Widow's Web

by Ursula Curtiss

  He was hardly aware of leaving his chair, but all at once Annabelle Blair’s face was only inches from his, as blurred and monstrous as a too-close image on a movie screen, and all the forced calm had gone out of him. He felt her shrink back into the loveseat with a movement as tiny and sly as an animal’s.

  He said in what he thought was a whisper but filled the room, “How did he look, Annabelle, while you were lying to him? Could you see him making up his mind then and there that he couldn’t face dying by inches? Or did he take a little convincing? I doubt that, it wouldn’t have occurred to Martin not to trust the woman he’d married. And then he didn’t know about Simeon, did he?”

  Torrant’s hands had gone to Annabelle Blair’s shoulders, fingers biting into the rigid wincing flesh. His own voice reached him suddenly in the echo of a shout, and he looked down at his hands, and the white imperturbable face that was now damp and pocketed with fear, and he let her go and walked sharply away.

  Behind him there was a single harsh indrawn breath and a sound of released pressure from the loveseat. When he turned around, cold and drained and a little disgusted, Annabelle Blair was standing at the far side of the mantel, watchfully near the doorway. She was still breathing unevenly, but her poise was coming back. They stared at each other for a moment across the room which Gerald and Louise Mallow had inhabited so briefly, and in which Sarah Partridge had for a time wielded a dust-cloth and a vacuum cleaner.

  “Even if all that were true,” said Annabelle Blair, and her voice was conciliatory and even a little wheedling, “Martin didn’t have to kill himself.”

  It wasn’t a thing to bother answering. Torrant watched her speechlessly, wondering whether there were any depths this woman recognized as such, and saw the quickening return of her confidence. Only moments ago she had been a crouched and helpless thing, too swallowed up by fear to look for any way out of the trap, and then in a smooth transition she had been ready to bargain about Martin’s death.

  Now she was steady and cold again. She said, “You’re distraught, Mr. Torrant. You doted on Martin, you were shocked to hear of his death when you came back, and you won’t accept his suicide for what it was. I don’t know what you hope to gain by all this.”

  “Guess.”

  “Oh, I can guess. But you’re much too intelligent to think you can get anywhere, because,” Annabelle Blair said, “you can t.

  She left the mantel and walked toward him. A portion of Torrant’s attention noticed that the pale eyes were no longer blank; it was as though she had come out of hiding to fight. “Martin was ill. He bought the sleeping pills himself. He went back to an empty house and thought about what he was doing and swallowed them. And,” said Annabelle. meeting Torrant’s gaze levelly, “with all your talk, there isn’t a thing you can do about it,‘Mr. Torrant.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “THERE ARE A couple of things I can do about it,” Torrant said, calm against the pounding at his temples. “Not about Martin. About you.”

  Annabelle gave him a waiting look. The pretenses were gone between them; she was openly pitting her wits against his. Torrant lit a cigarette deliberately. “I’m a free agent— and I can go where you go. I can see that your neighbors, or your apartment-house superintendent or the people you try to make your friends, know how you arrived at being a widow.”

  “Nobody would believe you,” said Annabelle, but she seemed to have withered a little.

  “Try it and see. People like to believe the worst, it livens things up for them. When there’s something more than rumor attached to it, and when three other people connected with you have died in short order, it’s really something to whisper about. And edge away from. Of course,” said Torrant invitingly, “you could always sue me.”

  Annabelle’s lips tightened at the mocking air of that; her eyes with their new brilliance and rocus went narrow. “You don’t seriously think you could—”

  “Or,” Torrant went on as though she hadn’t spoken, “I can go back to the doctor in Greenwich—‘what was his name? Davies.”

  Annabelle relaxed a trifle; the glance she gave him was tinged with contempt. “Surely you know, Mr. Torrant, that doctors never allow themselves to be involved?”

  “Well, hardly ever,” Torrant said, staying calm. “On the other hand, when Davies talked to me about Martin’s ‘traumatic experience’ at his father’s death, he was obviously riding a hobby-horse. There must have been some official queries. I’m certainly not the only person he explained to about the . . . what was it? ‘Effects of a parent’s suffering on an impressionable child’—a child of twenty-six, by the way. Davies might very well feel outraged if he saw a photostat of John Fennister’s death certificate, showing a coronary seizure. He didn’t look like a man who enjoys being made a fool of.”

