Widow's Web

by Ursula Curtiss

  For Torrant the light struck a note of insistence, as though she had deliberately called attention to herself. Why—unless to establish the impression that she had been at the library when Mrs. Partridge went into the pond? Her whereabouts wasn’t apt to be called into question, and if it should be, eventually, the librarian’s memory as to a specific evening would have had ample time to dim.

  It was a small point, but it was in sharp contrast to Annabelle’s passion for unobtrusiveness. Torrant thought that over; he said to Maria, “I got here last night at a few minutes after seven. Had she come back by then, or did you notice?”

  She shook her head. “I was dressing. But if she did come back she walked, because none of the cars that went by stopped. I’d have heard—” She was standing with her back to the sink; she turned suddenly, proving her point, and Torrant joined her at the window.

  Simeon’s gray convertible was pulling to a stop behind the Renault. Simeon got out, his gilt head spotlit in the gray morning, and walked unhurriedly up to the door of the Mallow house. He carried a manila envelope, and after he had knocked he began to flip it against his open palm. The rhythmic motion, the smooth bright head silhouetted against the doorway under its arch of wisteria, gave the casual moment an oddly pantomime air.

  A minute ticked by and then another. Annabelle was not going to answer the door. Torrant quoted softly under his breath, “Miss Otis regrets—” and across the road Simeon gave the envelope a final flick and turned away. He had none of the self-consciously brisk, busy-anyway look of a man who is sure he has been outwaited. He was, very faintly, smiling.

  He was halfway to his car when his head came up sharply. Torrant got only a rapid glance of the beaked face as it lifted; instinctively he had put out a hand and caught Maria’s wrist and pulled her roughly away from the window. Her hip collided with a corner of the counter, and she closed her eyes and said tartly, “Thank you.”

  “Sorry.” Torrant moved abruptly out of the alcove. He could not have explained the lightning fear that had struck through his mind when Simeon glanced up at the window. But Mrs. Partridge had somehow turned into Maria Rowan, dragged from a pond with her dark hair dripping because she saw things she shouldn’t see. She was openly intent about it; all she lacked, Torrant thought irritably, was a fedora.

  He said decisively, “Mrs. Partridge changes things. You’ll be much better off back in New York and out of this. You’re naturally concerned, and if you like I can keep in touch—”

  “Thank you,” said Maria composedly. “I’ll be right here.” Torrant gave her a weary look. He knew at the back of his mind that this was unfair, that the claim she exerted, the demand to be cared for and worried about, was unconscious on her part. It was a matter of walk, possibly, or depth of gaze or cut of features—but it was there. He could not let anything happen to her.

  He used the only weapon he had; he said coolly, “About the only thing you can be certain of during your cousin’s stay here is that her husband left her out of his will. Are you sure you want to know why?”

  “Yes,” said Maria after a second’s silence. “Quite sure.” Her head had gone back a little; apart from that she showed no reaction at all. After a moment she took a cigarette and lit it, deliberate and thoughtful, and deposited the burnt match carefully in an ashtray. She said with a random air, “It was two years, wasn’t it, since you’d seen Martin Fennister?”

  “Yes.”

  “People change,” Maria remarked to her cigarette.

  Torrant sifted that instantly, with a kind of ferocious amusement: Martin losing his mind, unknown to his wife, his doctor, his friends, his neighbors and his professional contacts, and suffering a delusion about his father’s death . . . He glanced at Maria’s challenging eyes, gave her a small ironic bow and reached for his hat.

  Something toppled from the bookcase as he lifted the hat, Maria’s navy pocketbook. Torrant bent for it, his inner gaze on another pocketbook, Annabelle Blair’s ready and waiting with her coat and gloves and suitcase. Somewhere, cataloguing the woman who had owned and used and carried it, there was a third: Louise Mallow’s.

  He put his hat down again and prepared to be persuasive.

  The public library, a small T-shaped brick building on the street leading into Chauncy’s small center, sat on a slight rise under black-boughed maples. It was two blocks up from Hazel Street, where Mrs. Partridge had turned off into darkness.

