I was distracted from this misery by a sudden agitation in the key on this side of the lock. I saw it quiver and jiggle like something alive, and then it popped out — it seemed to leap out, itself a suicide leaping from a cliff — and clattered to the floor, and an instant later the door was pushed open and Greg’s ashen face stared at my own purple face, and after the astonishment and horror, his expression shifted to revulsion — and contempt? — and he backed out, slamming the door. Once more the key turned in the lock, and I heard him hurry away downstairs.
The clock read 9:58. Now he was telling her. Now he was giving her a drink to calm her. Now he was phoning the police. Now he was talking to her about whether or not to admit their affair to the police; what would they decide?
“Nooooooooo!”
The clock read 10:07. What had taken so long? Hadn’t he even called the police yet?
She was coming up the stairs, stumbling and rushing, she was pounding on the door, screaming my name. I shrank into the corners of the room, I felt the thuds of her fists against the door, I cowered from her. She can’t come in, dear God don’t let her in! I don’t care what she’s done, I don’t care about anything, just don’t let her see me! Don’t let me see her!
Greg joined her. She screamed at him, he persuaded her, she raved, he argued, she demanded, he denied. “Give me the key. Give me the key.”
Surely he’ll hold out, surely he’ll take her away, surely he’s stronger, more forceful.
He gave her the key.
No. This cannot be endured. This is the horror beyond all else. She came in, she walked into the room, and the sound she made will always live inside me. That cry wasn’t human; it was the howl of every creature that has ever despaired. Now I know what despair is, and why I called my own state mere truculence.
Now that it was too late, Greg tried to restrain her, tried to hold her shoulders and draw her from the room, but she pulled away and crossed the room toward… not toward me. I was everywhere in the room, driven by pain and remorse, and Emily walked toward the carcass. She looked at it almost tenderly, she even reached up and touched its swollen cheek. “Oh, Ed,” she murmured.
The pains were as violent now as in the moments before my death. The slashing torment in my throat, the awful distension in my head, they made me squirm in agony all over again; but I could not feel her hand on my cheek.
Greg followed her, touched her shoulder again, spoke her name, and immediately her face dissolved, she cried out once more and wrapped her arms around the corpse’s legs and clung to it, weeping and gasping and uttering words too quick and broken to understand. Thank God they were too quick and broken to understand!
Greg, that fool, did finally force her away, though he had great trouble breaking her clasp on the body. But he succeeded, and pulled her out of the room and slammed the door, and for a little while the body swayed and turned, until it became still once more.
That was the worst. Nothing could be worse than that. The long days and nights here — how long must a stupid creature like myself haunt his death-place before release? — would be horrible, I knew that, but not so bad as this. Emily would survive, would sell the house, would slowly forget. (Even I would slowly forget.) She and Greg could marry. She was only thirty-six, she could still be a mother.
For the rest of the night I heard her wailing, elsewhere in the house. The police did come at last, and a pair of grim silent white-coated men from the morgue entered the room to cut me — it — down. They bundled it like a broken toy into a large oval wicker basket with long wooden handles, and they carried it away.
I had thought I might be forced to stay with the body, I had feared the possibility of being buried with it, of spending eternity as a thinking nothingness in the black dark of a casket, but the body left the room and I remained behind.
A doctor was called. When the body was carried away the room door was left open, and now I could plainly hear the voices from downstairs. Tony was among them now, his characteristic surly monosyllable occasionally rumbling, but the main thing for a while was the doctor. He was trying to give Emily a sedative, but she kept wailing, she kept speaking high hurried frantic sentences as though she had too little time to say it all. “I did it!” she cried, over and over. “I did it! I’m to blame!”
Yes. That was the reaction I’d wanted, and expected, and here it was, and it was horrible. Everything I had desired in the last moments of my life had been granted to me, and they were all ghastly beyond belief. I didn’t want to die! I didn’t want to give Emily such misery! And more than all the rest I didn’t want to be here, seeing and hearing it all.
They did quiet her at last, and then a policeman in a rumpled blue suit came into the room with Greg, and listened while Greg described everything that had happened. While Greg talked, the policeman rather grumpily stared at the remaining length of rope still knotted around the beam, and when Greg had finished the policeman said, “You’re a close friend of his?”
“More of his wife’s. She works for me. I own The Bibelot, an antique shop out on the New York road.”
“Mmm. Why on earth did you let her in here?”
Greg smiled; a sheepish embarrassed expression. “She’s stronger than I am,” he said. “A more forceful personality. That’s always been true.”
It was with some surprise I realized it was true. Greg was something of a weakling, and Emily was very strong. (I had been something of a weakling, hadn’t I? Emily was the strongest of us all.)
The policeman was saying, “Any idea why he’d do it?”
“I think he suspected his wife was having an affair with me.” Clearly Greg had rehearsed this sentence, he’d much earlier come to the decision to say it and had braced himself for the moment. He blinked all the way through the statement, as though standing in a harsh glare.
The policeman gave him a quick shrewd look. “Were you?”
“Yes.”
“She was getting a divorce?”
“No. She doesn’t love me, she loved her husband.”
“Then why sleep around?”
“Emily wasn’t sleeping around,” Greg said, showing offense only with that emphasized word. “From time to time, and not very often, she was sleeping with me.”
“Why?”
“For comfort.” Greg too looked at the rope around the beam, as though it had become me and he was awkward speaking in its presence. “Ed wasn’t an easy man to get along with,” he said carefully. “He was moody. It was getting worse.”
“Cheerful people don’t kill themselves,” the policeman said.
“Exactly. Ed was depressed most of the time, obscurely angry now and then. It was affecting his business, costing him clients. He made Emily miserable but she wouldn’t leave him, she loved him. I don’t know what she’ll do now.”
“You two won’t marry?”
“Oh, no.” Greg smiled, a bit sadly. “Do you think we murdered him, made it look like suicide so we could marry?”
“Not at all,” the policeman said. “But what’s the problem? You already married?”