Widow's Web

by Ursula Curtiss

  It was a theory that fitted well with Annabelle’s peculiar talents, and Torrant regarded it with pleasure while he dressed. If it weren’t for one small but vital point—

  You could plant ideas only in a mind that was ready for them; Annabelle had been successful with Martin because of his ingrained dread of lingering illness. Had Gerald Mallow been ready in his own way, had he already begun to fear his wife? Torrant found that he was eyeing his own face shrewdly in the mirror. He left the room and went downstairs and out into the brilliant dripping morning.

  He had breakfast at the cafe and was irritated to find himself looking again for Maria Rowan. She wasn’t there; she was, he discovered half an hour later, leaning against the garage on Vanguard Street, squinting in the sun and talking amiably to a small bald man in a Mackinaw who was working busily on the lock.

  Torrant put the Renault against the bank in front of the Mallow house and gazed across the street at black lettering on the faded tan sedan parked there: Joseph Pym, Locksmith, 76 Rockland Street, Chauncy, Mass., Tel. 848. Mr. Pym was evidently finishing up. He closed the garage door and tried a key which opened it instantly; he said something to Maria Rowan and disappeared inside the garage. He was back again a minute later, handing her something with a flourish and wagging his finger playfully. She smiled and paid him and he climbed into the car and drove off.

  Torrant was out of the Renault by then and across the street. He said cheerfully, “Good morning. Get locked out?

  “I lost my key. Somewhere,” said Maria, smiling but guarded, “there are a number of keys I’ve lost.

  The new lock glittered goldenly in the sun. Torrant gave it a flickering side-glance; so did Maria. She said, “I didn’t want to bother Miss Blair . . . If you’re looking for her, by the way, she went out a little while ago.”

  With Simeon? The gray convertible had been gone when Torrant took out the Renault. He said as though it didn’t matter, “Was she walking? I might pick her up ” and Maria nodded, indicating Vanguard Street’s course away from the town. “I think you’d find her in that direction.”

  Something about her, voice or mouth or disturbing eyes, held irony. And she was still, Torrant knew, measuring him. What was it about her that both annoyed and attracted him, and set him seeking her face in restaurants? She didn’t seem like someone he had barely met; she felt, because he supposed it was a matter of impact, unique and very personal. Which was nonsense, of course; everybody was unique.

  He avoided to himself the knowledge that very few semi-strangers touched the personal consciousness that was under everybody’s conventional surface. Standing in the sunlit snow, meeting Maria’s level and ironic eyes, he said brusquely, “Thanks, I’ll try it,” and walked back to the Renault.

  New locks, new keys; did that mean anything more than jitters? Torrant dismissed it and gave his attention to the curving road. It began to climb a hill; he passed a farmhouse advertising eggs, a gaunt old Victorian wreck that might have advertised bats, a little red house looking jaunty in the snow. He came upon the cemetery at the hilltop with a jolt, wondering if this were the cause of Maria Rowan’s irony.

  Yes, because there was Annabelle Blair threading her way out among the headstones, her head primly down, her hands black-gloved—after, presumably, a visit to the Mallow graves. She hadn’t seen the car, halted in the shadow of the cemetery pines, and as she drew near the iron gate she lifted her head. Torrant watched her steadily in the few seconds of grace be’ fore she would turn out through the gate and come upon the Renault; he wondered what childhood image it was that her expression brought back so sharply. Something domestic and comfortable in its proper setting, but all wrong in a cemetery.

  He placed it just as she reached the gate. It was the face of his efficient aunt, who at the first sign of an approaching storm would descend into the cellar to review the emergency supplies and reappear again looking as Annabelle Blair looked now, serene, complacent, reassured.

  The light eyes blazed for an instant when she saw him; Torrant thought with satisfaction that she was beginning to be afraid of him. Then the icy control took over again and she answered his greeting with a short “Good morning,” and began to walk by.

  “Let me give you a lift,” said Torrant promptly. “I’m on my way back anyway, so unless you’re ashamed to be seen in this vehicle—”

  “Thank you, but I enjoy walking.”

