Widow's Web

by Ursula Curtiss

  The flashlight showed him that it was. Torrant emerged from it through an unpleasant silk barrier of cobwebs, and sent the circling light over an ancient washing machine, an area of dusty cement floor, a woodpile—and just beyond it, stairs leading up.

  The door at the top was bolted from the other side.

  She would naturally take all visible precautions. Torrant moved the knob gently and there was play. The bolt gave at the third impact of his shoulder and he stood in Annabelle Blair’s kitchen, finding the light switch a few seconds later. Pale green walls, immaculate surfaces, not so much as a teaspoon in sight. Torrant located the flimsy bolt and, after a slight delay, the screws. He fitted them meticulously back in place with the tip of a knife from Annabelle’s silver drawer, because his contorted trip through the cellar window deserved anonymity, and switched the kitchen into darkness and went deeper into the house.

  Dining room in shadow and then the lighted living room, silent, waiting, subtly strange visited from this new angle and without Annabelle. Suddenly an ivy leaf fell crackling to the rug and Torrant swung and then moved with automatic caution through the room, into the little hall, up the white staircase.

  He didn’t turn on the upper hall light. He aimed the flashlight through a partially open doorway into a room that was obviously Annabelle’s; he paused, tempted, before lie went on. The next room on that side was occupied solely by a tack hammer. Across the hall, then. Torrant opened the door, groped for a wall switch and stood looking in.

  It was a big room, an original two thrown together, with a fireplace in the inner wall and the barest of furnishings against its faded paper: twin beds, dresser and. bureau, single straight chair. The opulent touches the Mallows had left behind them in this austerity were startingly evident even at a glance—gold-backed brushes and an initialed leather shaving kit on the dresser, a barrage of gilt and glass on the bureau-top, an alligator overnight case set on the floor beside it.

  Torrant thought suddenly and jarringly about Mrs. Partridges overnight case, different from this one, probably, but equally left behind. He dropped the flashlight on the nearest bed, and because he had to pass it on his way to the bureau, opened a closet door.

  Louise Mallow had pre-empted most of the space. There were her suits, grape-colored, copper, gray; a black dress that looked promising even on the hanger, a long white sheath of something that felt like silk. At the back of the closet hung a stone-marten scarf, its pale-and-dark skins chasing each other up the wall. From everything came a faint breath of some concealed sachet, not a romantic lavender, not a casual long-married fragrance but something subtle and deliberate.

  Torrant closed the closet door abruptly, shutting in a ghost, and crossed to the bureau and began opening drawers. He found the pocketbook in the top center drawer, a huge polished wedge of alligator, heavy, topped in gold.

  Wind brushed against the panes; a faint draught stirred the edge of one white curtain. Torrant’s ear was set like an inner alarm for the peal of the telephone, Maria Rowans warning that Annabelle Blair was returning. Apart from that one mechanical guard, which told him that the house was quiet below him, all his attention was on the pocketbook as he opened it.

  Fitted leather lining, with “Louise H. Mallow” looking up at him in tiny gold letters. Lipstick, comb, compact—this her second-best, because it was a round utilitarian wafer of navy calf, unmarked. Handkerchief, smudged faintly with pink and embroidered with a pale-gray LHM. Another lipstick, somewhat tarnished—emergency ration? In the zippered change purse, three dollar bills, a quarter, a nickel, two pennies.

  No checkbook, or was it downstairs in the living room desk? Torrant had a queer conviction that this pocketbook had been left untouched by Annabelle Blair, because in a case of sudden death it had probably been checked automatically by the police and released later.

  At any rate, Louise Mallow had been careless about her financial affairs. Out of the three envelopes in her bag, one contained a charity appeal; the other two were bills, dated December of the previous year and stamped with mildly dunning exhortations, from department stores in St. Louis.

  Torrant replaced the pocketbook in the drawer, feeling flat. He had, he thought, only what he had had all along, with a few embellishments—a woman of expensive tastes and sheltered habits, who dressed herself beautifully and passed the bills along to her husband when she remembered; who dutifully carried a letter from a charity in her two hundred-dollar pocketbook and visited the country with a lavish wardrobe.