  At nearly one o’clock Torrant tried the main entrance, found it locked, and followed a curved brick path that led around to the right and ultimately to a side door that opened on lights and silence, books and long tables, the warm dry fragrance peculiar to libraries. At a desk in the foreground a dark-haired woman was ruffling through a card index. Torrant’s hopes lifted at once; she looked alert, intelligent, bored with the empty room and the silence.

  A friend of his, he told her, a Miss Blair, had promised to pick up a book for him the night before and he hadn’t been able to get in touch with her. Would—he glanced at a card propped on the edge of the desk—Mrs. Biscoe know if Miss Blair had been in last night?

  His voice went glibly through the prepared speech; his mind said, Two blocks. Not far to go, after the taxi driver had let her off at the library steps with books under her arm. And at Hazel Street, no street-lights close enough to reveal her there, waiting—

  “Yes, Miss Blair was in last night,” said Mrs. Biscoe, innocently cheerful. “For quite a while, in fact. If you’ll tell me the name of the book you wanted I’ll check and see whether she took it out.”

  Torrant was jarred; it took him a moment to remember the name of any book at all. The librarian said at once, “Oh, no. If it’s in it’ll be at the new-fiction stand, over there. But I remember quite clearly that the book Miss Blair took out was from the stacks.”

  Torrant thanked her and moved mechanically off to the new-fiction stand. The lights had gone out on his carefully-reconstructed murder scene, and there was only the small grim spark of his own hatred to work by. It took him a while to orient himself in this new darkness, and he had gazed blankly at rows of book titles, and the library door had opened and closed a number of times on tiptoeing feet and subdued voices, before he remembered something the librarian had volunteered. Annabelle Blair had been in—for quite a while. Noticeably long, and in the stacks.

  At the desk a tiny old man in a black chesterfield was balking at a book fine because, he said reasonably, he hadn’t liked the book. Torrant circled past him into a corridor beyond the edge of the lights, with three dark aisles opening on either side. At each upright was a light switch and a printed notice: “Please turn off light when leaving.” At the very back, two abandoned desks with chairs perched on top flanked the door which was locked on the outside.

  And on the inside.

  Torrant left it after one silent try. Back into the main corridor then, shadowy at one o’clock on a February day—and how much darker at night? But still, would it be possible to enter at the side door, return books, go into the stacks, slip out again—and then, perhaps half an hour later, reverse the process without being noticed? Certainly not, under Mrs. Biscoe’s alert eye.

  Here were History and Medicine. Torrant flipped on the light at random, gazing down the neat empty aisle, and was diverted by the brilliant wash of light that came out into the corridor. At night it would be even brighter, an open advertisement of a presence there . . . all of it mockingly possible, until you came upon the locked door at the back.

  Meticulously, because he had built so much on Annabelle Blair’s ostentatious errand here, Torrant went on flipping switches. In P to Z, at the back of the corridor on the fiction side, he came upon the leaf.

  It was an undistinguished leaf, maple probably, tom and long-browned. Torrant had taken a few heedless steps away from it before it occurred to him, idly at first, that the leaf was still moist and that, at the back of the stacks and two-thirds of the way down the aisle, it was rather a long trip for a leaf on a shoe.<
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  He went rapidly back, and was not surprised to find the three steps leading down from a short passage at the end of the aisle, and the door at the bottom.

  A janitor’s door, obviously, because opposite it was a small closet with mop, broom, dustpan, wax, a wad of soiled cloths. Torrant opened it and turned the knob from the outside; it was unlocked, possibly because it gave on a dark clump of cedars that almost hid it. A notice typed in red said, “Keep Out,” and, “Positively no admittance.”

  Nothing said about exits.

  A raw gust of wind came slicing through the cedars, meeting and beating back the library warmth. Torrant closed the door carefully, mounted the stairs and left the stacks. At the desk Mrs. Biscoe said helpfully, “Did you find something?” and he gave her, she thought, the oddest smile, and said seriously, “Yes, I did, Mrs. Biscoe, but I’m afraid I wouldn’t be allowed to take it out.”