  He could almost see Annabelle’s brain exploring this, not quite convinced but not liking it, trying to twist it this way and that so it would take a different shape. She wet her lips; she said with triumph, “Martin was—irrational. The verdict said so, didn’t it? Suicide while of unsound mind. The shock of what the doctor told him confused him so that he—”

  “He didn’t know what his own father died of, or when?” Torrant asked her softly. He bent to deaden his cigarette. “I’d stay away from that if I were you, Annabelle. It’s a very leaky boat.”

  She made one last desperate try; she even managed the outlines of a smile. “Aren’t you weakening your own case, Mr. Torrant? After all, a proven suicide, a fatal car crash, an accidental drowning . . . Even Dr. Davies—or should I say especially Dr. Davies?—is going to suspect that you have an obsession.”

  “I have,” Torrant said deliberately, and walked toward her. He watched one of her hands go up to grip the mantel edge; the other curled itself slowly and rigidly at her side. It reminded him of an innocent-looking weapon. He said, “You got away with Martin, at the time. And Mrs. Partridge went down without a ripple, didn’t she? Wouldn’t it be ironic if it were Gerald and Louise Mallow who caught up with you?” He thought back to the alert and waiting poise of Simeon’s head, the hard curiosity behind Mrs. Kirby’s affable blue gaze. He said, “They might, you know, any day now, and save me the trouble,”

  Silence, except for the scrape of a bush at one of the gray windows. Nothing moved in the room except a strand of light that appeared briefly on the rug, stirred waterily as the willows stirred and vanished again. Annabelle Blair was in a corner at last, but after a single glance at the closed eyes in the white face, Torrant found that he didn’t want to examine the details.

  Had some of Maria Rowan’s distaste for this rubbed off on him, or was it the utter blankness of the woman at the mantel that left him with a tired anger in place of exultation? He had expected her to defy him, he had hoped that she would plead with him; he hadn’t counted on this air of resignation. She might have been an animal, neither tame nor hostile, caught up with by the hunter and waiting simply to be destroyed.

  Or was it less simply a trick, a disarming tactic by a master of tactics? The mind behind the closed eyelids might be up to almost anything. Torrant was suddenly and almost literally sick of Annabelle Blair; he walked away from her and put on his coat.

  “Mr. Torrant . . .”

  It wasn’t as though he had really trusted that cornered pose. Torrant stopped on his way to the door and gazed at her, grimly inquiring. Her eyes were brilliant and busy again, as if she had used that hidden instant to draw on an ace in the | hole. An offer to pay him? A deal of some kind, certainly; he could see as well as hear the deep breath she drew. He said harshly, “Whatever it is, no,” and walked past her.

  Behind him, she said coolly, “What do you intend to do?”

  Torrant reached the door and opened it. “If I were you,” he said, “I’d start asking myself that. But don’t do anything— drastic, Annabelle.”

  The faint humorless smile touched her lips again. “Don’t worry, Mr. Torrant,’ said Annabelle Blair. “I won’t.”

 
How long before she would show her hand?

  Torrant drove back between the bleak gray fields, wondering about that. His fury had spent itself, and for the moment he was able to look at Annabelle as an abstract problem that had to be resolved. She would hardly want to leave Chauncy until Gerald Mallow’s will had been probated, and when she did leave she would certainly want to sever herself completely and for good.

  Which left her—a week? Two weeks? Torrant’s legal knowledge was sparse, but the Mallows had died only five weeks ago and wills moved through weighty channels. In any case, the interval would be different for her now. He had used the Mallows as a deliberate goad, and the goad had found its mark; Annabelle Blair, looking for suspicion in the town, would find it everywhere.

  It was what she had done to Martin—planted the He and left it to grow until it destroyed him. Martin had been vulnerable, and at last, for all her assumed composure, Annabelle Blair was vulnerable, too.

