Widow's Web

by Ursula Curtiss

  It must have been minutes, although it seemed no time at all, before she found herself gazing directly into the face at the misted pane in the garage door.

  Maria caught her breath, and it was louder in her own ears than the wind and the peppery tinkle of sleet. When Annabelle Blair said, dim but imperative, “Miss Rowan? This will only take a minute,” there was somehow nothing to do but, in slow motion, release the lock, push the door open, step out into the dying afternoon. She didn’t close the door behind her, and the latch felt solid and safe under her gloved fingers.

  It was a deceptive time of day, looking nearly dark from a lighted interior, dully luminous under the open sky. The sleet was a faint cold sting in Maria’s face and a crystal dampness in Annabelle Blair’s dark hair; with the dry shelter of the garage only a step behind Maria, neither of them moved. Annabelle’s smile was faintly visible in the thick wet light. “Don’t be afraid, Miss Rowan. I won’t keep you.”

  “I’m not afraid,” Maria said steadily.

  A sudden small rush of wind sent her dipping hat-brim back, and she put up an automatic hand. Annabelle watched her. She said in a curious voice, “Still, Maria?” and took a step that seemed casual until, a second or two later, a car went by in a brief arc of headlights. The lights would have caught only an open garage door . . . But Torrant would be driving up at any minute. Maria clung to her steadiness; she pushed the garage door back toward the wall, destroying any kind of cover, and said, “What is it?”

  Annabelle still wore her faint reflective smile. “That hat, I suppose. For a moment you looked—about thirteen, holding on to your hat brim . . There was a pause, and then she said slowly over the sound of the sleet, “You know, don’t you, Maria.”

  For Maria it was almost like being seasick; there was the same sway and roll of a familiar horizon, the closer countersway that was dizzying to lock at. She couldn’t think at all, but she heard her own voice say blankly, “Yes, I know.”

  “Well, then—” Had the other woman made a sudden movement, there in the dusk? She was staring over Maria’s shoulder, not finishing what she had started to say, head tilted alertly as though she were listening. “I thought, just now, that I heard something.”

  But there was nothing except the busy rustle of sleet—was there? Against her will, in the face of that straining stare over her shoulder, Maria turned; it didn’t cross her newly-numbed mind that this was the oldest trick of all. She turned, and the hands were instantly at her throat.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE CHARCOAL DAY had turned suddenly into night. The sleet and the wind caught the pattern in front of Torrant’s headlights and twisted it mockingly, so that for a blinded second he was not quite sure of what he saw as the Renault neared the garage on Vanguard Street and came to a wrenching stop.

  He was out of it with the motor running and the door open behind him, because now the close raw brilliance showed him the only thing that mattered in this or any other pattern: Maria Rowan’s face, tipped back against the garage door, eyes closed, lips parted as though she were gasping. And in front of her, hands on her—

  Simeon whirled. The Renault’s headlights held his face briefly against the darkness, white, parrotlike, lined thinly with blood from eyebrow to jaw. He said sharply, “She’s all right. Stay with—”

  The rest of that was lost in his hard running footsteps and the cloaking patter of sleet. Maria took a step away from the garage door and stumbled, and Torrant caught her and held her tightly. Her breathing was rough and spasmodic; she had, he thought, been nearly unconscious. When she had quieted a little he lifted her face and looked at it and kissed her cheek lightly. He said, “Now. Where is she?”

  Maria stared at him for a wild blank moment, and then she said, “Oh, God,” and slipped out of his arms and began to run. Across the road, up the steep bank toward the Mallow house; Torrant caught her arm there and she gasped something he didn’t hear and shook it off furiously.

  The guarded white door stood invitingly open, the light inside gilding the sleet and the wisteria and the frozen brown lawn. There was no sign of Simeon. There was the tiny hall and the curving staircase, the shadowy living room full of the silence that seemed to be built into the very walls. And all at once, in the doorway of the red-painted sitting room opposite, there was Annabelle Blair, who must have watched them come in; Annabelle, with a gun almost casually in her hand.

