“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“So am I,” I said. “I’m sorrier than anyone.”
“Would you like to tell me about it?”
“It’s hardly worth while. I took a job, and this turned out to be part of it.”
“It’s all my fault.”
“Sure it is.”
“But I don’t understand. Why should anyone do this to you?”
“Someone wanted me to give up the job, and I didn’t want to. We had a difference of opinion.”
“Does that mean you’ve decided to go ahead with it?”
“That’s what it means. At least for a while longer. When anyone wants so hard for me to quit doing something I’m doing, it makes me stubborn. I’m a contrary fellow by nature.”
“You must be careful,” she said.
She sounded as if it would really made a difference if I wasn’t. She was sitting facing me, her left leg resting along the edge of the sofa and her right leg not touching the sofa at all, and she lifted her hand again and touched the battered side of my face as if she were reminding herself and me of the consequences of carelessness, and it seemed a natural completion of the gesture for her hand to slip on around my neck. Her arm followed, and her body came over against mine, and I was suddenly holding her and kissing her with bruised lips, and we got out of balance and toppled over gently and lay for maybe a minute in each other’s arms with our mouths together. Then she drew and released a deep breath that quivered her toes. She sat up, stood up, looked down at me with a kind of incredulity in her eyes.
“I think I need a drink,” she said. “You too.”
“No gin and tonic, thanks,” I said. “Straight bourbon.”
“Agreed,” she said.
She walked over to a cabinet to get it. I watched her go and watched her come. Her legs in the tight Capri pants were long and lovely and worth watching. This was something she knew as well as I, and we were both happy about it. She handed me my bourbon in a little frosted glass with the ounces marked on the outside in the frost, and the bourbon came up to the third mark. I drank it down a mark, leaving two to go, and she sat down beside me and drank a little less of hers.
“I liked kissing you, and I’m glad I did,” she said, “but I won’t do it again.”
“All right,” I said.
“Are you offended?”
“No.”
“There’s nothing personal in it, you understand.”
“I understand.”
“There are obvious reasons why I can’t afford to.”
“I know the reasons. What I’d like to do now, if you don’t mind, is to quit talking about it I came here to talk about something else, and it would probably be a good idea if we got started.”
“What did you come to talk about?”
“About you and Constance Markley. When I was here before, you said you knew her in college. You said you shared an apartment that she paid the rent on. I neglected to ask you what college it was.”
“Amity College.”
“That’s at Amity, of course.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“What was your name then?”
“The same as now. Faith Salem.”
“You told me you’d been married a couple of times. I’ve been wondering about the Miss. Did you get your maiden name restored both times?”
“Not legally. When I’m compelled to be legal, I use another name. Would you believe that I’m a countess?”
“I’d believe it if you said it.”
“Well, I don’t say it often, because I’m not particularly proud of it. The count was attractive and quite entertaining for a while, but he turned out to be a mistake. I was in Europe with my first husband when I met him. You remember the publisher’s son I married in college? That one. We were in Europe, and he’d turned out to be rather a mistake too, although not so bad a one as the count turned out later. Anyhow, I met the count and did things with him while my husband was doing things with someone else, and he was a very charming and convincing liar, and I decided it would probably be a smart move to make a change. It wasn’t.”
“Wasn’t it profitable?”
“No. The amount of his income was one of the things the count lied about most convincingly. Are you being rather nasty about it, incidentally? I hope not. Being nasty doesn’t suit you somehow.”
“Excuse me. You’ll have to remember that I’ve had a hard day. The publisher’s son and the count are none of my business. At your request, Constance Markley is. I’d like to know exactly the nature of the relationship that caused you to share an apartment at college.”
“It was normal, if that’s what you mean.”
“It isn’t.” I lowered the bourbon to the first mark. My mouth was cut on the inside, and the bourbon burned in the cut. “I don’t know just what I do mean. I don’t even know exactly why I asked the question or what I’m trying to learn. Just tell me what you can about Constance.”
She was silent, considering. Her consideration lasted about half a minute, and after it was finished, she took time before speaking to lower the level of her own bourbon, which required about half as long.
“It’s rather embarrassing,” she said.
“Come on,” I said. “Embarrass yourself.”
“Oh, well.” She shrugged. “I liked Constance. I told you I did. But I wasn’t utterly devoted to her. She was rather an uncomfortable girl to be around, to tell the truth. Very intense. Inclined to be possessive and jealous. She often resented the attention and time I gave to other people. At such times, she would be very difficult and demanding, then withdrawn and sullen, and finally almost pathetically repentant and eager to make everything right again. It was a kind of cycle that she repeated many times. Her expressions and gestures of affection made me feel uncomfortable. Not that there was the least sign of perversion in them, you understand. It was only that they were so exorbitant.”
“Would you say that she admired you?”