  Small wonder that, as beneficiary of Gerald Mallow’s will, Annabelle Blair had escaped the usual attack. People like the Mallows were rare birds in towns like Chauncy, suspicious because of their very plumage. Add to that the efficient, self-effacing secretary—

  All of it done as expertly as the confiding tale to Martin’s doctor.

  Torrant switched off the lights in the bedroom. His mind held the brief flash-lit image of Annabelle Blair’s room across the hall; wouldn’t that stand elaborating? A woman had emerged from the closet and the bureau in the big double room behind him. Mightn’t the real Annabelle—the astonishing woman who had married Martin and killed him and gone on from there—emanate from hers?

  Without warning the light in the hall went blazing on, and close to Torrant there was a small half-shriek of indrawn breath. “My dear man,” said Paulette Kirby when they had both blinked the light from their eyes, “don’t do that again. You’ve taken a good ten years off my life.”

  One plump red-nailed hand rested extravagantly over her heart in the sudden bald brilliance of the hall. “I couldn’t imagine—where did you spring from? I’ve had a key for years, but you don’t mean to say that Annabelle’s been handing them out?”

  Torrant thought rapidly back to the quiet of the street when he approached the house, the time it had taken him to get into the cellar, the altercation with the kitchen door.

  He said blandly, “You didn’t quite close the front door behind you,” and watched the blue eyes narrow delicately. “Miss Rowan happened to see someone going into the house and didn’t recognize you. She knew Miss Blair was out, and under the circumstances . . .”

  “My,” said Mrs. Kirby carelessly, “the perfect tenant.” Was she frightened under the nonchalance? At any rate she didn’t seem her usual swaggering self. “I should have thought she’d know my car.”

  “All cars are gray in the dark,” said Torrant nimbly.

  Mrs. Kirby gave him a thoughtful look and began to descend the stairs. She said over her shoulder, “I really must cart away those boxes of mine—this time it was my birth certificate.” They continued down in silence. “To think,” she added with a faint ebullience, “that at my age I should be called upon to produce such a thing.”

  And at seven-thirty in the evening too. Having produced a piece of random nonsense, Torrant reflected, she was boldly embroidering it. He took a slanting glance at the enormous leather pouch that swung from a strap over her shoulder; it was a handy size, he thought, for visiting attics with, and from its weighty look her birth certificate might have been written on brick.

  They were in the little front hall. He reached for the knob, and he and Mrs. Kirby emerged sedately through Annabelle Blair’s door. Shadows blew across the tiny frozen lawn; after the tight secret silence of the house behind them the night seemed enormous and windblown. Maria Rowan’s was the only other lighted window looking out of the dark.

  Mrs. Kirby shivered elaborately and walked down the bank to her car. She said over her shoulder, “Sorry about the false alarm,” and although Torrant couldn’t see her face her voice sounded amused and a little malicious. When she had found her keys and was settled behind the wheel, he closed the door and bent to glance in. “I hear you had a visitor last night.”

  There was barely light enough to show him the quick turn of her head, the suspended motion of her hand at the ignition. “Mr. Simeon dropped in and stayed for a cocktail, if that’s what you mean. He left at about seven-thirty. Is
that,” inquired Mrs. Kirby, faintly edged, “of great moment, Mr. Torrant?”

  “Just asking,” Torrant said equably.

  “Should I be flattered? Somehow I don’t think so,” Mrs. Kirby said with a sharp laugh. She switched on the headlights and her bold curving face sprang out of the dark, traced glossily with gold. “Next question?”

  She wasn’t really expecting one; she had started the motor and was shifting into gear. Torrant shook his head and took his leaning arm away from the rolled-down window. “Not unless there was something you wanted to see me about, yesterday afternoon at Mrs. Judd’s?”

  “Oh, that said Mrs. Kirby dismissingly. “I found out after you’d left that that list of mine was hopelessly antique. You seemed anxious to get in touch with Mrs. Partridge, and as I was driving by anyway I thought I’d ask if you had. But as things turned out you didn’t get to talk to her after all.”

  “Only over the telephone.”

  ‘ Oh?” said Mrs. Kirby alertly. “Was she any help at all about—whatever it was?”

