“Then the prediction was Myers’ suggestion, to break down Reid, drive him to his death?”
“I wish I could say it was. That would be simple. No, the prediction came by itself. Myers was an outsider to it; he tried to cash in on it, to twist it around to serve his own purposes, when he heard it had been made. He was trying to maneuver Tompkins into inducing Reid to change his will, so that Tompkins himself would be the beneficiary once-removed, after the daughter. Tompkins would have been putty in his hands; for all practical purposes, the estate would have been turned over to Myers, with Tompkins just a figurehead, not knowing what it was all about. And that way, his own name, Myers’, would have safely stayed off paper.”
“What about Jean? You said ‘after her.’”
“I don’t think she would have lived very long after her father. I think she would have been put out of the way within a very few days, or maybe right along with her father tonight, if Myers had remained alive. I don’t think Myers believed in the prediction himself. I’m pretty sure he would have tried to give it a hand, in one way or another, to make sure it was carried out; maybe tried to talk the two of them, Reid and the girl, into a suicide pact as the time approached. He didn’t know we’d been sailed into it. Well, anyway, one of the fellows got him on the stairs, so we’ll never know just what he would have done about it.”
“And then Tompkins did away with himself, and then the prediction—”
“—came off anyway,” McManus finished it for him. “Leaving that big ‘why,’ leaving us just about where we were before. Myers wasn’t the villain in the center, pulling all the strings. Myers was just a pint-sized villain on the outside, trying to muscle into something that was already in progress without any activation from him.”
“Tompkins wasn’t the villain either, I guess,” Shawn suggested.
“Far from it. He was just a poor tormented soul, cursed from the day he was born; caught in the middle of something, crushed by something that he probably couldn’t understand himself. Wriggling all the time to get free, like a blind worm under a stone. A farm boy, with a flash of searing fire between his eyes.”
“There were prophets in the Bible,” Shawn reminded him.
McManus flung open the door.
The stars were like silver hailstones beating into their faces; hailstones without sound, without feeling.
They both dropped their eyes, uncomfortably, warily.
“I don’t feel good,” McManus muttered rebelliously. “There was something there. Something I can’t get down on a report, so it’ll stick there, fast; it keeps slipping away. That actress and the diamond wrist watch. That kid that nearly got run over. The way Dobbs’ gun misfired on the stairs. He even knew their names, Tom, their Christian names, from the floor below—” His voice meshed with what sounded curiously like a sob, though his face was grim enough. “There was something there, and I don’t want to know what it was! I tell you, I don’t feel good. I feel just like I do when I’m coming down with a cold, and I’m not coming down with a cold! I’m going home to my old lady, and drink a stiff hot toddy.” He sounded argumentative, as though Shawn were trying to stop him, and Shawn wasn’t.
“Are you coming in with me?” he demanded. “Give you a lift?”
Shawn glanced inside, along the hallway to the stairs. “I guess I’ll stay out here. Tonight anyway. She’s alone up there.”
“Isn’t there anyone with her at all?”
“Yes, but—you know what I mean. We sort of went through the whole thing together from first to last. I’ll walk you down to the car.”
They walked down the path heads inclined, watching the ground as they walked over it; like men deep in thought do.
McManus suddenly gave vent to an irritable thought. “I wish you’d never brought that girl to me! I wish I’d never seen her, never heard the whole thing.” After a moment, he added, “I bet you wish you’d never walked along the river that night.”
“I had to,” Shawn answered simply. “That was where I was to walk, there wasn’t any other place.”
McManus glanced at him with a sort of furtive curiosity.
“See you tomorrow, Tom. Take it easy, come in whenever you want.”
He watched the car go down the driveway, its red tail-light making a corkscrew twist until it had straightened out to take the public highway.
Then he turned and trudged back toward the house. A little blue rivulet of shadow rippled before him in the palish starlight. It was cool and quiet and dark. He wasn’t afraid, but he felt very small, very unimportant. He felt as though there were no longer any need to worry about what happened to him, whether for good or for ill; that was all taken care of from now on, that was all out of his hands. It was a strange feeling, a light feeling, as though something heavy had dropped off your back.
There was a dim light upstairs, in the window of the room where she slept and the nurse kept vigil. He wondered if she felt that way too.
And when you felt that way, you needed your complement. You couldn’t go on alone, you were too small, too helpless. Two helpless children in the dark.
He didn’t want to sleep. Who could have slept? He lit a cigarette and stood around out there on the gravel, waiting. Waiting for it to be light, for when he’d see her again. Suddenly he threw the cigarette away. The door had moved a little. Something white, the edge of a face, was peering through at him.
“Who is it? Is it you?”
The door slipped open a little wider, the face nodded.
“Come out. Come out here to me.”
She stood poised there. He saw her eyes go up overhead, then quickly drop.
“Don’t be afraid. It’s just a few steps, and I’m standing here. My arms are out to you.”
Suddenly they were together, pressed close.
“You should be resting.”
“She fell asleep, and I stayed awake. I knew you were down here somewhere. I knew you wouldn’t go away. Wherever you were, that was where I wanted to be, that was where it was best to be. Even out here, in the open.”
She squinted defensively, and averted her face.
“Open your coat, let me cover my face.”
She burrowed her face against his chest, as though she couldn’t get in close enough. He covered almost her entire head with the flaps of his coat. She snuggled against him as in a cocoon of safety.
You couldn’t hear them from a foot away, they breathed their confidences so low to each other, for each other alone. Two children in the night.
“Lie still, don’t tremble so. You’re in my arms. I’ll be your husband in a few more days, and you’ll never be alone again. Lie still, beloved, the stars are going, one by one. Morning is on its way.”
But his eyes went uneasily upward past his own shoulder, studying those distant inscrutable pin points of brilliance.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1945 by Cornell Woolrich
Introduction copyright © 2007 by Francis M. Nevins, Jr.
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
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Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 33