“She wasn’t crazy. She had a nervous breakdown. Small wonder, being married to you.”
“She died in an institution. The same place you’ll die if you keep on.”
“It would be better than dying before my time in the house of Clay Moran.”
“What’s that: What did you say? You really must be crazy!”
“He wants me to die. He plans to murder me.”
His mouth hung open, his mind groping in darkness behind his eyes for some sense and sanity in her words. Then, stunned by the enormity of what she had clearly said, he pushed back from the table in his chair and stood up deliberately. “I knew it. I’ve been fearful of it. You’re crazy like your mother. Do you know what you’re saying?”
“I’ll say it again. He wants me to die. He murdered his first wife, and he plans to murder me.”
“His first wife drowned. It was an accident. What kind of hellish trouble are you trying to breed for yourself and for me? Clay Moran is a powerful man in this town. A rich and powerful man. What do you think he’s going to do if he hears his wife has been going around making such insane accusations? I won’t hear anymore. I won’t listen to you.”
“Don’t. I knew you wouldn’t. I should never have come here.”
“Be reasonable. Try to be sane for a minute. Has he ever tried to murder you?”
“Not yet. You don’t know Clay. He’ll only need to try once.”
“Has he ever threatened you?”
“He looks at me. He says sly things with double meanings. It’s not his way to threaten directly. He’s incredibly cruel and clever.”
“It’s in your mind. Can’t you understand that? You imagine these things.”
“He plans to murder me, as he murdered his first wife, because he hates me, as he surely hated her. I think he must hate anyone who marries him. It’s a kind of madness in him.”
“Now look who’s crazy! You ought to be right back where you came from, and that’s where you’re going. It’s not right for you to bring this kind of trouble into my house.”
He jerked his narrow shoulders, as if shaking off an intolerable burden, and started for the door. She could hear him in the hall, dialing the telephone. After a few seconds, she could hear his voice, angry and urgent.
“Is Mr. Moran at home? Let me speak with him, please. It’s important.”
She didn’t hear anymore. She isolated herself in silence, hearing nothing, sitting still and mute. She had wasted her strength and will. Having fled this short way to no good end, she could flee no farther.
Sitting so, futile and spent, she thought of Roger. She had not thought of him for a long time, and now that she did, after all this while, she was filled with regret and fruitless pain.
She awoke with a start and was instantly attuned to the sounds of the day, perception hypersensitized by apprehension. She could hear the soft whirring sound of the electric current driving the delicate mechanism of the little ivory clock on her bedside table. She could hear the remote and measured drip of a lavatory tap in the bathroom between her room and the next. She heard the gimping footsteps of the upstairs maid, who had suffered as a child from poliomyelitis, pass by her door in the hall. She heard from a tree outside her window the clear, repeated call of a cardinal. She thought that she could hear, deep below her in the bowels of the house, the deadly, definitive closing of a door.
It was about eight o’clock. She could tell by the slant of the sun through a window in the east wall of the room. She could measure time by the distance the sunlight reached into the room. Not exactly, of course, not with the precision of the little ivory clock she could hear on her bedside table, for the distance was longer or shorter at any given time of the morning as the sun rose earlier or later in the course of the season, but she was, nevertheless, surprisingly accurate in spite of having to make minute adjustments from time to time to the inflexible schedule of the universe. It was, like her keen perception of almost indiscernible sounds, a part of her hypersensitive attunement to everything around her. Her senses had been refined and directed by persisting danger.
She turned her head and looked at the other bed, the twin of her own, across an intervening aisle. It was empty. Neatly made. Clay had not slept in it last night. It gave her an exorbitant sense of relief, the empty bed, although she had known perfectly well, before turning her head, that no one was in it. If Clay had been there, she would have been aware without looking. She would have been aware in the instant of waking even if he had lain as still as stone and made no sound whatever. She would have known through the cold, instinctive shrinkage of her flesh. She would have smelled him, the aura of him, the sickening, sweet, pervasive scent of death.
He was in the other room, beyond the bath. She could not hear him. She sensed him through her infallible senses. He was standing in utter and deliberate silence, motionless, his head canted and his eyes watching her through double walls, waiting to detect through his own acute senses the slightest movement of her body, the merest whisper of her bated breathing. Slowly she closed her eyes in an effort to preserve the secret of her wakefulness. No use. He knew her secret. He was coming. She heard him in the bathroom. She heard him crossing the room to her bed. She heard his voice.
“Good morning, Ellen,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
Knowing the futility of simulation, she opened her eyes and looked at him. He was, she had to admit, very deceptive. He did not look at all like a man, a devil, who had murdered his first wife and was planning to murder his second. His body was slender and supple, just under six feet, and his expensive and impeccable clothes hung upon it with an effect of casual elegance. His smooth blond hair fitted his round skull like a pale cap. His mouth was small, the lips full, prepared to part unpredictably, at the oddest times, in an expression of silent laughter. His eyes were azure blue, brimming with a kind of candid innocence, a childlike wonder, as if he were listening always to a private voice telling an interminable fairy tale. Oh, he was deceptive, all right. He was deceptive and deadly.
“I’m feeling quite well, thank you,” she said.
“Improved from last night, I hope.”
“Wasn’t I feeling well last night? I can’t remember that I wasn’t.”
“Well, never mind. A good sleep will sometimes work wonders. Did you sleep well?”
“I slept quite well, thank you.”
“You see? It was the work of the sedative I gave you. You were a bad girl to try to avoid taking it. They have done some remarkable things in drugs these days. It’s absolutely amazing what can be done with them.”
What did that mean? Why did he suddenly, when you least expected it, say such disturbing things? Why did his words, so overtly innocent, have so often under the surface a sinister second meaning?
“I don’t like to take drugs,” she said quietly. “I’m afraid of them.”
“Well, one must be cautious with them, of course, but it’s foolish to avoid them when they’re needed. I was very careful not to give you too much. Did you imagine for an instant that I would be careless where you were concerned?”
There! There! Did you hear that?
“They make you vulnerable,” she said.
“Vulnerable? Nonsense. Vulnerable to what?”
“Who knows? Who knows what the effects may be?”
“My dear, you sound like a Christian Scientist. Or do you? I’m afraid I don’t know just what Christian Scientists believe.” He revealed his small white teeth in the unpredictable expression of silent laughter. “Anyhow, I assure you that you were sleeping like a baby when I looked in on you later last night. I didn’t want to risk rousing you, so I slept in the next room. Did you miss me this morning?” There he had stood. There he had stood in the dark and dangerous hours of the night, surrounded by the silent, waiting house, watching her and watching her as she slept a drugged sleep, and death had stood at his side.