“Well,” I said, “we won’t have to try our luck with a couple of dry sticks or a pair of battery cables, after all.”
“No,” he said. “She’s lit a fire. She’s lit a fire.” He seemed puzzled and perhaps slightly uneasy.
“Maybe she thought of the battery stunt before we did, or maybe she found a match,” I suggested.
“No,” he said, “the car’s still in the shed and there wasn’t a match in the house . . .” His voice trailed off slowly, reluctantly, I thought.
“Oh, well,” I told him, “any fire is better than none. ‘Take the gifts the gods provide.’ ”
He looked at me. “What’s that? Oh, yes, sure.” But he wasn’t thinking at all about what I had said.
He kept the lead as we went on to the house, but he was no longer hurrying. In fact, it seemed to me that he was hardly moving with any purpose at all. If it hadn’t been the end of a fairly long tramp, I’d have thought him merely strolling. Several times he lifted his head and looked toward the house; each time I noticed how tense his face was, and how remote the expression around his eyes.
Sure enough, when we entered the living room there was a big, crackling fire on the hearth, dried desert wood that burned intensely and was gone to ash in an hour. Selena was sitting on the settle, looking into the flames. There were filaments of fire glowing in her pale, bright hair, and a faint flush on her cheeks from the heat.
“Hello,” she said. “Have an interesting walk?”
“Sure,” I said, “only keeping up with a long-legged mountain goat like your husband is no job for one who hath been long in city pent.”
“He does walk fast, doesn’t he?”
I went over and stood with my back to the fire; the heat soaked into my legs and took some of the tiredness out of them. Jerry was standing behind the settle, behind Selena; he took out his package of cigarettes and put one between his lips. His voice was perfectly casual.
“Gimme a match, will you, honey?”
That woman could think, and think fast. Only the smallest trace of some expression went over her face; then she stooped and pulled out from the flames a long twig of mesquite.
“Here,” she said, and held it to his cigarette.
He drew in a long drag of smoke and looked at her across the flame without saying anything except “Thanks.”
She tossed the twig back into the flames and sat down again.
“We were worried,” I remarked. “Jerry was positive there wasn’t a match in the house, and we used our last up on the mountain. But I see you found one.”
Jerry came round the end of the settle and stood at the opposite side of the fireplace, looking down at his wife. “Yes,” he said, with an unsuccessful attempt at lightness in his tone, “where did you find the match?”
She looked up at him and there was a sort of stillness in her face that I shall never forget. “Does it matter?”
“No,” he said, “it doesn’t matter at all where you found it. It matters if you found it.”
The remark made no sense to me at all, and I still don’t understand it, but Selena did. She stood up.
“You shouldn’t have said that.” There was no anger, no sharpness in her tone, only weariness and what sounded to me at the time like despair.
Jerry was staring at her; the look on his face was so thinly sharp, so direct, so full of horror that I was instantly aware that this conversation, which was meaningless to me, possessed some sort of positive and dreadful implication for him. “So,” he said, “so that’s it. I’ve wondered for a long time.”
She looked at him calmly. “I tried to stop you.”
“Yes,” he said. “You tried to stop me. That was kind of you.”
He threw his head back and laughed. A short, nervous laugh that had the timbre of fear in it. “That was condescending of you— Selena.”
“No,” she said in a very low voice, “no, Jerry, it wasn’t condescension.”
He was watching her, I noticed. His eyes never moved from her face. I saw, too, that he was trembling, that his hands, at his sides, were twitching, and that his lips, which had suddenly become thin and gray, were quivering slightly. He licked them. “I would have found out sometime,” he said to her at last. She made no reply. “But sometime is now.”
“Yes,” she said, and her voice was impersonal.
Suddenly he was in complete command of himself. “Do you know what I am thinking?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Am I right?”
She nodded her head gravely. “You know that too.”
“All right,” he said, as though agreeing to something, and turned to me. “Bark, you don’t know what this is all about, do you?”
“No,” I told him.
“That’s good,” he said, and there was affection in his voice. “I want you to do me a favor.”
“Sure,” I told him.
He left the fire. “I want you to take something to Dad from me when you go. I’ll write it out now . . . before I forget it.” He went into the study, and I followed him somewhat uncertainly. The whole thing was confusing, and for some obscure reason I felt frightened. Selena followed me, but she stopped in the doorway.
Jerry was sitting at the desk in there. The last gray light from the east came through the window behind him and lighted the room with a dull, unlovely color. He was writing by the time I reached the room, with a swift, racing drive of his pen as though to finish before the light faded entirely. I watched him a minute, conscious of Selena white and glimmering in the dusk of the door behind me. All at once, with a quick, impatient gesture he crumpled the note and flung it into a corner.
“Hell,” he said, with a swift, tight grin at me. “It’s not so important, after all.”
The rest happened before I knew it. The gun must have been there in the desk drawer, ready to his hand. He simply put it up to his head and pulled the trigger.
