Widow's Web

by Ursula Curtiss

  Torrant was not to be won so easily; he noted that it was well after six when he headed into Mrs. Judd’s driveway. There was no sign of Simeon’s convertible. Mrs. Judd was hovering nervously in the lower hall, like a woman distracted in the midst of something although she wasn’t, visibly, doing anything. She glanced at Torrant and opened her mouth and closed it again. She said finally, “Mrs. Xirby called this afternoon.”

  “Oh?”

  “About a house,” said Mrs. Judd primly, and added, “apparently.”

  “Thank you,” said Torrant, and went on up the stairs, wondering briefly about Paulette Kirby’s mission. Was she merely holding up her end of the pretense about his house-hunting friends, or had she something to add to what she had told him about Mrs. Partridge?

  He changed his clothes rapidly after a further glance at his watch. Mrs. Partridge would be at the Grotto at eight, and he wanted time first to talk to the bartender, cousin-in-law of the mechanic at Earnshaw’s garage, who had noticed the Mallows on their last evening alive. If there was a loose end about the accident, it might be here . . .

  It entered his mind, not for the first time, that it might turn out to be awkward having Maria along when Mrs. Partridge arrived. It was true that she would be more at ease in the presence of another woman, partly because she had been dubious about the propriety of a trip with all expenses paid; he had realized that from her manner over the phone. But would she—just possibly—say something about Louise Mallow that her cousin would not want to hear?

  All right, said Torrant forcibly to the part of himself that gave a damn; what if she does?

  “This is the kind of place,” said Maria Rowan, looking thoughtfully around the upstairs bar of the Grotto, “that makes you wonder what goes on in the back room.”

  “Probably something unmentionable,” said Torrant, and added with surprise, “but the drinks are honest.”

  They were industriously affable with each other, covering up a mutual wariness while they waited for the bartender, Maurice, to appear in the wake of a note sent by way of the waiter. Maria was braced and a little defensive, preparing for another look at the dead woman who had been her cousin. Torrant was detached but bitterly intent, because the Mallows were markers on the road that led back to Martin Fennister.

  “Mr. Torrant?”

  Maurice Leatherby was a nimble young man with sharp eyes and an evocative tongue. He placed the Mallows at the other end of the room, at a table near the bar; he dressed Louise in a purple-blue suit looped with furs and Gerald in a rosy three-drink glow. Torrant, listening, was very much aware of Maria Rowan beside him on the banquette, tight and still.

  Louise Mallow had ordered a Scotch old-fashioned with her husband the first time around; when Gerald kept signalling the waiter she had changed to gingerale. She had seemed to remonstrate with Gerald, and he had looked amused at first and then annoyed. At this juncture Dr. Nutter, on his way out after a late sandwich and coffee, had paused at their table to chat; the bar was idle at the moment and Maurice had heard him say something casual and friendly about the driving conditions.

  The Mallows had ordered dinner then. The bartender thought that Gerald had had a brandy with his coffee. It was late for the dinner crowd at this time, about a quarter of ten, and still early for the evening arrivals.

  Torrant, listening, felt as though he had reached the dead end of this particular street. There were no loose ends here, only the familiar scene of the wife counting her husband’s drinks, the familiar tragedy at the finish. Beside him, Maria stirred. Across the table, Maurice said, “It was quiet then, see—nothing doing at the bar at all. So I could hear them talking just before they left, and she sure sounded nervous about the car.

  Abruptly, Torrant was back at that table again. And Louise Mallow said, “Gerald, I tell you I’m frightened.”

  “Let’s not go into that again, sweet. I told you I’d see to it and I will.”

  “But every time we drive away like this I keep wondering—”

  “Don’t. She’s built for stress and strain. But if it bothers you that much . . .”

  The waiter had arrived with the check then, ending the conversation. Maurice seemed regretful about having spun out his tale; he had been giving Maria a number of dark and admiring glances. Torrant said perfunctorily, “Thanks very much—have a drink on us when you get the chance,” and watched Maurice depart reluctantly in the direction of the bar. He said to the still-silent Maria, “Ready for another?” and nodded at their waiter.

