room, and went to bed without bothering to shave.
He woke up about four in the morning, and it felt strange knowing she wasn’t in the house with him, and he hoped she was all right wherever she was, and he finally forced himself to go back to sleep again. In the morning there wasn’t anyone to wake him up. Her not being around didn’t seem so strange then simply because he didn’t have time to notice; he was exactly an hour and twenty-two minutes late for work.
But when he came back that night, it did seem strange, not finding anyone there waiting for him, the house dark and empty, and beer bottles rolling all around the living-room floor. Last night’s meal, their last one together, was still strewn around on the table after twenty-four hours. He poked his finger at one of the biscuits, thought remorsefully, “I s
hould have kept quiet. I could have pretended they were good, even if they weren’t.” But it was too late now; the damage had been done.
He had to eat out at a counter by himself, and it was very depressing. He picked up the phone twice that evening, at 10:30 and again at 11:22, on the point of phoning up to her mother’s place and making up with her, or at least finding out how she was. But each time he sort of slapped his own hand, metaphorically speaking, in rebuke and hung up without putting the call through. “I’ll hold out until tomorrow,” he said to himself. “If I give in now, I’m at her mercy.”
The second night was rocky. The bed was no good; they needed to be made up about once every twenty-four hours, he now found out for the first time. A cop poked him in the shoulder with his club at about three in the morning and growled, “What’s your trouble, bud?”
“Nothing that’s got anything to do with what’s in your rule book,” Bliss growled back at him. He picked himself up from the curb and went back inside his house again.
He would have phoned her as soon as he woke up in the morning, but he was late again—only twelve minutes behind, this time, though—and he couldn’t do it from the office without his fellow draftsmen getting wise she had left him.
He finally did it when he came back that evening, the second time, after eating. This was exactly 8:17 p.m. Thursday, two nights after she’d gone.
He said, “I want to talk to Mrs. Belle Alden, in Denby, this state. I don’t know her number. Find it for me and give it to me.” He’d never met Smiles’ mother, incidentally.
While he was waiting for the operator to ring back, he was still figuring how to get out of it; find out how she was without seeming to capitulate. Young pride! Maybe I can talk the mother into not letting on I called to ask about her, so she won’t know I’m weakening. Let it seem like she’s the first one to thaw out.
The phone rang and he picked it up fast, pride or no pride.
“Here’s your party.”
A woman’s voice got on, and he said, “Hello, is this Mrs. Alden?”
The voice said it was.
“This is Ed, Smiles’ husband.”
“Oh, how is she?” she said animatedly.
He sat down at the phone. It took him a minute to get his breath back again. “Isn’t she there?” he said finally.
The voice was surprised. “Here? No. Isn’t she there?”
For a minute his stomach had felt all hollow. Now he was all right again. He was beginning to get it. Or thought he was. He winked at himself, with the wall in front of him for a reflector. So the mother was going to bat for her. They’d cooked up this little fib between them, to punish him. They were going to throw a little fright into him. He’d thought he was teaching her a lesson, and now she was going to turn the tables on him and teach him one. He was supposed to go rushing up there tearing at his hair and foaming at the mouth. “Where’s Smiles? She’s gone! I can’t find her!” Then she’d step out from behind the door, crack her whip over his head, and threaten: “Are you going to behave? Are you ever going to do that again?” And from then on, she’d lead him around with a ring in his nose.
“You can’t fool me, Mrs. Alden,” he said self-assuredly. “I know she’s there. I know she told you to say that.”
Her voice wasn’t panicky; it was still calm and self-possessed, but there was no mistaking the earnest ring to it. Either she was an awfully good actress, or this wasn’t any act. “Now listen, Ed. You ought to know I wouldn’t joke about a thing like that. As a matter of fact, I wrote her a long letter only yesterday afternoon. It ought to be in your mailbox by now. If she’s not there with you, I’d make it my business to find out where she is, if I were you. And I wouldn’t put it off, either!”
He still kept wondering: “Is she ribbing me or isn’t she?” He drawled undecidedly, “Well, it’s damned peculiar.”
“I certainly agree with you,” she said briskly. He just chewed the inner tube of his cheek.
“Well, will you let me know as soon as you find out where she is?” she concluded. “I don’t want to worry, and naturally I won’t be able to help doing so until I hear that she’s all right.”
He hung up, and first he was surer than ever that it wasn’t true she wasn’t there. For one thing, the mother hadn’t seemed worried enough to make it convincing. He thought, “I’ll be damned if I call back again, so you and she can have the laugh on me. She’s up there with you right now.”
But then he went outside and opened the mailbox, and there was a letter for Smiles with her mother’s name on the envelope, and postmarked 6:30 the evening before.
