Widow's Web

by Ursula Curtiss

  Or had Annabelle Blair, standing behind him as he emerged from the door, glanced up and murmured a warning?

  The thought of Annabelle noting the field glasses was sharply worrying; it affected Maria like the sudden memory of a cigarette left burning, or a laundry iron plugged in. It stayed with her, a soundless stop watch, while she ordered and ate a chicken sandwich, left the table to call a taxi, went back to finish her coffee.

  Annabelle wouldn’t like being watched. And Annabelle was cold and quiet and dangerous.

  Maria had originally intended to do some shopping, to pick up the odds and ends that were always left out of a hurried packing, but under the spur of Torrant’s cool query she directed the driver to Vanguard Street. In the taxi moving slowly through a world of dotted-swiss, she felt better, merely because she was on her way back; she could even, thoughtfully, summon an image of Torrant. In his mid-thirties, she guessed; dark-headed, perceptive, with capable eyes in a face that looked experienced but not bored. Not, in any sense, an idle man.

  And not a stranger to Annabelle Blair, in the way that counted. Annabelle lived aloof in the old house Gerald Mallow had bought; she would never have admitted a total alien into what she had made a fortress.

  The taxi stopped before the garage. Maria paid the driver, got out into a white hush and scooped for her key. Her gloved fingers fumbled and nearly dropped it, and the brief pause in front of the doors made her aware of something she might otherwise not have noticed—the double line of footprints beside her own of just now, their crispness blurred with a light powder of snow. Coming, and going. Losing themselves in the tire-tracked width of the road and reappearing on the opposite bank, where the Mallow house sat old and silent in the falling snow. Maria turned her back on it, looked at the footprints again and used her key.

  The garage was dim after the white flare outside, seeming to contain, in its shadows and lingering breath of gasoline and metal and concrete, the wraith of a wrecked convertible. Maria walked through it to the stairway at the back and up to the apartment above. She unlocked the door and stood on the threshold a moment, because rooms returned to suddenly always looked subtly different than when you had left them; sly and too quiet, as though the opening door had interrupted some secret coming-to-life of fabric and wood.

  Or had this door been opened a short time ago, while another face looked in?

  It was a pleasant room, perhaps because it had been furnished out of odds and ends, and surprisingly airy after the shadowed space below. A windowed kitchenette alcove faced the old house across the road, fir branches brushed against the glass in the dormer at the far end. The walls were painted a warm off-white that took kindly to chintz curtains, an old rocker in rakish brick-red, a flowered armchair beside a black-lacquered bookcase, the dull blue studio bed where Maria slept.

  The field glasses she had left on the counter beside the sink were gone.

  Maria made sure of it after she had closed the door behind her and—an ironic gesture now—locked it. Her first reaction was a stung anger, although she knew that wasn’t quite reasonable: the field glasses did not belong to her, and using them as she had was a further abuse. But for anyone to unlock her door, to enter her room in her absence, to be at leisure to inspect anything she owned . . .

  Anyone? Annabelle Blair.

  The radiator gave an enigmatic hiss. Maria stopped her furious walking and sat down in the flowered armchair, wondering abruptly if this was all calculated and she was responding nicely, if Annabelle had left the field glasses in the garage deliberately, knowing that Louise Mallow’s cousin would use them and thereby provoke an open breach.

  She hadn’t wanted to rent Maria the garage apartment. The presence of the real-estate agent, to whom Gerald Mallow’s lawyer had sent Maria, had forced her to, because it would look odd if the secretary who had benefited by Gerald’s will refused to accommodate his dead wife’s only relative.

  But if Maria confronted Annabelle Blair with the entering of her apartment, the other woman would be justified in drawing herself up, in saying, “I’m afraid, Miss Rowan, that under the circumstances . . .” she would smile her faint cold smile and be rid of Maria without blame.

  It might be that, or it might be the silent and contemptuous rebuke it seemed on the surface. Either way, Annabelle had made the first move on the shadowy board.

