Widow's Web

by Ursula Curtiss

  Davies? Having confused Martin’s case with another, and calling up to rectify it?

  It wasn’t Davies. A series of operators came on, and eventually Torrant’s brother Alan in San Francisco, who even at that distance sounded pleased and solid.

  “Jim? Listen to this, it’s made to order for you. I’ve just been talking to Helen’s godfather, he’s first vice-president of—”

  Torrant listened. His sister-in-law was wealthy and well-connected and on the whole nice, but she had a host of friends and relatives who were all, in spite of the fact that he was solvent and content, constantly alerted to Find Something for Torrant. Journeying about the country with a typewriter might be amusing, but it was not very sound.

  Usually he declined these respectable openings with a mixture of amusement and irritation; this time he was not so sure. A definite job to plunge into, as different as possible from what he had done with Martin . . . Torrant said with a new uncertainty, “Can I call you back?”

  “When?”

  “By tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon!” repeated Alan’s faraway voice. He sounded horrified. “Helen’s godfather . .

  Helen, Torrant knew, would have the very best godfather; he had a brief mental image of a scarlet old gentleman with drooping white moustaches, irascible in a private office the size of the Savarin Grill. He said mildly, pushing down the familiar irritation, “If somebody turns up for the job before then, more power to him. Tell Helen I’m still eating. I’m even drinking.”

  He was ashamed of that instantly and then angry; he wished that people would not be so blatantly patient and good-hearted with him. He said, “Thanks for all the trouble, Al. I’ll let you know.”

  It was nearly two o’clock. Torrant went downstairs to the bar off the lobby and ordered a ham sandwich which presently appeared, stuffed with what seemed to be a head of lettuce. He ate it mechanically while a small portion of his attention went back to Alan’s offer.

  It had sounded like a nice job, in fact a very nice job, with an impressive salary and more freedom than you might expect on the staff of a national magazine. The trouble was that no job, here or on the coast, would leave him free enough to look for Annabelle Blair.

  And that, he knew coldly, was what he wanted to do. To find Annabelle Blair. For the moment, he shut his mind to anything after that.

  During the rest of that day and the morning of the next, he found out a few scant facts about the woman who was such a maddening blank in his mind. For one thing, she had left no forwarding address at the post office, which could mean that she did not want to be located or merely that her plans had been unsettled when she left.

  She had profited by Martin’s death to the extent of thirty thousand dollars. Ten of that was insurance; she had sold the house in haste for twenty thousand, although the real-estate agent who had handled the sale said with reminiscent gloom that, given time and the proper season, he could have gotten more. At that, thought Torrant, thirty thousand was a nice round sum; Annabelle Blair had averaged five thousand dollars for each of her six months of marriage. You couldn’t call that bad.

  Perhaps the most significant thing he found out was the dexterity with which she had disposed of herself. Martin Fennister had been a reasonably well-known photographer, his suicide had received attention in both the local and the New York newspapers for the date—and yet his widow’s abrupt departure from Bolton Road had raised no interest or even speculation in anybody’s mind. It had been a year ago, of course; Torrant, whose own knowledge was so new, had to remind himself of that.

  At close to three o’clock on the second day of his search, with the feeling that this was the only area that held any hope at all, Torrant went back to the house on Bolton Road.

  Mrs. Westing, handing him his forgotten gloves, did not look rosy or childish this time; she was crisp and wary and a little apprehensive. Her attitude said clearly that she had scrubbed and polished and re-wallpapered Martin Fennister out of the house, and she didn’t want him brought back in.

  She shook her head when he asked about Annabelle Blair, but at the door, perhaps because she was so anxious to be rid of him for good, she said suddenly, nodding at a white house visible behind trees up the road, “Why don’t you ask Polly Stark? I understand she and her husband were friends of the Fennisters’.”

  She said it with faint malice, but it was the first promising thing that had offered itself in two days. Torrant thanked her and walked down the flagged path again and into the road.

  Seen from a distance, helping two small children construct a snowman, Mrs. Stark looked like something to tempt you to Lake Placid; up close she was older than her lithe navy-blue figure suggested. She had boyish caramel-colored hair and big light green eyes in a small alert weather-browned face; the children, both too young to have assumed any obvious gender, were carbon copies of her.

