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

He was in the other room, beyond the bath. She could not hear him. She sensed him through her infallible senses. He was standing in utter and deliberate silence, motionless, his head canted and his eyes watching her through double walls, waiting to detect through his own acute senses the slightest movement of her body, the merest whisper of her bated breathing. Slowly she closed her eyes in an effort to preserve the secret of her wakefulness. No use. He knew her secret. He was coming. She heard him in the bathroom. She heard him crossing the room to her bed. She heard his voice.

“Good morning, Ellen,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

Knowing the futility of simulation, she opened her eyes and looked at him. He was, she had to admit, very deceptive. He did not look at all like a man, a devil, who had murdered his first wife and was planning to murder his second. His body was slender and supple, just under six feet, and his expensive and impeccable clothes hung upon it with an effect of casual elegance. His smooth blond hair fitted his round skull like a pale cap. His mouth was small, the lips full, prepared to part unpredictably, at the oddest times, in an expression of silent laughter. His eyes were azure blue, brimming with a kind of candid innocence, a childlike wonder, as if he were listening always to a private voice telling an interminable fairy tale. Oh, he was deceptive, all right. He was deceptive and deadly.

“I’m feeling quite well, thank you,” she said.

“Improved from last night, I hope.”

“Wasn’t I feeling well last night? I can’t remember that I wasn’t.”

“Well, never mind. A good sleep will sometimes work wonders. Did you sleep well?”

“I slept quite well, thank you.”

“You see? It was the work of the sedative I gave you. You were a bad girl to try to avoid taking it. They have done some remarkable things in drugs these days. It’s absolutely amazing what can be done with them.”

What did that mean? Why did he suddenly, when you least expected it, say such disturbing things? Why did his words, so overtly innocent, have so often under the surface a sinister second meaning?

“I don’t like to take drugs,” she said quietly. “I’m afraid of them.”

“Well, one must be cautious with them, of course, but it’s foolish to avoid them when they’re needed. I was very careful not to give you too much. Did you imagine for an instant that I would be careless where you were concerned?”

There! There! Did you hear that?

“They make you vulnerable,” she said.

“Vulnerable? Nonsense. Vulnerable to what?”

“Who knows? Who knows what the effects may be?”

“My dear, you sound like a Christian Scientist. Or do you? I’m afraid I don’t know just what Christian Scientists believe.” He revealed his small white teeth in the unpredictable expression of silent laughter. “Anyhow, I assure you that you were sleeping like a baby when I looked in on you later last night. I didn’t want to risk rousing you, so I slept in the next room. Did you miss me this morning?” There he had stood. There he had stood in the dark and dangerous hours of the night, surrounded by the silent, waiting house, watching her and watching her as she slept a drugged sleep, and death had stood at his side.

“Your bed hadn’t been slept in,” she said. “I saw that when I awoke.”

He sat clown and took one of her cold hands and held it in both of his. “Tell me, Ellen,” he said, “why did you run away yesterday?”

“I didn’t run away. I went to see my father.”

“Your father was disturbed about you. He said you didn’t want to come home again.”

“My father is a foolish man. He says foolish things.”

“He seemed to be concerned about your mother — or about you, rather, as your mother’s daughter.”

“What do you know about my mother?”

“I know that she died in a mental institution. I knew it when I married you. After all, it was no secret.”

“There was nothing wrong with my mother that my father didn’t cause.”

“It’s all right, Ellen. Everything will be all right. I was just wondering about something, that’s all. Would it make you feel better to see a good doctor?”

“A psychiatrist, you mean?”

“If you wish.”

“I don’t wish. I don’t wish at all.”

“It might be the best thing for you. To tell the truth, I’ve been concerned about you myself the past year or so. I don’t know what it is, exactly. You changed somehow. You seem to be more imaginative. Confused about things.”

“I’m not confused.” In a moment of defiance, she looked squarely into the wonder of his childlike eyes. “I see everything quite clearly.”

“Well, I only want to help if I can. You know that, my dear.” He leaned forward from his position on the side of the bed and brushed his lips across her forehead. “Now I must be off to the office. You had better stay in bed and rest. Would you like me to have your breakfast brought up?”

“No. I can’t just lie here. I’ll go down.”

“As you wish. I suggest, however, that you stay in the house today.”

“Is that an order?”

He had stood up and turned away, and now he turned back, his eyebrows rising in surprise. “Certainly not. Whatever made you say such a thing?”

“I thought perhaps I was being put under a kind of house arrest to keep me from running away again.”

“Run away? Nonsense. You are my wife, not my prisoner. You are free to go whenever and wherever you please.”

“Thank you.”

He walked to the door and turned to look back at her once more. Blue, candid eyes. The sudden unpredictable expression of silent laughter. “You are my wife, my dear. Remember that. Whatever your trouble is, if there is trouble at all, we will work it out together, you and I. There is a cure for everything, you know. One balm for many fevers.”

He opened the door and went out, leaving his words hanging in italics in the breathless air of the room.

One balm for many fevers! Hadn’t she heard that before? Had she read it somewhere? It meant death. Death was the balm. Death was the only cure for all ills and troubles.

Her thoughts acted on her like a catalyst. She got out of bed immediately and started for the bathroom, but on the way, between her bed and the bathroom door, she caught an oblique glimpse of herself in a full-length mirror on the wall. She halted abruptly, as if fixed and held static in the flow of action by cataleptic trance, turned her head slowly and looked at her reflection directly. Then, drawn magnetically by what she saw, she moved toward the mirror and stood in front of it. Slowly she turned this way and that, assuming positions as a model assumes them on display, and her slim body in her sheer nightgown was the body of a dryad rising in a cloud of cool blue mist from the floor of an ancient forest.

Oh, she was lovely! She was all gold and old rose and loveliness. She felt for her lovely body a fierce pride and an agony of tenderness. She enclosed herself in her own arms, in love and apprehension. It was incredible that the passing years would destroy her. It was a monstrous and unholy crime that anyone should want to do now what the years would surely do soon enough.

She must delay no longer in a narcissistic spell, entranced before her mirror by the vision of herself. She had made precipitately the decision to do what must be done, the last desperate measure she must take to save herself, and now was the time, now if ever, to do it.

Wrenching herself away from the mirror with a feeling of dreadful urgency, she went on, hurrying now, into the bathroom.

His name was Collins. He was an old man, tired. With a small treasure of petty graft which he had tucked away over the years, he had bought five acres in the country, and when he retired next year he was going to build a nice house on the acreage to die in. He had a coarse thatch of grizzled hair growing low on the forehead of a worn leather face. The approach of retirement had made him cautious, inclined to act slowly if he acted at all, but at least he was the chief. That, anyhow, was hopeful. It was a special concession to her, of course, because she was the wife of Clay Moran. The wife of the richest and most powerful man in town, majority stockholder of its only steel plant and chairman of the board of directors of its most prosperous bank was entitled, after all, to every courtesy and consideration. If she had been someone other than who she was, she would surely have been forced to talk with a sergeant or someone like that.