  That was at one o’clock. At nearly two the slam of a car door in the road outside brought Maria to the kitchenette window. Annabelle Blair, black-coated, unhurried, was walking around the front of a green car that looked familiar to Maria. She couldn’t place it until the driver’s arm went out to close the far door more securely. A cuff of purple tweed under some nameless brown fur, a plump red-nailed hand with a brief flash of rings—Mrs. Kirby, the ebullient real-estate agent who had handled both the sale of the Mallow house and the renting of the garage apartment.

  Business, wondered Maria at the window, or one of those unlikely friendships that women drift into?

  At the moment it didn’t look very like either. Mrs. Kirby called something indistinct through the snow, and called again before Annabelle stopped and half-turned, something almost savage in the motion of her shoulders. She nodded. Then she turned again, put out a hand to the lock of the white door under the wisteria—keys for any and all occasions, thought Maria grimly—and, a moment later, closed the door behind her.

  Vanguard Street settled back into its peculiar isolation,. and in spite of her odd expectancy Maria’s telephone did not ring.

  Darkness came early, wiping the snowy afternoon light off the windows. Maria patched together a dinner out of her waning supplies and ate it sitting in the flowered armchair with her eyes firmly on a book. She had coffee then and cleaned the little kitchenette meticulously, a nuisance she rushed through when she dined at home in New York. When that was finished and there was nothing to do but pick up her book again or go to bed, she looked around at the silent apartment with the night at its windows and felt flat and a little foolish; she wondered for the first time what she expected to get out of all this vigilance.

  Statistics on Annabelle Blair’s weekly milk consumption, or the name of the laundry she dealt with? The extent of her daily exercise, the frequency with which she had groceries delivered? Because surely the woman who had persuaded Gerald Mallow to change his will in her favor, and who had then contrived the Mallows’ death in an accident that went unquestioned, would show her no more than that.

  Annabelle Blair, the perfect secretary, would have thought of everything.

  Maria took a bath in the midget tub and prepared herself for an unprecedented amount of sleep. She didn’t get it. She was probing in the bottom of her suitcase for her brush; idly, she lifted out the thin sheaf of papers she had brought with her, intending to do something about them, and discovered that the removal of the field glasses had been an excuse or perhaps an afterthought.

  Because the letter was gone, the random innocuous letter that was only important because the signature in blue ink at the bottom—Louise Mallow—had been cut so very soon afterwards into a white marble headstone.

  The field glasses were one thing; her dead cousin’s letter was quite another.

  Carefully, feeling cold and shocked, Maria turned out the contents of her suitcase on the studio couch and went through them, making herself shake out and fold everything that might possibly conceal a smallish sheet of cream notepaper. She did it scrupulously but without conviction, because she knew very well where she had put the letter. So had Annabelle Blair known, because Maria had told her, explaining herself like a defensive child.

  She remembered clearly standing in the dim stiff living room of the house across the road while Mrs. Kirby introduced her and then went on, loudly persuasive, into the subject of the garage apartment. Annabelle had listened in silence; her very taciturnity and the flat quality of her gaze had made Maria feel for no reason like a fraudulent Exhibit A. So she had said, when the real-estate agent ran out of breath, “M
y cousin wrote me from here in December,” and opened her purse automatically.

  For a split second, Annabelle Blair’s face was not impassive, and because of that tiny flashing change Maria felt called upon to explain what she remembered a moment later: that she had packed the letter with some other mail in her suitcase. And Annabelle, smooth and cool again, said, “It isn’t necessary, Miss Rowan. I hadn’t planned on renting the apartment, but for such a short time and under the circumstances . . .”

  Had she, Maria wondered now, agreed only because of the letter? Almost certainly she hadn’t known of its existence before; a part of that swiftly-controlled reaction had been surprise. But then Maria had been surprised at the letter too.

  It had come a few days before Christmas, addressed in a blue unfamiliar hand, forwarded from the old house in Connecticut where she had lived with her father until his death two years before. The rest of the mail that morning had been Christmas cards, and she had scooped the lot into her purse on her way to the bookshop . . .