The crash of the shot in that small room made my eardrums ring. The revolver clattered to the floor beside his chair; his arms went out across the desktop, and his head sank forward between them. It seemed to me that for an instant after the shot his eyes were looking at me. Then I couldn’t see them any more.
For a long time, an unmeasured sequence of nothingness, I stood there in the room and stared at him. There is no way to explain how I felt, for I don’t suppose I felt at all. My only sensation was one of having ceased to live, and a horrible tightness in my throat.
I was aware that Selena was moving past me. She walked to the desk slowly but without uncertainty, and her face was perfectly quiet, the face of an angel who knows neither sorrow nor loss nor death nor anything else that quickens the pulse of living men and women. She placed her hands, palm down, on the surface of the wood and leaned forward a little, looking down at him silently. Then she put her hand, her long hand with the strong white fingers, on his hair, so lightly that she scarcely touched his head. The next instant she was across the room and stooping to pick up the crumpled note in the corner. I watched her take it up and go out of the room. A moment later, I heard the front door open and close again.
Of course, I did all the things that you think of to do. He was dead, but I felt his heart to make sure. He was still warm inside his shirt. Some cheaply melodramatic instinct made me wrap up the gun in my handkerchief; afterwards I was glad I’d done so. I saved a lot of trouble with the sheriff. I carried his body into my own room, and laid it out on my bed; I could not imagine taking it into the room he had shared with Selena. Closing his eyes was the hardest part. Then I went into the living room and built a very big fire and lit all the lamps. The whisky bottle was in the kitchen; I found it easily enough, but I did not drink much. It seemed to stick in my throat. There was nothing else to do till morning; that long and twisted road into Los Palos would be indecipherable in the dark.
As I sat there I began to wonder if Selena was coming back. I kept listening for the sound of her step outside the door. But there was sile
nce except for the strong rush of the wind past the house and the steady crackle of my fire on the hearth.
Nothing that I thought or felt through that long night is of the least consequence. In reality I was simply waiting, in a chaos of loneliness and sorrow and fear, for one of two things: Selena’s return or the first light of morning. After a long time the eastern window began to show gray; I went at once to start the car. In the dusk outside, the great loom of the mesa over my head made me shudder in spite of myself. I looked up where I knew the line of steps to be, wondering if she was coming back to the house. But there was no one there.
The car started easily enough, and I got it round to the front door, as close as I could. When I went inside again, I left the engine running. I liked the sound it made. Getting him into the tonneau was horrible enough, but I was past the ability to feel any more. Before I left, I put out the lamps and the fire, and left the door open, in case she came back. Then I blew the horn, over and over again. Its harsh, deep yell went echoing up and down the valley and came back flatly from the face of the mesa behind and above me. She did not come. I put the car in gear and rolled slowly down the road toward the desert and Los Palos, seventy miles away.
The rest of it isn’t important, though it was tedious enough, and long before the formalities with the sheriff and the undertaker were over the numbness that had got me as far as Los Palos without agony had worn off. I don’t know why they all took my story so readily at its face value, but, of course, there was the gun and the powder burn on his forehead. The sheriff went back with some of his men to try to find Selena, but she wasn’t there, and he told me the house was just as I had left it. He managed to make me admit that Jerry hadn’t been entirely happy with his wife, and that seemed to satisfy him and the coroner’s jury. They let me go quickly, and it was just three days until I caught the morning train out of Los Palos. The only stop I made was at my apartment. I wanted to put Jerry’s ashes in the silver urn.
15. EARLY LIGHT
WHEN I had finished speaking I felt tired and empty of all emotion. For better or worse, the story was told. As I looked back over it I wondered whether there was in it anything more than the record of personal obsession, springing out of the shock of finding LeNormand and a subconscious jealousy of Jerry that an analyst might put an ugly name to. The episodes that seemed strange to me might appear natural or coincidental to a calm, clear mind like Dr. Lister’s. Nowhere in the course of my narration had I produced any tangible proof of my instinctive belief that Selena was different from all the rest of us, and that in some way not clear to me she was responsible for the deaths of two men.
And yet, sitting there tired and miserable, I had a swift feeling that something was yet to be said or done. It seemed to me there was an immanence in the air and that we were not at the end of the story. I could not guess what the end would be, but I dreaded it.
Dr. Lister did not speak for a long time. His hands were clasped in front of him on the table and he was staring at them as if the shape of his own knuckles was strange to him. Neither of us moved. Above and around us the night was undergoing a change; the great constellation of Orion was low on the western sky and the darkness was turning to a tarnished, misty silver. Again, as on Cloud Mesa, I thought of the eastward spin of the earth, rolling through space. The minute area of its surface which the two of us occupied was being turned toward the sun—the house, the trees, the wide reaches of the Sound, the whole eastern edge of the continent borne along in-exorably into the light of a new day. Miles away a train whistled once. A thin, lingering insertion of sound in the silence around us.
He unclasped his hands at last and looked at me thoughtfully. “That is all you have to tell me?”
“Yes.”
He put his palms down flat on the table, stood up, and blew out the stump of the candle. “It does not seem to prove anything,” he said, and sat down again. “Do you believe there is some connection between all the things you have told me?”
