Widow's Web

by Ursula Curtiss

  Louise Mallow’s glasses continued to bother him, because what Maria proposed, and the glasses themselves suggested on the surface, was a very chancy murder method indeed. Even granted that she knew Gerald Mallow’s drinking habits, his secretary might have had to wait forever for the combination of icy road and alcohol, and she could hardly possess herself of his wife’s glasses as a regular thing. And even when the three factors were dovetailed together, the chances were that Gerald and Louise would have ended up in an accident ward with a few broken bones and some new resolutions.

  Accident, on the other hand, pure and simple, after she had coaxed or forced Gerald Mallow into writing a new will in her favor . . . Torrant said it aloud, trying it, and Maria 1 gave him a scornful and incredulous look. “Accident—just after he’d changed his will?”

  Torrant said neutrally that if all the people who broke a leg the day after they dropped their insurance were laid end to end they would reach to Little Rock and perhaps a little j beyond, but he didn’t argue the point. Because Gerald and Louise had died in the crash, and Louise’s glasses had been removed from the garage.

  He wondered for a cold instant what would have happened to Maria Rowan if she hadn’t dropped the glasses, and then he reached for his coat. He said, “Let’s hear what Annabelle has to say.”

  On the way down through the garage, Torrant stopped to examine the window in shadow under the stairs, the means I of entrance that Maria had forgotten until she felt the draught from the night outside. He raised it experimentally and it shuddered in its frame, causing the vibration that had sent the saw crashing down from its nail on the same wall to drown the sound of its opening.

  He paused again at the tool chest and the window above it. A board had been nailed onto the center joining, wide enough for small flowerpots, wide enough for a pair of glasses that might somehow have dropped down behind the tool chest. Except that he could not imagine the fastidious Louise Mallow tossing her glasses on a garage window ledge.

  At some point during the last few minutes Simeon had arrived at the Mallow house; when Torrant opened the doors on the lead-colored morning the gray convertible was parked at the opposite bank. Maria stopped involuntarily when she saw it, and Torrant put a compelling hand on her arm. He said, “They both knew your cousin, and there may be a slip of the tongue somewhere.”

  The knocker dropped and echoed over the fields; the door opened as Torrant was about to lift it again. Annabelle Blair, in one of the severe wool dresses that made her startlingly pale-and-dark against the shadowy hall, said, “Oh, Miss Rowan—Mr. Torrant.” The blank, untenanted gaze flicked from one face to the other. “Is it something pressing? Because just at the moment . .

  “Come in, come in,” said Simeon, appearing suddenly behind her. A fleeting trick of perspective made him a mischievous parrot perched on her shoulder. “I think this calls for sherry, don’t you, Annabelle? We’ve about wound up those papers anyway—no, stay where you are, I’ll get it.”

  Annabelle Blair looked briefly angry—almost, Torrant thought detachedly, vicious. She clearly had no intention of pretending anything more than the barest civility. She glanced coldly from Maria to Torrant and said over a distant clicking of glass from the kitchen, “You wanted to see me about something?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Torrant busied himself with cigarettes, offering one to Annabelle, lighting Maria’s and his own, “it’s a small detail about Miss Rowan’s cousin. We thought you might be able to settle it for us,”

  Simeon came back with a decanter and glasses, pouring the sherry with a ritual air. Torrant watched Annabelle’s hand go out, the fingers closing around the slender stem as though it were an anchor. He said, “Did Mrs. Mallow wear glasses when she drove?”

  Silence—complete, instant, ticketable by the small scrape of a bush under the low windows, the diminishing hum of a car. Annabelle Blair took her hand gently away from her sherry glass and said with a musing expression, “Did she . . . I’m trying to think—” and Torrant had time to notice Simeon.

  The other man sat slightly forward in his chair, stilled there in the act of settling back. The face under the smooth gilt hair had lost its ugly charm; it was cold and waiting. He was, for an instant, the hunter that Torrant reluctantly had known him to be.

  And Annabelle Blair said with an air of sudden decision, “No.” Torrant could have sworn that it was a lie, because she had taken too long to think it over, except for the fact that it was so easily checked. Mrs. Kirby, for instance, who had looked at Louise Mallow with the all-seeing eye of dislike, might easily remember if it had been otherwise—and Simeon, staring obliquely at the rug, looked like a man doing figures in his head.

