Jean Backus - Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

At the first gap in the stream of traffic I hurried across the road. She was about half a long block ahead of me. She walked with a stiff-legged jouncy stride and the pink handbag swung rhythmically from her arm. Her pink dress had some kind of ruffled collar and this flapped up and down as she walked. The tail of the pink scarf fluttered and at one point flew up, exposing the back of her head. I could not distinguish the exact color of her hair, although it seemed to be dark, a kind of dusty brown.

She turned the corner and I hurried to catch up. My heart pounded and I was having trouble drawing breath. My legs were trembling from the effort not to run. When I reached the corner, she was nowhere in sight but the door of the third house from the corner was just closing. There was no one else on the street.

I walked on casually, taking in as much of the house as I could without stopping. It was a small house, as most of the houses were in this area, and it sat back from the street on a small plot of lawn. It was painted pale green with darker green trim. There was a wide front window with green drapes hanging open at the sides, and in the middle a green ceramic lamp with a green shade. I could see no more without stopping to stare. It was a house like all the others on the block, unrelenting in its greenness, but in no way out of the ordinary. With one exception.

The house was surrounded with flower beds. The flowers tumbled against each other with no regard for order: orange marigolds, purple petunias, stiff zinnias of many colors, daisies and delphinium, nasturtium and portulaca, all thrown in together in heaps and huddles of every kind and color. It was a surprise.

I walked on down the block. My eyes still tingled with the shock of those tumultuous flower beds. My heart slowed to its normal steady pace and I breathed more freely. My legs, however, were extremely tired and I longed for a place to sit down and rest.

Could she be the gardener? The creator of that flamboyant atrocity? Indeed, I suppose she could, although I would have expected something else. A garden of many kinds of flowers all chosen for a uniformity of color would have been my guess.

It became more and more necessary for me to sit down and pull myself together before going home. My way took me through the small shopping area of the village: a few shops, a beauty salon, the post office, and a small cocktail lounge. I had never been inside the cocktail lounge. I knew that some of the bus riders stopped off there occasionally before going home. I hoped that none would be there to see me — or at least none with whom I had a nodding acquaintance. I was not in the mood for conversation.

I found myself standing at the bar before my eyes had accustomed themselves to the gloom. The bartender was attentive. I have never been much of a drinker and ordered the first thing that came into my head.

“A whiskey sour, please.”

I laid my newspaper on the bar and noticed that my hands were stained with ink. The paper was damp where I had clutched it.

“The men’s room?” I murmured.

The bartender pointed to a glowing sign at the rear of the long room.

As I made my way down the room I became aware that my hands were not the only part of me that had been sweating. My clothes felt limp and sodden, and in the air-conditioned chill I began to shiver uncontrollably. It had been warm outdoors, but not uncomfortably hot. I wondered if I were coming down with something, a summer cold or a touch of the flu.

I let the hot water run over my hands until the shivering stopped, then washed with the gritty powdered soap from the dispenser. As the ink ran away down the drain, I glanced into the mirror. I was shocked by what I saw.

Instantly I blamed it on the distortion of the glass, the fact that the mirror was old and flaked. But for a split second the face I saw was not my own — or rather it was my own, but with a subtle difference. The features were those I’d known for many years, the face I shaved each morning, the face whose lines and pouches and discolorations I’d accepted as badges of respectable seniority. But the mouth had an unpleasant downward quirk, the nose was pinched, and the eyes — the eyes were worst of all.

I dried my hands on the roller towel. Imagination, I thought. No sense in feeling guilty over stopping for a quick drink, even though I’d never done it before. Nothing wrong in taking a walk through the quiet suburban streets. I would have to come up with some reason for getting home late, but there would be no need to lie. I had never lied to my wife.

“It was such a nice evening, I took a walk and then stopped off for a drink.”

Back at the bar my whiskey sour was sitting in a circle of wetness. I sat on the barstool and glanced around the room. It was a pleasant enough place, running heavily to wood paneling and beamed ceiling. There were perhaps five or six other customers. A man and a woman sat at a table lost in an earnest whispered conversation. The others were congregated at the end of the bar chatting raucously with the bartender. Politics or baseball, most likely. I sipped my drink. Oh, it tasted good. It was just what I needed. Strength flowed back into my legs, and the evil vision in the men’s-room mirror faded from my mind.

My wife accepted my explanation without question, but she was a little disappointed that I had forgotten to bring her the newspaper. I had left it on the bar. I offered to walk down to the stationery store after dinner to get her one. I detoured past the green house with the flower beds, but saw no one.

The next evening I left the office a few minutes early and hurried to the bus stop. I wanted to get there before she did, so that I could determine from which direction she came. Things had gone badly in my division. A report that was due in the president’s office the following morning had been badly botched by a new typist. She came to me in tears, claiming she had not been given adequate instructions and she couldn’t read Mr. Pfister’s handwriting anyway and there was no need for him to be insulting.

“He called me a dumb little idiot,” she sobbed.

Normally I can settle these upheavals with a few words. Mr. Pfister was ambitious, ingratiating with those above him and overbearing with those below. The girl probably had some justification. But as she poured out her woes, I found my eyes wandering to her thin summer blouse. It had no sleeves and its round neck was cut low. It quivered with her sobs. As she bent into her handkerchief I could see that she wore no brassiere.

My thighs trembled in the kneehole of my desk. Beneath my jacket my shirt grew suddenly clammy. I wondered if my face had changed into the face I had seen in the men’s-room mirror the night before. I swung my chair around to face the window.

“Go back to your desk,” I said. “Do the report over and see that you get it right, even if it takes you all night.”

I heard her gasp and mumble, “Yes, sir.” Her soft footsteps receded. Before she reached the door, I said, “Miss — um,” I couldn’t remember her name. “In the future see that you dress more suitably.”

She ran down the hall. A few minutes later I left and went to the bus stop.

The sky was the color of tarnished brass. The air was hot and heavy, and little whirlpools of wind lifted bits of scrap paper from the gutter, flapped them about, and dropped them abruptly. We would have rain. I stood on the corner and tried to look in all directions at once. I wanted to see where she came from, to find out, if I could, which building she worked in. There was still five minutes before the bus was due.

I was watching the entrance to the new glass-fronted office building across the street and might have missed her had not a screaming siren called my attention back down the street to the entrance of my own building. The police car sped past me bound for some emergency or other, but my eyes remained riveted on the high arched doorway of the building where I had invested all the working years of my life. She stood just outside the revolving doors, scanning the livid skies. Then she turned and walked with her stiff jouncing stride toward the bus stop.