Fletcher Flora - The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK™ - 26 Stories by Fletcher Flora

“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 just arrived recently.”

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

“I don’t know. It depends on how things work out, Miss Salem. Is that correct? I seem to remember that you’re single.”

“That’s quite correct. I’ve never married,” she said, and nodded.

“I’m surprised that such a lovely woman has escaped so long. Do you live here alone?”

In her face for a moment was an amused expression that did not disturb the basic serenity, and I wondered if it was prompted by the trite compliment or the impertinent question. At any rate, she ignored the first and answered the second simply.

“Yes. I’m quite alone here. I like living alone.”

“Have you lived in Amity long?”

“Many years. I came here as a student in the college and never left. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”

“Forgive my asking, but don’t you find it difficult to live by giving private music lessons?”

“I’m certain that I should if I tried it. I give private lessons only in my off hours. Evenings and weekends. I’m also an instructor in the Amity Conservatory. A private school.” She hesitated, looking at me levelly across the short space between us, and I thought that she was now slightly disturbed, for the first time, by my irrelevant questions. “I understand that you should want to make inquiries of a teacher you are considering for your child, Mr. Hand, but yours don’t seem very pertinent. Would you like to know something about my training and qualifications?”

“No, thanks. I’m sure you’re very competent, Miss Salem. I’m sorry if my questions seemed out of line. The truth is, I know so little about music myself that I hardly know what to talk about.”

“Do you mind telling me who sent you to me, Mr. Hand?”

“As a matter of fact, it was the Conservatory. They recommended you highly, but they didn’t mention that you were an instructor there.”

“I see. Many students are directed to me that way. The ones who are unable to attend the Conservatory itself, that is.”

I looked down at my hat, turning it slowly in my hands, and I didn’t like the way I was beginning to feel. No one could accuse me fairly of being a particularly sensitive guy, and ordinarily I am conscious of no corruption in the dubious practices of my trade, dubious practices being by no means restricted to the trade I happen to follow. By now I was beginning to feel somehow unclean, and every little lie was assuming in my mind the character of a monstrous deception. I was suddenly sick of it and wanted to be finished with it, the whole phony case. I had been hired for twenty-five and expenses to find a woman who had disappeared two years ago, and here she was in a town called Amity, living quietly under the name of Faith Salem, which was the name of the woman who had hired me to find her, and it had all been so fantastically quick and easy, a coincidence and an itch and a classified ad, and now there seemed to be nothing more to be done that I had been hired to do.

But where was Regis Lawler? Here was Constance, but where was Regis? Well, I had not been hired to find Regis. I had been hired to find Constance, and I had found her, and that was all of it. Almost all of it, anyhow. All that was left to do for my money to get up and get away quietly with my unclean feeling after my necessary deceptions. Tomorrow I would drive back where I had come from, and I would report what I had learned to the woman who was paying me, and then she would know as much as I did, and what she wanted to do with it was her business and not mine.

There were still, however, so many loose ends. So many mental itches I couldn’t scratch. I did not know why Constance had come to Amity. Nor why she had assumed the name of Faith Salem. Nor certainly why, for that matter, the real Faith Salem wanted her found. Nor why Silas Lawler did not. Nor where in the world was Regis Lawler. Nor if, in fact, he was. In the world, that is.

Suddenly I looked up and said, “ Mrs. Markley, where is Regis Lawler? ”

Her expression was queer. It was an expression I remembered for a long time afterward and sometimes saw in the black shag end of the kind of night when a man is vulnerable and cannot sleep. She stared at me for a minute with wide eyes in which there was a creeping dumb pain, and then, in an instant, there was a counter expression which seemed to be a denial of the pain and the pain’s cause. Her lids dropped slowly, as if she were all at once very tired. Sitting there with her hands folded in her lap, she looked as if she were praying, and when she opened her eyes again, the expressions of pain and its denial were gone, and there was nothing where they had been but puzzlement.

“What did you call me?” she said.

“Mrs. Markley. Constance Markley.”

“If this is a joke, Mr. Hand, it’s in very bad taste.”

“It’s no joke. Your name is Constance Markley, and I asked you where Regis Lawler is.”

“I don’t know Constance Markley. Nor Regis Lawler.” She unfolded her hands and stood up, and she was not angry and apparently no longer puzzled. She had withdrawn behind an impenetrable defense of serenity. “I don’t know you either, Mr. Hand. Whoever you are and whatever you came here for, you are obviously not what you represented yourself to be, and you didn’t come for the purpose you claimed.”

“True. I’m not, and I didn’t.”

“In that case, we have nothing more to discuss. If you will leave quietly, I’ll be happy to forget that you ever came.”

I did as she suggested. I left quietly. She had said that I was in bad taste, and I guess I was, for the taste was in my mouth, and it was bad.

I turned left at the street toward the drug store on the corner, and I had walked about fifty feet in that direction when a man got out of a parked car and crossed the parking to intercept me, and the car was a Caddy I had ridden in before, and the man was Silas Lawler.

“Surprised?” he said amiably.

“Not especially,” I said. “I heard you’ve been coming out here pretty regularly the last couple years.”

“I was afraid that might have been one of the things you heard. Robin has a bad habit of knowing things she’s not supposed to. Not that it matters much. You’ve just made me make an extra trip, that’s all. Darcy’s really annoyed, though. He’s the one who’s had to tail you since you got into this business, and Darcy doesn’t like that kind of work. He figures it’s degrading.”

“Poor Darcy. I’ll have to apologize the next time I see him.”

“That could be right now. Just turn your head a little. He’s sitting over there behind the wheel of the Caddy.”

“I’ll have to do it some other time. Right now I’m on my way to the corner to call a cab.”

“Forget it. Darcy and I wouldn’t think of letting you go to all that trouble. We’ve been waiting all this time just to give you a lift.”

“I hope you won’t be offended if I decline.”

“I’m afraid I would. I’m sensitive that way. I always take it personally if my hospitality’s refused. You wouldn’t want to hurt my feelings, would you?”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

“That’s not very gracious of you. Hand. I offer you a lift, the least you can do is be courteous about it. What I mean is, get in the Caddy.”

“No, thanks. The last time we got together, you didn’t behave very well. I don’t think I want to associate with you any more.”

“It won’t be for long.”

He took a gun out of his pocket and pointed it at me casually in such a way that it would, if it fired, shoot me casually through the head. I could see, in a glimmer of light, the ugly projection of a silencer.