Widow's Web

by Ursula Curtiss

  Torrant turned quietly into the partly open doorway. Among a profusion of piecrust tables and stiff wing chairs and whatnots and potted plants, Mrs. Watts and a policeman sat in diminishing profile. They evidently assumed that the boy had dispatched the caller, because neither head turned.

  The policeman said with an air of nearing the end of his routine, “Your sister hadn’t been living here in town, Mrs. Watts?”

  “No, not for over a month. Another sister of mine in Connecticut lest her husband, and Sarah went to help out and decided to stay.”

  Some disturbance of light or a breaking of pattern caught her attention then; she turned her head and saw Torrant in the doorway. He thought with a faint and unreasonable surprise that she looked exactly the same: mournful melted-candle face, lightless dark eyes, folded lips and hands as rigid as though she were sitting for her portrait.

  The single moment before she moved seemed like the calm before hysterics, or at the very least a pointing finger and a shrieked accusation. Torrant braced himself, waiting, and Mrs. Watts said with reluctance, “Oh, Mr. Torrant,” and when the policeman stood up inquiringly, “This is Sergeant Hilary.”

  Mechanical greetings followed. The sergeant resumed his seat. Torrant sat down uninvited, reflecting bleakly that Mrs. Watts was building up to her own moment of triumph.

  Sergeant Hilary said sympathetically, “It’s pretty clear what happened, I guess, Mrs. Watts. Your sister was walking past the pond and it’s pretty dark up there, she didn’t realize how slippery it was. Maybe if she hadn’t struck her head when she fell . . .” He stopped, shrugging.

  A grandfather clock in the corner behind Mrs. Watts suspended its ticking, groaned faintly and began to strike. Sergeant Hilary waited for it to conclude as deferentially as though it were another person. He said, “There was a return ticket to Lynnfield and thirty dollars in cash in Mrs. Partridge’s bag. She was on her way here for a visit, was she?”

  Torrant’s fingers stopped on his unlit cigarette.

  His first amazement at the sergeant’s credulity was gone; looked at in one light, the circumstances of Mrs. Partridge’s death dovetailed neatly into accident. Given the real reason for her return to Chauncy, the same circumstances were the framework of murder—and Mrs. Watts was leaning forward in her chair.

  She didn’t glance in Torrant’s direction. She said, “That’s right, Sergeant. Sarah was going to start a new job in Lynnfield, and I asked her to spend a few days with me first.”

  Behind her the grandfather clock resumed its dull ticking, as though nothing at all had happened in the room.

  CHAPTER 11

  TORRANT DEVOTED his stare to the pattern of the parlor rug, and Sergeant Hilary left. Mrs. Watts went out into the hall with him; Torrant caught a few apologetic phrases about routine and an autopsy. When Mrs. Watts re-entered the parlor he stood up expectantly—and felt his own face tightening.

  The mask she had worn under the sergeant’s inquiries was still in place. She didn’t look at Torrant, he might not have been in the room. For a silent few moments he watched her plump the pillow where the policeman had sat, move the chair a fraction of an inch, give a microscopic turn to the beaded lampshade above it. Then he said almost casually, “Why didn’t you tell the sergeant about me, Mrs. Watts?”

  She plucked at a faultless antimacassar. “Sarah was coming anyway.”

  “You didn’t mention that yesterday.”

  “If you wanted to telephone her yourself,” said Mrs. Watts with the same stony indifference, “that was none of my business.”

  It was a lie, of course, and a peculiarly unassailable lie, cold, careless, open. Why? Something had steeled her to it, so thoroughly that she met Torrant’s gaze without blinking. She had been bought, or threatened, because in spite of her stubbornness and her steady hands there was something almost palpable in this grim little parlor.

  It wasn’t grief in any recognizable form, or even shock; that had clearly been wiped out by something stronger. Fear? Greed? Or the unbeatable combination of both?

