Widow's Web

by Ursula Curtiss

  Annabelle watched her with the pale blank gaze that was more disturbing than any open thought. In the middle of it she said almost idly, as though Maria weren’t speaking at all, “You know, Miss Rowan, I’d rather you hadn’t forced me to tell you about your cousin. As you’re determined to find it out in any case, you might as well hear it now, from me.”

  I won’t believe it, Maria thought stonily, but it seemed to her that a tiny shock had travelled around the room, dimming the colors, deepening the folds and patches of shadow, wiping out in a twinkling any familiarity or comfort or illusion of safety it might have held.

  She lifted a match to her cigarette, and with the same conscious effort raised her eyebrows and gazed steadily at the woman across the room.

  “I don’t know whether Mr. Simeon told you,” said Annabelle Blair in the same contemplative tone, “that Mr. Mallow was taken very ill just before we came East.”

  “Oh, indeed he did,” Maria said, equally polite. “The point seemed to be that Gerald’s attack of ptomaine poisoning was really attempted murder by Louise. Someone tried to murder me with potato salad last summer too, but that didn’t come off either.”

  “It isn’t funny, Miss Rowan,” said Annabelle Blair slowly, “when you realize that it wasn’t the first time your cousin had tried to kill her husband.”

  She hadn’t—surely she hadn’t?—looked, for an instant, pitying.

  Maria left her chair and walked into the kitchenette and took a glass down from the cupboard. She said over the rush of cold water, without turning around, “Really? And what were these other—attempts?”

  Lies, she thought, drinking the water she didn’t want. The gesture gave her something to do with her hands, it broke the dangerous passivity, the helplessness of merely sitting there and listening. Illogically, she thought of the phonograph record placed under the sleeper’s pillow. Relaxed, unmoving, you admitted into your mind things that your full consciousness would reject; you woke up with a brain furnished with thoughts that seemed your own.

  She wished, tightening the faucet, that she could turn off the flat unemotional voice behind her, the voice that was recreating an incident in the woods in November.

  Gerald Mallow had rented a small lodge in Minnesota for three weeks during every fall hunting season, partly for his own enjoyment, partly because it made an impressive background for the frequent clients he invited. He had taught Louise how to use a rifle, developing her eye to the point where, on the weekend in question, they had made a bet on the first deer of the season and set out from the lodge in opposite directions.

  An hour later Gerald, attired meticulously in brilliant red jacket and cap, had a rifle bullet graze his visor, an inch or two away from smashing through his brain.

  “Hunters get shot at every season,” said Maria levelly.

  “Of course, in open grounds. As it happened, Mrs. Mallow was carrying the only other rifle on a number of acres—and she admitted firing the shot. She said,” said Annabelle, her eyebrows up, “that she had gotten lost on leaving the lodge, and fired it as a signal.”

  “Oh—you were there, then.”

  “Yes, Mr. Mallow had a guest, a Mr. . . . Nesbitt, I think,” said Annabelle. “He was transferring some business, wheat shares, I believe—it was really a business weekend, so Mr. Mallow asked me to come along. Mr. Nesbitt had sprained a wrist his first day there, so we kept each other company in the lodge.”

  But there might have been turning leaves, as brilliant as a hunting jacket—or there might have been a sound, deliberately startling, to make Louise Mallow’s finger pull the trigger prematurely. There might have been no shot at all, no narrow escape, no Mr. Nesbitt, except that Maria, reluctantly, bitterly, found them real.

  “Accident?” Annabelle Blair was saying coolly. “Naturally Mr. Mallow let it go at that. Later that month, when he was bothered by insomnia, he very nearly took sleeping capsules that—with his heart—might easily have killed him. The capsules, which Mrs. Mallow had bought the week before, were in the medicine chest in place of the sedative his doctor had ordered.”

  Maria’s throat felt dry. “Who stopped him?”

  “He stopped himself, as I understand it. He generally took the capsules with water, but he had them with a hot drink that night. The first one melted on his tongue and the taste of it warned him.”