  She knew, Torrant realized with a small shock; she had known all along what he wanted with Mrs. Partridge.

  “In a way,” he said.

  He learned five minutes later that Maria Rowan’s phone had been busy when Paulette Kirby drove up to the Mallow house. They had both forgotten, in arranging to have her call Annabelle Blair’s number by way of a warning signal, that the garage apartment had a two-party line and that on the other line dwelt a feminine voice which answered, and frequently, to the name of Violet.

  “Violets a pretty popular girl,” said Maria. She still looked remote. “So I couldn’t call when Mrs. Kirby arrived—and then, after all that, you went and let her in yourself.”

  It took a few minutes to straighten that out. Torrant listened, intrigued at the pantomime Mrs. Kirby had presented: her hand at the knocker, her wait for the knock to be answered, the door opening to let her in—under the pressure of her own key, but to a watcher there would appear to be someone behind it. And Maria Rowan might have been out, or busy and unaware, when Annabelle had left with Simeon, so that Mrs. Kirby’s secret visit to an empty house would pass as a call on her friend.

  It was impossible to doubt Annabelle’s cold fury if she were to find out that someone else possessed a key to the house where she lived in such careful privacy. But Paulette Kirby had risked that for something in the attic . . .

  Torrant remembered all at once something he hadn’t fully noticed at the time. The drawers of Louise Mallow’s bureau had been almost empty, and nowhere upstairs had he seen anything larger than the alligator overnight case. There were certainly trunks in the attic, then, and possibly other things belonging to the Mallows.

  Abstractedly, because he was preoccupied with that, Torrant invited Maria to join him for a drink and dinner. He was surprised at the clarity of disappointment when she shook her head, saying that she was too tired; she would have a sandwich and go early to bed. Even then he felt reluctant to leave this comfortable haphazard room suspended in the icy night— and that, he informed himself dryly, was because it was warm inside and cold outside, and his overcoat was still stuffed behind barberry bushes at Annabelle Blair’s cellar window, and probably full of thorns.

  Nevertheless, at the door he turned back and said only half-lightly, “Don’t forget to use those nice new locks.”

  Maria locked the garage door behind him and, moments later, the door of the upstairs apartment.

  Tired wasn’t exactly the word; she felt drained and subtracted from herself, and she knew defeatedly why. Torrant made an assault on emotions she had never used before and it was as bruising as the sudden activity of idle muscles. She knew the exact moment when it had begun, with Torrant standing in the doorway of Annabelle Blair’s living room and saying her name in that warm possessive where-have-you-been way.

  Part of his plan, of course, but disconcerting to senses that weren’t braced for that. It led to a humiliating wonder about what it would be like if his tone were real and honest, and after that to a further wonder if there were really room for anyone else in his chilling singleness of purpose. That was as far as she had allowed herself to go. She had always known chance encounters for what they were before; she had guarded her sensibilities. Had she, she thought a little bitterly, been taught to guard them too well? Because if you had been brought up in a sterile glass room you could nearly die of a common cold.

  Mixed up with all that was the flat and frightening suggestion that Torrant—and Simeon before him, and who knew what percentage of Chauncy—had made about Louise Mallow.

  Are you sure you want to find out?

  Maria went through the motions of dinner; a sandwich and coffee. She reminded herself stonily that Torrant wanted her out of the way and that Simeon, on all counts, was not to be trusted. That left the vague drift of public opinion, but Annabelle Blair and the Mallows had been viewed from a distance, and distance was sometimes distorting.

  Her cousin had not been a would-be murderess. Maria put out of her mind the fact that all murderers, all erratics of any kind had friends and relatives who sturdily denied it. Instead, her mind slid ahead to Annabelle Blair, and there again was the small sawing edge of all her relations with Torrant.

  Find out why Louise had died disinherited, and exactly what had led up to her death; Maria hadn’t thought beyond that. You might trap an animal if you had to, but you didn’t want to watch the approach, the entering, the sudden spring of steel.

  Torrant did.

  Maria wished herself violently out of it, away from a man who disturbed her, a woman who frightened her, a ghost who held out a tentative hand. But she had failed Louise once, and to run away again would be to set a pattern she might never succeed in breaking.

