The Iron Cobweb

by Ursula Curtiss

  No way out there, because her bewilderment was like Maire’s and there was, although for different reasons, the same inability to fight back. And because Elizabeth was almost sure she had caught in Noreen’s eyes, and had had to pretend to overlook, the same incredulous speculation she had caught in Oliver’s.

  Dinner, coffee; Constance and Oliver a little more talkative than usual and sending—weren’t they?—worried messages at each other. Elizabeth found herself always one topic behind, felt her mouth curving meaninglessly and her gaze too absorbed, as though she were the hostess and these two difficult guests. There was still the evening to get through, three hours of it if she were to cling to normalcy, to behave as though nothing had happened at all.

  As though adult hands hadn’t deliberately torn and mutilated the roses. Not an accident, with the stripped stems standing formally in the pitcher, but the mockery of mischief, a frightful parody of a prank. As though evil had gone romping through the house.

  The book on the Hiss trial; where had she left off? Elizabeth went through the motions of finding her place and glanced up instead at the quiet room around her.

  At the desk at the other end of the room, Constance was seated solidly at her evening pastime of recipe-clipping. Lamplight shone down on the pale brown hair, profiled the long nose, the musing lips, the faintly stubborn chin. It was, thought Elizabeth, like a character-cameo: the odd mixture of greed and austerity, naivete and a disapproving fortyish firmness. While she watched, her cousin held up a clipping and frowned at it, and the scissors flashed with a surprising violence, slivering the paper.

  Oliver, stretched at an easy angle in the deep leather chair, was intent on a newspaper column, dark head bent. She couldn’t see his eyes but his mouth looked skeptical. His whole attitude was completely absorbed in what he was reading. She had been mistaken at dinner, then; he had forgotten about the roses, he—

  Without warning, Oliver’s eyes met hers over the edge of newspaper. There was nothing casual about the suddenly lifted glance. He was doing, Elizabeth thought, exactly what she was doing— pretending to read, wondering, remembering. She dropped her own gaze sedulously, turned a page.

  Two alternatives: which was nicer?

  She hadn’t left the dining room when she thought she had; she had simply stood there, her fingers following an independent pattern of their own, her mind not registering this.

  Or someone else had come by and wrenched the heads off the roses. If she lifted the protective covering off the ‘someone else’ it became Steven or Lucy Brent, or Constance or Oliver. There was also the possibility that Noreen was lying, but if that were true then Maire could be lying too, and Maire was not.

  Steven, Lucy, Constance—Oliver.

  Could this, wondered Elizabeth raggedly, be what we are going to do about Elizabeth?

  Eleven o’clock was the normal time of release. Elizabeth rose and was startled to find how easily deception came. The yawn, the casual, “I’ll look at the children, shall I?” to Oliver, the carrying out of the coffee cups. In the upper hall Constance said abruptly, “You look terribly tired, Elizabeth. Why don’t you stay in bed tomorrow—just read and nap? Noreen’s here and there won’t be anything I can’t take care of.”

  “I might,” Elizabeth said, and forced a smile. “You’re awfully good, Constance. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

  “Nonsense.” Constance blushed through her briskness. “It’s been nice for me too, you know. Hadn’t you better take one of your pills tonight . . . ?”

  ‘It’s been nice;’ did that mean Constance was about to conclude her visit? Elizabeth went along the hall to the children’s room and opened the door with caution. All she could see of Maire under the quilt was pink-gold curls and an outflung arm; she nearly stepped on Jeep, peacefully asleep on the floor beside his crib. She stooped, lifted him into the crib, kissed the warm cheek gently and pulled up the covers. Jeep made an instant and drowsy demand for his truck. She found it, put it into the groping fingers and tiptoed out.

  There was no hope of pretending sleep before Oliver tonight; he was there in the bedroom when she came in. Elizabeth turned down her bed and got undressed in silence. Oliver took studs out of his shirt cuffs, put them in a leather box and said casually, “By the way, when do you go to Hathaway?”

  “For my checkup? The first week in December—I’ve got it down somewhere. Why?”

