by Vera Caspary
A mist rose, clouding his sight, dimming his mind. His hands loosened and fell away. His ecstasy passed and he felt weary. Both of them were worn out. Bedelia’s eyes sought Charlie’s. She tried to catch and hold his glance. Her hand groped forward, found his arm, lay heavy upon it.
“Charlie, Charlie dearest.”
He avoided her eyes.
“You don’t understand,” she murmured.
“I’m afraid I do,” Charlie said coldly.
He pulled her toward him again as if her were going to kiss her, but instead he reached into the neck of her robe, took out the pillbox, and dropped it into his pocket. Then he went to the bushel basket and shuffled the packages until he found the one she had hidden under the bag of salt. This, too, went into the pocket of his mackinaw.
Bedelia leaned against the stool, watching him through her eyelashes. “You wouldn’t hurt me, Charlie. I know you wouldn’t. I wouldn’t hurt you either.” She had planted herself before him, barring his way to the door. “I do love you, I’d rather die than see anything happen to you.”
He pushed her aside and left the shed. As he crossed the kitchen, he reached for the cord and snapped off the light.
In the hall he felt that she was behind him, but he did not turn. She caught hold of his arm.
“We haven’t much time.”
Charlie jerked away. The whispered warning had made him her partner in crime. “Go upstairs,” he said.
She was bent over, a suppliant, begging for mercy. She dared not look at Charlie, for his face was of metal, no more alive than the face of his ancestor, Colonel Nathaniel Philbrick, the bronze rider on the bronze horse in the square downtown. Bedelia spoke quickly as if she had only a short time and a great deal to say. “We can get away now if we hurry.”
“Sh-sh!”
“We needn’t take anything with us, we can buy whatever we want. I’ve got money, plenty of money, more than you know; it’s in New York and I can get it without anybody finding out. Even you don’t know the name.” Her voice reached a high note and cracked. “I’ll give it all to you, Charlie, every cent.”
“Sh-sh!” he said again. Mary was coming down the stairs slowly, squatting on each tread as she dusted the baseboard.
“You’re all I’ve got,” Bedelia whispered. “I haven’t anyone else in the world. Who’ll take care of me? Don’t you love me, Charlie?”
The telephone rang. Charlie swept Bedelia off her feet and carried her up the stairs.
Mary saw them and her jaw dropped. The phone continued to ring.
“Answer it, Mary. Take the message. Say I can’t come now,” Charlie barked at the gaping girl.
He carried Bedelia into the bedroom. After he had put her on the bed, she would not let him go, but clung to him with tense, trembling hands. As he struggled to free himself, he noticed the garnet ring on the fourth finger of his wife’s hand, and he remembered painfully his joy when he discovered the trinket in an antique shop.
“Let go!” he said.
“Don’t be so mean to me, please, Charlie. Why don’t you call me Biddy any more? You haven’t called me Biddy for a long time now. Have you stopped loving me?”
The effrontery of it shocked him. He gave up the struggle and allowed her to cling while he sat at the edge of the bed. Her hands, gripping on his coat-sleeve, were no longer plump and seductive. The dimples had disappeared and there were blue veins running from wrists to fingers.
She tried, courageously, to smile at Charlie. “You wouldn’t let them take me away, would you? I’m your wife, you know, and I’m sick. I’m a very sick woman, your wife. I’ve never told you, dear, how sick I am. My heart, I might die at any moment. I must never be distressed about anything.” Her hands tightened on the rough wool of the mackinaw. “I didn’t ever tell you, Charlie, because I didn’t want you to worry.” This she said with a sort of determined gallantry, both sweet and bitter.
Gently Charlie removed her hands. Bedelia submitted humbly, showing that she considered him superior, her lord and master. He was male and strong, she feminine and frail. His strength made him responsible for her; her life was in his hands.
He rose.
“Where are you going?” Bedelia demanded.
Charlie did not answer until he had reached the door. With his hand on the knob he turned and said, “I want you to stay up here. You’d better lie there and rest.”