  “But you’re wet,” said Torrant, gently implacable, and put a hand on her arm. He felt the flesh contract instantly, as though she had read his mind and found the harsh instinct for violence there. He said, “Really, Miss Blair, you mustn’t —expose yourself,” and she glanced at him and walked around the front of the car and got in without speaking.

  Torrant turned the Renault neatly in a spray of slush and started down the hill. He said presently that Martin had gotten some magnificent effects with snow, not the usual frozen-brook-and-birches treatment but closeups you felt you could plunge your hands into. “There must have been a tremendous amount of stuff for you to go through afterwards. Were you able to get any help on that?”

  He was thinking as he spoke of Phil Stark, who had arranged the sale of Martin’s cameras and equipment and who hadn’t trusted Annabelle. But she said casually, “No. His work seemed so peculiarly his own—I didn’t want anyone else riffling through it just then. It’s all in storage, just as he left it.” Having said that, she sat in a braced silence, apparently waiting for him to ask where, or to request access to some particular photograph. Torrant did neither. He brought the Renault to a stop in front of the Mallow house, got out and opened the door on the other side and said briskly, “Now for a fire.”

  “Oh no,” said Annabelle, smiling and hard. “It’s kind of you to be concerned, but I’m quite all right.”

  “Nonsense,” said Torrant over his shoulder, and walked across the slushy brown-and-white lawn to the front door, soberly recounting the tale of an acquaintance who had just recovered from pneumonia. Annabelle Blair wanted to order him off her property; it was there in her set, quietly furious face. She didn’t dare. She took out her key and opened the door.

  The living room with its seaweed wallpaper had an almost cellar-like darkness after the sun and snow. It was, Torrant thought, glancing briefly about him, an appropriate place in which to live a shadow life. Behind him Annabelle Blair said stiffly, “If you’ll excuse me, I’d like to put on some dry shoes.”

  “While you’re doing that, I’ll get a fire going. And,” said Torrant, because this was the woman who had mentioned Simeon’s name after highballs at the Starks’, “can I get you something to drink? You look chilled.”

  “I am cold,” murmured Annabelle after a brief hesitation; she sounded as though she had argued something with herself. “No, I’ll get it, Mr. Torrant . . .”

  She was back almost at once with a decanter of sherry and glasses. She poured them both and lifted hers; she met Torrant’s eyes and something seemed to click into place behind her own. She lowered the glass and set it down with an odd finality. “My shoes,” she said. “I really must change them,” and went out of the room and up the white staircase.

  Close, Torrant thought regretfully. It was good sherry, dry and subtle, so subtle that she didn’t dare trust herself with it. He set down his own glass and crossed to the fireplace. There were half-consumed logs there, and in the Dutch oven he found stacked newspapers and kindling and more logs. How provident she was . . .

  Again and unrelatedly, a small teasing question poised itself at the edge of his mind. He left the hearth, wondering, trying to track it down, and went rapidly across the room to the desk in the corner.

  There was no sound at all from the stairs. The desk flap came down noiselessly, on pigeonholes with a few neat papers. He pulled one out at random, a letter to Gerald Mallow from Village Queen Enterprises, full of cautious legal phrases and dated January fourth. Another: a receipted bill for turning on the water at 707 Vanguard Street. Nothing here that w
asn’t safe and proper—and Annabelle Blair had been gone a long time for a woman changing her shoes. Was she hoping to find him at the desk?

  Torrant went back to the hearth, examined his groundwork critically and held a match to it. The newspaper flared, the kindling he had interlaced among the logs began to crackle. And here was something he hadn’t seen before, a brown-edged paper tucked under the andirons, the remains of a handwritten letter. The signature was there, bitten off at the corner: “Loui—”

  Torrant bent forward intently and stretched a hand toward the base of the flames. A poker shot over his shoulder, nudging the logs and sending up a small explosion of sparks, pushing the half-burned letter carelessly into the heart of the fire. Behind him Annabelle Blair said mockingly, “What a good idea this was after all. But—don’t bum yourself, Mr. Torrant.”

  He straightened, noticing on the way that she wore sponge-soled slippers, soft and silent. And she had managed another change while she was upstairs; she was no longer trapped and angry but quietly sure of herself. He wondered what was up there; it crossed his mind for the first time that it might be interesting to see. Through Maria Rowan, perhaps, or Paulette Kirby, who had trunks stored in the attic.