  A door closed somewhere and then the house was silent again. Torrant said gently, “Mrs. Watts, you don’t really believe your sister slipped and fell, do you? No matter what someone has told you—”

  “I’m busy,” said Mrs. Watts jerkily, standing motionless behind a wing chair, “so you’ll have to pardon me now.” Torrant looked at her a moment longer and then walked to the doorway. He was sharply aware of not liking Mrs. Watts; that might have been because of the wary undersized eyes in the tallowy face or because of his own sense of involvement. The dislike added to his burden instead of lightening it, and he said out of a sudden bitterness, “Someone came to see you this morning, or was it as early as last night, Mrs. Watts? Miss Blair, wasn’t it?”

  The soundless impact of that took up a moment in which nothing stirred. Then Mrs. Watts said flatly, “You’ll leave this house or I’ll call my nephew.”

  The weedy youth with the forelock. “I’ll go while I’m still in one piece,” said Torrant wearily, and walked out.

  He knew he hadn’t the price of buying Mrs. Watts back again, because while greed was calculable, fear was not. Halfway down the short path to the street he paused, listening to a sharp echo on the cold air. It came again, drawn raspingly in and out: the sound of a saw on wood. Torrant turned and went rapidly around the house to his left.

  The boy saw him approaching under a frozen twist of grapevine. He straightened, dropping the saw and leaving the log on the wooden horse half-severed. His vague pallid face under its forelock went hostile; he said before Torrant had a chance to speak, “I got to go in now,” and walked away and up a flight of wooden back steps. The door closed firmly behind him.

  So that was that. Mrs. Watts had spoken to him—but somebody had spoken to Mrs. Watts first. Somebody had put into crisp close outline the vague and lifelong fears implicit in the watchful eyes, the grudging mouth—because there was no other possible explanation of this stoniness in the face of a sister’s sudden death.

  Fear invited brutality in some natures. In animals, in young children, in vicious adults.

  In Annabelle Blair.

  Two minutes away from the Watts house, Torrant stopped the Renault at Willet’s Pond. It was deserted now after the morning’s drama, but it had a cold patient look under the gray sky. Broken ice moved lazily about in the wide dark mouth of water toward the lower end. Torrant, about to flip his cigarette end into it, paused for no reason and stepped on it instead.

  His first thought was of how close Mrs. Partridge had been to her sister’s house and safety—but logic told him that she hadn’t been safe since she stepped off the train; that she had been played, like a fish. She had been allowed to leave the lighted houses near the station and walk unmolested up the hill and into this silent danger area. If she struggled then or had time to scream, the thin woods, the old cemetery on the far side of the pond, the chimneys of the houses at the foot of the hill wouldn’t tell.

  She had reached Chauncy, according to Sergeant Hilary, on the 6:35 train instead of the taxi Torrant had told her to take at South Station. There had been no specific warning in his mind at the time, only an idea that if her coming was worth while at all it ought to be as private as possible. But years of economy must have conditioned her against taxis, because she had saved the fare and spent her life instead.

  And she had telephoned her change in trains. Torrant’s mind veered away from the eagerness of that, the hurry she had been in to come and be killed. If she had taken the train agreed upon—

  But she hadn’t, and Mrs. Judd had written down her name and message and left the note on the hall table for Simeon to see, or Mrs. Kirby in the course of her call. And it had gotten back to Annabelle. Exit Mrs. Partridge, in a plan that was daring and spur-of-the-moment because it had to be.

  It must have been touch and go there for a minute before she walked obligingly into the dark. Carrying a purse with the money in it saved for nothing, and an ove
rnight case she wouldn’t live to open. Torrant took a last look at the gray open-mouthed ice, knowing that this was one of the reasons why police hated meddling amateurs. But what had he had to take to the police? A year-old suicide, tucked away under official blessing, and his own conviction that the quiet sedate shell of a woman housed a killer who must be growing increasingly confident.

  He thought of Maria Rowan, then, and walked back to the waiting car.

  Maria was a moving blur behind the window of the garage apartment. Torrant gave her a small salute, feeling a tension leave him and not even wondering at it any more. Then he walked up the bank and across the patch of frozen grass and knocked at the door of the Mallow house.

