Маргарет Миллар - Do Evil In Return

Mrs. Reyerling had gone to the window and was looking down into the street below, her arms folded across her breasts.

“Here’s how I figure it,” Sally said. “If it happened once it could have happened plenty of times, so maybe this man who left the tie had nothing to do with Violet’s being in the family way.”

“It never happened at all.” Mrs. Reyerling didn’t turn. She addressed the window pane as if it was some land of impersonal umpire. “The kid was Eddie’s. He said it wasn’t because he was sick of Violet. He was playing around with somebody else and he wanted to drive Violet away.”

Sally didn’t argue. She made a little grimace at Charlotte to indicate that Myrtle was beyond reasoning.

Charlotte said, “Perhaps if I could talk to Mr. Rawls, he might remember...”

“Now wait a minute. You think he’d admit anything? Not on your life! He’d swear black and blue there wasn’t any man or any tie or even any motel. How could he admit about the tie without admitting he’s a crook? Why, if he did, they might take away his AA Approved card. Those AAA people are fussy. They don’t stand for stuff like that. They’re always snooping, around to see if I changed the bath mats and the shower curtains and swept under the beds.” She paused. “Rawls won’t tell you a thing. Besides, I might get fired, see?”

“I see, of course.”

“You won’t go to Rawls, then?”

“No.”

“I should have kept my yap shut, anyway,” Sally said with a trace of bitterness. “I don’t know what gets into me, to talk so much. I just came over here to help Myrt, to cheer her up.”

Mrs. Reyerling turned a flat gaze on her. “Cheer me up... Tell me lies about my own sister.”

“Now listen, Myrt. Don’t go turning against me.”

“Bad lies.”

The girl was beginning to get angry; a red flush crept gradually up her neck like the colored mercury in a thermometer. “You better look into your own conscience. Who was it that got Violet going around with Eddie in the first place? Who was it kept saying, ‘Eddie’s a nice dependable guy. He’ll make some girl a good husband.’ Who was it said, ‘Looks aren’t everything.’ Hell no, looks aren’t everything, he may look like a chimpanzee with smallpox but you’ll get used to it, Violet Once you got Mrs. in front of your name...”

“I didn’t,” Mrs. Reyerling cried. “I didn’t force her to marry him. I didn’t even ask her to. She liked him.”

“You told her to like him.” Her mimicry was sharp, cruel: “ ‘Marry Eddie and love will come later, and maybe he’ll even get over those little habits of his, like pulling the wings off flies.’ ”

“Stop! Stop it!” Mrs. Reyerling put her hands over her ears and ran into the bedroom.

They could hear the thud of her body as she flung herself across the bed. She didn’t weep, but heavy, anguished breathing rose and fell in the humid air, the breathing of a wounded animal.

Sally’s belligerence was gone. She stood scratching the side of her neck where the flush had been, looking ashamed of herself. “I guess I ought to keep my temper more.”

“I suppose we all should.”

“What I said was the truth, but not the whole truth. The whole truth — well, that’s hard to get at, the why of everything. I guess Myrt had her reasons for wanting Violet to be married, to be settled down and safe. It’s not her fault that she judged Eddie wrong.” She lapsed into silence.

“I’d better leave,” Charlotte said. “If there’s anything I can do to help Mrs. Reyerling, I’ll be at the Siesta Motel.”

“I know it. It just opened. We already got so many nobody’s making money any more.”

“Perhaps I can drive you back to work.”

“No thanks. I’m through for the day. I’d stay here and make Myrt some tea. She’ll snap out of it. I looked after her the day she got the telegram about Tom dying.” She added, with a sad little sigh, “Maybe we don’t act like friends, sometimes, but we are.”

Charlotte stepped out into the hall. She had the feeling that the girl had spoken the truth. She and Myrtle had a bond of friendship that would survive the bickerings, as well as the tragedies, of day-today existence.

On the street below, the rays of the late afternoon sun shot through the plate-glass windows of stores and ricocheted off the sidewalks and the white stucco walls of buildings. The heat was palpable, like a layer of jelly, through which the cars crawled and the pedestrians moved sluggishly.

Only the children hurried, boys on bicycles weaving through the traffic with careless ease, and grade-school girls, intent and purposeful, impatient for the next minute, the next week, the next year.

Charlotte unlocked her car. She thought of Violet walking up and down this same street, softer than the other girls, not quite so forceful, so decisive. (And Mrs. Reyerling had known this about Violet, perhaps — had tried to protect her and blundered.)

She had a feeling of discontent, of failure. The further she plunged into Violet’s life, the murkier and more diffuse it became. It was like diving into a strange lake, diving deeper and deeper and gradually realizing that the lake had no bottom, only a constantly moving silt that would never settle. One could reach out and grasp at the silt — as Violet herself had reached out and grasped in her final moments — but when the fist was opened it contained only a few grains of sand and the marks of fingernails on one’s own flesh.

She turned the car around and headed back in the direction of the motel. She wondered if Easter had arrived in town yet and what he was up to. Perhaps the girl Sally would be too afraid of losing her job to tell him about the tie Rawls had kept. Or perhaps he wouldn’t see Sally at all. She might be gone by the time he reached Mrs. Reyerling’s apartment and it was unlikely that Mrs. Reyerling would tell Easter about her and give Sally a chance to repeat her story.

She felt obscurely pleased that Easter might never find out about the episode in the motel but she didn’t understand why she should feel this way. The episode didn’t involve her personally. It concerned only the nameless, faceless man who had left a tie in a motel bathroom and the seed of a child in Violet’s womb. She realized that she was afraid of Easter. Though he couldn’t harm her, couldn’t even touch her, the fear was growing, stupidly, irrationally. What had he said on the telephone last night...? That he was driving up “unofficially.” This could mean that, officially, the case was closed. She suddenly hoped that it was, closed and filed away forever in a steel drawer.

She had an early dinner at a drive-in on Main Street. When she arrived back at her motel the sun was settling into a pillow of pink clouds and Mr. Coombs had turned on his red neon vacancy sign. He was still sitting in the kitchen chair, looking strangely dwarfed by the background of huge trees. He had finished his comics for the day, piled them neatly on the wooden step with a stone on top to keep his dreams from blowing away. Captives, they fussed and fluttered in the rising wind.

Mr. Coombs nodded, and tipped an invisible hat “Evening.”

“Good evening.”

“Cooling off some. Still too hot inside, though. If you want to sit out for a spell, I’ll bring you a chair.”

“No thanks, don’t bother.”

Mr. Coombs slapped at a mosquito on his forearm. “You get in touch with Myrtle Reyerling all right?”

“Yes.”

“Her kid sister died. A genuine tragedy.”

“I heard about it.”

“O’Gorman, her name was. I know her husband, we went to school together. He worked in a bar about a quarter-mile up the road, but I hear he blew town.”