  Maria, beside him. With the small part of his mind that wasn’t concerned with Maria, Torrant measured the gun-compact, businesslike, probably a .32, he thought—and then the hand that held it. That was what needed attention, and it didn’t somehow look as businesslike as the gun.

  He shifted his weight with care, watching the white fingers, and Annabelle went on gazing at Maria and smiling a faint unreal smile. She said, “Gerald never knew how useful this would turn out to be. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  He had to turn her attention, and the poise of her body, away from Maria. “Ironic as hell,” Torrant said, and saw the flicker of her eyes and began to move. He stopped almost at once, halted by something that was absurd but still shocking. And behind him, more slowly, with an echo of his own bewilderment, Maria said it again.

  ‘ Annabelle Blair is dead. She was in the car with Gerald and she’s been dead for—is it five weeks? This is my cousin, this is Louise.”

  “I’ve called the police. I gave them Mrs. Judd’s address,” said Louise Mallow, five minutes later. She seemed not to want to mention Simeon by name, as though it might bring him back out of the sleet. “I tried to fight him, outside, and then I remembered Gerald’s gun and ran back here. I thought he was going to kill me—he came as far as the lawn, and he looked demented. Even when he began to run again, I was afraid to let the gun out of my hand,”

  She had examined Maria’s throat anxiously. It was a painful red now, it would be ugly tomorrow. She had insisted that Torrant make drinks for Maria and himself; her own sat untasted beside her. She said directly, “I don’t know how much time I have before the police come here. I suppose I’d better begin at the beginning anyway.”

  Louise, Torrant said to himself firmly. Not Annabelle, after all these days of watching and probing and baiting. Louise. He went on staring at the woman who was bewilderingly the same and not the same. Composed, but not the automaton she had made of herself. Not empty-eyed, now that she wasn’t hiding under a borrowed personality, but steady and bitter and honest. He realized with a fresh sense of shock that what he had thought a clever disguise was this tired woman’s normal appearance.

  She was speaking now to Maria. “You remember—I don’t think you were too young—how all the family said Gerald was only marrying me for my money? They were wrong,” Louise said almost calmly. “Gerald was much worse than that.”

  “But your letters,” Maria said in a small wondering voice. “Your postcards . . .”

  Louise shrugged a little. “It isn’t easy to admit you’ve been the fool everybody said you were. I asked Gerald for a divorce before we’d been married six months—but of course there was the money, which he hadn’t quite gotten his hands on yet. And he was careful about his—affairs. He was an expert at that.”

  Torrant studied an unlit cigarette; out of the comer of his eye he could see Maria, beside him on the loveseat, twining her fingers tightly together. Louise Mallow’s level voice went into details in spite of them both.

  There had been affairs from the first, thinly cloaked as valuable contacts and business interests—not because Gerald wanted to spare Louise but because he was determined to give her no grounds for divorce. She was after all a housekeeper and hostess, an unimpeachable background, perhaps most of all a sea anchor when one of his affairs reached a stage that might become awkward.

  Until he met Annabelle Blair.

  “She was a little taller than I am,” Louise said slowly, “and she had a beautiful figure and a kind of—I don’t know— magnetism. Some quality that made you want to watch her, anyway. I remember the fi
rst time I met her, when Gerald brought her to the apartment for dinner. She told us she’d been widowed about six months before, that her husband, a test pilot, had been killed on an experimental flight.”

  Torrant had been absorbed in answering to himself, for the first time, the mystery of what had drawn Martin Fennister to a woman who would deliberately destroy him. ‘Some quality that made you want to watch her’ . . . that would have fascinated Martin of all men; it was what he had always pursued with his cameras. He glanced up sharply now, listening to what Louise Mallow had just said, remembering her words when he had first broached the subject of Martin’s death. ‘It was always possible . . . with what Martin .was.’ He had taken that for the coolest kind of challenge, but Louise had still believed in Annabelle’s casual tale of a test pilot. He stared at the woman in the wing chair, and began to realize a part of what he had helped to put her through.