  Torrant liked her at once, but he was careful when he put his question to seem nothing more than solicitous about his best friend’s widow. Mrs. Stark dispatched her children to the snowman and rumpled her hair thoughtfully.

  “Let me see . . . Annabelle did say something, I think, about taking a job again, but she didn’t say where or what. She wouldn’t have been apt to, though—we hardly knew her. For that matter we didn’t know either of them really well, but,” her cool gaze challenged Torrant to make what he pleased of this, “we were very fond of Martin.”

  Torrant hid a sudden small elation. He had a feeling that Mrs. Stark didn’t feel nearly as polite as she sounded. He said in her own level tone, “What was Annabelle like?” and waited in a growing tensity, because the stranger who occupied all of his mind was about to assume a face.

  “To look at, you mean? Attractive, I suppose,” said Mrs. Stark, frowning, “although men and women don’t see eye to eye about that. Phil—my husband—and I look at a Vogue model and I say stunning and he says Ugh. But I thought Annabelle was attractive. She’s a little older than I am, maybe thirty-six. Dark hair, blue eyes, I think, and a very good figure.”

  She stopped, pushing the toe of her boot around in the snow as though she didn’t much care for the subject of Annabelle Blair. Torrant wondered why; she didn’t look like a woman to brood over mere dislike of a former neighbor. Mrs. Stark gave him her cool gaze again, and said, “I know that doesn’t tell you much about her, but it’s all we knew. We had the Fennisters over here a few times, and we went there for drinks now and then—my husband’s a camera fiend and he crept over Martin like moss—but Annabelle was very seldom there.”

  And there it was, the thing she didn’t want to say but wanted him to know. It wasn’t dislike she had felt for Martin’s wife, but distaste. Torrant said, feeling as though he were taking the maximum weight over a fragile bridge, “Mrs. Stark, I have my reasons for asking this, and there isn’t another soul in the world to hear whether you answer or not. Would you say there had been another man involved?”

  “I thought so,” said Mrs. Stark. She sounded at once troubled and relieved. Torrant came out of an instant of black bitterness to hear her adding, “. . . benefit dance committees and things like that, she said, but—well, charity work may give you an inner glow and all that, but not that particular kind of glow. And then over here one night, when we’d all had a few drinks and Martin and Phil were downstairs in the darkroom, she said something that made me almost sure of it. She mentioned a man’s name . . . Simon?” asked Mrs. Stark tentatively, and shook her head. “Something like that.”

  Thirty thousand dollars, another man, a bloodless weapon . . . one of the children had gotten snow inside his mittens and was shrieking with rage. Mrs. Stark went nimbly across the snow and undid the damage. She came back to say suddenly, “What a shame I threw Annabelle’s letter away—I’m almost sure there was a company letterhead.”

  “She wrote to you?” asked Torrant in surprise. It didn’t seem in keeping until Mrs. Stark said, “Yes. Martin had a terrific amount of equipment, as you kno
w, and she didn’t know how to dispose of it and Phil took care of it for her. She wrote to acknowledge the check, but I’m afraid I didn’t look at the address or even the postmark.”

  She had kept her own curiosity nobly in check; Torrant thanked her for that as much as anything, and walked back along Bolton Road for the last time. He passed the gray white-shuttered house again; without the warmth at its windows it looked haughty and withdrawn, and he wondered wearily how he could ever have thought that Martin was there.

  When he reached his hotel again it was close to six o’clock, which meant close to three in San Francisco. Time to call Alan and, if the magazine job was still open, accept it with thanks, for the reasons he had repeated to himself during the walk home.

  For one thing, tracing a woman as quietly evasive as Annabelle Blair would be a long and possibly a hopeless project without the help of the proper authorities—and if she knew that Martin’s closest friend was searching for her she would be forewarned and forearmed.

  For another, Martin was dead, had been dead a year, and no amount of rebellion at the manner of his death could alter that. Whether a man were caught in an airplane crash or the strong web of someone else’s brain, it came to the same final thing in the end. You could sort through the wreckage, but what would you get out of it besides a fresher pain?