  He wondered whether Louise Mallow had been frightened of the car’s being tampered with or of Annabelle Blair, who knew so much about Gerald’s business affairs; he wondered whether Gerald had used the feminine gender about his convertible or the woman he thought so arrogantly that he had bought.

  He glanced at his watch, and he was suddenly relieved that Sarah Partridge was arriving by taxi.

  Mrs. Partridge had no intention of taking a taxi.

  From South Station to Chauncy it was upwards of fifteen dollars, if you gave the driver anything at all, and by catching a train an hour earlier than the one she had mentioned to Torrant she would be able to make connections and be fifteen dollars to the good. It wasn’t only a matter of finance; Mrs. Partridge’s hard-working soul rebelled at such a lavish gesture.

  She had persuaded her sister Molly to throw a few things into a bag for her while she telephoned the Lynnfield taxi, and her shouted instructions to call Mr. Torrant in Chauncy about this change of schedule had almost made her miss the train.

  There hadn’t been time to buy a magazine. She settled stoically down to her journey, a round rubbery little woman in a black cloth coat and a hat with a sat-upon air. She didn’t look remotely holidayish, but behind her folded lips and her formidable brown gaze, she was pleasantly excited over this unusual development in her life.

  The Mallows, dead like other people for all their finery. That had been a shock in itself, because she never looked at a newspaper and her sister wasn’t a letter-writer. Mrs. Partridge couldn’t cudgel up any feeling at all about the husband; she was dimly but genuinely sorry about the wife. She was a little confused as to Torrant’s interest in the whole affair, and doubtful about the wisdom of going to meet a strange man until Molly assured her bluntly that her honor would be perfectly safe. And for the moment, even though she didn’t know how she could help him, Torrant had made her feel important. Not an anonymous creature to be instructed about the mop-boards, or scolded about a dull patch on the dining room table, but someone to be listened to with interest.

  At Providence, dutifully, Mrs. Partridge began to think.

  She caught the connecting train at South Station with several minutes to spare. It stopped at what seemed to be every mailbox, but the fifteen dollars of saved cab fare was consolation for that, and there would still be time to freshen up at her sister’s house before she went to meet Mr. Torrant.

  There was only one other passenger for Chauncy, a college boy who swung off the train before it had stopped; by the time Mrs. Partridge had dismounted he was already an echo of footsteps and a diminishing whistle. Overnight bag gripped firmly in one hand, she left the lighted platform and walked briskly into the darkness.

  Hazel Street, then right on Cherry and up the hill to Willet’s Pond: her sister’s house was only around the curve at the foot of the answering descent. The night was icy and quiet around her, but Mrs. Partridge was hardened to discomfort and, a countrywoman, unbothered by small random noises in the dark.

  What might have sounded like following feet, if you didn’t know better, was the occasional shift of branches overhead, the reaction of wood to bitter cold, a quake from the iced-over pond. What might have been breath behind her, surprisingly close, was the dip of a shrub—

  Mrs. Partridge’s body went into the pond like something out of a cruel comedy: a thin crash, a splash, a great untidy black star in the faint glisten of ice. Moments later there was Mrs. Partridge’s head, breaking the surface
in a terrified , stillness of mouth and eyes, and presently that was gone, too.

  CHAPTER 10

  ROBERT MOSS, aged nine, stopped on his way to school to speculate upon the faintly sunken star in the ice. He stopped because it was his habit to linger wherever possible on this particular journey, and because everything about Willet’s Pond was fascinating for the simple reason that the pond was out of bounds.

  It was a deep, dangerous place; a magnet for children in the summer and a killer of one almost every year, with its thick lazy weeds concealed under an innocent surface. In the winter it was equally tempting, freezing more smoothly than any other pond in town.

  But it wasn’t quite smooth this morning. Standing near the unrailed edge, oblivious of his lunch box and school books and the bite in the gray air, Robert considered that. There were always a number of boys who ignored the “No Skating” signs posted at either end of the long oval, and it entered his mind laboriously that they might have broken the ice with something. Another thing entered his mind but he pushed it out again, unconsciously.