  The Bluebird Cafe was crowded. Torrant stood abstractedly just inside with none of his usual fury at waiting in restaurants; he was thinking how close he had come to missing that small important door. It must be unlocked as a rule during library hours, because Annabelle Blair had had to be very sure of it.’

  At his elbow, startlingly close, Simeon’s voice said pleasantly, “They seem to be full up here. I have a booth down here—will you join me, Mr. Torrant?”

  The carved parrot face smiled, the dark tired eyes looked preoccupied. He had finished his lunch; he gave his attention to an untouched cup of coffee while Torrant, glancing through the menu for something the chef could not do much to, ordered a chicken sandwich and a bottle of beer. The waitress left, and Simeon said, “How did you find Annabelle this morn-mg?

  “Her usual self,” said Torrant, deliberately non-committal.

  ‘‘Really? I stopped by, as you probably noticed, and I thought perhaps she wasn’t feeling well. As it is, I believe I’m being punished for last night,” Simeon said, smiling a little.

  Torrant said nothing. He suspected this man-to-man air, he wondered whether, in spite of the Renault parked in front of the Mallow house, Simeon really thought he had been inside with Annabelle at the time of that unavailing knock. He doubted it, but he wanted to see where this was going.

  Simeon said, “I had an appointment with Annabelle early last evening and I’m afraid I stood her up, quite unintentionally. I dropped in to see Mrs. Kirby, and what with one thing and another,” he glanced up wryly, “I lost track of the time. Annabelle’s anxious about some papers of Gerald’s, and I suppose it does sound rather offhand.”

  It didn’t sound offhand to Torrant; it sounded like a deliberate explanation of Simeon’s movements the evening before. Or was all this merely an extension of the smile Simeon had worn turning away from Annabelle’s door—self-congratulation at this show of feeling on her part? He hadn’t married her after Martin had been disposed of; he looked like a man who had no use for marriage, but the Mallow estate was a considerable enhancement.

  Torrant’s lunch arrived, and he poured his beer. “I take it you’re interested in real estate in Chauncy.”

  “Only the piece Gerald bought,” said Simeon frankly. “For one thing, it’s too big a deal for Annabelle to handle, for another, it’s bad for her to be bound to this town under the circumstances. For a third—” the beaky face was disarming, “like most of Gerald’s deals, it’s a very good thing.”

  Torrant listened with the surface of his mind; he had a feeling that all this was embroidery. Simeon was not a man to explain his motives without a further motive. Had he, just possibly, acted for Annabelle Blair at the pond last night?

  Logic rejected that instantly. Even if there were a loophole in the time he said he had spent with Mrs. Kirby, this man would not be used as a tool by anyone. Torrant knew that in the same sharp undeniable way he knew that Simeon had stood by while Annabelle shepherded Martin to his death.

  Had he tired of her by that time, or had they decided to wait for the bigger game, the Mallow estate?

  Torrant put out of his mind, willfully, the brooding and speculative look Simeon had worn about the car crash, and the fact that the other man had been before him in examining the wrecked convertible. He looked up to find the dark eyes regarding him thoughtfully. “Who is this woman who drowned last night?” asked Simeon.

  Somewhere in the forefront of the restaurant a tray of dishes went crashing and a woman gave a startled squeak. Both sounds seemed to halt at the very edge of the booth. “A Mrs. Partridge,” said Torrant levelly. “She worked for the Mallows as a cleaning-woman.”

  “For the Mallows . . . I see. I asked,” said Simeon, “because I met Mrs. Kirby on the street this morning and she said she had telephoned Annabelle about it and Annabelle had seemed quite—upset.”

  “But not,” Torrant said coolly, “as literally as Mrs. Partridge.”

  “I wasn’t being funny, Mr. Torrant,” said Simeon; he looked surprised and a little austere, an affronted parrot, as he picked up his check. Was he perhaps overdoing it? “It’s another more or less personal tragedy as far as Annabelle is concerned, and unfortunately that kind of coincidence can turn a sensitive woman—morbid.”

  Torrant shook his head. “That would be too bad,” he said.