  Three months after he met Annabelle, the steady voice went on, Gerald came to Louise and demanded a divorce. He hadn’t counted on the depth of the bitterness that had been growing through twelve years of humiliation, and he was dumbfounded and then furious when she refused.

  “Pride didn’t come into it any more by that time,” Louise said; she seemed to be trying to explain it to herself. Gerald was so confident, so used to his own way. He wrung the use out of a thing or a person and then he was through—but I wasn’t, and in a way it was what I’d wanted for years, to see him wanting something he couldn’t have. I remember that he flung out of the apartment that night in the worst rage I’d ever seen him in. He turned up the next day as though nothing had happened, with,” her mouth moved wryly, “an olive branch, an alligator handbag. He said a trip would do us both good, and as it was to be business combined with vacation he would need Annabelle Blair along. So we came here, Gerald and Annabelle and I.”

  The room was still, absorbing that slow trio of names. Louise stood up suddenly and walked to one of the windows facing the road; she might have been watching for a car or struggling to keep the calm that was almost detachment. Turning, she said, “I wonder if I can make it clear to you. I should have known instantly what it was all about, but although I knew Gerald through and through by that time, I didn’t know there were women like Annabelle.”

  Torrant saw it at once, with a kind of bemused clarity; he had had almost all of it in his mind, except that he had applied it to the wrong woman. Beside him, Maria drew a single furious breath and then sat in a shocked quiet while Gerald and Annabelle, summoned by the controlled voice at the window, drifted from under their double blanket of myrtle and occupied these shadowy rooms again.

  There was Annabelle, bored, restless, splashing the other sitting room with raw vivid color because, she said, it was such a delicious touch to paint anything in Chauncy red. Annabelle giving Mrs. Partridge her orders because, Gerald told Louise while Mrs. Partridge stood by, “You’re inclined to be much too lax with servants.” Gerald asking Louise to fix something for lunch as he and Annabelle had some letters to do, and from upstairs, instead of the tap of the typewriter, low voices and an occasional spurt of laughter.

  There were the times when the three of them went out to dinner, Annabelle beautifully suited and furred, Louise in quiet black. Gerald ordered for himself and Annabelle with numerous instructions about what was or was not to be done with the salad or the sauce; Louise’s order was briskly disposed of. There was, with surprising sting even at this late telling, one evening after Mrs. Partridge had gone to Connecticut.

  Louise had finally rebelled at bearing the entire weight of the housework alone; at half-past five she found that she couldn’t stand the disorderly, dish-piled kitchen. She changed into a tweed skirt and her oldest sweater, pushed up the sleeves and began to attack it. At six Annabelle came down to fix cocktails for Gerald and herself and left a tray of melting ice cubes and some discarded lemon peel behind her.

  There was a rib roast in the oven; Louise put potatoes in to bake and returned to the sink. At seven o’clock there were footsteps on the stairs and Gerald and Annabelle walked into the kitchen, Gerald immaculately pink and shaven, Annabelle with stone martens slung about her shoulders.

  Annabelle said, ‘‘We thought we’d go out for a change, we haven’t been for ages,” and at her shoulder Gerald said amiably, “How about it, Louise?”

  Louise glanced doubtfully at the oven. Her back ached from standing at the low old-fashioned sink and the rib roast would keep, but she would have to dress . . . Annabelle flipped her gloves against her palm, and said blandly, “Come as you are ”

  As you are. Old sweater and skirt, low-heeled shoes, hands reddened with hot water, hair damp at her forehead where she’d brushed it back with a soapy wrist. And they knew, of course; this was the careless twist of the knife. She said steadily, “No, thanks,” and then, “Oh—not taking my bag tonight, Annabelle? Because I’d appreciate it next time if you’d leave me my glasses.”

  Annabelle glanced back over her shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” she said, mockingly contrite. “I’ll remember.

  It might have been that evening that made them nervous, because during the next few days Louise began to notice that Gerald was watching her thoughtfully and that Annabelle’s glance slid nervously away from hers.