  “Mrs. Mallow wore glasses for the theatre, I believe, and now and then a movie—not for driving or reading. Although she seldom read,” remarked Annabelle with faint contempt.

  Simeon glanced up flickeringly at that and Annabelle moved a little in her chair, warily, as though she wished she had left it unsaid. “Why? Oh, I see—you’re wondering why Mrs. Mallow didn’t do the driving under the circumstances. This can’t be very pleasant for you, can it, Miss Rowan?”

  “I don’t mind,” Maria said in a removed voice.

  Annabelle lifted her sherry glass at last. Her hand was steady and precise, but the glass she put down again was nearly empty. “I think I can answer that for you, although I don’t imagine anyone will ever know exactly.” The same phrase, Torrant noted grimly, that she had used about Mrs. Partridge’s death in the pond. “When Mr. Mallow had reached a certain stage in his drinking, he was apt to become quite— bad-tempered. Interference of any kind, and particularly the implication that he wasn’t in a condition to drive, would have made him furious. If Mrs. Mallow had suggested that she take the wheel instead, his normal reaction would have been to drive even faster, to prove that she was mistaken.”

  Annabelle closed her eyes as she stopped speaking, forcing them all to see the heavy pale blue convertible gathering speed, hurtling over the icy road under the impetus of drunken pique. Simeon said into the silence, “I’m afraid, knowing Gerald, that I have to agree,” but his slow regretful tone didn’t quite cover a note of reserve.

  Torrant stood up. He was reminded of the child’s game of being blindfolded and spun around before being sent in search of a goal. He said, “So it didn’t matter, Mrs. Mallow’s leaving her glasses behind that night?” and Annabelle answered with a calm change of mood, “I have no idea where Mrs. Mallow left her glasses, but no, Mr. Torrant, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

  Again there was a small tight silence in the room. Simeon sat motionless, his attention almost a tangible thing. Maria stopped smoothing on a glove and looked up at Annabelle Blair, cool and reflective, and under the focus of the watching and waiting Annabelle turned her back and straightened a tendril of ivy on the mantel.

  The ivy jerked badly. It was a tiny thing, but it was the straw-weight that broke through the careful detachment Torrant had worn ever since he had walked out of the doctor’s office in Greenwich.

  He was suddenly impatient to be out of here, so that he could come back. Without any pretenses at all, this time, and alone.

  CHAPTER 16

  OUTSIDE, recklessly close to the door, Maria said, “She’d hardly tell us if Louise had needed her glasses for driving, would she?”

  “On the other hand, she wouldn’t want to be caught in an open lie. She’s frightened,” said Torrant, slowly and pleasurably. “She’s beginning to know a very little of what it’s like to see something—closing in.”

  Maria glanced up quickly at his tone, and then as quickly away. They crossed the road to the garage in silence. With her shoulder a few scant inches from his, Torrant felt her withdrawal; he wished irritably that he could stop Geiger-counting this girl’s moods. He said brusquely, “Better get some sleep, hadn’t you?” and Maria said with an answering crispness, “Thanks, I’m going to.”

  The door closed behind her; as though it had b
een a cue the door of the Mallow house opened, and Annabelle Blair emerged with Simeon. She was saying something over her shoulder, and the clear icy air cupped her voice like something under glass. “I’m quite all right now, the headache’s better. Perhaps some fresh air . .

  Had she read his mind, there at the door? Getting into the Renault, watching the gray convertible drive away, Torrant almost smiled at that. He had had no idea, so she could have none, of how patient he could be once he had made up his mind to stop fencing with Martin’s killer.

  Meanwhile, he had seen two sharp and puzzling reactions to the mention of Louise Mallow’s glasses. Would there be a third in the woman who, next to Mrs. Partridge, had seen the Mallows at closer range than anyone else in Chauncy? Next to Mrs. Partridge . . . not the safest place to be. Five minutes later, Torrant brought the Renault to a sharp halt outside Paulette Kirby’s small green and white house.

