Widow's Web

by Ursula Curtiss

  The morning was dark, still rattling with the wind which Mrs. Judd’s house seemed in some mysterious way to inhale. Torrant shaved, showered under a contraption evidently designed by a fun-loving plumber, and went in search of his landlady to inquire about the car in the garage behind the house.

  “The little blue one? That’s my son Eddie’s,” said Mrs. Judd, separating egg-whites in the kitchen. She began at once to reflect that Eddie, away at Marine training camp, would not be wanting the car for some time; she looked at Torrant and there was none of last night’s peculiar tightness in his face. She said, “I suppose you could rent it if you want to while you’re here. You’d take good care of it, wouldn’t you? Eddie thinks the world of that little car.”

  This was not strictly true; Eddie had been known to offend the neighbors with his bitter morning greetings to the Renault. Still, it was a car and it went, on occasion. Mrs. Judd wiped her hands and went to get the key.

  Because he had been in a number of small New England towns before and his mission here was what it was, Torrant paid Mrs. Judd in advance, drove into the town and bought a newspaper from the woman who had directed him to his room without asking either of them where Annabelle Blair lived. He did that very casually at the post office, after breakfast in Chauncy’s only restaurant.

  “The Mallow house, fellow and his wife got killed right after they bought it? Vanguard Street,” said the clerk, and gave directions. “You’ll know it when you come to it, big old place right on the road, with a garage across the way. It’s off by itself, so you can’t miss it.”

  Off by itself, its garage across the street . . . how convenient, how tempting a situation for a hand that was ready to kill again, at a time of year when the roads were slippery and the going dangerous under the best of conditions. But if the isolation had served Annabelle Blair’s purpose, it would also serve his own. Torrant thanked the clerk and went back to Eddie Judd’s Renault.

  He had been acting on the vaguest of instincts when he approached the Fennister house with care; his reconnoitering of Vanguard Street was deliberate and cold. He wondered as he drove what Gerald Mallow had been doing in a town like Chauncy, small, half-asleep, startlingly rural. It was pretty country, full of fields and barns and willow-ringed ponds, but it was a mystifying goal for a business trip so extended and involved that Mallow had been accompanied by his wife and secretary.

  He came upon the house around a stand of willows, and stopped the car and let the motor idle while he gazed at the shell that held Annabelle Blair.

  It must have been beautiful once; it still had an air of elegance that rain and ruin could not wash away. It was classic colonial, facing squarely on the road, proud of its fanlight, now cracked, its doorway under spidery wisteria, its white stone cornerings that had turned gray just as its yellow paint had become tan. There were battered shades at uneven levels behind its small-paned windows—and there was, as Torrant watched, a flicker of movement at one of the white curtains in an upstairs room.

  Torrant almost smiled at his windshield; he said to himself, Company, Annabelle, and put the Renault into gear and nosed slowly into the edge of the road without a glance at the garage opposite. He was leisurely, because this was what he had come for; he took an unhurried moment to light a cigarette before he opened the door of the car and, of necessity, came crouching out of it.

  The curtain was still again, the whole faded handsome house-front so blank that it might have been an abandoned place, left to the mercy of squirrels and small boys. Torrant walked up three rough stone steps cut into the bank and crossed a few feet of grass to the flaked white door under the wisteria. The sound of the knocker when he dropped it seemed to travel over the empty fields.

  She had watched his approach, but a deliberate silent interval went by before he heard her progress toward the door. Unhurried, as his had been; calm, secure in this isolated place. Then the knob turned and the door swung inward, and he was face to face with the woman who had delicately, expertly murdered Martin Fennister.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE ICY GRAY light fell bleakly on Annabelle Blair. In the single direct stare that he allowed himself, Torrant absorbed details that didn’t, because of his intensity, come together at once.

  Pale oval face, with a strong and rather heavy jawline, light blank eyes. Pools of webbed softness under the eyes and jaw: didn’t murder agree with her? Dark hair in a secretarial knot, one strong motionless hand in position on the doorknob, ready to dismiss him. That last gave Torrant a touch of grim satisfaction.