  “You don’t—” Oliver whipped off his tie, “think you ought to go sooner?”

  “What for?” Deception was effortless just so far, and besides, she had to know whether there was substance to the shadow in Oliver’s eyes. She said very slowly, “Hathaway’s only an obstetrician, you know.”

  Silence. Oliver moved roughly away from the bureau and took a cigarette from his bedside table without looking. He said coolly, “And what’s the inner meaning of that?”

  “This.” Why was it so like taking a hurdle? “As you’ve pointed out, the affair of the roses was no tragedy. But it happened. Weirdly enough, it seems to me that you’ve a notion I did it.”

  There never used to be these blanks, she thought, these moments when we both go off away from each other and all the lines of communication are down. What’s happened, what’s making us behave this way?

  Oliver seemed to have had the same wonder; he swung to face her. “Elizabeth—”

  She would not be melted, she would not be forced into remembering the way things had been. She said evenly, “You do think so, Oliver, don’t you?”

  The match he had been holding flickered out. He said without lighting another, with halts between the words, “You were—thinking about something else. My God, everybody pulls up grass and plucks at wicker and peels off bark—it’s the nature of the beast. What the hell,” said Oliver, suddenly and explosively violent, “does it matter, and why do we have to keep on talking about it? I’m sorry I ever brought the damned things home.”

  “That,” observed Elizabeth stiffly into the sudden darkness, “was prettily put.”

  “I suppose it was. Sorry. Maybe it was a cunning florist’s trick . . . let’s forget it anyway. End of episode.”

  His voice sounded sleepy. Elizabeth lay rigid, her mind slipping back to yesterday and that disturbing sense of unease, like the slyest of motions somewhere in the background.

  She hadn’t caught the motion itself, or the hand. But this, the roses, was the very tangible proof of its existence. This, and not Oliver and Lucy—or perhaps an offshoot of Oliver and Lucy—was what had made her afraid.

  Afraid, under the softest possible blankets, with her husband not six feet away and her children safely healthily asleep only a wall’s thickness from her. More afraid than she had ever been in her life, because there was nothing to fight.

  Bells counted themselves distantly in the clear cold night. Five of us, all told, thought Elizabeth, turning restlessly on her other side. Five and maybe one more, whom all of us know and one of us won’t admit, something that isn’t flesh and bone but more of an entity than any of us. . . . Finally, interruptedly, she slept.

  Thanksgiving came and went; in the face of Constance’s mute horror Elizabeth sewed up the turkey with red thread and felt ridiculously gay. It was impossible not to with the children in the kitchen; they formed an instant and devoted attachment to the docile creature in the roasting pan. Jeep said dubiously, “Might bite you,” and Maire said earnestly, “No, he loves you. Jeep,” and the turkey went into the oven amid pattings and farewells.

  And even after that there were days when everything was almost all right. Almost, because it was as though there were a wall of glass between herself and Oliver. They could speak and smile through it, and go briskly about their lives on either side of it, but it was there. Elizabeth forgot that at times until she bumped into it and hurt herself.

  There were the other days, when the children caught her mood and translated it in their own disastrous fashion. Maire had perfected her technique and could now not on
ly cry like a baby but like a whole nursery full of babies; the sound of it sawed ceaselessly at Elizabeth’s nerves. Jeep was like a small rogue elephant: the phonograph suddenly stopped functioning, toys fell magically to pieces, the breakage in the kitchen shot up at an appalling rate.

  Elizabeth, clinging grimly to calm, thought, Careful, this is like virus. Nothing to do but wait it out.

  Oddly enough, in spite of the betraying words that kept echoing in her brain, she found Lucy Brent a welcome distraction. Lucy was a being from another world, crisp, definite, untroubledly sure of herself. If the other woman noticed a subtle change in their relationship, and very little escaped the brilliant dark eyes behind the restless flow of chatter, she said nothing.

  Lucy was there on the third of December, when Elizabeth’s bank statement came. She said, “Aren’t you lucky, all I ever get around the first of the month is bills,” and stood. “Steven’s home, feeling frightful, and I really should be there to stroke his brow. Mind if I phone the drug store first?”