  Mrs. Kirby was in, looking brisk and surprisingly competent and, under the glossy tan and the nonchalance, hard as iron. Torrant had never seen her before without a turban. Her pale brown hair was short and thin and vaguely frizzled; she wore it magnificently, as though anything more abundant would be vulgar. She bore very little resemblance to the woman who had invited Torrant to join her in a cold reviving beer.

  She said, “Glasses?” and if she was startled at the question she didn’t show it. “No. I must have seen Mrs. Mallow driving the car—oh, half a dozen times, and I’m quite sure she wasn’t wearing glasses.” A small pause went by. “So that’s out,” said Mrs. Kirby briskly.

  “Out?” repeated Torrant politely, and got a bold blue stare in return.

  “My good man, you obviously aren’t house-hunting, and : you’re just as obviously interested in the Mallows. And of course,” said Mrs. Kirby, stepping casually out of her role of sympathetic friend to Annabelle Blair, “with a will like that, and an accident like that, one does wonder.”

  Torrant was a trifle jarred in spite of himself. He had a number of brief impressions, among them that this woman was like some sort of nimble sponge, who could be squeezed dry of information if he knew where to catch her, and that she was relieved at the turn the conversation had taken.

  Mrs. Kirby said, “She didn’t, though,” with a faintly regretful air. “Murder them, I mean. She couldn’t have.”

  It wasn’t an act of faith, it was a matter of pure logic. Torrant wondered why he had ever bothered to be circuitous with her. “Right, she couldn’t have. So it goes back to the will.”

  Mrs. Kirby shrugged. “That needn’t be so very complex.” Her voice was offhand, her eyes were hard. “Mrs. Mallow was a very attractive woman, and her husband looked like the possessive type. If he suddenly discovered—” the full blue gaze dropped, “evidence of an affair of some sort . . .”

  Torrant watched her abstractedly, reflecting that this was not a specific theory so much as a vague and general drift of malice. Or was it something sharper than that? His memory presented him all at once with a picture of Mrs. Kirby, hand at her heart, acting out thorough surprise at the sight of him in the upper hall of the Mallow house. But when he had shone his flashlight earlier into the open doorway of the bedroom across from the Mallows’, what had it covered? Just enough to identify the room as Annabelle Blairs. The path of light hadn’t touched the corners of the room, the sides, the closet.

  He said slowly, “You were in Annabelle’s room the other night, weren’t you?” and cursed himself instantly because Mrs. Kirby’s narrowed eyes went wide and she gave her small genial laugh. “My dear man, I am not a peeping tom. Besides, as I told you—”

  “—you were there to get your birth certificate, which you store in a friend’s attic for lack of adequate space at home.” Mrs. Kirby shrugged. “It’s hardly a document I care to pore over. And now, Mr. Torrant, fascinating as all this is, I have some work I really must get at.”

  She turned as she spoke, pulling open the drawer of a modernistic white desk, putting on her shell-rimmed glasses and picking up a sheaf of papers. Torrant collected his hat and stood. He said mildly, “Does Annabelle know you have a key to her house?”—and saw her guard go up instantly.

  This was what she had been wary about, this was where the camaraderie came to a dead halt. She faced him icily, her head up and back, her whole body a statement of outraged hauteur. It might, Torrant thought in the back of his mind, be the good old days and Mrs. Kirby about to dismiss an impudent housemaid.

  She said, “No, she doesn’t. But it’s hardly a tactful point for you to raise, is it, Mr. Torrant? When we both know I shut the front door behind me very securely that night?”

  Torrant made two further stops in the town; one at the cafe, for a sandwich purporting to be ham but proving only that the chef had discovered a new animal, the ether at a large white house set a little back from the street behind a chaste black and white sign. He had passed it a number of times since his arrival in Chauncy; it was hospitably lit when the rest of the town was dark, but it had only held significance for the past two days. He stopped now and went in, past the black-lettered “Hissop Funeral Home,” across a short crescent of driveway and up two Iron-railed steps.

  A solemn young man conducted him to the proper doorway. Torrant looked at potted palms and a pitiful array of flowers and the folded candlelit hands; he hadn’t realized until now how acutely he did not want to see Mrs. Partridge’s face. Like a child hiding its head under the covers, he thought bitterly, and took one long indelible look down and knelt briefly.

