He must believe, she thought. If only he believes!
Looking at her watch, she saw that it was almost noon. Did school let out at three-thirty or four? She tried to remember from her own years there as a student, and she thought that it was four, but she wasn’t positive, and schedules, besides, are sometimes changed. No matter. She would call Roger again at four-thirty, after he had had time to get home, and she would keep calling him at intervals, if necessary, until he answered. In this resolution she was supported at last by the blind, unreasoned faith that he was her last good hope.
There at this instant was the remote, shrill sound of the noon whistle in the railroad yards. There were four hours and a half that must be spent somewhere, and it was impossible to return to the house of Clay Moran. She could never, after today, go there again. Neither could she sit indefinitely at a lunch counter in a drugstore.
Wondering where to go and what to do, she remembered seeing her checkbook when digging in her purse for a dime for her coffee. She opened her purse again and looked in the checkbook and saw that her account showed a balance of slightly more than a thousand dollars. Well, there was one more place to go and one more thing to do, one place and one thing at a time and in turn.
She went to the bank and cashed a check for an even thousand dollars. After leaving the bank, she went to a restaurant and ordered lunch. She wasn’t hungry and couldn’t eat, but over food and coffee, growing cold, she was able to spend almost an interminable hour. Then, walking down the street from the restaurant, she saw the unlighted neon sign of a cocktail lounge and turned in, although it was something she would not ordinarily have done, and spent a second hour over two martinis, only the first of which she drank. It was then almost two o’clock. Spent piecemeal, a fragment here and a fragment there, time crept. It was an unconscionable drag from one hour to the next. She must somehow find a way to hurry the hour she wanted it to be, or to make less laggard the hours between then and now. Outside the cocktail lounge she saw, across the street and down a block, the marquee of a movie theater. She walked to the theater, hurrying as she wished time to hurry, bought a ticket and went in.
She never knew what the movie was. She did not read the posters outside, and inside she did not watch the screen. Sitting in cool and blessed darkness in the back row of seats, she closed her eyes and tried not to think, but this was impossible, she discovered, and so she began deliberately to think of the days and years before Clay, the tender time of sweet sadness when she had loved Roger and Roger had loved her. In the end she had rejected his enduring love with cruel contempt when Clay, much older and immensely richer, had seen her and wanted her. That was before the smell of death crept in. She had sold herself for wealth and security and enviable status. Good-bye, Roger. Forget me if you can. Here’s stone for bread and vinegar for wine.
Time passed in darkness before the silver screen, and it was four-thirty. She read her watch and left the theater and walked down the street until she came to a sidewalk telephone booth. She deposited her dime and dialed Roger’s number, but again there was no answer. She dialed three times more, waiting outside the booth for ten minutes between each attempted call, and then, on the fourth attempt, he answered at last. His voice, speaking after two years with the sound of yesterday, brought into her throat a hard knot around which she forced her response with a sensation of physical pain.
“Hello, Roger,” she said. “Do you know who this is?”
There was a silence so long that she had a bad moment of incipient panic, thinking that he had simply put down the phone and walked away, but then his voice came back, interrogative and listless, as if he were asking a question with an answer he did not really wish to hear.
“Ellen? Is it Ellen?”
“I’ve been trying and trying to call you, Roger.”
“I was at school. I just got home.”
“I know. I remembered. Listen to me, Roger. I want to see you again. Will you meet me somewhere?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Please, Roger. Please do.”
“I don’t think so.”
“All right, then. There’s no use. No one will help me, and there’s nothing I can do.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“If you don’t help me, I’m going to die.”
“What? What did you just say?”
“Nothing. It’s no use. Good-bye, Roger.”
“Wait a minute. Did you say you were doing to die? Is that what you said?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I can’t tell you over the phone. What does it matter? No one else will help me, and neither will you.”
“How can I help you?”
“I don’t know. I only know there’s no one else.”
“I see. When there’s no one else, ask Roger.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Never mind. Where are you?”
“Downtown. In a phone booth.”
“Do you have a car?”
“Yes. It’s parked in a lot.”
“Come out here. I’ll wait for you.”
“To your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure it would be wise. Maybe we had better meet somewhere else.”
“Come or not. I’ll wait here.”
“You don’t understand. It might be dangerous for you.”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“All right. I’ll come. Oh, Roger, it will be good to see you and talk with you again.”
“Yes,” he said, “it will be good.” She hung up. She had now, after a long time of terror, a blessed feeling of security and peace. Roger would believe. Roger would help. He would be her refuge and her strength, and it was time, past time, for her to go to him. First, before going, she leaned her head against the telephone in the little booth and began silently to cry.
Roger had been sitting, when the phone rang, on the edge of his bed holding a revolver. It was an old revolver that he had acquired from his father at the time of his father’s death. He did not like guns, and had never fired this one, although he longed to fire it, just once, and it gave him comfort sometimes to sit and hold it. He was holding it again now, having returned after the telephone call to his place on the bed.
It had been a bad day at school. He’d had discipline problems. He was not good at discipline, and he often had problems of that kind. The principal had talked with him seriously about the problems several times. It was unlikely that he would be rehired next year, but he didn’t care. It was just another failure in his life. His life was full of failures. All his days were bad.
His headache was back. It always came back. In fact, it rarely left. There was a contracting steel band around his head, slowly crushing his skull.
Ellen was coming. Coming here. She would be here soon. Ellen had been the most beautiful thing in his life, and he had loved her, but in the end she had deserted him. Another failure for him. After Ellen, his life had been sick, and all his days were bad. It had been wrong of Ellen to make him sick with hate instead of love. Now she might die. She had said so herself.
He broke the revolver in his hand. Because of a kind of inherent petty meanness in his nature which would not permit him to provide for any effort in excess of what was needed to complete it, there was only one cartridge in the cylinder. One bullet for one death.
Carrying the revolver over to a chest of drawers where other cartridges were, he loaded a second chamber.
Something Priceless
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, November 1968.
Dinner was served at seven, the routine hour, just as if it were an ordinary evening of an ordinary day. The courses were served in order by the maid, whose name was Clara. Neva Durward sat at one end of the long dining table, and Dwight, her husband, at the other. By a scale of three inches to the year, the interval between them was a measure of the disparity of their ages. It was also a fair indication of the climate of their relationship. Neva was thirty-two. Dwight was double that.