  He said deliberately, “Just getting warm,” and stood aside. “You’d better, too. You can’t be too careful, Miss Blair. It’s a tricky time of year.”

  “It is, isn’t it? But I’m really quite careful,” said Annabelle Blair softly, and then excused herself as a telephone began to ring in another room. “More sherry, Mr. Torrant? Mr. Mallow found it excellent . .

  Torrant gave her ten seconds and went soundlessly after her. She had gone through the small front hall but not up the stairs. He reached the hall and looked past a white door that was not quite closed, beyond which Annabelle’s voice sounded in monosyllables. It was another living room, a front parlor, probably, but somehow startling: the two-inch opening showed him a vivid slice of burgundy-red paint.

  “No,” said Annabelle guardedly, somewhere behind the door. “I know, but I can’t talk now . . . yes. Yes, I’ll be here.”

  The receiver went down. Torrant was back in the square dark living room, strolling idly forward, when the door across the hall swung wide on a white-windowed red wall and a strong breath of paint. Head-high beside the window was a splash of pale blue, like a surprised and peeping eye. Torrant said mildly, “Painting?”

  “The red was Mrs. Mallow’s idea,” said Annabelle. She walked past him and stood staring out at the willow grove, her back turned. “I find it rather difficult to five with, but Mrs. Mallow liked things—gay.”

  Torrant watched the hands she had forgotten, knotted and white and strong. He said slowly, “You hated Louise Mallow, didn’t you?”

  A full minute went by. The willows moved in the wind and let in a few reluctant shards of light. The convulsed hands loosened gradually until they hung sedately at the sides of the shapeless black dress, and Annabelle Blair turned around. She looked like any woman of forty-odd, quiet and cool and sedate, if you could forget her empty eyes and the pattern of violence in her hands.

  She said flatly, “What a peculiar thing to say. Just because she had everything—clothes and furs and a man who’d have gotten the moon for her if she wanted it—doesn’t mean I hated her, Mr. Torrant. Mrs. Mallow was part of my job.”

  But the hatred was there in every line of her. It made an ugly mixture with her visit to the cemetery and the damp clinging snow on her coat where she had knelt, and that quiet triumph as she neared the gate.

  “You’ll have to excuse me now, I have an appointment,” she said in the same, level voice, and moved toward the door as she spoke. Torrant picked up his coat, coldly exultant, as anxious to be out of here as she was to have him go.

  Because he knew now that his weapon lay with the Mallows, that he could only pay his obligation to Martin through the man and woman with whom Annabelle Blair had dealt so recently. Martin had been dead a year, but the Mallows were, so to speak, a new kill. What he had to do now was clothe the names with flesh and identity, and uncover the track of the hunter—the quiet constant deadly presence they hadn’t thought about.

  And he knew what it was, the tiny persistent point that had been bothering him.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE BLACK IRON real-estate sign creaked lazily in front of Paulette Kirby’s house. The tubbed evergreens at the door moved in the melting wind, unbuttoning the last of the snow with small wet noises. Torrant, who had just removed his finger from the bell, thought that there had been another and suspended sound from inside the house. He waited briefly, and went back to the car with the feeling that Mrs. Kirby’s bold arched face was watching him from behind a curtain.

  He would start, then, with where the Mallows had ended.

  The convertible stood out like an orchid in the weedy lot behind Earnshaw’s garage, the obvious choice because it was the only garage in Chauncy with a towing service. Torrant shook his head unconsciously as he gazed at it; it had been a beautiful mechanism and it looked almost humanly wounded in its bent chrome and slivered glass and crumpling of pale blue metal.

  The mechanic beside him made a sympathetic noise. “Ain’t she sweet,” he said reflectively. “Damage not as bad as it looks, either—that’s the way it goes. Orders are to scrap her, though.”

  “Orders?”

  The mechanic nodded and spat a respectful distance away from the blue convertible. “Lady up at the house called Mr. Earnshaw the day after the crash and told him she wanted it scrapped right away. We been kind of busy lately and haven’t got to it yet.”

