Ruthie knew she wasn’t like that at all. Ruthie would know on account of Lew. Of course, Lew was only nineteen, just a kid really, but he had that cute grin and those big brown shoulders and he was always at the pool and came over and he always started kidding around, always making a play for her, not for Ruthie. She guessed Ruthie had kinda wanted to make trouble, asking her why she didn’t give the kid a break. Go on, Seel. Give him a date. I won’t say a word, honest. Lew had a beat-up old car and he wanted her to meet him and they’d go out dancing some night way out of town some place. She had known Ruthie wouldn’t say anything, and she knew she could keep Lew in line afterward, even if she did let him do anything, but it wasn’t that. It was just she was married and you didn’t do that kind of thing. It was all right kidding around with him there by the pool with a lot of people around, but a date was something else. He did get kinda fresh, like the times when she’d be on her stomach and he’d real sneaky run his hand under the big beach towel she was on, and she’d let him go ahead for just a little while, just long enough to feel sort of sweet and dizzy, and then make him cut it out and tell him he could put more oil on her back.
It was Danny’s fault, and it was Danny who’d made a real tragic thing happen so all the rest of her life she’d maybe feel a little bit ashamed of herself.
So why not anyway just take it out and look at it?
It began to seem to her that the only thing she could see in the kitchen was the yellow canister with those dumb ducks on it and the fancy printing that said flour. When she tried not to look at it her eyes kept swinging back. Suddenly she got up, locked the back door, snatched the canister, took it over to the sink, dug her fingers down into the softness of the flour, felt the edge of the envelope, and pulled it out, tapping it against the edge of the canister to knock the loose flour off of it.
There wasn’t any harm in just looking at it.
It was a long white envelope with the gummed flap stuck down and scotch tape pasted over it. She tried to lift a corner of the tape. It came up, but it pulled part of the paper with it. It felt as if there was just one sheet of paper in the envelope. She thought of various ways of opening it. But with the scotch tape there, anything she did would show and Danny would see it, and she was scared of Danny.
Suddenly she had an idea. She trotted into the living room and yanked open the drawer where Lee kept stationery. Yes, he had long white envelopes too. She measured one against the sealed one. It was almost the same — a little bit whiter and a tiny bit longer. The scotch tape on the small roll was the same width.
She stood very still, took a long deep breath, and then ripped the envelope open. She took out the single sheet and unfolded it, held it in tremulous hands and read it. It had been written with a ball-point pen in Danny’s rough scrawl.
To whom it may concern,
Burton Catton and Paul Verney have got the rest of the Rovere ransom dough. Mrs. Cotton told me about it. Mr. Catton told her. They figure on peddling it outside the country. They bought it through a Detroit contact, and Verney picked it up in Tulsa. The Detroit contact is named Dickson. I am going to try to take it off them and if anything happens to me it will be one of them arranged it. Make sure Sarge Ben Wixler gets to read this. He knows I wouldn’t kid about a deal like this.
Lucille read it again, confused, incredulous. As an inveterate reader of the social columns, she knew of Burton Catton. He had a young wife. She was a Downey. She took her maiden name back after something happened to her first husband. She used to ride show horses. She didn’t know who Paul Verney was. The name had a very faint familiar ring, something to do with a charity drive. The Red Cross or the Community Chest or something like that.
She put the sheet in the new envelope, then copied exactly the way the scotch tape had been put on. She handled it, bent it, dogeared it until it looked like the original. She crumpled Danny’s envelope, put it in the tiny untidy fireplace and lighted it. While it was burning she hurried into the kitchen, buried the envelope in the flour and replaced the canister. When she went back into the living room the last bit of flame was flickering out. She dropped into the biggest chair, curled her legs under her. Everybody remembered that terrible Rovere thing, those poor twin kids. Everybody knew about the money. Gee, it was an awful lot of money. Hundreds of thousands.
Just how could Danny ever get to know Mrs. Catton, and why in the world would she ever tell him something like that?
Lucille realized she wasn’t bored any more. This was a big shiny fact. It sat squarely in the middle of her mind, and it seemed to her that she could walk around and around it, looking at it from every angle and trying to see some way it could be grasped and picked up. And used.
She did not doubt that Danny would get the money. That man was after Danny. They wanted to send him back to Alton. Danny knew that. When he got the money, he would be able to afford to go a long way away where they couldn’t ever get him. Before he went, he would come back after the envelope. When he came back after it, it would mean he already had all that money.
She nibbled her thumb nail, biting it painfully into the quick. She knew that, more than anything else in the world, she wanted to go with Danny. This marriage was a trap, and this stinking little house was a trap. She’d never been meant for this kind of a life. Life was supposed to be gay, and just dangerous enough to be delicious.
She and Danny were on a little terrace outside their hotel suite. You could see the deep blue water of the harbor. Two waiters would roll in the breakfast on a little jingling cart. Maybe one of them would carry an ice bucket with champagne. They’d both be dressed for the private beach.
When the waiters left, Danny would look at her and grin and say, “I must admit you were right, darling.” And he had changed some. He looked a little bit like Cary Grant.
“I guess you could call it blackmail,” she would say. “You didn’t want to bring me with you, but you had to.”
And they would laugh and drink the champagne and go down to the beach, and then in the afternoon they would go down a windy little street and into a dark little shop and he would buy her an emerald. They would try not to think of Lee, but when they did they would both feel sad.
There was enough money to last them their whole life.
When Lee came back to lunch, she wanted to laugh the way he looked so surprised at how nice she had made everything.
“What’s the occasion?” he asked.
“Does it have to be an occasion? I thought you might like a nice lunch.” She couldn’t tell him that she was going to do as many nice things as she could for him in the time that was left. Or tell him she hoped there wouldn’t be much time left.
After he left and she had cleaned up, she felt restless. She walked back and forth through the house, snapping her fingers, humming to herself. In the late afternoon the wind increased, the rain stopped and it became colder. She had a long talk with Ruthie over the phone. Ruthie was bored, and Lucille knew she had only to give the slightest hint and Ruthie would come over. But she couldn’t see how she could keep from telling Ruthie about everything. It was hard to keep from hinting about it over the phone. So they talked movies and food and television and bargain sales and about what could be causing the stiff neck Ruthie kept getting all the time.
Lee came back from the school at four with a whole stack of papers to go over and he said he had to get right at it because he was going to Dr. Haughton’s house after dinner for a conference or something. Dr. Haughton was the head of the English department.