  “They’d set up an intolerable situation,” Louise said, “to force me into walking out of it and giving Gerald a divorce. They didn’t know, either of them, that if you hate someone enough you can bear anything. Annabelle wasn’t used to the country anyway, and I could feel her growing afraid of me and infecting Gerald. So he changed his will,” her gaze met Maria’s, “and he told me about it.”

  She had been stunned, she needed time to think. But before she could arrive at any conclusion, Gerald and Annabelle went out for the evening together for the last time.

  “She took my alligator bag,” Louise said in a voice that was suddenly thin and faraway, “and I suppose when they got to the garage she remembered about my glasses and wouldn’t go to the trouble of bringing them back. But the bag was the only thing I had that she envied. They’d had cocktails here, and they left at about seven o’clock. It must have been almost midnight before the doctor knocked at the door. I was still up, I was trying to think what to do . .

  The town of Chauncy had had three weeks in which to draw its conclusions; Louise had unconsciously protected herself from the full clarity of the situation. When the doctor said gently, “I’m afraid you must prepare yourself for a shock, Miss—er. There’s been a tragic accident. Mr. and Mrs. Mallow were both killed when their car—” she shook her head blindly, once, and said in a whisper, “Mr. and Mrs” and toppled.

  Torrant said in a voice he didn’t quite know how to use to this woman, “You haven’t touched your drink, Mrs. Mallow.”

  “I don’t want it. Or maybe I do,” said Louise, “to try and explain . . . I was dazed, I couldn’t think at all for a while. The doctor sent a nurse over for a few hours the next day, and she kept calling me Miss Blair. I thought about the humiliation of the truth coming out, and then,” said Louise, her head lifting, “I thought about the money. It was mine to begin with, and what had happened, all of it, seemed like retribution. Gerald had deliberately paraded the woman everybody thought was his wife, and he made it quite easy for me to become Annabelle Blair. I don’t know what made me think I could ever really get away with it.”

  It had all seemed simple, however, in the fog of shock. She had the black calf handbag, full of personal identification, which Annabelle had left behind that night; she spent hours learning the signature that would at some point be required. She moved her own belongings into the bedroom Annabelle had occupied, and transferred the other woman’s suits and dresses and furs to the closet in the big double bedroom. Beyond that she did nothing at all, because her role was a passive one.

  But there was the cousin she had briefly forgotten, to whom she had written that lonely letter. She knew that Maria had been very young at the time of the wedding a
nd that she herself had changed a great deal, but she was afraid of the handwriting and of what she might have said. She had used the spare key to the apartment and removed the letter.

  “I didn’t want you to be involved with—I’m a felon, aren’t I?’” Louise asked Maria. “I suppose I am. I meant to go away when it was all over, abroad, perhaps. . .

  She had been completely at sea over Torrant’s mission in Chauncy. She knew by then that Annabelle Blair had been an alley-cat in pedigreed clothing, but the test pilot was still vaguely in her mind and she never thought about murder.

  Until Simeon came.

  Torrant saw him as Louise Mallow talked. Knocking at the door under the wisteria, winter sunlight bright on his head, t melancholy dark eyes running astoundedly over the woman who opened the door. Deep fluid voice saying after a pause, “Annabelle. My dear, how you’ve changed.”

  “The worst of it was,” Louise said, shivering a little, “that he—admired me. When he read about the accident in the papers, he thought Annabelle might be worth looking up again, I suppose, but what he found was so much better. He bargained with me,” said Louise, and covered her face with her hands for the first time. “He said half. I think I knew that it wouldn’t stop there, blackmail never does. And all the time he kept looking for proof of murder, probably to make even surer of me. Being what he is, he couldn’t conceive of accident.’’

  The speculative gaze, the steady brooding . . . Torrant looked back at that and then at the whitened face across the room. “Mrs. Mallow—”

  “No, let me finish. I asked him about Annabelle’s husband, and little by little he let me guess at part of the truth. I think he enjoyed having me find out what kind of character I’d assumed. He never quite said as much, but,” said Louise, gazing steadily at Torrant, “whatever she did to Martin Fennister was Simeon’s idea. Annabelle could carry things out, once she’d been told, but she had to be told.”