Donald Westlake - The New Black Mask ( No 3 )

“But I need her,” I said. “She has to do the shopping for us.”

“You can order whatever we need. Have it delivered.”

“Well, uh, there are other things besides shopping. Anyway… anyway…”

“Yes?”

“Well, it wouldn’t seem quite right for us to be alone in the house. Just the two of us, I mean. It just wouldn’t be right, now, would it?”

“Why not?” said Kay; and as I hesitated, fumbling for words, she said curtly, “All right, Britt. You’re too softhearted to get rid of her, and I probably wouldn’t like you as much as I do if you weren’t that way. So I’ll say no more about it. Mrs. Olmstead stays, and I just hope you’re not sorry.”

She left my office, leaving me greatly relieved as I returned to my work. Glad that I had not had to explain why I did not want to live alone in the house with her. I had no concrete reason to suspect her, or, rather, to be afraid of her. Nothing at all but the uneasy doubts planted in mind by Claggett and Pat Aloe. Still, I knew I would be more comfortable with a third person present. And I was very happy to have managed it without a lot of fussing and fuming.

The pamphlet I was doing was on soil erosion, a subject I had shied away from in the past. I was afraid I would be inadequate to such an important topic with so many facets; i.e., flood, drouth, wand, and irresponsible agricultural practices. Somehow, however, I had found the courage to plunge into the job and persist at it, meeting its challenges instead of veering or backing away — my customary reaction when confronted with the difficult. And I had advanced to its approximate halfway point when I looked up one afternoon to find Kay smiling at me from the doorway.

I stood up automatically, and started to unbuckle my belt. But she laughed and said we could dispense with the vitamin shot today.

“Just let me get your pulse and your temperature,” she said, and proceeded to get them. “You’re doing very well, Britt. Working hard and apparently enjoying it.”

I agreed that I was doing both, adding that I was going to be very irritated if I was finished off before the job was finished.

“Well, then, I do solemnly swear to keep you alive,” she said piously. “Not that I know why it’s so important, but…”

I told her to sit down, and I would give her a hint of its importance. Which she did, and I did.

It was as important as life itself, I said. In fact, it was life. Yet we sat around on our butts, uncaring, while it was slowly being stolen from us.

“Do you know that three-fourths of this state’s top-soil has been washed away, blown away, or just by-God pooped away? Do you know that an immeasurable but dangerously tragic amount of its subsoil has gone the same route? Given a millennium and enough million millions, you can replace the topsoil, but once the subsoil’s gone, it’s gone forever. In other words, you’ve got nothing to grow crops on, and nothing—” I broke off, paused a moment. “In other words,” I said, “it stinks. Thanks for being so graphic.”

She looked at me absently, nose crinkled with distaste. Then, she suddenly came alive, stammering embarrassed apologies.

“Please forgive me, Britt. It sounds terribly interesting, and you must tell me more. But what is that awful smell? It stinks like, well, I don’t know what! It’s worse than anything I’ve smelled before in this house, and that’s really saying something!”

I said I had noticed nothing much worse than usual. I also said I had a lot of work to do, and that I was anxious to get back to it.

“Now, Britt—” She got to her feet. “I’m sorry, and I’ll run right along. Can I do anything for you before I go?”

Mollified, I said that, as a matter of fact, she could do something. There were some USD A brochures in the top drawer of my topmost filing cabinet, and if she would hold a chair while I climbed up on it, I would dance at her wedding or render any other small favor to her.

“You just stay right where you are,” she said firmly. “I’ll do any climbing that’s done around here!”

She dragged a chair over to the stack of files, hiked her skirt, and stepped up on the chair. Standing on tiptoe, she edged out the top file drawer and reached inside. She fumbled blindly inside, trying to grasp the documents inside. And, then, suddenly, she gasped and her face went livid.

For a moment, I thought she was going to topple from the chair, and I jumped up and started toward her. But she motioned me back with a grim jerk of her head, then jumped down from the chair, white-faced with anger.

She was holding a large, dead rat by the tail. Without a word she marched out of the room, and, by the sound of things, disposed of it in the rear-porch garbage can. She returned to my office, stopping on the way to scrub her hands at the kitchen sink.

“All right, Britt—” she confronted me again “—I hope you’re going to do something now!”

“Yes, I am,” I said. “I’m going to go up to my room, and lie down.”

“ Britt! What are you going to do about that awful woman?”

“Now, Kay,” I said. “That rat could have crawled in there and died. You know it could! Why—”

Kay said she knew it could not. The rat’s head had been smashed. It had been killed, then put in the file.

“The shock of finding it could have killed you, Britt. Or if you were standing on a chair, you could have fallen and broken your neck! I just can’t allow this kind of thing to go on, Britt. I’m responsible, and — You’ve got to fire her!”

I pointed out that I couldn’t fire Mrs. Olmstead. Not, at least, until she returned from shopping. I pointed out — rather piteously — that I was not at all well. This in the opinion of medical experts.

“Now, please help me up to my bed. I implore you, Kay Nolton.”

She did so, though irritably. Then, looking up at her from the pillow, I smiled at her and took one of her hands in mine. I said that perhaps she would not mind discussing Mrs. Olmstead when I was feeling better — say, tomorrow or the next day or, perhaps, the day after that. And I gave her a small pinch on the thigh.

She drew back skittishly, but not without a certain coyness. Which was all right with me. I wanted only to avoid a problem — Mrs. Olmstead — not to walk into another one. But Kay had her wants as well as I. And to get one must give. So when she said that she had to go to her room for a moment but would be right back, I told her I would count on it.

“I’ll hold your place for you,” I promised. “I’ll also move over on the bed, in case you want to sit down, in case you cannot think of a more comfortable position than sitting.”

Well.

When we heard Mrs. Olmstead return an hour later, we were locked together as the blissful beast-with-two-heads. We sprang apart, and she trotted into the bathroom ahead of me, her white uniform drawn high upon her sweet nakedness. I used the sink, while she sat on the toilet, tinkling pleasantly. And then I went over to her and hugged her red head against my stomach, and she nuzzled and kissed its environs in unashamed womanliness.

I congratulated myself.

For once, Britton Rainstar, I thought, you bridged a puddle without putting your foot down in stinky stuff. You’ve closed the door to debates on Mrs. Olmstead. Without compromising yourself, you’ve had a nice time and given same to a very nice young lady.

That’s what I thought — and why not?

I nourished that thought, while I returned to bed and Kay went downstairs to prepare my dinner. It began to glimmer away, due to a kind of bashful shyness of manner as she served said dinner to me. And at bedtime, when she came into my room in an old-fashioned, unrevealing flannel, lips trembling, eyes downcast, a pastel symphony of embarrassment — bingo. The sound was the sound of my comforting thought leaping out the window.