Флетчер Флора - Leave Her to Hell

After the long night and a sluggish morning, I didn’t get out of town the next day until ten o’clock. It was three hundred and fifty miles by highway to Amity. In my cold clunker, allowing time for a couple of stops, I did well to average forty miles an hour. Figure it for yourself. It was almost exactly eight and a half hours later when I got there. About six-thirty. I was tired and hungry, and I went to a hotel and registered and went up to my room. I washed and went back down to the coffee shop and got a steak and ate it and went back to the room. By then it was eight. I lit a cigarette and lay down on the bed and began to wonder seriously why I was here and what the hell I was going to do, now that I was.

I thought about a lot of things and people. I thought about Robin Robbins looking like a tough and lovely kid with her beautiful shiner. I thought about Faith Salem lying in the sun. I thought about Silas Lawler and Graham Markley and Regis Lawler and Constance Markley. The last pair were shadows. I couldn’t see them, and I couldn’t entirely believe in them, and I wished suddenly that I had never heard of them. I thought about Colly Alder and Rosie the redhead, and I wondered if anything could possibly be worth dying for the way Colly and Rosie had died.

I did this thinking about these people, but it didn’t get me anywhere. I lay there on the bed in the hotel room for what seemed like an hour, and I was surprised, when I looked at my watch, to learn that less than half that time had passed. The room was oppressive, and I didn’t want to stay there any longer. Getting up, I went downstairs and walked around the block and came back to the hotel and bought a newspaper at the tobacco counter and sat down to read it. Tomorrow, I thought, I would begin making inquiries of certain people in an effort to discover, as a beginning, why Silas Lawler came to Amity once a month. But in the meanwhile I would read the paper. I read some of the front page and some of the sports page and all of the comics, and started on the classified ads.

Classified ads interest me. I always read them in the newspapers and in the backs of magazines that publish them. They are filled with the gains and losses and inferred intimacies of classified lives. If you are inclined to be a romantic, you can, by a kind of imaginative interpolation, read a lot of pathos and human interest into them. Someone in Amity, for instance, had lost a dog, and someone wanted to sell a bicycle that was probably once the heart of the life of some kid, and someone named Martha promised to forgive someone named Walter if he would come back from wherever he’d gone. Someone named Faith Salem wanted to teach you to play the piano for two dollars an hour.

There it was, and that’s the way it sometimes happens. You follow an impulse over three hundred miles because of a thin coincidence. And right away, because of a mild idiosyncrasy, you run into another coincidence that’s just a little too much of one to be one. And then the first one, although you don’t know why, no longer seems like one either.

I closed my eyes and tried to see Faith Salem lying again in the sun, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t see her lying in the sun because she was in another town teaching piano lessons for two dollars an hour. It said so in the town’s newspaper. I opened my eyes and looked again, just to be certain, and it did. Piano lessons, it said. 1828 Canterbury Street, call LO-3314, it said. Faith Salem, it said.

I stood up and folded the newspaper and stuck it in my coat pocket and looked at my watch. The watch said nine. I walked outside and started across the street to the parking lot where I’d left my car. But then, because it was getting late and I didn’t know the streets of the town, I turned and came back to the curb in front of the hotel and caught a taxi. I gave the driver the address, 1828 Canterbury Street, and sat back in the seat. The driver repeated the address after me and then concentrated silently on his driving. I didn’t try to think or make any guesses. I sat and listened to the ticking of the meter that seemed to be measuring the diminishing time and distance between me and something.

We hit Canterbury Street at 6th and went down it twelve blocks. It was an ordinary residential street, paved with asphalt, with the ordinary variations in quality you will find on most streets in most towns. It started bad and got better and then started getting worse, but it never got really good or as bad in the end as it had started. 1828 was a small white frame house with a fairly deep front lawn and vacant lots between it and the houses on both sides, which were also small and white and frame with fairly deep front lawns. On the corner at the end of the block was a neighborhood drug store with a vertical neon sign above the entrance. It would be a place to call another taxi in case of necessity, and so I paid off the one I had and let it go. I got out and went up a brick walk and across a porch. There was a light showing at a window, but I heard no sound and saw no shadow on the blind. After listening and watching for perhaps a minute, I knocked and waited for perhaps half of another. While the half minute was passing, a car, a Caddy, drove slowly down the street and turned left at the corner.

Without any prelude of sound whatever, the door opened and a woman stood looking out at me. The light behind her left her face in shadow. She was rather short and very slim, almost fragile, and her voice, when she spoke, had an odd quality of detached airiness, as if it had no corporeal source.

“Yes?” she said.

“I’m looking for Miss Faith Salem,” I said.

“I’m Faith Salem. What is it you want?”

“Please excuse me for calling so late, but I was unable to get here earlier. My name is Percival Hand. You were referred to me as an excellent piano teacher.”

“Thank you. Are you studying piano, Mr. Hand?”

“No.” I laughed. “My daughter is the student. We’re new in town, and she needs a teacher. As I said, you were recommended. May I come in and discuss it with you?”

“Yes, of course. Please come in.”

I stepped past her into a small living room that was softly lighted by a table lamp and a floor lamp. On the floor was a rose-colored rug with an embossed pattern. The furniture was covered with bright chintz or polished cotton, and the windows were framed on three sides by panels and valences of the same color and kind of material. At the far end of the room, which was no farther than a few steps, a baby grand occupied all the space of a corner. Behind me, the woman who called herself Faith Salem closed the door. She came past me into the room and sat down in a chair beside the step-table on which the table lamp was standing. It was apparently the chair in which she had been sitting when I knocked, for a cigarette was burning in a tray on the table and an open book was lying face down beside the tray. The light from the lamp seemed to gather in her face and in the hands she folded in her lap. The hands were quiet, holding each other. The face was thin and pretty and perfectly reposed. I have never seen a more serene face than the face of Constance Markley at that moment. “Sit down, Mr. Hand,” she said.

I did. I sat in a chair opposite her and held my hat and had the strange and inappropriate feeling of a visiting minister. I felt, anyhow, the way the minister had always appeared to be feeling when he called on my mother a hundred years ago when I was home.

“What a charming room,” I said.

“Thank you.” She smiled and nodded. “I like bright colors. They make a place so cheerful. Did you say you are new in Amity, Mr. Hand?”

“Yes. We arrived just recently.”

“I see. Do you plan to make your home here permanently?”