  There was still some coffee left in the little drip pot. While she waited for it to heat, Maria wandered violently around the apartment, hands gripped tightly together, and stared minutely at things she didn’t see while she concentrated on remembering everything about the letter that was so important to Annabelle Blair.

  Good stationery: heavy, plain, the handwriting across it rapid and decisive, as you might expect from a woman who, twelve years ago, had been Gerald Mallow’s radiant bride in the face of her family’s bitter opposition. Maria couldn’t recall much of the wedding; she had been thirteen at the time and totally wretched in a navy blue breton which her father had somehow thought suitable for the occasion and which, unless she carried her head thrust forward like a turtle’s, rose eerily into the air. She did remember the set faces of the Hathaways and the Killians, her father’s half-amused detachment, and the slender defiant look of her cousin Louise’s back as she stood at the altar with Gerald.

  It should have made for drama, but it didn’t. Louise never came back brimming with tears of remorse, nor did Gerald Mallow, as the family half-hoped, tire of her and her considerable money and turn her into the snow. Instead there were serene Christmas greetings every year and an occasional gay postcard from Florida or Bermuda, and the daring gesture turned over the years respectably dull.

  So that the letter was, in a way, a legend come to life. Apart from that it was so idle a communication that Maria had wondered mildly that her cousin had bothered to write it at all.

  It had begun: “Dear Maria—I don’t know whether you remember me but I remember you very well, you were at our wedding in a wide-brimmed navy hat.” That hat. “Did you know that Margaret Killian died in September? I think that leaves us each other’s only relatives. I am writing this from Chauncy, a small town in Massachusetts where Gerald has bought this old house and some land which he plans to sell to one of those huge housing enterprises. His secretary is along to expedite matters. We are all strangers to the East . . .”

  Pleasant, rambling, and more than a trifle pointless. There was certainly no reason why, an hour after she had put it aside, Maria should suddenly think of the letter as a small half-hopeless gesture, like a hand lifted in supplication over the heads of a hostile crowd.

  She had dismissed the feeling, uneasily, because out of his own deep shock at her mother’s death, her father had taught her to be everybody’s companion and nobody’s keeper, a spectator who could enjoy amusement without risk. Louise Mallow was hardly more than a name to her, and the bookshop in which Maria was part owner was at its busiest before Christmas. Maria had shelved the letter, telling herself that she would reply to it later.

  But Christmas came and went, and there was the usual flood of January returns at the bookshop: the maiden aunt to whom somebody had sent a camping guide, the earnest young man who wanted to turn in Winston Churchill for a manual of Yogi exercises, the gentle widower for whom, suggestively, Five Thousand and One Knots were not enough.

  And then the lawyer’s letter—also postmarked Chauncy— came, and baldly, shockingly, Louise and Gerald were dead and there were “effects.” Would Miss Rowan, at her convenience, present herself in Chauncy to claim these effects?

  Maria had learned detachment, and Louise was after all a stranger, but a simple phrase like “each other’s only relatives” struck through that disarmingly. She began to wonder what would have happened if she had answered her cousin’s letter promptly: would Louise have asked her up to Chauncy during the holidays? And if she had gone would Louise—why did she think of this?—be alive now?

  She went to Chauncy. Partly in response to the lawyer’s letter, mostly for the gesture she had left unanswered, and because her cousin Louise, if she had survived her husband of twelve years, would have had to go to court to claim even her dower right. And because she had a sudden feeling that her father’s well-studied detachment had not been a matter of armour but of blanketing, a comfortable insulation that hardly knew it was selfish. It wasn’t pleasant going to Chauncy as Louise Mallow’s cousin, because people placed only one interpretation on that.

  No one thought of murder. Because Annabelle Blair wasn’t swaying and sultry or blond and fetching, no one thought of the twin deaths as anything but accident even when it was common knowledge that she would inherit. If she had flown to Miami, or tried to draw on the considerable estate, or begun appearing in Louise’s wardrobe of furs, she might have started tongues wagging.

  But she was much too clever for that.