“I guess so. I guess that’s what it was.”
“Well, I understand it isn’t so unusual to find that kind of thing among school girls. Boys either, for that matter. Do you have anything left over from that time? Any snapshots or letters or anything like that?”
“It happens that I do. After you left the other day, I got to thinking about Constance, the time we were together, and I looked in an old case of odds and ends I’d picked up different times and places, the kind of stuff you accumulate and keep without any good reason, and there were this snapshot and a card among all the other things. They don’t amount to much. Just a snapshot of the two of us together, a card she sent me during the Christmas holiday of that year. Would you like to see them?”
I said I would, and she went to get them. Why I wanted to see them was something I didn’t know precisely. Why I was interested at all in this period of ancient history was something else I didn’t know. It had some basis, I think, in the feeling that the thing that could make a person leave an established life without a trace was surely something that had existed and had been growing for a long time, not something that had started yesterday or last week or even last year. Then there was, of course, the coincidence. Silas Lawler wanted this sleeping dog left lying, and once a month he went to the town where Constance Markley had once lived with Faith Salem, who wanted the dog wakened. It was that thin, that near to nothing, but it was all there was of anything at all.
Faith Salem returned with the snapshot and the Christmas card. I took them from her and finished my bourbon and looked first at the picture. I don’t know if I would have seen in it what I did if I hadn’t already heard about Constance Markley what I had. It’s impossible to know how much of what we see, or think we see, is the result of suggestion. Constance and Faith were standing side by side. Consta
nce was shorter, slighter of build, less striking in effect. Faith was looking directly into the camera, but Constance was looking around and up at the face of Faith. It seemed to me that her expression was one of adoration. This was what might have been no more than the result of suggestion. I don’t know.
I took the Christmas card out of its envelope. It had clearly been expensive, as cards go, and had probably been selected with particular care. On the back, Constance Markley had written a note. It said how miserable and lonely she was at home, how the days were interminable, how she longed for the time to come when she could return to Amity and Faith. Christmas vacation, I thought, must have lasted all of two weeks. I read the note with ambivalence. I felt pity, and I felt irritation.
Faith Salem had finished her bourbon and was looking at me over the empty glass. Her eyes were clouded, and she shook her head slowly from side to side.
“I guess you’ve got an idea,” she said.
“That’s an exaggeration,” I said. “Why are you interested in all this? I don’t understand.”
“Maybe it’s just that I’m naturally suspicious of a coincidence. Every time I come across one, I get curious.”
“What coincidence?”
“Never mind. If I put it in words, I’d probably decide it sounded too weak to bother with. I’m driving to Amity tomorrow. The trip’ll hike expenses. You’d better give me a hundred bucks.”
“All right. I’ll get it for you.” She got up and went out of the room again. I watched her out and stood up to watch her in. From both angles and both sides she still looked good. She handed me the hundred bucks, and I took it and shoved it in a pocket and put my arms around her and kissed her.
She had meant what she had said. She said she wouldn’t kiss me again, and she didn’t. She only stood quietly and let me kiss her, which was different and not half so pleasant. I took my arms away and stepped back.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“So am I,” she said.
Then we said good-by, and I left. Going, I met Graham Markley in the hall, coming. We spoke politely, and he asked me how the investigation was getting along. I said it was getting along all right. He didn’t even seem curious about the condition of my face.
CHAPTER 8.
I didn’t get out of town the next day until ten o’clock. It was three hundred fifty miles by highway to Amity. In my old clunker, allowing time for a couple of stops, I did well to average forty miles an hour. Figure it for yourself. It was almost exactly eight and a half hours later when I got there. About six-thirty. I was tired and hungry, and I went to a hotel and registered and went up to my room. I washed and went back down to the coffee shop and got a steak and ate it and went back to the room. By then it was eight. I lit a cigarette and lay down on the bed and began to wonder seriously why I was here and what the hell I was going to do, now that I was.
I thought about a lot of things. I thought about Robin Robbins looking like a tough and lovely kid with her beautiful shiner. I thought about Faith Salem lying in the sun. I thought about Silas Lawler and Graham Markley and Regis Lawler and Constance Markley. The last pair were shadows. I couldn’t see them, and I couldn’t entirely believe in them, and I wished suddenly that I had never heard of them. I did this thinking about these people, but it didn’t get me anywhere. I lay there on the bed in the hotel room for what seemed like an hour, and I was surprised, when I looked at my watch, to learn that less than half that time had passed. The room was oppressive, and I didn’t want to stay there any longer. Getting up, I went downstairs and walked around the block and came back to the hotel and bought a newspaper at the tobacco counter and sat down to read it. I read some of the front page and some of the sports page and all the comics and started on the classified ads.