  There was no message on the table in Mrs. Judd’s hall; there had been, Mrs. Judd told him stiffly, no telephone calls at all. She looked longingly as she spoke at the room key Torrant was bouncing in his palm, and he dropped it briskly into his pocket before she could gather the courage to ask for it back.

  He thanked her and turned away; at the foot of the stairs he said casually, “By the way, Mrs. Kirby is a widow, isn’t she?” and watched her lips tighten into the peculiar primness he had noticed once before.

  “Her husband left her,” said Mrs. Judd.

  Was it Paulette Kirby she disapproved of, or the departing husband, or the situation as a whole? It took Torrant a little while to coax it out of her. Jonas Kirby had been liked and respected in Chauncy in spite of the fact that he came from a wealthy Boston family who had turned their backs in horror at his bohemian ways. He was a contentedly unsuccessful painter, living alone, keeping his own odd hours and getting his own odd meals in a barn converted into a studio. People had shaken their heads doubtfully when, after one of his periodic trips away, he brought home a bride from Chicago.

  According to Mrs. Judd, Paulette had come up to the darkest expectations, forcing Kirby out of his comfortable studio and into an elaborate new house, entertaining lavishly and sometimes raffishly. All of it had come to a sharp end on a summer night five years ago, with a guest killed instantly in the Kirby driveway under the wheels of his host’s car.

  Jonas Kirby served five years for manslaughter. The claims and the lawyers ate up the servants and the big house and the all-night parties, and Paulette Kirby, composedly ignoring the muttered questions about who had actually been at the wheel of the car, scraped together what was left and bought the small house on Chauncy’s main street and hung out the wrought iron sign.

  But Jonas Kirby didn’t come back when he got out of prison. Some people said that proved his wife’s guilt; a more neutral faction held that prison changed a man. And therefore, Torrant thought, Mrs. Kirby’s ebullient laugh and bold glance and—give her this—head held high in a hostile town.

  He went upstairs to his room thinking that it explained a good deal about her, and wondering if her hard icy dislike of Louise Mallow was merely the resentment of one woman toward another who has all the things recently lost. Opulence, position, a devoted husband—

  Torrant caught himself sharply there. It was a Chauncy’s-eye view and all he had, but somewhere there had to be a distortion. A worm in the apple, a thorn on the rose . . .

  It was nearly seven o’clock that evening when the phone call he had been waiting for with a mounting expectancy came through.

  CHAPTER 13

  MARIA ROWAN’S TONE was cool and more than a little crisp over the wire. Torrant took time to marvel at the
perversity of that. She had watched Annabelle Blair like a hawk ever since her move into the garage apartment; now, when there was a definite goal for the watching, her voice held an edge of stiffness.

  She said, pointedly brief, ‘“Annabelle just left with Simeon.”

  For dinner, probably, at this hour. Torrant hoped so. Certainly the inner woman—literally—had to be fed. ”You’ll phone the house if she comes back unexpectedly?”

  “Yes,” said Maria detachedly, “but what good that would do—” It was not a question but a reserved comment.

  Torrant said, “It’s a big house,” and hung up. Five minutes later, the flashlight he had bought that afternoon beside him on the seat, he was driving toward Vanguard Street through the windy darkness.

  Some portion of his mind had presented him earlier with a rutted lane on the near side of the willow grove, possibly the entrance to some long-mouldered outbuilding. His headlights found it now, and the Renault rode nimbly into the lane and the frozen field. Torrant left it behind screening willows and, using the flash, cut in back of the grove.

  A faint glow met him on the other side of the willows; Annabelle Blair had left the lights on in the living room and pulled the shades to the sills. Had she been thorough in her locking-up, or had she forgotten a window somewhere? Women were often chary of cellars, and after a deafening collision with a paint bucket at the rear of the house, Torrant found that Annabelle Blair was no exception.

  The window was small and cobwebbed, set deep among barberry bushes that Torrant cursed in silence. It went up with a loud shuddering noise, and he had to remind himself that the look of occupancy created by the lights and the drawn shades was deliberate and false. He took off his overcoat and stuffed it behind the bushes; a moment later he had squeezed through the narrow opening and dropped down into what felt from the grainy crunch underfoot like an abandoned coal bin.