Маргарет Миллар - Do Evil In Return

She was raising her hand to pull down the garage door when the blow struck her. She had no time to duck, or even to be aware that she’d been hit on the side of the head.

She dropped stiffly like a felled tree.

In the dream she was riding in a long, gray bus with Lewis and Voss and Violet and the old man, Tiddles. The rest were quarreling fiercely, and Charlotte kept trying to pacify them, to reason with them. But the words that came out of her mouth were terribly wrong: You must calm down and regurgitate yourselves. You must stop this synthetic acne and parturition. I’ll call the police and you’ll all be incarcinomated. Stop the bus, I say, stop the pus!

When she regained consciousness she was lying on the davenport in her own sitting room. Lewis was kneeling beside her, urging her to drink from the bottle of Scotch he held under her nose as if the fumes alone were medicinal like smelling salts.

She grimaced and pushed the bottle away. “No — no...”

“Charley... Darling, are you all right?”

“Yes.” There was a painful area on the side of her head, but no swelling and the skin wasn’t broken; her coronet of braids had softened the blow.

“I found you in a faint on the driveway. I keep telling you, Charley, you’re overworking.”

She sat up, feeling dizzy and nauseated. “Someone hit me,” she said in a surprised voice. “On the head.” “Lie down, darling.”

“No...”

“You hit your head when you fell.”

“No. Someone else — where’s my purse?”

“Purse? I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you find it?”

“I didn’t look for it, naturally,” Lewis said, frowning. “I came back to apologize for being irritable and found you on the driveway.”

“Lewis, get me the flashlight.”

“Why?”

“I want to see if my purse is out there.”

“You shouldn’t move around. I’ll go and look.”

“No. Let me.”

“Do you have to be so damned independent? Can’t I ever do anything for you? Hell, Charley...”

Her face was set and stubborn. He found the flashlight in the utility drawer in the kitchen and they went outside together to look for the purse. There was no sign of it.

Lewis said, “How much money was in it?”

“Forty dollars or so.”

“You’ll have to report it to the police.”

“In the morning,” Charlotte said. She didn’t point out to him what she observed in front of the garage door where she’d fallen. It was a dribble of moist sand. She hadn’t been to the beach for a month and there was no way the sand could have come there accidentally. Moist sand packed in a stocking or a sock, she thought. A neat home-made blackjack, except that it sometimes left traces.

They returned to the house and Lewis bolted the door. “As a lawyer I advise you to phone in a report to the police. Aimed robbery is a serious business.”

“I can’t, not tonight. They’ll come out and ask questions and I don’t feel up to answering them.”

She was rather relieved that the purse had been stolen. There had been a series of petty robberies in the neighborhood recently and she wanted to believe that this was simply one of the series and that the man who did it had no connection with Voss or Violet or the face between the rails of the banister. It was only chance that her visit to the house on Olive Street coincided with the robbery.

Lewis was looking at her sharply. “What were you doing out there on the driveway, anyway? I thought you were going to bed when I left.”

“I had a call to make.”

“Emergency?”

“ I think so.”

“You’re holding something back.”

“I can’t discuss my cases with you, Lewis.”

“I don’t believe this was a case.”

“He was an Italian,” Charlotte said. “An old man about eighty.” It wasn’t quite a lie; Tiddles was a case, in a way. Lying to Lewis, even a little, pained her, but he sometimes made lying necessary by his extreme reactions to the truth. He would disapprove of her visit to Violet.

Lewis had some old-fashioned ideas about women. Gwen was, in a way, his ideal: she loved her home, she kept the place meticulous, the dogs clean and obedient, the garden neat, fragrant. But Lewis never stayed home to enjoy any of it. Gwen bored him to death, while Charlotte very frequently shocked him. It was a blow to his male pride that a woman could be as emotionally and physically independent as Charlotte. She was a competent physician and supported herself in comfort; she witnessed with detachment the most harrowing kinds of death and disease; she drove alone through the roughest sections of the city picking up hitchhikers when she wanted to, out of interest or pity; she paid calls to houses where the children slept five to a mattress on the floor. Such activities should be limited to men, in Lewis’ opinion. While it was all right for a woman to be a doctor, her practice should be confined to people of a certain level of society, within a certain income bracket. He would never understand that her background was different from his. She was fitted, by temperament and training, for the work she did. She enjoyed meeting all classes of people and she met them with an impersonal ease, and without pretensions of any kind.

“You shouldn’t stay here alone for the rest of the night,” Lewis said. “Call Miss Schiller and ask her to come over.”

“Oh no! She’ll be in bed.”

“She can get up again. Be reasonable, Charley.”

“She’ll fuss around all night.”

“Even so.”

“All right, Lewis,” she said wearily. I’ll call her.”

Miss Schiller arrived by taxi five minutes after Lewis left.

She tottered under the weight of a suitcase the size of a trunk. Her face glowed with night-cream, and in the bun of hair at the nape of her neck was stuck a pair of steel knitting needles. Miss Schiller was in a state of wild excitement.

“Imagine,” she kept repeating. “Just imagine!”

Among Miss Schiller’s friends thing were always happening — people got engaged, sick, fired, married, divorced — these were common enough. But it wasn’t every day that someone she knew got hit on the head by a burglar and left to die in the night.

She was a little disappointed at the size and seriousness of Charlotte’s injury. You’d expect at least a lump at the hands of a ruthless burglar that attacked defenseless women and left them for dead. No lump, and not a drop of blood. Miss Schiller swallowed her disappointment and reminded Charlotte that a criminal usually returns to the scene of his crime. Her tone implied strongly that very likely this one would be around during the night to finish the job.

“You can’t tell,” she said. “He might be watching us through the window this very minute.”

“He must have x-ray eyes then. The blinds are drawn.”

“I’ve never liked Venetian blinds,” Miss Schiller said decisively. “I know for a fact, anyone can see in through those cracks.”

She refused to accept Charlotte’s suggestion that she sleep in the guest room. After she’d turned out Charlotte’s light she took up her position on the davenport. From here she could watch all the windows and all the windows could watch her.

She removed the knitting needles from her hair and put them within easy reach on the coffee table.

The needles were not, as Charlotte had supposed, for knitting, but for defense. And in the big suitcase at her feet were some of Miss Schiller’s more valuable possessions. (If there was one burglar in town there was very likely another, and she was taking no chances.)

Miss Schiller spent a restless but satisfying night. She investigated noises, diagnosed shadows, patrolled the house and suffered frequent hot flashes which necessitated her getting ice water out of the refrigerator. Every ten or fifteen minutes she crept into Charlotte’s room to ask Charlotte if she was sleeping and to assure her that all was, temporarily, well.