  Would Annabelle come, knowing that he must know? Torrant waited grimly, hearing silence and then footsteps and a sliding noise. A drawer? No, something heavier than that . . . The door opened without warning, and he looked at Annabelle Blair and tried to see her all over again in the light of this particular morning.

  Pale and rather heavy face, blank eyes, repressive black dress which expertly didn’t quite fit: she was difficult to see, Torrant told himself, because she wasn’t really there at all. How Martin’s widow must be leaping and lunging inside this husk . . .

  She didn’t ask by word or gesture why he was there, and her acceptance of him as something inevitable gave Torrant a cold satisfaction. He followed her into the living room, and because he saw it so often in his mind he knew instantly that something about it had changed. A table missing, a chair pushed out of place? Something, anyway, that lost its sharp edge when he tried to pin it down.

  He said without preamble, “I thought you might be interested in the news about Mrs. Partridge—unless you’ve heard already.”

  Annabelle turned a little too quickly. “Mrs. . . . ? Oh, of course—what is it?”

  Her eyes and her voice were only politely interested, but Torrant thought that she wore her hands like gloves this morning, aware of them, not quite sure how to dispose of them gracefully. He said, “I told you yesterday that she was coming back to Chauncy for a visit. She only got as far as Willet’s Pond, unfortunately. They recovered her body a couple of hours ago.”

  Just the right span of silence, a shocked stare, a look of pity—Annabelle Blair almost carried it off. She spoiled it, just as she turned away from him, by the pale flashing glance she shot at him around the edge of her lifted hand.

  And what was it that was wrong about this room?

  “It was icy last night,” Annabelle was saying slowly, “and I suppose she fell . . . There ought to be a railing there, of course.” She turned back from the window and said earnestly, “It’s a terribly dangerous place, Willet’s Pond.”

  Torrant agreed; he added gently, “You’d think that Mrs. Partridge would have known that, living here so long.”

  “People get used to things—hazards—and after a while they don’t even . . .” Annabelle caught herself there; had her own persuasive voice warned her? She finished coolly, “At least I presume that’s what must have happened. I don’t suppose anyone will ever know exactly.”

  Torrant looked at the challenge and let it go by. He was thinking about the one normal natural question she hadn’t asked—and all at once, as though her brain were tuned warily in on his, Annabelle said with a faint frown, “But I thought you said Mrs. Partridge wasn’t arriving until today, Mr. Torrant?”

  She looked directly at him as she spoke, and Torrant’s deep bitter anger moved a notch nearer the surface at her air of inquiry. He said steadily, “She changed her mind, Miss Blair. Unlucky for her, wasn’t it?”

  Annabelle Blair didn’t answer him. Torrant realized that for the last few moments she had had a listening air, realized a split second later that a car had slowed in the road outside. She had transferred her gaze to the windows behind Torrant; now she said, “Will you excuse me?” and walked unhurriedly past him to the front door and opened it and went out, pulling it lightly to behind her.

  Torrant had swung in time to catch a glimpse of a moving fender, black and polished, before the car moved beyond the range of the windows. A taxi? Someone, at any rate, whom Annabelle wanted to put off because of her awkward visitor. The sitting room on the other side of the hall, the vivid red room which she was transforming with paint into a place as cold and pale as herself, would look out on that part of the road. Torrant started for it, and stopped.

  The change in perspective showed him what had changed in the room, and what had made the heavy sliding noise audible outside the door. A rust-colored wing chair had been pushed back from the far side of the hearth, leaving a paler patch of rug and parallel scratches on the oak flooring.

  Torrant crossed the room rapidly and soundlessly. He stared down through shadow between the angle of the chair and the wall at a calf suitcase, and on top of it a folded coat and a black purse and gloves. Something warned him then, the faintest of sounds. Annabelle Blair stood just inside the living room, the front door behind her open on the icy gray morning, watching him.

  Slowly, not taking her eyes from his face, she retreated a step and put a hand behind her and pushed the door shut. Something careful about the gesture, some suggestion of collaboration, turned Torrant’s voice hard. “Were you planning a trip, Miss Blair?”