  Maria got up again, automatically. She took her ashtray and emptied the remains of one cigarette, a neat hostess kind of gesture that had always annoyed her. She wondered detachedly now what all those hostesses had had on their minds. She didn’t trust herself to argue the affair of the capsules yet; instead she said evenly, “Overlooking the fact that all these things were accidents, why is my cousin supposed to have tried to kill her husband?”

  Again, disconcertingly, Annabelle Blair gave her that peculiar glance; Maria held herself furiously away from the pity in it. “Your cousin was a very proud woman, Miss Rowan. I gather that she had led a somewhat sheltered life until the time of her marriage. I believe that a husband who was—” her eyelids dropped, “unfaithful, drove her beyond herself.”

  For Maria the dropped gaze, the oblique glance that preceded it, tore the delicate and dreadful web apart. There was a great deal she didn’t understand, and there might be an oddly real look to this new background, but she should not have forgotten, even for an instant, that this woman would naturally want to discredit Louise.

  She said crisply, “Is that what you came to say, Miss Blair? I appreciate your being frank. I’ll be equally frank—I don’t believe it.”

  Annabelle Blair didn’t move. “Gerald believed it. I happened to overhear something he said to your cousin one evening shortly after we came here. Or aren’t you going to believe that either?”

  Maria looked at her in silence.

  “He said—” Annabelle Blair stood up suddenly, buttoning her coat, and the red rocking-chair gave a few surprised creaks, “ ‘Don’t get any ideas, pet, just because we’re off in the wilds. I have things fixed so you don’t get a cent.’ ”

  Gerald, Maria repeated foolishly to herself after she had locked the doors again; she called him Gerald. It had always been Mr. Mallow before, proper, secretarially sedate. Urgency had tricked Annabelle Blair into letting the familiar first name slip out.

  Blankly, not minding the thrust of cold air, Maria opened the window at the back of the apartment a few inches. It seemed necessary to do something to this room, this altered place which was suddenly enemy territory. She turned and gave it an unfriendly look, and the patches and flares of color she had liked before seemed uncontrolled and subtly disordered. But then she wouldn’t be staying in it long, now— would she?

  It would still go on holding echoes, whether she heard them or ran away. ‘Don’t get any ideas, pet, just because we’re off in the wilds.’ Why was she so sure that Gerald Mallow had actually said that to Louise? Because Annabelle Blair, inventing it, would have said ‘my dear’ and ‘out in the country?’ Or because the arrogance of it fitted her own preconceived idea of Gerald?

  Maria knew bleakly that she was examining fragments of a pattern because she didn’t want to look at the whole. But she couldn’t shut out the vivid pieces of this new design. There was Gerald’s red-capped head an inch away from a bullet, Gerald starting in alarm at an alien taste to what should have been a familiar sedative, Gerald seized with the symptoms of poisoning after dining alone with his wife.

  Was it possible, after all, that Louise—

  Maria caught herself sharply there. Sitting on the end of the studio couch, fingers of one hand ruffling distractedly at her hair, she said the half-incredulous phrase again to herself, as Gerald Mallow must have said it. Is it possible that Louise—?

  Annabelle Blair had built up those scenes for Maria; had she subtly, deliberately, distorted them for Gerald? If, as Torrant said, she had persuaded Martin Fennister to believe in a death sentence that didn’t exist, then she would have been able with the aid of accident and ci
rcumstance to convince Gerald Mallow that his wife had tried to kill him.

  Maria clung to that, and to the only other factor that stood out clearly among shadows. If Louise had tried to kill Gerald, and somehow been caught in her own trap, why was Annabelle Blair so very anxious to be rid of her cousin?

  It wasn’t, certainly, a desire to spare Maria’s sensibilities; in those betraying last few words she had been cool and deliberately brutal, watching for the impact. Was there something she had to do, that mustn’t be seen from this vantage-point across the road; was she fidgeting in her prim and proper role? Was there some tell-tale thing in the Mallow house itself, that Maria might sooner or later discover?