Classified ads interest me. I always read them in the newspapers and in the backs of magazines that publish them. They are filled with the gains and losses and inferred intimacies of classified lives. If you are inclined to be a romantic, you can, by a kind of imaginative interpolation, read a lot of pathos and human interest into them. Someone in Amity, for instance, had lost a dog, and someone wanted to sell a bicycle that was probably once the heart of the life of some kid, and someone named Martha promised to forgive someone named Walter if he would come back from wherever he’d gone. Someone named Faith Salem wanted to teach you to play the piano for two dollars an hour.
There it was, and that’s the way it sometimes happens. You follow an impulse over three hundred miles because of a thin coincidence, and right away, because of a mild idiosyncrasy, you run into another coincidence that’s just a little too much of one to be one, and the first one, although you don’t know why, no longer seems like one cither.
I closed my eyes and tried to see Faith Salem lying again in the sun, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t see her lying in the sun because she was in another town teaching piano lessons for two dollars an hour. It said so in the town’s newspaper. I opened my eyes and looked again, just to be certain, and it did. Piano lessons, it said. 1828 Canterbury Street, call LO 3314, it said. Faith Salem, it said.
I stood up and folded the newspaper and stuck it in my coat pocket and looked at my watch. The watch said nine. I walked outside and started across the street to the parking lot where I’d left my car, but then, because it was getting late and I didn’t know the streets of the town, I turned and came back to the curb in front of the hotel and caught a taxi. I gave the driver the address, 1828 Canterbury Street, and sat back in the seat. The driver repeated the address after me and then concentrated silently on his driving. I didn’t try to think or make any guesses. I sat and listened to the ticking of the meter that seemed to be measuring the diminishing time and distance between me and something.
We hit Canterbury Street at 6th and went down it twelve blocks. It was an ordinary residential street, paved with asphalt, with the ordinary variations in quality, you will find on most streets in most towns. It started bad and got better and then started getting worse, but it never got really good or as bad in the end as it had started. 1828 was a small white frame house with a fairly deep front lawn and vacant lots between it and the houses on both sides, which were also small and white and frame with fairly deep front lawns. On the corner at the end of the block was a neighborhood drug store with a vertical neon sign above the entrance. It would be a place to call another taxi in case of necessity, and so I paid off the one I had and let it go. I got out and went up a brick walk and across a porch. There was a light showing at a window, but I heard no sound and saw no shadow on the blind. After listening and watching for perhaps a minute, I knocked and waited for perhaps half another.
Without any prelude of sound whatever, the door opened and a woman stood looking out at me. The light behind her left her face in shadow. She was rather short and very slim, almost fragile, and her voice, when she spoke, had an odd quality of detached airiness, as if it had no corporeal source. “Yes?” she said.
“I’m looking for Miss Faith Salem,” I said.
“I’m Faith Salem. What is it you want?”
“Please excuse me for calling so late, but I was unable to get here earlier. My name is Percival Hand. You were referred to me as an excellent teacher.”
“Thank you. Are you studying piano, Mr. Hand?”
“No.” I laughed. “My daughter is the student. We’re new in town, and she needs a teacher. As I said, you were recommended. May I come in and discuss it with you?”
“Yes, of course. Please come in.” I stepped past her into a small living room that was softly lighted by a table lamp and a floor lamp. On the floor was a rose-colored rug with an embossed pattern. The furniture was covered with bright chintz or polished cotton, and the windows were framed on three sides by panels and valences of the same color and kind of material. At the far end of the room, which was no farther than a few steps, a baby grand occupied a
ll the space of a corner. Behind me, the woman who called herself Faith Salem closed the door. She came past me into the room and sat down in a chair beside the step-table on which the table lamp was standing. It was apparently the chair in which she had been sitting when I knocked, for a cigarette was burning in a tray on the table and an open book was lying face down beside the tray. The light from the lamp seemed to gather in her face and in the hands she folded in the lap. The hands were quiet, holding each other. The face was thin and pretty and perfectly reposed. I have never seen a more serene face than the face of Constance Markley at that moment.
“Sit down, Mr. Hand,” she said. I did. I sat in a chair opposite her and held my hat on my knees and had the strange and inappropriate feeling of a visiting minister. I felt, anyhow, the way the minister always appeared to be feeling when he called on my mother a hundred years ago when I was home.
“What a charming room,” I said.
“Thank you.” She smiled and nodded. “I like bright colors. They make a place so cheerful. Did you say you are new in Amity, Mr. Hand?”
“Yes. We just arrived recently.”
“I see. Do you plan to make your home here permanently?”
“I don’t know. It depends on how things work out, Miss Salem. Is that correct? I seem to remember that you’re single.”
“That’s quite correct. I’ve never married,” she said, and nodded.
“I’m surprised that such a lovely woman has escaped so long. Do you live here alone?”
The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK Page 20