I studied for a minute, trying to find a way to give him the feeling that I had. “Yes, I’m sure there is. I know there is something behind the whole business because I know that Jerry found out what it is. That’s why he shot himself.”
“And you don’t know what this thing is?”
“No,” I said slowly, “I don’t. Except that it is connected with Selena. Everything goes back to her.”
He nodded. “She is a strange person. I grant you that. But except for her character—which I don’t wholly understand, I’ll admit—I can’t see anything definite to give you this impression you seem to have.”
“What about LeNormand’s death? No one’s been able to explain that, but it happened. And what about Galli-Galli and the cards? That seems to me something more than just chance or coincidence. How about the things that happened on that trip to Montauk? And the fire she lighted out at Cloud Mesa. How did she light that?”
Even as I asked the questions I could imagine the answers he would make. LeNormand’s death was an unsolved mystery. The police had never been able to find the murderer, but they don’t find every murderer anyway. Galli-Galli and his cards was a trick, in a night club where I was none too sober and probably easy to fool. Most mind reading of the sort I’d accused Selena of on the Montauk road was a matter of close observation of the small gestures and expressions of the other person, and Selena was a highly intelligent woman. She had pulled on the brake because some scrap of sound or a flash of sun reflected from the approaching car had warned her. And as for the fire at Cloud Mesa, she had simply found a match. There was no part of my story which did not have a rational explanation.
“All those things,” he said quietly, “are out of the ordinary. But I don’t see any mystery in them. I can think of an explanation for every single one. Except LeNormand’s death, of course.”
“And Jerry’s,” I said brutally.
“Yes,” he replied in a low voice. “That is the hardest of all for me to accept.”
“Please, Dad,” I said, “before you make up your mind that I’m suffering from some sort of delusion, try thinking about what’s happened from the other point of view. If you can show me that there’s nothing in it, you’ll be doing me a profound service.”
“All right,” he agreed, and lit a cigarette. He looked across at me with sympathetic toleration. “Let’s skip the minor things for the moment. Begin with Jerry and LeNormand.”
“There are some common factors there,” I said.
“Yes. What are they?”
“The most important of all,” I said, “is that there’s no explanation in either case. The presence of Selena, and Jerry, and me too, I suppose, in the immediate vicinity both times.”
“Anything else?”
“One more thing,” I told him. “The equations. LeNormand’s equations. They were part of the setting.”
“All right,” he conceded.
“And there was a fire, both times.”
He nodded.
“You can eliminate some of those factors. Jerry had nothing to do with either fire. And I didn’t. That leaves Selena. Selena and the equations. Jerry was working on them out at Cloud Mesa. Don’t forget that.”
He leaned forward. “Go on.”
The pieces were slowly fitting themselves together in my mind, but nothing was wholly clear yet, and the picture which was forming was not translatable into ordinary words. “The only other thing I’m sure of,” I said lamely, “is that when Jerry realized Selena had managed to light that fire, he thought at once of something else. But I’m not entirely sure what it was, and I can’t put it into words.”
“Well,” he observed after an uncomfortable pause, “most of what you’ve said tonight has been about Selena. That’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And that means, or suggests, that if you are right the answer must lie in her.”
“I know it does.” There was no shadow of doubt in my mind on that point. “It’s got to. If we knew who s
he is and where she came from—” I could not complete the sentence.
“Luella Jamison?”
“What do you think?”
He shook his head. “I don’t see how she could be. Even if the idiocy were the result of some mechanical factor, and not congenital, it could not have cleared up so fast.” Then he looked out over the Sound and said in a low voice, “Though I see what you’ve had to live with. It’s no wonder—” He stopped suddenly.
“It’s no wonder I have a fixation about her, you were going to say. If I have one. I’m still not sure. Tell me honestly what you think of Selena. You could look at her without thinking the things that have been tormenting me.”
When he finally spoke he chose his words slowly and carefully. “Selena is the most intelligent and the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met.” He paused again, and went on in an altered voice. “I was not entirely happy about Jerry’s marrying her. She seemed hard to me, not merely on the surface but all the way through. I kept watching her, hoping to see her tender or openly in love with Jerry, and I never did. She was cold and reasonable; impersonal is perhaps the word, and I never knew whether she was different to Jerry. I worried about it. I didn’t believe, till tonight, that she had another side at all.”
I was puzzled. What, I wondered, had I told him to make him revise his estimate of Selena? “I still think all that about her,” I told him. “She frightens me. She’s all mind and no heart. She simply stood there, knowing what he was going to do, while Jerry—”
“Yes,” he admitted, “I know everything you can say. But there are two little things. You said she touched his hair after . . . after . . .”
“Hell,” I said, “she’s seen movies and plays. She learned that gesture somewhere, the same way she imitated Grace. And it wasn’t much.”
“No, not much. But the other thing she couldn’t have learned. You told me that the first evening you were out there, she was reading one of Jerry’s old books. Do you remember saying that? One of his old books of fairy stories.”
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