  Or was there something in the garage below her, where the Mallow convertible had been housed?

  Not a thing, Maria assured herself; she would have taken care of that long before this. Nevertheless the thought stayed with her, through another cigarette, an absent-minded tour of the long room, a surprising reluctance to open her door again tonight and go down into that damp silent area.

  In the end, she wrent. At the last minute she had told Anna-belle, with a convincingly shaken air, that she would consider her offer after all, and surely the woman had gone away lulled. Besides, Maria was familiar with the small spill of light now coming from the second floor of the Mallow house; it meant that Annabelle was tucking herself in for the night. Even then, she held the apartment door wide after she had flicked on the switch that lit the garage, listening to the safe and utter silence below her before she went down the stairs, instinctively cautious.

  The naked ceiling bulb shone on dusty concrete, spotted faintly with oil, and the usual appurtenances of garages everywhere: lawn mower, ancient grass rake, garden hose coiled like a dusty snake. The shadowed area under the steep lift of the stairs contained an array of paint cans, a cob-webbed window’, the dim shape of the oil burner.

  Maria stood in the pale-yellow silence and concentrated, after a single ticketing glance around her, on the tool chest under the window at the side of the garage. If the Mallow convertible had been tampered with—and Louise had said to Gerald an hour or two before she died, ‘Every time we drive away like this I keep wondering . . .’—then the tool chest was the obvious place to look.

  Maria found herself tiptoeing across to it. That was ridiculous, because she had locked the outer door herself, but she had the edged and close-to-panic feeling of someone in a private forbidden place, anxious to be finished and away before its dangerous guardian returned. She knelt before the tool chest—and somewhere behind her in the garage there was a terrifying clatter of sound.

  After a second of pure blankness she was on her feet and running, not looking around her, not wanting to see. The stairs and the safety at the top filled her whole consciousness, so that she nearly tripped over the thing that had caused the commotion.

  The saw, the heavy wooden-handled saw that had hung from a nail beside the stairs. Vibrations it wasn’t used to, and now her last journey down, had slid it up the nail and over the end. Maria leaned weakly against a post, getting her breath back and regarding the saw with hatred, and then she walked slowly and reluctantly back across the garage.

  The tool chest had now, out of all proportion, taken on the character of a mission. It was a squat scratched metal thing, an inch or two out from the wall; its closed lid was tantalizing. And Annabelle Blair wanted her out of here so urgently that she had offered first a bribe and then a subtle threat of publicity.

  Maria forgot that these were two steps on the way to a possible third, and in her absorption she failed to notice, or put down as inevitable in cement-floored places, the delicate new brush of cold across her ankles.

  CHAPTER 15

  TORRANT SLEPT uneasily that night, and because of his constant awareness of Simeon across the hall, or the sense of gathering tension that he took with him to sleep, or merely the pickpocket draughts at the top of Mrs. Judd’s house, he dreamed of Martin Fennister.

  Martin behind a camera and later behind an old-fashioned; Martin at the airport saying “You’ll be back,” and handing Torrant a grenade cleverly shaped like a silver flask. The images fled when Torrant awoke; the feeling of reality stayed with him for a long black minute. He found cigarettes and matches without turning on the light, and the taste of smoke and the small red glow dulled the edge that had brought him out of sleep.

  He wondered, propped up in darkness, whether Martin ever came alive for Annabelle Blair when she was asleep and helpless. Did she see him perhaps, facing his private terror alone? Counting out a killing number of sleeping pills? Or— the crowning irony—writing a last apology to her before his brain stopped functioning? Torrant’s hatred was as comfortable as an extra blanket, and eventually he went to sleep under it. . .

  The morning was dark and frozen. He went into town for his breakfast and the newspaper that Mrs. Judd had nerved herself up to ask for, and in the cafe heard a number of seasoned rumors that had an air of truth. The Medical Examiner had found Sarah Partridge’s head injury compatible with a fall and there had been water found in her lungs, proof that she had entered the pond alive. Add to that her sister’s statement that Sarah hadn’t used that shortcut for years, and would have been hurrying to get in out of the cold, and you had just one more accidental drowning.

