“No.”
“There you are, then.” Leaning forward, he spoke slowly with a kind of dreadful reasonableness, and every tired syllable was an echo of his dread and a measure of his futility. “Listen to me, Teresa. You must tell me exactly where you got the love potion. It’s very important.”
And she met his dreadful reasonableness, as he had known she would, with dreadful innocence.
“Cousin Kelly gave it to me. In the park. He was there.”
Refuge
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1968.
She had walked all the way to her father’s house, three miles across the town, and now she had been sitting alone in her old room for more than an hour. She knew that it was more than an hour because the clock in the front hall had said almost a quarter to four when she arrived, and the five o’clock whistle had just sounded up north at the roundhouse in the railroad yards. At the first shrill blast of the whistle, she had raised her eyes and cocked her head in an attitude of listening, as if she were hearing something new and strange that only she in all the world could hear, but when the sound had diminished and died away she had lowered her eyes again and sat staring, as before, at her hands folded in her lap. In all the time she had been here, except for the brief interval when the whistle blew, she had hardly moved. She wondered if she should get up and go into the kitchen and begin preparing supper for her father, who would soon be getting home from his job in the yards. No matter. She had burned all her energy in the simple and exhausting ordeal of getting here. She had come, indeed, only because there was no place else to go. Now that she was here, there was nothing else to do.
She was an intruder in the little room that she had known so intimately for so many years. She was not welcome here. The room wanted her to leave. She could feel the pervasive hostility in the still, stale air, the corrosive bitterness of the abandoned, the sad, sour lassitude of the lost. But this was just her imagination, of course. It was part of the encroaching terror she had brought with her across town. The room was no different. The room was the same. There was the desk at which she had written daily in her diary, the fanciful log of hopeful days, and there above the desk was the framed copy of Gauguin’s Yellow Christ, which she had admired and hung to appease some distorted hunger in her heart. There on the walls was the same pale blue paper, perhaps a little more faded and soiled, stained at one corner of the ceiling where the probing rain had seeped through from the attic below the low roof. And there against the wall between the room’s two windows was the long mirror that had reflected her imperceptible growth from day to day and year to year, and had told her all the while that she was a pretty girl and would be a lovely woman. She wanted suddenly to run away from the walls and the mirror and the Yellow Christ, but she sat and stared at her folded hands. She wanted to scream, but she was mute. She sat fixed and mute in the terror she had brought with her. Having fled from the fear of death, she wished irrationally that she could die.
She heard her father’s steps on the porch outside. She heard them in the hall, moving toward the rear of the house. For a while, after they were gone, she continued to sit quite still on the edge of her bed, her hands folded in her lap, and then she got up abruptly, as though prodded by sudden compulsion, and went out of the room and followed the footsteps into the kitchen. Her father, his back turned to her, was standing before the open door of the refrigerator. Hearing her behind him, he turned, holding a can of beer in one hand, pushing the refrigerator door closed with the other. He was a tall, lean man with stooped shoulders and long, lank hair grown shaggy over his ears and on the back of his neck. About him, like a miasma sensed but not seen, there was an air of stale accommodation to dismal years, the atmosphere of repeated frustrations. He peered at his daughter through the dim light of the kitchen.
“Ellen?” he said. “Is that you, Ellen?”
“You can see very well that it’s me,” she said.
He carried the can of beer to the kitchen table and sat down facing her. There was a metal opener on the table. He plugged the can and took a long drink of the beer.
“I was just surprised to see you here, that’s all.”
“Is it so surprising that I’d come to see my own father?”
“I didn’t see your car outside. Where’s your car?”
“I didn’t drive today. I walked.”
“All the way here?”
“All the way.”
“You shouldn’t have done that.” His voice thinned, took on an angry, querulous tone. “You know I don’t have a car. Now it will be late before you can get back.”
“That’s all right. I’m not going back.”
“You’ll have to call a taxi, that’s what you’ll have to do.”
“Listen to me. I said I’m not going back.”
He looked at her for a moment, now that he had listened and heard, as if he was unable to understand. He drank again from the beer can, wiping his lips afterward with the palm of his hand. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere. If I can’t stay here, I’ll go somewhere.”
“You’ll go back, that’s where you’ll go. You’ll go right back where you belong.”
“Do you think so? I don’t.”
“What’s the matter with you? Are you out of your head?”
“Don’t start that. I’ve heard enough of that.”
He apparently received some kind of warning from her words, for his attitude changed suddenly. He smiled, nodding his head, but the smile was more an expression of slyness than of understanding or affection. “Well, something has upset you, that’s plain. Come. Sit down and talk it over with your father. You’ll feel better then. You’ll see. Will you have a beer?”
Knowing him for what he was, recognizing from long experience another of his repeated efforts to deceive her, she sat down across the table from him, nevertheless, simply because she was tired and it was easier to sit than to stand. “No, thank you,” she said. “I don’t want a beer.”
“Well, then, tell me what’s wrong. You’ve had a foolish quarrel with Clay. Is that it?”
“Clay doesn’t quarrel with me. Clay doesn’t quarrel with anyone. He’s far too cold and contained. He has other methods.”
“Clay’s rich. A successful man. They say at the yards that he’s worth millions. The richest man in town. You can’t expect a man like that to be like other men.”
“He hates me. I can see it in his eyes. When we are alone, I can hear it in his voice.”
“Oh, hell! That’s crazy. He married you, didn’t he? Just two years ago, he came and took you away and married you. He didn’t have to do it, either. Don’t try to tell me he did, because I know better. I was here. I remember how you were. No crazy talk about hate then. He could have had whatever he wanted from you, marriage or nor, and he probably did.”
“That’s right. I sold myself. And you — because he was rich, you thought you were onto something big. You didn’t care about anything else.”
“You were lucky — lucky to be born with a face and body to rile a man’s blood and make him lose his head. How many poor girls from this part of town get a chance to marry a rich and powerful man liked Clay Moran?”
“They’re the lucky ones. The girls who don’t get the chance.”
“What kind of curse has been placed upon me? It’s almost more than a man can bear, and that’s the truth. I’ve never had any luck with my women. All those years I had your mother on my hands, and now I’ve got you.”
“Don’t start on Mother! Don’t start!”
“She was my wife, and I’ll say what I please. She was crazy — so crazy I had to put her away.”