  He was skeptical about auras; he was’ astonished at the amount of hostility this woman could shed without speaking.

  During the one brief instant in which they regarded each other silently, he had again that impression of her awareness, her mocking wait for him, and again dismissed it as impossible. He said, “Miss Blair?”

  “Yes?”

  “I almost,” Torrant smiled disarmingly, “said ‘Mrs. Fennister.’ My name is Torrant—you don’t know me, but I was a very close friend of Martin’s.”

  He thought that when he said ‘Fennister’ the white door moved forward an inch. Then Annabelle Blair said slowly, “I see,” and her light eyes had certainly narrowed a little.

  “I’ve been abroad,” Torrant went on easily, “and out of touch. I didn’t know about Martin’s death until I went to Greenwich last week. It seemed the least I could do to look you up, under the circumstances.”

  Annabelle Blair stood like a statue in the sharp fluttering light. Torrant said blandly, “May I come in?”

  He didn’t feel bland. He wanted to seize this woman by the shoulders and shout that he knew what she had done to Martin, that he would see to it that other people knew it too; he wanted to produce in that cold steady face a pale echo of the terror she had planted in Martin’s mind. But she had not done her work as cleanly as that, and it was the essence of his plan to follow her own slow deadly method.

  She seemed to hesitate a moment, and then she stepped back and said, “Yes, of course,” and swung the door wider.

  The hall was shadowy; Torrant had only a brief glimpse of an oval mirror in a delicate frame and a white curve of staircase before Annabelle Blair led him into a square living room to the right of the front door. The dimness persisted here, in spite of the low windows; two of them faced the willow grove that swallowed the light on that side. The furnishings did nothing to brighten it: plush settee in bottle green, a pair of stiff fringed chairs, puddle-colored rug, wallpaper which seemed a faithful reproduction of dried seaweed. No previous tenant had been able to spoil the white mantel, which even to Torrant’s uncaring eye looked valuable.

  He took in all these details meticulously, because he had to interest himself in everything that concerned this woman. Annabelle said, “Won’t you sit down, Mr.—Torrant? It’s kind of you to come. It’s—” she lifted the light, peculiarly blank eyes, “so thoughtful.”

  Torrant absorbed the deliberate prick, and said politely that he had been so close to Martin, closer in fact than he was to his own brother, that it seemed the natural thing to do. “Did he tell you about our work together, Miss Blair?”

  She had taken a chair with her back to the light. “Something of it, yes. Of course, we were married so short a time—”

  “Six months,” said Torrant, and because it was the term of survival she had allowed Martin it came out more sharply than he intended. Annabelle Blair said with an air of sad reproach, “I’m afraid I didn’t count the days.”

  “Of course not. It must have come as a terrible shock to you. Did you have someone to go to, or stay with . . . family?” She shook her glossy dark head; she said evasively, “People were very kind,” and her eyes on Torrant were probing. He noted that down as his first forward step, and met her gaze solicitously. “I realize that it’s a very personal question to ask, but did you have any suspicion beforehand? Was there any indication of what he had in mind?”

  There was a small thoughtful silence w
hile she inspected this. “No. But it was always a possibility with . . . what Martin was. As you say,” said Annabelle, looking levelly across the room at him, “under the circumstances.”

  Torrant was moved to a cold admiration. Annabelle turned her head and gazed pointedly at a dark coat and scarf folded over one arm of the settee, and he stood up, pretending to notice them for the first time. “I’ll be on my way now, I’m afraid I’ve kept you.”

  “Not at all.” She rose and crossed the room to precede him out; Torrant let her get as far as the entrance to the hall before he said confidingly, “I’m going to be here in town for a while, as a matter of fact. Nice little place, isn’t it? Quiet. Some day when you aren’t busy we must have a good long talk.”

  She didn’t answer that, and it might have been the light that contracted the pupils of her eyes to tiny black points under ice. He said good-by again and heard the door close behind him; there was a peculiar soundlessness after that, as though she were leaning against it, not moving.