  Interest had gone out of the affair as far as the town was concerned. Mrs. Partridge had never been a colorful figure, and no one connected her death with the earlier accident in which Gerald and Louise Mallow had died. It was expert, Torrant thought, buying Mrs. Judd’s newspaper. It was practice made perfect . . .

  Mrs. Judd, glancing at his bleak face, explained agitatedly that she had only wanted the newspaper in order to see what movies were playing in the adjoining towns; she pressed five pennies upon him and hoped it hadn’t been a nuisance. “Miss : Rowan called while you were out, and” said Mrs. Judd with a withdrawn air, “I wrote it down. Here it is.”

  Wrote what down? Torrant took the slip of paper with a sudden tenseness, feeling Mrs. Judd’s triumphant gaze. The p note read, “Miss Rowan called while you were out.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Judd,” said Torrant containedly, and went rapidly out.

  He didn’t know what he had expected but he was relieved when Maria answered his ring. She was wearing something slender and black, which would account for her pallor and her too-brilliant eyes; it wouldn’t account for the intensity that was in the apartment like a current.

  She offered Torrant coffee with a perfunctory air. She sat down in the red rocker and got up again as though there had I been a pin in the cushion and took the end of the studio couch instead. She said, “I called you because I thought you might be interested in something I found in the garage last night. My cousin’s glasses. That’s why Louise didn’t take the wheel that night, that’s why—”

  “Hold on,” said Torrant, and looked at her carefully. He was willing to swear that she hadn’t slept much, and that it was nervous fatigue as well as excitement that gave her this dangerous glow. “Where were the glasses?”

  “There’s a tool chest,” Maria began, deliberately quiet, “on the left-hand side of the garage as you go in, under the window. I thought I’d have a look at it last night, because—” A number of silent seconds went by; Torrant wondered if her color had heightened. “I found the glasses between the back of the chest and the wall,” said Maria as though she hadn’t stopped, “and I know they were Louise’s because her initials were stamped in gold inside one of the earpieces.”

  Past tense. Torrant said, “Let’s have a look at them,” and Maria said, “That’s just it, I dropped them. I knew all at once —the way you do—that there was someone in the garage with me, and I ran for the stairs. I must have hit the post with my hand, because I felt the glasses going. You’d think they would have broken, but when I went down again—it must have been half an hour later—there wasn’t a trace.”

  Torrant said that he would have coffee after all.

&
nbsp; Louise Mallow’s glasses—why in the garage? Granted that Annabelle Blair had chosen that as a temporary hiding place, why hadn’t she taken one of the thousand opportunities to retrieve them before last night? Unless, under the stress of that first twenty-four hours when the full attention of the police and the town was concentrated on the accident, she had forgotten where she put them.

  That raised a further question in his mind. From something Paulette Kirby had said he was sure that Louise Mallow had driven the convertible on occasion—but where was her driver’s license? There hadn’t been one in the alligator handbag. Was that because she was licensed “with glasses” and the glasses couldn’t be found?

  Torrant frowned over that; a carelessness amounting to stupidity was not. in Annabelle Blair’s technique. On the other hand the glasses, which were obviously betraying in one way or another, had been allowed to languish in the garage until, on a random impulse, Maria Rowan had turned on the light and gone rummaging through the tool chest.

  He looked across at her and thought about the night she must have spent, listening for a sound at the door or the windows below her, hardly trusting herself to sleep. Probably looking out, from time to time, at the old house across the road. He said abruptly, “Why on earth didn’t you call me last night?”

  “I’m a big girl,” Maria said after a startled glance at him. Her cheeks were pink. “And after all, you did warn me, remember?”

  A grudge-bearer, Torrant thought, outraged. He opened his mouth to say something stiff, caught Maria’s eye, thought better of it and walked into the kitchenette alcove, trying to concentrate on the matter at hand.