“I’ll kill myself if you let them take me away.” She waited, watching the effect of her words. “I’ll kill myself and you’ll be to blame.” She laughed harshly because she was frustrated. Charlie had shown no feeling.
He closed the door, locked it, and dropped the key in his pocket. He was no more moved by her threat of suicide than by her appeals and ruses. By getting away from Bedelia he had believed he could find clarity and think dispassionately. But his mind was a fog. He felt actually that his head was filled with thick gray clouds.
Mary came out of the living-room, the mop in one hand, the carpet sweeper in the mother. “It was Miss Ellen Walker calling. She says she’s got to see a man up Wilton way, and Mrs. Horst asked her for lunch. She’s coming.”
Leaning the mop and carpet sweeper against the wall, she started up the stairs.
“Where are you going, Mary?”
“I got to ask Mrs. Horst about lunch.”
“Mrs. Horst has a headache. She’s not to be disturbed.”
“What are we going to have for lunch?”
“What difference does it make?” he said querulously.
Mary’s lip quivered. Mr. Horst was not usually rude. She sensed something queer about him and about the atmosphere of the house. “Is Mrs. Horst very sick? Can I do something?”
He did not answer. Mary squeaked her hand along the varnished handle of the carpet sweeper. It sent shivers down Charlie’s spine. Irritably he wondered if he was to be annoyed by Mary at this tragic and uncertain moment in his life, and a moment later, recovering, he rebuked himself for taking out his distress upon an innocent girl, a servant who was in an inferior position and unable to defend herself.
“Sorry,” he muttered. “I was thinking of something else, Mary. Do what you like about lunch. I don’t think either of us will want very much.”
“But Miss Walker’s coming.”
“Of course.” He bowed his head. “Whatever you do, Mary, will suit me.”
He went into the living-room. With his mackinaw on and the sealskin cap pushed back on his head, he sat down. For a long time he stayed in the same position, perched at the edge of the chair, legs apart, hands hanging between them. The hall clock ticked, Mary sang at her work, wagons rattled past on the cleared highway.
Charlie thought about his wife and his marriage and of the life they should lead if they escaped Barrett. He was no longer concerned with the past nor with moral issues nor his shattered pride. Within the half-hour he had caught his wife at a new crime. To save herself she had tried to kill two men. Her mind was a child’s mind, her vision limited by her own needs and desires. If danger threatened again, she would try again to avert it, and probably with the same ruthlessness.
He rubbed his numb hands. Under the flannel shirt and the mackinaw his flesh was cold. He had had a glimpse of the future and what he had seen sickened him.
Shouts drew his attention to the world outside. The Keeley boys had pulled their sled down the hill and tumbled through the snow to the Horsts’ back door. They chattered with Mary as they warmed themselves before the kitchen fire, and when they left they were eating apples. They had tied the basket of groceries to the sled, but it was not firm, and while one boy pulled the other held it. Halfway up the hill they switched jobs.
Charlie watched until the boys were out of sight. When this diversion was gone and he was obliged to face himself again, he felt guilty. Although the present crisis was not of his making, he could not absolve himself from blame. He had been weak with Bedelia. From the start he had blinded himself to her faults and indulged her caprices.
He could not have known then that the little New Orleans widow was a murderess, but he had known that she told lies, played tricks, used her sex unfairly. He had cherished, even enjoyed, these little feminine faults because they had flattered him and swelled his male pride. By falling in love with weakness he had grown weak.
He became angry; angrier than he had been when he discovered his wife at the kitchen table with a wedge of cheese in one hand and poison in the other. This anger was more potent because it turned inward, upon himself. In the shed, when his fingers had tightened on Bedelia’s throat, Charlie’s fury had been aimed at her guilt. Now it was himself he hated. He knew that if he continued to live with Bedelia, he would go on indulging her, giving in, appeasing so that she would commit no more murders.
He rose and straightened his shoulders, walked up the stairs quickly and lightly. Bedelia did not hear him unlock the door or come into the bedroom. She had thrown herself across the bed, heedless of bolster and spread. Her hairpins lay in a pile upon the rose-colored silk and her hair flowed about her head, gleaming darkly.