  Because the law couldn’t touch Annabelle Blair Fennister, widow. She had destroyed Martin, Torrant knew, as surely as though she had used a gun or a knife or an axe—but it was Martin who had made up his own tortured mind.

  Call Alan, then . . . but Torrant put it off. He said to himself, After a shower, and then, sternly, After a drink. He was finishing the drink while he dressed when the telephone rang.

  Mrs. Stark hadn’t thrown away Annabelle s letter after all. Her husband, handling the sale of Martin’s cameras and equipment for a woman he didn’t like, had kept it punctiliously in case any question about payment should ever arise.

  And there was a letterhead: Gerald Mallow, Inc., Winter Building, St. Louis.

  Torrant wrote it down and stood staring at it for a long moment before he lifted the telephone again and asked for long distance. When Alan’s voice came on at last, he was not surprised to hear himself making plausible excuses for declining the magazine offer; he knew now that his mind had been made up all along.

  The law couldn’t touch Annabelle Blair. In one sense, perhaps nobody could.

  But the weapon she had used was two-edged, and he could try.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE TELEPHONE for Gerald Mallow, Inc., in St. Louis had been temporarily disconnected.

  Torrant, sitting on the edge of his bed the next morning, stared blankly ahead of him as this information was delivered liltingly into his ear. For an uncomfortable instant he had a vision of Annabelle Blair, quiet, mockingly aware, glancing back over her shoulder as she cut the threads that would lead him to her. He shook off the vision at once, knowing that she could not possibly be aware and that the single flashing image was the result of another edgy night, and hours of wondering.

  Was this thing really his business, after all? Was he, in returning from the turmoil of Korea to the sudden quiet of civilian life, unconsciously seeking windmills to tilt at? He had argued that with himself through the darkness and a number of cigarettes; he fell exhaustedly asleep and his own conclusion woke him.

  Murder—or willful destruction, call it that-had to be somebody s business. Looking at it and then walking away was not only countenancing evil, it was giving it a small admiring bow. And if he had felt obligated by friendship to inquire about Martin’s widow, and in the inquiring had stumbled upon a set of murderous discrepancies, then the obligation became that much more binding.

  With the receiver at his ear, and Long Distance repeating impatiently that Gerald Mallow’s telephone had been disconnected, Torrant asked about a listing for Annabelle Fennister or Blair, and because he had asked without much hope was surprised to hear the operator saying presently, “I have an Annabelle Blair at 400 Willow Street. Would that be your party? The number . .

  Torrant wrote it down, because it was another piece of surface identity, and waited tautly while a telephone rang lazily across the miles. He would destroy his own purpose if he made himself known; on the other hand, with a bitter sense of the fruitless time already elapsed, he had to be sure that this was the woman he wanted, and that she was there, before he went to St. Louis.

  The drawling line clicked suddenly into life. A woman’s voice said, “Hello?” and then, impatiently, “hello, who is this, please?”

  The operator said tardily, “Ready with St. Louis.”

  Torrant said warmly, “Annabelle?”

  The snow began at about four o’clock that afternoon, a soft and tentative fall that, with the dropping temperature and the rising wind, seemed like the outer fringe of something else. At a little after six, when Torrant arrived in a town twenty-five miles south of Boston, the snow had stopped, but the wind still spun it about in cold little webs on the lighted street.

  He didn’t feel the wind as he headed toward the frosted windows of a newspaper store; he felt as though he had caught a thread Annabelle Blair hadn’t severed quite completely enough. In response to his assertions that he was an old and valued friend, her landlady had informed him that Miss Blair— Miss, so she had wiped Martin completely out of her past-had departed several weeks ago on a business trip with her employer and his wife. She hadn’t left a forwarding address, but the landlady had happened to overhear her mention the town of Chauncy, Massachusetts, as her destination.

  For all his travels Torrant had never been in Chauncy before, or heard of it; it was the kind of town you thought you had reached the outskirts of and discovered miles later that you had passed through. But the newspaper store windows looked promising, and he went in.