  A muscle in the thick white throat began to flicker; he watched it, fascinated and repelled. “What sharp eyes you have, Mr. Torrant,” said Annabelle Blair with the first open venom he had heard her use. “As a matter of fact, I was sorting out some things for storage. There’s been a lot of that to do.”

  The clean-up spot. She had been in it twice: tidy up after Martin, straighten out the Mallow affairs—and then, in both cases, after she had established herself as quiet and harmless, flight. Mrs. Partridge had thrown her badly off schedule, as witness the hastily hidden suitcase, the uncontrollable twitching.

  “That’s right, of course,” said Torrant pleasantly. “You’ve had more than your share of that lately, haven’t you, Miss Blair?”

  Annabelle shrugged. She had herself under iron control again, moving into the room, straightening a fold of curtain as though her mind were already elsewhere. The gesture was small; it contrived to appear mocking. “Perhaps. I am rather busy at the moment, Mr. Torrant, so if you’ll excuse me . . .”

  Torrant left. He passed her at the window as he let himself out, and the faint tiny pearling of dampness along her hairline reminded him unpleasantly of advertisements for synthetics which were porous, and breathed.

  Twenty minutes later, head tilted consideringly, Maria Rowan said, “You can’t be sure, can you, that it wasn’t accident?” She had lost her cool untouchable look; she was pale and intent, her eyes imploring. “People do—fall into ponds.”

  “Children,” said Torrant brusquely. “Drunks. Kids on bets.

  Very seldom middle-aged women who know every step of the way.” He glanced across at her. “It’s possible, of course. The telephone message in Mrs. Judd’s hall might have blown away in a draught. Or been carried away by a pack rat with nothing to read. Mrs. Partridge might have been going to tell me that all was bliss between the Mallows and Annabelle Blair the soul of honor, she may have gone teetering along the edge of the pond just for the hell of it.”

  He stopped, and said flatly, “But I don’t believe it. It wasn’t an accident. I ought to know—I set the whole thing up.”

  “That’s nonsense—” Maria began and broke off, not looking at him, because there was really nothing to substantiate that. She poured coffee instead into the waiting cups in the kitchenette. Torrant said quietly, “The train got in at 6:35. Did Annabelle Blair go out after I left you?”

  “You left at a little before six—and then I was dressing.”

  Something oblique about that, something sharply at variance with the character of a girl who stood at the window with field glasses, had her locks changed, found out where Annabelle Blair went on her walks. Was she beginning to wonder about the cousin she had never kno
wn? Was she afraid of what Annabelle, cornered, might have to say about Louise Mallow?

  Torrant felt the new, already-familiar anger stirring in him again. Mrs. Partridge was only a name to Maria Rowan, comfortably remote, divorced from even so frail a reality as a voice heard over a telephone wire. She was not a dead weight on Maria’s conscience—but she was dead. He looked at the silky dark head, the clear profile that made its own decisions, and found himself telling Maria about Martin Fennister.

  It was the first time he had spoken aloud about Martin, and he kept it dry and factual. Brief though he was, the subtle horror came through, the discerning intelligence that could don a Hallowe’en mask and send a fanciful child tumbling over a rooftop. Because in that one sense Martin had had a child’s vulnerability, with a child’s trust in the people close to him.

  There was a silence when his voice stopped. Maria looked chilled through. It crossed Torrant’s mind irrelevantly that she had the kind of face that Martin, bored with luscious and lacquered beauty, would have liked to photograph.

  And whatever indecision had been in it was gone. Maria said flatly, “Yes, she did go out last night, at a little after six.” There was no need for a name between them. “She was at the telephone twice, I could see her against the shade. I suppose the second time was to call the taxi.”

  And the first? But the taxi—open, brisk, a matter of record; Torrant’s grim elation flattened a little. Then Maria said in a suddenly doubtful voice, “She was going to the library, or at least it looked as though she was,” and Annabelle Blair’s expedition took on a subtly different air.

  CHAPTER 12

  ANNABELLE HAD waited outside for the taxi, standing in the brilliance of the overhead light for between five and ten minutes. She hadn’t paced about or glanced at her watch or shown any other signs of impatience; according to Maria she had simply stood there, although the night had been piercingly cold, and waited.