  The wind felt raw and honest after the subtle ugly chill inside. Torrant walked across the grass and down the stone steps, gazing automatically at the garage across the road. The gaze became a stare; he bent his head, cupping a match against the wind, and managed to go on watching obliquely the two small points of light, perhaps two inches apart, in the window above the wide double garage doors. Abruptly, the lights withdrew.

  Torrant got into the Renault and started it on the fifth try. He made a cramped U-turn and drove briskly by the faded old house again and past the willow grove. There was a sharp curve here, sharp enough to give him, when he parked the Renault and entered a field over a low stone wall, a view of Annabelle Blair’s front lawn.

  He didn’t think she could see the car here. He leaned against a tree and smoked a cigarette, waiting, but in spite of the coat and scarf on the settee and her coldly imperative air, Annabelle Blair did not emerge from the house.

  Had she changed her mind about going out—or was she telephoning to someone? Had she, holding the door as he left, looked up and seen those twin points of light in the window over the garage?

  Torrant examined her again in his mind, trying to shut out the hatred born of knowledge. Not an attractive woman—and yet she had drawn Martin to her. ‘Handsome,’ Polly Stark had said, and that came close because it was a cold word with which to describe a woman. The longer Torrant looked at her, the more she seemed like a, person who, fearing an attack in the night, had left a dummy in her place.

  It was a clever and very convincing dummy, planned to the last detail of colorless mouth and nails, severely knotted hair, low-heeled shoes that half-disguised the slender legs, dark dress of such uncertain cut that it might have been designed for a feather bolster. The eyes gave it away, with the blankness of a personality held in abeyance, the emptiness left behind when a brain went roving away on some secret pattern of its own.

  There was snow on the wind now, which made it even less probable that she would issue forth from that peculiarly dim old house. Torrant left the half-shelter of the tree, started back to the Renault and stopped. The doors of the Mallow garage were opening.

  Even through the snow-flaked gray distance and a few trailing willow branches, the navy-coated figure that emerged, closed the doors again and turned its back to use a key was familiar. It was unmistakably the girl in the newspaper store, who had studied him so analytically over her collar. After that brief pause for certainty and a further moment of surprise, Torrant moved rapidly.

  The Renault seemed to catch some of his urgency; it started almost at once. Torrant drove off between the fields, turned into the first road he found, idled along it with one eye on his watch and eventually turned back. The snow was now more businesslike than the windshield wipers and he drove carefully, peering through the white spin.

  The girl in the navy coat was a faster walker than he had thought; he had driven well past his turn-off before he caught up with and cannily passed her, backed, and opened the far door. He said through the snow, “I’m on my way into town— can I give you a lift?”

  It wasn’t a day on which she could decline without making a point of it. She said after the smallest hesitation, “Thank you very much,” and got in.

  Torrant felt as though he had netted a strange and wary bird which he mustn’t alarm too soon. He said as he put the car in motion again that it looked like a storm, and the girl beside him said that it did, didn’t it? That took them to the end of Vanguard Street, where he introduced himself and learned—again there was that tiny reluctance—that her name was Maria Rowan. Did she live in Chauncy? No, it was just a visit.

  She was polite and uncommunicative, sitting as far away from him as the Renault would allow, gloved hands primly in her lap. Torrant was interested in the frequency of the brilliant side-glances she managed to give him although the dark head didn’t turn. He kept his own gaze sedulously on the road, wondering mildly about that; he said presently, “I hope you’ve been luckier than I was about accommodations.”

  It was boldly inviting, but she left it there a moment before she said, “As a matter of fact, I was able to rent the garage apartment from your friend Miss Blair.”

  His friend Miss Blair. Torrant gave the choke some unnecessary attention and said neutrally, “I’m afraid I can’t claim to be a friend, exactly. I met Miss Blair for the first time this morning.”

  “Oh?”