  He was briefly torn between the certainty of being punished for taking this forbidden shortcut and the probability of getting someone of roughly his own age, but with more daring, into awesome trouble. Eventually he trotted home, bursting with virtue, to tell his mother about the whitish and queerly flattened ball visible through the new ice on Willet’s Pond.

  Robert was a nagger, and twenty minutes later Henrietta Moss, armed purposefully with his books and lunch box, headed schoolwards with him again and detoured to peer through the ice for herself.

  Robert did not go to school that day, and in the course of what followed nobody remembered to punish him at all.

  Torrant knew later that there had been things to warn him, the small shock waves generated in a country town by any startling event. There was Mrs. Judd on the telephone in the lower hall, saying agitatedly, “Think of it, a little boy like that . . .”, the proprietress of the newspaper store shaking her head sagely and muttering something about drainage, the policeman holding court on the corner of the main street. But when the waitress at the Bluebird Cafe told him the news he gazed at her blankly, as though there were two Sarah Partridges and this one had nothing to do with him.

  The Mrs. Partridge in Torrant’s mind—for whom he and Maria Rowan had waited until after nine o’clock at the Grotto the evening before—had decided not to come to Chauncy after all. On second thought she had distrusted this trip arranged by a total stranger, or perhaps his own intentness had frightened her off. In any case she had abandoned the project and stayed cosily at her sister’s home in Lynnfield.

  That was one image; the other was what the waitress had just told him. The two clicked mercilessly together and became the actual Sarah Partridge, dragged an hour ago from a Chauncy pond.

  And Torrant had put her there.

  He left the restaurant and his untouched coffee, dropping a bill on the table and leaving the waitress wide-eyed. He got into the Renault and drove away from the town, looking at but not comprehending the arrowed signs. Fields and houses and other cars ravelled away behind him, but he would not have been able to find his way here again; he was wholly absorbed in the bitter knowledge that except for him Mrs. Partridge would be alive this morning, breathing the bleak air, occupying herself as usual, presently seeing the sun go down harmlessly on another day.

  Without ever seeing her face, he had plucked her out of her existence in Lynnfield and killed her. And—might as well look at this too—he had complimented himself on his arrangements while doing so.

  There was the taxi he had instructed her to take at South Station, the hour of her arrival deliberately falsified for Anna-belle Blair, but not for Maria Rowan. Torrant slid his mind past that with an effort and thought about the taxi instead, the safe sure means that was to have whisked Mrs. Partridge to their appointment at the Grotto.

  But she had obviously been walking near the pond, and, familiar with the countryside, she had known the pond was there. She certainly hadn’t—this hard-working middle-aged woman who had sounded so cautious over the telephone-gone teetering along its icy edge for the sheer joy of risk. There must have been someone waiting . . .

  Torrant’s numbness receded gradually, giving way to a controlled fury at whoever it was who had placed this black burden of responsibility on his shoulders. Had Annabelle Blair done it in person, standing back in the shadows with her blank-eyed stillness, or had she implemented someone?

  She could buy people now, with the Mallow estate so nearly within her grasp. She would hardly tolerate having that snatched away by the random reappearance of a cleaning-woman, but would she dare risk an accomplice? Hired hands so often got hold of the whip, and she looked well aware of that, as carefully solitary now as she must have been while she steered Martin Fennister to suicide.

  There was Simeon, of course—how sure of herself she had had to be in order to summon him boldly to the town where his friend had died. And Paulette Kirby, with greed and determination behind her ebullience. And Maria Rowan.

  Torrant turned the car abruptly back towards Chauncy.

  Mrs. Judd was in the lower hall again, with an air of having sped in from the kitchen at the sound of the front door closing. Torrant was no longer surprised at her nervous and propitiatory glance; he thought remotely that he might have been a tiger in a cage with one bar missing. He nodded without speaking and was heading toward the stairs when she said hesitantly, “Mr. Torrant, I don’t know whether you’ve heard—”

  “About Mrs. Partridge? Yes, Mrs. Judd.”