  She was rinsing her cup and saucer at the sink when Simeon’s convertible slowed and then stopped in the road below. Simeon accompanied Annabelle Blair to her door but didn’t go in; lights built up slowly in the half-darkened house-front after he had driven away. It might have been five minutes or ten before the door under the wisteria opened and Annabelle Blair stepped out.

  Then, as though she had forgotten something, she went back in again, leaving the door ajar. Her shadow moved briefly against the windows opposite the living room; she must have been close to them because she was definable for a moment, bent and reaching.

  The shadow vanished, the front door swung wider and then closed. Annabelle appeared on the gold-windowed lawn and walked deliberately down the bank into darkness. An instant later Maria’s doorbell rang.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE DOORBELL sounded a second time. Annabelle knew Maria was in the apartment; she had, after all, stood in the lighted kitchenette, putting away her coffee things.

  Had Annabelle discovered that someone had entered the house in her absence?

  As though she had been instructed, as though something in Torrant’s parting tone suggested it, Maria lifted her telephone receiver and laid it carefully down on the bookcase, half-noting the flow of a voice along the painted wood. Then she unlocked her door and ran down the stairway into the lighted garage.

  In the rush of cold air when she opened the outer door, Annabelle Blair, black-coated, was only a face hung pallidly against the dark. Her voice was surprisingly casual. “Are you, busy, Miss Rowan? If you have a few minutes I’d like to talk to you.”

  “Not at all, come on up,” said Maria too brightly, and led the way. Upstairs again, she crossed the room, hearing the sound of the apartment door closing behind Annabelle, and lifted the receiver from the top of the bookcase. Violet’s now-familiar voice in her ear said amblingly, “—something to go with my blue, but I can’t see twelve-ninety-five, can you, when I’ll only wear it—”

  “May I call you back?” asked Maria of the wall. She had never realized before how difficult it was to act convincingly with a telephone, particularly a telephone with somebody on it. She said, very conscious of the stillness behind her, “Yes, I am . . . Mi
ss Blair’s dropped in.”

  “There’s somebody on this line,” announced Violet’s interlocutor.

  “She’s always at it,” said Violet unjustly, and administered a sharp click.

  “Yes, I’ll be here,” said Maria, and hung up. Childish, she thought, turning around, but comforting in a small way. Or was it really childish? The brush of a branch against the far window reminded her of the black empty fields out in the night, the isolation of this particular road. And Annabelle Blair, seated in the rust-red rocker, wore the faint fixed abnormal smile of a plaster model.

  She said, “Miss Rowan, I’ve been thinking about our little talk yesterday afternoon. Perhaps I underestimated the shock that Mr. Mallow’s will would naturally be to his wife’s only relative, and I’d like to correct what I’m sure was an oversight. I think I could arrange an advance of—five thousand dollars.”

  Maria reached for a cigarette, keeping her lashes down. Going, going—how Annabelle wished her gone. For all the woman’s smoothness there was a tensity under what was obviously her last bid. But then five thousand dollars was a great deal of money to receive for merely going away and forgetting a letter signed “Louise.” “

  It was also a great deal to pay for merely not being watched. So that there was something to be found out, something that seemed innocent on the surface but wouldn’t bear continued looking at . . .

  Annabelle was waiting. Maria said, carefully pleasant, “Thank you again, Miss Blair, but no.”

  The pale eyes flashed over her from head to foot—was that contempt, or controlled rage? Annabelle said in a mildly wondering voice, “You really haven’t a price, have you?” The bold casual word dropped between them like a stone. She leaned backward in the rocker suddenly, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her coat. “Then why do you persist in staying here, Miss Rowan?”

  Hands in her pockets—what had she gone back into her house to get, just before crossing the road? A handkerchief, of course, or a glove. Forget the water boiling briskly for tea yesterday, the tea that Annabelle, smiling, had said might taste a little strange . . . Maria occupied her own tense fingers with her unlit cigarette and managed a few’ reasonably offhand phrases. She had taken a leave of absence from her job, she got out of New York so seldom that she wasn’t anxious to rush back . . .