  The gray afternoon was losing its clarity, the lilacs in Mrs. Judd’s back yard moved a little in the beginning of a wind. Torrant let himself into the house and stood in the hall, listening to the silence. After a moment he walked to the door at the back and opened it. “Mrs. Judd?”

  Mrs. Judd wasn’t in the big old-fashioned kitchen or the back parlor that led out of it. Torrant walked thoughtfully back to the hall, put his hand out for the telephone, and crossed to the table under the mirror instead. There was a folded slip of paper under the bowl of artificial flowers; the outside said in Mrs. Judd’s writing, “Mr. Simeon.”

  Torrant opened it without compunction, but the two brief lines inside were not enlightening. “Mrs. Kirby called twice and would like you to call her.”

  Mrs. Kirby, professional runner with the hare and hunter with the hounds . . . The front door opened without warning; Torrant had barely time to drop the note into a pocket before Simeon entered the hall. He said blandly, nodding back at the telephone as though he had just left it, “Mrs. Judd seems to be out . . . Mrs. Kirby would like you to call her back.”

  “Oh?” Simeon’s brows went up. “Perhaps Annabelle’s decided to sell after all. Incidentally, Mr. Torrant, while were here I wonder if you’d mind a purely curious question. Why all the interest in Mrs. Mallow’s glasses this morning?”

  “Not at all,” Torrant said, “Someone else was interested enough to break into the garage to get them, after Miss Rowan had found and dropped them.”

  “The garage,” Simeon repeated, and gave Torrant a long bright stare. “The car, and the glasses . . . yes, I see. But Annabelle has a key to the garage.”

  Torrant didn’t bother replying that the locks had been changed; he had a feeling that the other man knew it and was probing. It was hard to tell, because the beaky exaggerated face and the wise parrot eyes were a mask in themselves: Simeon had been born in disguise. He reached for a cigarette, careful not to disinter Mrs. Judd’s message, and met the speculative gaze again.

  “For reasons I’d rather not go into just now,” Simeon said slowly, “I haven’t been quite candid with you about my coming to Chauncy, Mr, Torrant. To be frank, I was astonished when Annabelle sent for me, I respect her—she’s more than a competent secretary, she’s an extremely intelligent woman—but I fully expected to find proof that she had had a hand in the car crash, and wanted a prop, a kind of character witness.”

  Distantly, a car went by. Torrant was grimly determined not to be spellbound by the fluid and oddly convincing voice. He lit his last remaining cigarette, crumpled the empty package and concentrated on tossing it into Mrs. Judd’s claw-footed umbrella stand.

  “But,” said Simeon, his glance for a second naked and baffled, “she didn’t do it, Mr. Torrant. In spite of all the circumstances, the accident that killed the Mallows was—exactly that.”

  “This is all very disenchanting,” Torrant said briskly. “I had an idea that your relations with Annabelle were much too close to allow a suspicion of murder.”

  Simeon smiled. “I won’t deny that I saw a good deal of her at one time—while she was Mrs. Fennister, if you like. Under the circumstances I was hardly infatuated with her purity of spirit.”

  Was he admitting the manner of Martin’s death, or merely the fact of Annabelle as an unfaithful wife? Torrant was abruptly tired of riddles. He walked up the stairs, and then paused at the first floor landing as the voice below him in the hall asked for a telephone number.

  Simeon said, “Mrs. Kirby? I understand you called.” There was a pause, and then, “Not at all, it happens to—” and another pause. “Oh, ten minutes, fifteen at the outside . . . Of course.”

  Torrant covered the last two flights rapidly; he was at the window of his room, gazing down into the bleak side street, when Simeon reached the third floor. The door across the landing opened and then closed, and in spite of what had sounded like an imminent departure, remained that way.

  Torrant stayed restlessly close to the window. He didn’t like the darkening north or the quickening wind, or the fact that none of the fore-shortened dark-coated women hurrying along under leafless trees was Mrs. Judd. At a quarter after four he drove into the town for cigarettes and, in the glassed-in privacy of the booth at the back of the drug store, made a telephone call to Maria Rowan.