  Never mind about the Mallows; there was no doubt about what had happened to Martin, or to the woman in this silent and stifling room. It wasn’t a prayerful train of thought. Torrant rose again and saw out of the comer of his eye a jarring note in among the modest chrysanthemums and gladioli.

  It was a tall basket of white roses, lavish, just opening, calling attention to themselves by their very pallor. Torrant bent and took the florist’s card from its envelope among the green stems. “With deepest sympathy, Annabelle Blair.”

  From killer to victim, white roses . . .

  Almost without thought, Torrant picked up the basket and walked out into the carpeted hall with it. There was another doorway farther up, and more candles and flowers and a small knot of women. Torrant deposited the basket of roses just inside, where they would not be the mockery they had been for Sarah Partridge, and withdrew.

  Behind him there was a rustle of interest; a woman said hushedly, “Oh, aren’t those lovely,” and another said after a tiny pause, “Annabelle Blair . . . that must be one of his cousins in New Jersey. Don’t forget to write her, darling, they all have pots of money.”

  Torrant drove to Vanguard Street.

  He still saw the dead face against white satin, a surprising montage over Martins. Even more clearly he saw the jerk of the ivy under Annabelle Blair’s hand, the glisten of perspiration along her forehead—the breaking down of confidence, the building up of fear.

  Not quite two hours after he had left it, he knocked again at the door of the Mallow house.

  Would she answer? Torrant was queerly sure that she would. You didn’t hide from an aching tooth or close your eyes at an outbreak of flames; they had to be coped with if you were to live in peace and safety. And Annabelle Blair had risked a good deal for her present situation. While he was thinking that the door opened and she stood there, brows going up over her pale eyes.

  “Yes, Mr. Torrant?”

  It was a nice try, cool, a little surprised. Torrant said gently, stepping past her, “We were going to have a good long talk about Martin, weren’t we, Miss Blair? Or do you mind my calling you Annabelle?”

  She gazed at him stonily. Torrant took off his hat and coat uninvited and laid them over one end of the loveseat, giving himself an air of permanence. He said, “I knew Martin so well that I almost feel I know you,” and smiled at her very deliberately.

  Annabelle Blair didn’t smile back. Her face stayed expressionless as she sat down on the far
end of the loveseat—at the very edge, Torrant noted sardonically, as though they would both be rising in a moment or two. She said, looking at her hands, “I know it’s been a year since he died, but—as a matter of fact, Mr. Torrant, I’d rather not talk about Martin.”

  ‘‘Really?” Torrant watched the lowered lids, the pools of gray under the eyes, the fingers she didn’t know she had knotted, and kept back a rising exultation. “That’s a disappointment—it’s what I came to Chauncy to do. Talk about Martin, and how he died.”

  The willow-darkened room was still for a moment, while Annabelle’s pale empty gaze lifted slowly to Torrant’s face. She said, looking directly at him, “What is there to say about it? That Martin had a terrible fear of a certain type of illness— i you knew him. That when he found it in himself, he couldn’t face it. That he took an overdose of sedatives instead. What more is there?”

  “One thing more,” Torrant said to the cold and challenging face. “You murdered him, Annabelle.”

  She didn’t storm to her feet or cover her face with her ‘ hands or register any other kind of open shock. She froze a little on the loveseat, and she let a silence go by, but then she said almost coolly, “What a bizarre idea, Mr. Torrant—but not too surprising, I suppose. Friends and relatives never want to accept suicide, do they? In spite of the facts.”

  “The facts,” repeated Torrant. “Do you mean, by any chance, what Martin told you about his father?”

  “Yes.” The pale eyes sent him a lightning flicker of surprise.

  “About his dying of liver disease?”

  “That’s right,” said Annabelle, and seemed to breathe it.

  “He didn’t,” Torrant said flatly, “and Martin never told you he did. But it looked like a nice story, didn’t it? Explained everything to the doctor, after you’d convinced Martin he had nothing to live for. And there were no relatives to come around asking questions, were there? Martin’s aunt died shortly before I left the States, and his only uncle has been living in England for years and lost touch with the family long ago.”