  Torrant strolled casually closer. He circled the car and put his head in at the completely shattered driver’s window. Most of the damage seemed to be on that side, the door buckled, the fender crushed back—and Gerald Mallow had died first. He was glancing over the cream and red interior when, at the opposite window, the mechanic muttered and thrust in a proprietary arm.

  The glove compartment hung open, and he closed it with a snap. He said ruefully to Torrant, “‘Kind of a popular car today. Had a guy in earlier this morning, friend of Mr. Mallow’s, looking her over. Couldn’t hardly believe it, he said, when he got the news.”

  Nothing in the car, of course; anything of interest would have come to light at the time. But Simeon had opened the glove compartment to see for himself . . . Torrant joined the mechanic and began to walk back through the sodden lot. He said casually, “Driving on ice, wasn’t he?”

  “Driving on Scotch,” said the mechanic succinctly, and shrugged. “So they say. Bartender up at the Grotto, where they were that night, is a cousin of my wife’s, and he says Mr. Mallow was putting away a lot. Mrs. Mallow was getting kind of nervous but he wouldn’t listen to her. I guess they were on the way home when he skidded and wrapped the car around an elm.”

  Alcohol and darkness and an icy road—everyday tragedy, or a clever mask for murder? The Grotto: Torrant filed the name in his mind. He was surprised and a little angry at the doubt that had filtered into his mind at the mechanics summing-up. But there was no doubt at all about her part in Martin’s death, and again this time she had stood to gain financially . . .

  It was a little after twelve-thirty. He took himself off to a preoccupied lunch, and had just let himself out the restaurant door when he nearly collided with Maria Rowan and, at her shoulder, Simeon.

  Lunching together—and why not? Torrant greeted them with the firm smile of sudden bad temper; he had to remind himself that this cool olive-eyed girl was quite capable of taking care of herself and no concern of his. When Simeon presented her cousin as a would-be murderess, she would undoubtedly take it in stride. He said, checking his own turn away, “Oh, by the way, I did find Miss Blair this morning.” Simeon’s tired gaze swung alertly. Maria said, “So I noticed,” with no inflection at all. Torrant said pleasantly, “Keep away from the hot turkey sandwich, it’s really Turkish towelling,” and left them.

  The Renault was outside but he walked the
four long blocks to Paulette Kirby’s house, because it took that long to wipe Maria Rowan’s face out of his mind and he wanted it free for the other face, still blank, that ought to be there. It was a face that must exist, according to everything he had heard of Louise Mallow.

  “Why, it’s Mr. Torrant,” said Mrs. Kirby suavely after his second ring. “Do come in, by all means. Did you ring before? I’m afraid I had a late night, with old friends and Old Something, and I thought I heard someone at the door a while ago but it might well have been a nightmare . . . I’m a trifle, shall we say, bilious.”

  She was, Torrant thought, her own best alibi; she was clearly and magnificently in the throes of a morning-after. She wore a tailored navy blue robe that she swished impatiently about her tall and heavily handsome figure, and her bold good-natured face looked yellow instead of tanned inside its glitter of cold cream. Everything about her—small cherry mouth, nervous laughter, exaggerated gestures of red-nailed hands—had the faintly wild, unstrung look of hangover. Except her eyes, Torrant amended to himself; in the midst of all this harried amusement her eyes stayed cold and very shrewd.

  He said, “Sorry to bother you, Mrs. Kirby. What I wanted—” and she stopped him with raised hands and an arching of plucked brows over closed eyelids. “My dear man, I owe myself a cold beer. May I owe you one too?”

  “Done,” said Torrant, and followed her into a small blue and white kitchen that opened off the hall beyond the living room. On the table in the tiny breakfast nook was a cup of coffee which Mrs. Kirby had evidently had a valorous try at. It had a spurned look, and she gave it a glance of distaste, saying over her shoulder, “One does what one can without a maid, although I must confess that there are times . . . Income tax, the great leveller,” she ended wryly.

  Torrant’s first reaction was that she was still very slightly drunk, his second that she was not; that she had once had money and maids and revelled in them and was now busy creating the impression that she didn’t give a damn. He wondered idly what had happened to her husband; Mrs. Kirby looked like one of those women to whose husbands something weird and terrible inevitably happened.