Charlie stood above the bed and looked down at her. She was crying. Usually her tears affected him. He was not used to women who wept and asked for pity. His power to comfort her and dry her tears had always swelled his pride. As he stood above the bed, looking at her woeful, tear-streaked face, he pitied her, but in a different way, without the usual self-esteem. Without saying anything, he turned away and, after he had put on his felt bedroom slippers, left the room.
This time he did not lock the door. Bedelia lifted her head and looked after him. When he returned, however, she was lying in the same position, her eyes closed, her hands flat against the spread.
“Drink this,” Charlie said. He held out a glass of water.
Bedelia did not open her eyes.
He carried the glass to the bedside. “Drink this, Bedelia.”
She opened her eyes and tried weakly to raise her head.
“Wait, I’ll make you comfortable.” Charlie set the glass upon the bed table, lifted his wife’s head from the uncomfortable wooden bolster, took out the pillows, arranged them and lifted his wife so that she was in an easier position. Then he offered the glass again.
“What is it?”
“Please drink it.”
“A bromide, dear? But I haven’t a headache.”
“I want you to take it,” he said firmly.
Bedelia looked at Charlie’s face and then at the glass. The water was clear and bubbling lightly as if it had just gushed out of the artesian well. Charlie had not known how much of the white powder to put in it, but he had guessed that a small amount would work as well if not better than too much.
She took the glass and held it in a pretty, childlike way with both hands. Miraculously her cheeks had filled out, the bloom returned, and her soft glances and dimples were much as they had been that day on the veranda at Colorado Springs. She looked at him expectantly as if she were about to propose some treat or holiday.
“Let’s drink it together,” she said blandly.
Charlie staggered and groped for one of the bedposts. His heart beat swiftly and his face became purple.
Bedelia watched him, holding her head on one side and smiling gently. “You drink first, dear, and then I will.” And in the same bland voice she used when she gave him the digestive powder, she added, “Drink it fast and you won’t mind the taste.”
Under his hand he felt the rough surface of the carved wood pineapple. That, at least, was real and familiar.
Bedelia patted the quilt to show how soft the bed was, and then turned her hand and made a little gesture of invitation. “Come and lie beside me, Charlie. We’ll be together.”
Maurine had asked so prettily that Will Barrett could not refuse to take her out for a midnight sail. Chloe had run the water for Jacobs’s bath. Annabel McKelvey, when she set the fish before him, had been artlessly pleased to be able to serve one of her husband’s favorite dishes. The happy husbands had walked into the trap without knowing a trap was there at all. But Charlie knew that the catch had been set.
He let go of the wooden pineapple and walked toward the head of the bed. His anger had grown cold. When he reached for the glass, his hand did not tremble. Bedelia leaned forward, looking up at him. Her face showed excitement and greediness. The tip of her tongue slid over her lips as if she were impatient to taste a spicy dish which she had not had for a long time.
With the glass in his hand, Charlie sat down beside her on the bed. “Drink it,” he said, raising the glass until it was on a level with her mouth. “There isn’t much time.”
His face was stony. Bedelia knew that she was beaten. Her body stiffened, her back arched, and her eyes became hard and jetty. The cords of her neck stood out like pillars, and upon these two pillars her head trembled. “I thought you were different, Charlie. I didn’t think you were like the others.” She sighed, pitying herself, a woman wronged by a cruel man. Reproach shone out of her eyes and her lips were pulled into a hard knot that said, wordlessly, that Charlie was to blame for everything. She had married him with high hopes and he had betrayed her. He had changed for her, become like the other men she had known, rotten, rotten, a beast.
“I never thought you’d turn against me, too. Not you, Charlie.”
Charlie did not stir nor release her from the hard bitterness of his glance. Bedelia waited, her head trembling, her mouth pulled tight, her eyes glazed. There was no more greed in her, no more coquetry. Defeat had stripped away her charms and left a giant caricature of Charlie Horst’s pretty wife.