  “Go ahead,” Elizabeth said absently. It was a barren mail—soap coupons, what looked like an advertisement addressed to Oliver, the bank statement. At the phone, Lucy asked for the pharmacist. Elizabeth slit the long brown envelope, looked at her balance, which was surprisingly less than she’d thought, and ruffled idly through the cancelled checks. Constance, cash, the stocking shop, Noreen, Noreen, Noreen, cash again . . . and what was this?

  In her first casual glance Elizabeth thought it was a check she’d written while she was still in the hospital; her signature looked somehow laborious, not quite her own. She pulled the check free of the others and examined it, and Lucy’s voice and the room around her dropped away in her sudden incredulous attention to the slip of pale blue in her hand.

  The check was made out to Sarah E. Bennett, Noreen’s predecessor, in the amount of her week’s salary, thirty-five dollars. It was dated October 29th, and everything was in order except that that was nearly two weeks after Mrs. Bennett had departed for Canada to take over the household of a suddenly widowed sister, and the handwriting was not Elizabeth’s.

  Altogether, there were three of them.

  Four

  “WHAT’S THE MATTER?” asked Lucy amusedly. “Overdrawn?”

  “What? . . . No, not this time.” Elizabeth went to the door with Lucy, as conscious and careful of the checks in her hand as though she were holding a loaded gun. “I hope Steven’s better. Give him our best, will you?”

  Constance was moving briskly about in the upper hall; from the children’s room came intermittent thumps and shouts of delight. She was safe, for a few minutes at least; she could examine the forgeries more closely.

  Someone had been very careful over these. It had taken time and practice even to approximate the intricate loops and angles of Elizabeth’s handwriting. She went to the desk and got out a cancelled check, cashed in September, and compared it with the forgeries—and yes, the “Sarah E. Bennett” was particularly good, even to the scrambling backtrack with which the t’s were crossed. The writer had evidently been more nervous over Elizabeth’s signature; it had a cautious look. But, she found, it had improved. The first was palpably odd to anyone who knew her writing well; the third would easily have fooled, for instance, Oliver.

  “Elizabeth?” said Constance inquiringly at the head of the stairs.

  She put the checks back in the envelope and went up in a dream. Constance, dismayingly real and severe, confronted her at the linen closet. “Elizabeth, I do think something should be done about the laundry. Just look at this—they’ve sent you another sheet that doesn’t belong to you.”

  She held out the offending linen, and Elizabeth gave it an uncaring glance. “Oh. Is it in reasonably good condition, do you suppose?”

  “I haven’t looked,” said Constance affrontedly. “Here—just feel it for yourself. It’s obviously a Coarse Percale.”

  Who else could have made an epithet out of that? wondered Elizabeth giddily. I don’t care what you say about him, he’s nothing but a Coarse Percale.’ Aloud she said guiltily, “I suppose I ought to speak to them. If you’d put it up on the top shelf—”

  “—you’ll forget all about it,” finished Constance, smiling faintly. “If you don’t mind my doing it, I’ll just take care of it myself.”

  Elizabeth must have replied to that, because in another instant she was in her own bedroom, the door closed, the perfidious sheet sponged out of her mind then and forever. She was aware, as she sat down on her bed, of the slow shocked pounding of her heart. She singled out the three checks again and turned them over. One hundred and five dollars—but still considerate of whoever had written them, because wasn’t she liable?

  The endorsement on the backs was small and wooden, totally unlike Mrs. Bennett’s flourishing hand. No worry for the forger there, because Mrs. Bennett had cashed her checks locally and these had been cashed at Elizabeth’s bank. Nos. 351, 353, and 354. The attempt on No. 352 had apparently failed to measure up.

  Not Mrs. Bennett—not even if she were still in the country and Elizabeth had surprised her with checks and tracing-paper and pen; not Mrs. Bennett whose final parting had been accomplished with an unashamed sniffle.

  But someone who had access to Elizabeth’s personalized checks, kept in the desk in the living-room. Someone who had the opportunity to remove and study a cancelled check for the proper amount and the manner of writing Sarah Bennett’s name.