He opened it and read it through. It was bona fide, all right; leisurely, chatty, nothing fake about it. One of those letters that are written over a period of days, a little at a time. There was no mistaking it; up to the time it had been mailed, she hadn’t seen her daughter for months. And Smiles had left him the night before; if she’d gone up there at all, she would have been there long before then.
He didn’t feel so chipper any more, after that. She wouldn’t have stayed away this long if she’d been here in town, where she could walk or take a cab back to the house. There was nothing to be that sore about. And she’d intended going up there. The reason he felt sure of that was this: With her, it wasn’t a light decision, lightly taken and lightly discarded. She hadn’t been living home with her mother when he married her. She’d been on her own down here for several years before then. They corresponded regularly, they were on good terms, but the mother’s remarriage had made a difference. In other words, it wasn’t a case of flying straight back to the nest the first time she’d lost a few feathers. It was not only a fairly lengthy trip up there, but they had not seen each other for several years. So if she’d said she was going up there, it was no fleeting impulse, but a rational, clear-cut decision, and she was the kind of girl who would carry it out once she had arrived at it.
He put his hat on, straightened his tie, left the house, and went downtown. There was only one way she could get anywhere near Denby, and that was by bus. It wasn’t serviced by train.
Of the two main bus systems, one ran an express line that didn’t stop anywhere near there; you had to go all the way to the Canadian border and then double back nearly half of the way by local, to get within hailing distance. The smaller line ran several a day, in each direction, up through there to the nearest large city beyond; they stopped there by request. It was obvious which of the two systems she’d taken.
That should have simplified matters greatly for him; he found out it didn’t. He went down to the terminal and approached the ticket-seller.
“Were you on duty here Tuesday night?”
“Yeah, from six on. That’s my shift every night.”
“I’m trying to locate someone. Look. I know you’re selling tickets all night long, but maybe you can remember her.” He swallowed a lump in his throat. “She’s young, only twenty, with blond hair. So pretty you’d look at her twice, if you ever saw her the first time; I know you would. Her eyes are sort of crinkly and smiling. Even when her mouth isn’t smiling, her eyes are. She—she bought a ticket to Denby.”
The man turned around and took a pack of tickets out of a pigeonhole and blew a layer of dust off them. “I haven’t sold a ticket to Denby in over a month.” They had a rubber band around them. All but the top one. That blew off with his breath.
That seemed to do something to his powers of memory. He ducked down out of sight, came up with it from the floor. “Wait a minute,” he said, prodding his thumbnail between two of his teeth. “I don’t remember anything much about any eyes or smile, but there was a young woman came up and priced the fare to Denby. I guess it was night before last, at that. Seeing this one ticket pulled loose out of the batch reminded me of it. I told her how much it was, and I snagged out a ticket—this loose one here. But then she couldn’t make it; I dunno, she didn’t have enough money on her or something. She looked at her wrist watch, and asked me how late the paw
nshops stay open. I told her they were all closed by then. Then she shoveled all the money she could round up across the counter at me and asked me how far that would take her. So I counted and told her, and she told me to give her a ticket to that far.”
Bliss was hanging onto his words, hands gripping the counter until his knuckles showed white. “Yes, but where to?”
The ticket-seller’s eyelids drooped deprecatingly. “That’s the trouble,” he said, easing the back of his collar. “I can’t remember that part of it. I can’t even remember how much the amount came to, now, any more. If I could, I could get the destination by elimination.”
“If I only knew how much she had in her handbag when she left the house,” Bliss thought desolately, “we could work it out together, him and me.” He prodded: “Three dollars? Four? Five?”
The ticket vendor shook his head baffledly. “No use, it won’t come back. I’m juggling so many figures all night long, every night in the week—”
Bliss slumped lower before the sill. “But don’t you keep a record of what places you sell tickets to?”
“No, just the total take for the night, without breaking it down.”
He was as bad off as before. “Then you can’t tell me for sure whether she did get on the bus that night or not?”
Meanwhile an impatient line had formed behind Bliss, and the ticket-seller was getting fidgety.
“No. The driver might remember her. Look at it this way: she only stood in front of me for a minute or two at the most. If she got on the bus at all, she sat in back of him for anywhere from an hour to four hours. Remember, I’m not even guaranteeing that the party I just told you about is the same one you mean. It’s just a vague incident to me.”
“Would the same one that made Tuesday night’s run be back by now?”
“Sure, he’s going out tonight again.” The ticket man looked at a chart. “Go over there and ask for No. 27. Next!”
No. 27 put down his coffee mug, swiveled around on the counter stool, and looked at his questioner.
FOUR NOVELLAS OF FEAR: Eyes That Watch You, The Night I Died, You'll Never See Me Again, Murder Always Gathers Momentum Page 9