“All right,” she cried at last, as if she could no longer endure the waiting, “all right, but it’ll be your fault, Charlie Horst, they’ll blame you, you’ll hang for it!”
The stone wall which Charlie had built around himself collapsed. He felt sick with shame, guilty, as if he had been planning a crime for his own ends and had finally committed it. Looking down at his wife as she lay against the pillows, white and pitiful, he saw that she was thinking of herself as an innocent woman, suffering unjustly. She had planned a murder that morning, but the memory had fled along with the memory of her other crimes. The narcotic of self-pity had freed her of the sense of guilt. They were to blame, not she; they, the rotten men, the jealous women. This illness had enabled her to commit the cruelest of crimes and to forget them, to live almost normally, even to fall in love and to think of herself as a woman deserving a good husband, a home and a child.
Suddenly, as if she were this good wife and could not restrain her love for her husband, she reached for Charlie’s hand and pulled it toward her, resting her cheek against it.
Charlie jerked his hand free. The pity which she felt for herself and which aroused his compassion was the spell she had woven around him, her charm and her madness. He had been caught in the net once and he did not intend to let it happen again.
“Drink it!”
“It’ll be your fault, they’ll blame you, you’ll hang for it,” she repeated. And seizing the glass, she drank the mixture in one long swallow.
Charlie took the glass and put it back on the table. Then he left her and walked slowly down the stairs. The twelve-ten whistled as it rounded the curve. Charlie took out his watch to check its accuracy, counted the minutes until the train should arrive at the Wilton Station and Barrett shake hands with Ben Chaney.
Mary was at the telephone. “That Montagnino!” She jerked down the receiver. “Always forgetting stuff. Hannah wanted to know if they’d put the cheese with our order.”
When Mary had gone back to the kitchen, Charlie closed the door that separated the rear of the house from the front hall and stairs. He went up as far as the turn, listened for a moment, then came down and got his overshoes out of the hall closet.
The great rock beside the river had been rounded by water and weather. Charlie stood in its shadow fumbling in his pocket for the paper parcel that contained the Gorgonzola. He opened it, crumbled the cheese into bits above the swi
ftly moving water, folded the paper and returned it to his pocket. He did not want any evidence left of the new crime Bedelia had planned. There was enough against her and no need to add another crime.
He returned to the house, put away his overshoes, hung up his cap and mackinaw. He lighted the living-room fire and, when the flames were high, burned the paper which had been around the cheese and the piece of twine. At the washstand in the first-floor bedroom he scrubbed his hands.
Mary was setting the table for lunch. Charlie did not want to be alone and he went into the dining-room to be with her. He pretended to be looking for his meerschaum pipe. Mary had set the table with the filet lace doilies and tried several centerpieces. None suited her until she thought of the white narcissus which Bedelia had planted in the blue pottery bowl. As Mary studied her table decorations, she narrowed her eyes and held her head on the side in exact imitation of Bedelia.
CHARLIE WAS AT the window when Ellen turned in at the gate. He had the front door open before she reached the porch. The cold had painted red circles on her cheeks and her eyes were sparkling.
Charlie helped her take off the mannish coat. She raised her arms to remove her hatpins. This peculiarly feminine movement belied all her efforts to deny womanliness. Charlie’s attentions pleased her. She spent more time than usual on her hair, which she had tried in a new fashion, parted in the center and drawn back to a figure-eight low on her neck.
“How are you, Charlie? Feeling better? Why aren’t you at work?”
Charlie looked up the stairs. There was nothing to see except three photographs hanging on the wall at the turn. They were photographs of the Rocky Mountains which Charlie had taken before he lost his Kodak.
“Yes, much better,” he said, without turning his head.
“What are you looking for?” Ellen asked.
“Nothing.” He saw that he had been inattentive and hurriedly asked her the proper questions, about her health, her parents, her job. As they went into the living-room he had noticed Bedelia’s workbasket on the small table beside the couch. And his eyes sought the what-not where the ornaments stood as Bedelia had arranged them. There, on the ebony board, crouched the three monkeys who neither saw, heard, nor spoke evil.