  The coffee pot began to hiss. Maria poured a cup and carried it to the black-painted bookcase beside the armchair. The snow had stopped but the wind was rising; she heard the bow and swish of the fir branches against the dormer window while she got paper and pencil and began to write. “Dear Maria—I don’t know whether you remember me . . .”

  That was Louise, oddly tentative, half-beckoning, suddenly afraid of the woman who was her husband’s secretary. Closed up with her in an old country house full of shadows, on a lonely road, disinherited before she died.

  Somewhere in that letter, in among the rambling phrases, there had to be a cloaked suspicion, a beginning of fear, a suggestion of the truth that Annabelle Blair had had to destroy at all costs. Maria drank her coffee and lit a cigarette that burned forgotten in the ashtray while she remembered and wrote and stared at the words of a dead woman.

  CHAPTER 6

  TORRANT MET Simeon by degrees, slowly, invisibly at first, startled at the weight of his own hostility. But Polly Stark had told him that Annabelle Blair—Annabelle Fennister then —had mentioned a man named ‘Simon . . . something like that’ and had left Martin frequently in the evenings to return ‘in a glow.’

  People seldom went into murder alone. In the background there was almost always a human goad, witting or unwitting, the flesh and blood behind the police-blotter motive. Torrant, quietly elated at Mrs. Judd’s announcement of Simeon’s presence on the third floor, had barely closed the door of his room behind him when he heard the one across the landing opened, closed and locked.

  He had his own door open almost instantly, but the quick heavy tread had carried the other man down out of sight. He sounded big, solidly built but fast-moving. Torrant followed almost to the first floor landing and stopped at the sound of Mrs. Judd’s voice in the hall below. . .

  “Mr. Simeon, would you mind moving your car? We aren’t allowed to park on this street and I wouldn’t want—”

  “Of course, Mrs. Judd. I’m on my way out now. I’ll put it behind the house when I come back, shall I?” Deep voice, smooth and peculiarly sweet—commonly used, Torrant thought dispassionately, for charming birds out of trees. Wavy dark hair would suit it nicely.

  “‘One more thing,” Mrs. Judd was saying. “I forgot to ask you to sign the book when you came in.”

  Five minutes later, when the hall was deserted, Torrant opened the account book which Mrs. Judd used as a register and looked curiously at the latest entry. There
were no initials, just the single huge scrawled “Simeon” and an illegible street address in Florida.

  Almost generic, that flourishing signature by the man who had all but certainly stood in the wings while Martin Fennister was driven to death. Torrant stared at it a moment longer and turned and went out into the snow.

  He had a late lunch. He drove out along Vanguard Street and was surprised to find that Simeon’s old gray convertible was not parked outside the Mallow house. He glanced up at the window over the garage as he passed, half expecting a watchful glimpse of Maria Rowan, but the glass was blank.

  The yellow pages of the phone book in the drug store took him on two abortive trips to the edges of the town, so that it was nearly four o’clock when he walked up the miniature lawn of a small house at the end of the main street. The sign swinging from a black iron post said “Jonas Kirby, Real Estate.”

  But it was a woman who answered his ring. Her head came out first, wearing curlers under a turban; Torrant got a rapid impression of bold blue eyes and a small bright mouth in a face that seemed all curves and arches. Her skin was tanned and faintly glossy, as though unable to contain the vitality inside. It looked as though there might be a good deal of her, equally glossy, behind the door, and Torrant began a strategic retreat.

  She stopped him at once, saying imperturbably, “It’s all right, I’m decent. It’s just that I have a cocktail date. I’m Paulette Kirby, if you are inquiring about a house, and I may be able to help you anyway. Do come in, if you won’t mind the confusion.”

  Torrant entered, following her into a small and vividly modem living room. She was a tall woman, wearing her plumpness with an air; the pink and black stripes of her housecoat curved startlingly. She might, from her look of bursting vitality, the swelling stripes, the obviously manless room around her, have devoured Mr. Kirby within the hour. She was, Torrant thought, about forty-five.