  Maria Rowan’s politeness and distance and clear disbelief began to irritate Torrant; he had to stop himself from saying in her own tone, “Yes, oh.” They had entered the main street of the town now, and although she had slid the strap of her handbag over her wrist with an air of briskness, she was still watching him with that oblique glance. Torrant felt it with a growing combination of amusement and annoyance: she was not to be questioned, but he was there to be stared at like a baffling exhibit in a museum.

  He didn’t look at her as they drew to a stop before the traffic light at Chauncy’s only busy corner. He said casually, “See much through those field glasses of yours?”

  There was a moment of astounded silence. Torrant soberly re-adjusted the choke. Maria Rowan turned her head and gave him his first full and honest view of olive-gold eyes under delicately peaked dark brows, a self-possessed mouth, short dark hair ruffled by the snowy wind. He reassembled those details later; what struck him in that single instant was her fleeting look of fear.

  It was gone at once. She put out a hand and opened the car door composedly; she said, “Probably not much more than you saw from across the field. This will do nicely—thanks very much.”

  Torrant drove back to Mrs. Judd’s house, wondering.

  Mrs. Judd herself was in the lower hall, arranging artificial flowers with real agitation. Mrs. Petrie, the proprietress of the newspaper store, had just telephoned to inquire about the new lodger, and although Mrs. Petrie looked outwardly as good-natured as a balloon, she was full of a genial malice. The purport of her call, under its guise of interest and friendly advice, had been to remind Mrs. Judd of a much more famous Lodger.

  So that when Torrant entered the hall, Mrs. Judd eyed him nervously in the mirror over the bowl of flowers. The mirror was old and greenish, and it gave his pleasant face a cold preoccupied look. He caught her gaze in it and said, “Good morning, Mrs. Judd. It’s snowing.”

  Mrs. Judd repeated that comfortably to herself as he started for the shadowed stairs: Good morning, Mrs. Judd. It’s snowing. Nothing sinister there, certainly. Nothing . . . Lodgerish. She pulled out a paper daffodil, consideringly, and Torrant had turned back.

  “Miss Blair has a tenant, it seems.”

  His voice was inquiring, and Mrs. Judd found herself replying unwillingly. “Yes, I heard about her. She’s Mrs. Mallow’s cousin.”

  “Mrs. . . . Mallow’s . . . cousin,” repeated Torrant gently. He seemed to have forgotten about the stairs; he simply stood there, staring speculatively at Mrs. Judd, who twisted the daffodil uncertainly. He said, ha
lf to her and half to nobody, “It stands to reason,” and turned away and was on the third step before Mrs. Judd remembered the other event of this dark snowy morning. She said, “Mr. Torrant,” and he paused.

  “There’s another gentleman on the third floor—he came in shortly after you left and I gave him the other corner room, across from yours. I thought I’d mention it because you’ll probably be running into him now and then. He’s a Mr. . . . Simon?” inquired Mrs. Judd of herself. “Simeon, that’s it—Mr. Simeon.”

  The hall wasn’t shaped for echoes, but she thought as she spoke that Torrant looked as though he were listening to one. His head went back a little, alertly, when she said ‘Simon’ and in the second before she corrected herself he murmured in a quoting tone, “Something like that.”

  “Oh, you’ve met him, then,” said Mrs. Judd, obscurely relieved.

  “No,” Torrant said equably, “not yet, Mrs. Judd,” and walked unhurriedly up the stairs, leaving her with the tatters of the daffodil.

  CHAPTER 5

  MARIA ROWAN WATCHED the Renault out of sight, narrowing her lashes against the soft beat of snow. She thought that after the little blue car swung right Torrant turned his head fleetingly, as though he were looking back at her, but that might have been a trick of the shifting flakes. She crossed the street and walked an extra block to Chauncy’s only restaurant. Moments later, at a small table opposite a row of booths, she lit a cigarette for the shaken feeling inside.

  The field glasses. Fools rush in . . . She should have left them severely alone, dangling so invitingly from a hook on the garage wall; failing that, she should have remembered the light-catching quality of lenses close to a window, even on the darkest morning. Torrant had caught the reflection, his gaze had swung up just as she brought him into focus.