  “A terrible thing, isn’t it? And such a sight for a little boy to see. Now I suppose the police will be asking . . . What I wondered,” said Mrs. Judd, plunging, “is if under the circumstances I ought to say anything about the phone message Mrs. Partridge left for you yesterday. Did you find it, by any chance?”

  Torrant stopped dead, staring at her through the gloom of the hall. She was elaborately hopeful, as though messages were something like four-leaf clovers, to be stumbled upon if you were lucky. He said, “No, I didn’t,” and kept his voice down with an effort. “What was the message, Mrs. Judd?”

  “Something about the train she was taking, an earlier train, I think. I wrote it down, and I thought I put it on the table here until I’d have a chance to bring it upstairs—that’s .what I always do when I’m busy, and I had some potatoes boiling over,” said Mrs. Judd defensively, “but it seems to have gotten mislaid.”

  That was why she had looked so distracted in this same hall last night; she had been searching for the written message, not trusting herself to have its contents right and hoping to find it in time. And this was how the bottom had fallen out of his arrangements for secrecy, because Simeon had a room in the house and Mrs. Kirby had called.

  Torrant was suddenly and ragingly angry at this timid little woman who, afraid of her own shadow, had had a hand in the drowning of Mrs. Partridge. When she said, “Do you think I ought to tell the police?” he swung on her; he said icily, “I wouldn’t if I were you.”

  Halfway up the stairs he became aware that she was still standing transfixed in the hall, harried and more frightened than ever. He had tried to rub off some of his own bitterness, he had tried to haunt Mrs. Judd as he himself was haunted, and it wouldn’t work. Mrs. Partridge was his responsibility, no matter what unwitting tools had lain along the way. He turned and said with an effort at kindness, “If the police want to know, Mrs. Judd, they’ll ask. Why don’t you leave it at that?” and went on up to his room.

  The police. Of course they would want to know why he had asked Mrs. Partridge to come back to Chauncy, and his interest in the Mallow affair would come out in the open. They had looked at that once and called it accident, and— he knew country police—their backs would be up instantly at the suggestion that there had been any stone left unturned. Annabelle Blair would be twice exonerated, and the weapon he had hoped to use on Martin’s behalf would be useless.

>   Unless, of course, Annabelle could be placed anywhere near Willet’s Pond last night.

  Torrant realized with a sense of shock that he knew almost no details of this death which he had brought about. He didn’t know, for instance, whether Mrs. Partridge’s purse had been recovered. There hadn’t been time to wire money for the trip; she had said she could borrow it from her sister in Lynnfield. Was it possible—his mind turned bleakly away from the thought—that she hadn’t had taxi fare after all?

  God . . . but wait and see.

  Mrs. Watts would know by now everything that there was to know. Mrs. Watts, who had given him her sister’s address so reluctantly, and who had to be faced sooner or later.

  Torrant made himself a drink before he left, grimly and without pleasure. It crossed his mind that Mrs. Partridge, in spite of all her doubts over the telephone, had known something that would be the undoing of Annabelle Blair; had held, very possibly, the key to that bizarre will and the fortuitous death of Louise and Gerald Mallow. And that that was, on this gray morning when her own body had been recovered from under the ice, a mockery of triumph.

  There was a police car parked outside Mrs. Watts’ small yellow house.

  Torrant gave it a braced look; better here, he thought, than Mrs. Judd’s. He walked up the short path between thrusting lilac branches, knocked, and was presently answered at the door by a tall boy with a forelock, whom he remembered having been introduced to as a nephew. The boy stood silently aside and Torrant entered the tiny front hall with a murmured apology.

  He hadn’t noticed his surroundings on his previous visit here. Linoleum-treaded stairs rose directly ahead of him, on his right the varnished brown door of the kitchen was closing after the boy who had let him in. To his left, in what was obviously the parlor, a low murmur of voices only brushed the hush, the peculiar halted life of a house just visited by shock.