  It was a tiny place, full of a warm idle quiet when he closed the door on the rattling wind. A navy-coated girl with her back to him at the reprint rack didn’t turn at the sound of the door, but the proprietress emerged from a back region, a small woman, majestically fat, with the blandest eyes Torrant had ever seen on anything but a Siamese cat.

  Buying cigarettes and a Boston newspaper, he didn’t waste time inquiring about a hotel or a boarding-house; pinpoint places like Chauncy did not have either. He said instead, pocketing his change, “Is there anyone in town who takes in roomers?”

  “Roomers?” repeated the proprietress, and a comer of Tor-rant’s eye saw the girl at the magazine rack turn her head. “For how long?”

  “A week anyway, possibly longer.” Torrant went on watching the round face, and saw with mild interest the sliding glance she gave the girl. The glance didn’t seem to communicate anything, it seemed more speculative.

  “Mrs. Judd generally has a room or two vacant,” said the proprietress, and began to issue directions. Torrant thanked her, picked up his suitcase and walked to the door. With his hand on the knob he turned his head with deliberate suddenness and caught the girl by surprise.

  She was still watching him over the upturned collar of the navy coat. There was nothing coy about the direct olive-gold gaze; she looked as coolly challenging, Torrant thought, as a housewife X-raying peaches. He gave her a small sardonic nod and opened the door and went out into the wind again.

  Mrs. Judd’s house was on a quiet side street five blocks from the center of the town; Mrs. Judd herself was a thin and frantically nervous woman who looked as though a sudden loud noise would cause her to disintegrate. She led Torrant through a shadowy front hall and up three flights of stairs, each landing growing successively chillier. Heat might rise in most houses, Torrant reflected, following Mrs. Judd’s well-sweatered back, but in this one it appeared to have settled permanently in the cellar.

  The three bedrooms on the top floor were all vacant. Torrant took the one on the corner with its own inside bath, paid Mrs. Judd for a week and received a house key in return. Mrs. Judd, thrusting her lavender hands inside her
sweater sleeves, hoped that he would find the room comfortable. At the door she said timidly, “Have you friends in Chauncy, Mr. Torrant?”

  “Friends of friends,” said Torrant, turning from the bureau. “Someone told me to look up the Mallows, Gerald Mallow and his wife. They bought some property here several weeks ago, I understand, and I thought I’d—”

  “Oh, dear,” said Mrs. Judd, and stared at him with shocked eyes. “Oh dear. Of course, it wasn’t quite a month ago, so I suppose your friend hadn’t heard about the accident.”

  She stopped there, feeling nervously behind her for the doorknob, because her new lodger seemed suddenly to have turned to stone—or, thought Mrs. Judd, ice. His politely amiable face didn’t change, but the hand that had begun to unsnap his suitcase went sharply still. He said, “What kind of accident, Mrs. Judd?”

  “A car crash,” said Mrs. Judd distressedly. “It was a bad night, and the roads were slippery . . .” She looked at Torrant and placed her own interpretation on his steady unmoving stare. “The paper said they were killed almost instantly.”

  Tarrant moved at last. He walked toward one of the windows; he said over his shoulder in a tone that was very nearly casual, “Wasn’t there someone travelling with the Mallows— a secretary?”

  “Yes, she’s still here. I suppose there must be things to do in a business way. Otherwise I can’t see why she’d want to stay around a little town like this. They say he left her everything.”

  Because the room was so still that she could hear the stir of tree branches outside the windows, Mrs. Judd added as she opened the door, “Blair, I think her name is. She’d be able to tell you ail about it.”

  “Yes,” said Torrant gently. “Yes, Mrs. Judd, I’m sure she would.”

  The bedroom was cold and the wind loud around the top of the house. The uneven flap of a curtain settled into Tor-rant’s restless half-dreams and became something else, something to do with a woman who carried death around with her as casually as a purse. At one point he found himself sitting bolt upright, staring into blackness; then the far lonely cry that had waked him came again on the wind, and it was not a dying shriek of terror but a rooster. He went back to sleep and met Annabelle Blair there, smooth-plumaged and crowing.