  Maria put down the receiver with relief and a certain care, as though a brisker sound might wake the apartment to the waiting tension of the night before. She had reached the point, inconceivable a week ago, where she welcomed being told what to do; when Torrant said briefly that he would have his landlady find her another room somewhere in the town, and that if she would be ready he would pick her up at five o’clock, she had said only, “I’ll be ready. And—thank you.”

  How had she thought she could spend another night in this place? The answer was of course that she hadn’t thought about it at all; she had been caught up by the significance of Louise’s glasses, and it had been full daylight, with Torrant there. She hadn’t thought ahead to the graying afternoon or the sounds the wind could make, swallowing other, closer sounds, or the hours of darkness on the heels of the wind. And the nap hadn’t helped. She wasn’t a good daytime sleeper, she woke at odds with herself and the world, and the solidest objects looked subtly mischievous.

  Well, pack. And face the fact that she was running again, because she had stumbled into something she couldn’t handle and should have known better than to think she could handle in the first place. It wouldn’t help Louise if—Slippers, Maria said rapidly to herself, and the robe on the back of the bathroom door. Annabelle is busy with something or other, Annabelle can’t possibly know you’re packing. And even if she did know, it’s what she wants, isn’t it?

  The telephone on the black-painted bookcase rang like a sharp answer. Maria looked at it and went on capping a bottle of cologne. At the fourth ring, it occurred to her that Torrant might be calling back.

  “Miss Rowan?” Annabelle Blair’s voice, cool and authoritative, feeling no need to identify itself. Wanting to know whether Maria had decided to accept her bribe and go harmlessly away? “I wonder if I might see you for a few minutes.”

  “I’m—in the middle of a bath right now.”

  “Later, then?”

  “I’m sorry,” Maria said, stiffened by Annabelle’s faint irony, “but I’m going out. Wouldn’t tomorrow do?”

  “No,” said Annabelle, and then her voice changed subtly. “I’m leaving Chauncy, Maria. I thought you’d be interested in exactly what happened before your cousin died.”

  “You went into that pretty thoroughly last night.”

  “But—not quite.”

  And here it was, the dangling and almost irresistible bait that Torrant had warned her about. His voice came back now, grim under the lightness: Don’t go to tea again with Annabelle Blair. But surely the road would be safe enough, even though the daylight was beginning to ebb; Vanguard Street might not be heavily travelled but there would be an occasional car going by . . . Maria made herself look at it as Torrant
looked at it, and hardened. “I’m sorry,” she said again, and put the receiver down.

  She was a bad packer at best, starting out meticulously, ending in a random tucking-in here and there. Now there seemed to be a layer of blankness between her brain and her hands, so that she stood staring distractedly at a single pump and her hairbrush, paired neatly in the bottom of her suitcase.

  This wouldn’t do; for one thing, she had to leave the kitchenette the way she had found it. Maria finished packing and went into the windowed alcove, forcing her whole attention on the neat groups of knives and forks and spoons, the two cups dangling from their hooks, the two saucers under them. She cleaned out the picnic icebox and put the hot plate away, washed the ashtrays and polished the sink. At twenty minutes of five, except for the suitcase at the door with her coat and bag and gloves across it, the apartment looked ready for another stranger.

  In the bathroom, she put on fresh powder and lipstick and discovered her toothbrush in the process. The wind murmured around the garage walls; something, rain or sleet, began to tick at the windows. Maria opened her suitcase, poked the toothbrush in and took out the soft navy hat, an abbreviated sou’wester in wool jersey, that stayed on in any land of wind or weather. Her travelling clock was packed, firmly entrenched among slips and nightgowns, but by the time she had smoked a final cigarette and put on her coat, she thought it was almost five o’clock.

  She switched off the lamps, and the long brilliant room, already strange, sank down into a blur of deep gray. It seemed briefly incredible, as she stood on the threshold, that she had slept here, sat reading in that dark shape of armchair, heated soup and scrambled eggs at those blank and dimly shining counters. She turned on the garage light, closed the door on a tiny frightening slice of her life and went down the stairs to watch for Torrant’s funny little car.