  A woman, posing briefly and boldly as Sarah Bennett.

  Mr. Delbow, assistant cashier, said briskly, “Now, if you’ll just sigh this stop-payment order—it’s required, you understand. Well send you affidavits in the course of a day or two, and if you’ll sign and return those . . .”

  He was more than a little puzzled about Mrs. Oliver March, head bent as she wrote her name on a form at the comer of his desk, stone martens looped about the expensively-tailored shoulders of her suit. His reassurances that she hadn’t lost on the forged checks—“When we pay out money over a faulty signature the liability is ours, Mrs. March”—hadn’t brought the color back into the noticeably pale pointed face. And it was very hard to read the eyes behind the brief black veiling.

  He had already exhausted the possibilities of Mrs. Bennett; he had summoned the teller who had handled the check cashed at this, the main branch. All three checks had been cashed within the course of two hours, the latter two at a branch in the West End. The tellers concerned had written Mrs. Bennett’s address on the backs of the checks; in no case had the identification presented been noted down, which was in itself a rule of the bank.

  Mr. Delbow said as Elizabeth restored his pen, “This means, of course, Mrs. March, that whoever wrote these checks has some identification belonging to Mrs. Bennett. Otherwise the checks wouldn’t have been cashed at all.”

  She merely nodded. The assistant cashier then explained that although the bank would attempt prosecution the chances of their finding the culprit were almost negligible, unless the forger should turn out to be an habitual offender. To his bewilderment, he could have sworn that Mrs. March looked relieved. He said, “I’ll have the amount credited to your account at once,” and she stood up, gathering her gloves and bag, giving him a sudden wry smile.

  “The odd part of all this is that I’ve been banking here nearly four years, and when I try to cash a check your people stop just short of fingerprinting.”

  “Always the way,” murmured Mr. Delbow musically, putting a guiding hand on her arm; “always the way, isn’t it?”

  The interview at the bank had taken longer than she expected; Elizabeth, driving toward home, got caught in early commuter traffic and sat through a succession of red lights with an anxious eye on her watch. It was very important to get home before Oliver if her trip to Boston were to look purely casual—and she had been instantly determined that Oliver, to whom she would once have turned instinctively, should know nothing at all about the forgeries.

  Because Oliver, mercilessly lo
gical, would disregard personalities when he arrived at a list of the only possible suspects. Such a frighteningly short list, when the name of your own cousin was on it. It was, of course, unthinkable that Constance . . . But would Oliver recognize that?

  Elizabeth sounded her horn curtly, passed a Cadillac proceeding at a waddle, and was clear of die traffic. At a little after five o’clock it was almost dark; only a dimming lip of icy lemon light on the horizon separated the marshes from the sky. The evening was bleak, windy. With the car heater turned on full, Elizabeth was cold to the core.

  October 29th, the checks had been cashed, the first at 10:14 A.M., the second at 12:46 p.m. On October 29th she had been home from the hospital only three days, and the whole of that interval was a clouded dream, distant, unreal, further blurred by the sedatives she took when the before-dawn dark became intolerable. She had been aware of the household functioning dimly below her, but apart from Constance’s brisk consultations and Noreen’s occasional worried entrance, it might have been the household of another woman.

  How, then, to pin it down to a presence here, an undeniable absence there? It wasn’t so simple a matter as Noreen, Lucy, Constance, because Mr. Delbow had picked up instantly a detail that she had missed. Two pens had been used in the forging of the checks, which suggested the possibility of a companion. “Probably,” the assistant cashier had said thoughtfully, “a man. It generally is in cases of this type.”

  Elizabeth watched her headlights streaming into the dark. She said to herself firmly. You don’t know what associates Mrs. Bennett had, or how often they came to the house when we were out. How simple for one of them to take the necessary materials, to—

  If she had been speaking aloud, it would have stuck in her throat; as it was her mind stopped dead, mocking her. It pointed out that the checks, like the roses, like the subtle malaise pervading her home, were the result of evil ripening and swelling and finally beginning to seep out behind a known and trusted face.