Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

He took her hands across the table.

“No, listen. This is the way, this is how. New York. It has to be New York; he won’t be able to get you back; it’s too big; he won’t even be able to find you. The company’s holding a business conference there on Tuesday, with each of the regional offices sending a representative the way they always do. I was slated to go, long before this came up. I was going to call you on Monday before I left. But what I’m going to do now is to leave ahead of time, tonight, and take you with me.”

He raised one of her hands and patted it encouragingly.

“You wait for me here in the restaurant. I have to go back to the office, wind up a few things, then I’ll come back and pick you up — shouldn’t take me more than half an hour.”

She looked around her uneasily. “I don’t want to sit here alone. They’re already giving me knowing looks each time they pass, the waitresses, as if they sense something’s wrong.”

“Let them, the hell with them,” he said shortly, with the defiance of a man in the opening stages of love.

“Can’t you call your office from here? Do it over the phone?”

“No, there are some papers that have to be signed — they’re waiting for me on my desk.”

“Then you run me back to the house and while you’re doing what you have to at the office I’ll pick up a few things; then you can stop by for me and we’ll start out from there.”

“Isn’t that cutting it a little close?” he said doubtfully. “I don’t want you to go back there.” He pivoted his wrist watch closer to him. “What time does he usually come home on Fridays?”

“Never before ten at night.”

He said the first critical thing he’d ever said to her. “Just like a girl. All for the sake of a hairbrush and a cuddly negligee you’re willing to stick your head back into that house.”

“It’s more than just a hairbrush,” she pointed out. “I have some money there. It’s not his, it’s mine. Even if this friend from my days in Rome — the one I’ve spoken to you about — even if she takes me in with her at the start, I’ll need some money to tide me over until I can get a job and find a place of my own. And there are other things, like my birth certificate, that I may need later on; he’ll never give them up willingly once I leave.”

“All right,” he gave in. “We’ll do it your way.”

Then just before they got up from the table, that had witnessed such a change in both their lives, they gave each other a last look. A last, and yet a first one. And they understood each other.

She didn’t wait for him to say it, to ask it. There is no decorum in desperation, no coyness in a crisis. She knew it had been asked unsaid, anyway. “I want to rediscover the meaning of gentle love. I want to lie in your bed, in your arms. I want to be your wife.”

He took hold of her left hand, raised the third finger, stripped off the wedding band and in its place firmly guided downward a massive fraternity ring that had been on his own hand until that very moment. Heavy, ungainly, much too large for her — and yet everything that love should be.

She put it to her lips and kissed it.

They were married, now.

The emptied ring rolled off the table and fell on the floor, and as they moved away his foot stepped on it, not on purpose, and distorted it into something warped, misshapen, no longer round, no longer true. Like what it had stood for.

He drove her back out to the house and dropped her off at the door, and they parted almost in silence, so complete was their understanding by now, just three muted words between them: “About thirty minutes.”

It was dark now, and broodingly sluggish. Like something supine waiting to spring, with just the tip of its tail twitching. Leaves stood still on the trees. An evil green star glinted in the black sky like a hostile eye, like an evil spying eye.

His car had hummed off; she’d finished and brought down a small packed bag to the ground floor when the phone rang. It would be Garry, naturally, telling her he’d finished at the office and was about to leave.

“Hello—” she began, urgently and vitally and confidentially, the way you share a secret with just one person and this was the one.

Mark’s voice was at the other end.

“You sound more chipper than you usually do when I call up to tell you I’m on the way home.”

Her expectancy stopped. And everything else with it. She didn’t know what to say. “Do I?” And then, “Oh, I see.”

“Did you have a good day? You must have had a very good day.”

She knew what he meant, she knew what he was implying.

“I— I — oh, I did nothing, really. I haven’t been out of the house all day.”

“That’s strange,” she heard him say. “I called you earlier — about an hour ago?” It was a question, a pitfall of a question. “You didn’t come to the phone.”

“I didn’t hear it ring,” she said hastily, too hastily. “I might have been out front for a few minutes. I remember I went out there to broom the gravel in the drivew—”

Too late she realized he hadn’t called at all. But now he knew that she hadn’t been in the house all day, that she’d been out somewhere during part of it.

“I’ll be a little late.” And then something that sounded like “That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?”

“What?” she said quickly. “What?”

“I said I’ll be a little late.”

“What was it you said after that?”

“What was it you said after that?” he quoted studiedly, giving her back her own words.

She knew he wasn’t going to repeat it, but by that very token she knew she’d heard it right the first time.

He knows, she told herself with a shudder of premonition as she got off the phone and finally away from him. (His voice could hold fast to you and enthrall you too; his very voice could torture you, as well as his wicked, cruel fingers.) He knows there’s someone; he may not know who yet, but he knows there is someone.

A remark from one of the nightmare nights came back to her: “There’s somebody else who wouldn’t do this, isn’t there? There’s somebody else who wouldn’t make you cry.”

She should have told Garry about it long before this. Because now she had to get away from Mark at all cost, even more than she had had to ever before. Now there would be a terrible vindictiveness, a violent jealousy sparking the horrors where before there had sometimes been just an irrational impulse, sometimes dying as quickly as it was born. Turned aside by a tear or a prayer or a run around a chair.

And then another thing occurred to her, and it frightened her even more immediately, here and now. What assurance was there that he was where he’d said he was, still in the city waiting to start out for here? He might have been much closer, ready to jump out at her unexpectedly, hoping to throw her off-guard and catch her away from the house with someone, or (as if she could have possibly been that sort of person) with that someone right here in the very house with her. He’d lied about calling the first time; why wouldn’t he lie about where he was?

And now that she thought of it, there was a filling station with a public telephone less than five minutes drive from here, on the main thruway that came up from Boston. An eddy of fear swirled around her, like dust rising off the floor in some barren drafty place. She had to do one of two things immediately — there was no time to do both. Either call Garry at his office and warn him to hurry, that their time limit had shrunk. Or try to trace Mark’s call and find out just how much margin of safety was still left to them.

She chose the latter course, which was the mistaken one to choose.