Charles Williams - Hell Hath No Fury

“He looked just the way he did that time we saw him out at the oil well. He hadn’t shaved, and he had the gun in his arm and was carrying a dead squirrel by the tail.

“He stood there looking at us for a minute with that awful, filthy grin, and then he said, ‘Well, girls, a little lovers’ spat, huh?’

“I couldn’t do or say anything. I wondered if I was going to faint or be ill right there in the car. And then she tore into him, cursing just like a man. I don’t think I’ve ever heard such things as she called him. And all the time he just stood there and grinned. Then he said, ‘Well, girls, I won’t interrupt you. You go ahead and kiss and make up.’ And then he walked on away.

“I don’t know yet how I got away. I must have just grabbed my things and run, out into the timber. The next thing I knew I was all alone, lying in some leaves with my slacks and things in my arms, sobbing for breath. After a while I got up and put them back on over my bathing suit and started walking. I found the road all right, and a Negro woman in an old Ford came along and gave me a ride to town. When I got home Sister still hadn’t returned, so I tore up the note I’d left. I would never tell anybody about it.”

“And that was all?” I asked. “I mean, until he came and looked you up?”

“No.” She shook her head. “That was just the beginning. The terrible part was the next day, and Monday. She didn’t come back to town that night. Somebody at the boarding-house notified the Sheriff’s office that she was missing, and late Sunday afternoon Sutton came to town and reported the car had been parked there in the river bottom all night. He apparently didn’t say anything about having seen it before or knowing whose it was, or anything. They went out there, and when they found her slacks and shoes in the car they decided she must have gone swimming, and had drowned. They started looking for her in the river.

“I was scared, Harry. I was scared to death. Twice I tried to get up the nerve to go to the Sheriff and tell him about it, but I just couldn’t do it. How could I explain why I’d run off and left her? And then early Monday morning they found her. Right in that pool below the bridge. Only they didn’t think she had been drowned. They said she might have been killed by a blow on the head.”

I whistled softly. It was a mess, an ugly one. “Did they find out who did it?”

“No,” she said. “Of course, I was frantic by then. Now I couldn’t tell them I’d been down there. But nobody knew about it—except Sutton. Around noon on Monday, after they’d brought her to town, he came into the office. Mr. Harshaw was out and I was there alone. He pretended he didn’t know who I was at first, and just said he wanted to borrow five hundred dollars. I was so scared I didn’t know what I was doing, but I did ask him the usual questions, about security and co-signers, and so on, and got out the forms. And all the time he was watching me, as if he couldn’t remember where he’d seen me before. Somehow—I’ll never know how—I got the papers ready for him to sign. And that was when he did it.

“Just as he picked up the pen, he pretended to recognize me. ‘Now, I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘I knew I’d seen you somewhere before, and I couldn’t figure out how I’d forget a pretty girl like you.’ You know that awful grin he has. ‘It’s too bad about your lady friend, isn’t it? I wonder if they’ll ever find out who did it?’

“Harry, I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t think. I had to hold on to the counter to keep from falling, I was so weak. He said, ‘But I’ll tell you something that’s a scream. They’re looking for a man. Ain’t that a laugh, baby?’

“Then he put down the pen, without signing the papers, and said, ‘I’ll tell you what, honey. All this paper work looks too complicated for an old country boy like me, what with all this fine print and stuff, so why don’t you just give me the money now and you can fix up the fiduciaries and the hereinbefores yourself, like the smart little cookie you are. You see, I want to get out of town before that dam’ Sheriff drives me crazy. Just because I live down there he keeps pestering me with a bunch of silly questions about whether I saw anybody else or another car, until honestly I’m just in a pet about it.’ Then he winked at me and said, ‘How about it, sweetie-pie? You’d do that for a nasty old man, wouldn’t you?’“

She stopped and ran a hand across her face.

I’d told her I wasn’t going to do anything except talk to him, but now I could feel a cold and terrible rage churning around inside me. I wanted to get my hands on him so bad they hurt.

“So he went out without signing it?” I asked. “And he got the money?”

“Yes. I told you I was a coward, Harry. I was in such a panic I couldn’t think. So I had to falsify the books, to cover it up. Naturally, I didn’t have that much money myself. But it was all right. I’d pay it back a little at a time, until I got it paid off.”

“And then, the very next day, the Sheriff’s office said they were convinced it was just an accident. They found a big snag in the pool under the bridge, just under the surface, and they believed she had dived off the bridge railing and hit it. It had either killed her outright or knocked her unconscious and she’d drowned. You see, they’d performed an autopsy Monday afternoon, and found a little water in her lungs. If she’d been dead when she fell into the water there probably wouldn’t have been any.”

She stopped.

“Well, look,” I said, “then there isn’t anything Sutton can do. The whole thing was an accident—“

She shook her head wearily. “You don’t know Sutton, Harry. He came back a week later and got two hundred dollars more. Don’t you see? He knew it wasn’t my money I’d given him the first time, so now he had me there too.

And he was sure I was coward enough to keep on paying him to keep that ugly story from coming out. Don’t you see the suspicion there’d always be if people knew? Maybe it was an accident. And maybe it wasn’t.”

She was right. It was sweet, and it was murder. Sutton had it figured from start to finish. And now he’d gouged her for over fifteen hundred dollars, adding a little at a time, so she could never get it all paid back. The only way she could cover it up was with phony loans which called for interest, so trying to whittle down the actual shortage, with this interest and Sutton’s continued bites, was like trying to swim upstream over Niagara.

I gathered her up and kissed her. “All right, you can quit worrying about it. There won’t be any more ‘loans’ to Sutton. And between the two of us we can put every nickel of it back and have the books straight in less than three months.”

I wasn’t as optimistic about it as I sounded, but I wanted to get the load off her mind right then, so she could get some rest.

“But, Harry, I’ve got to go to Mr. Harshaw—“

“No, honey,” I said. “You can’t. Don’t you see, with his heart in the shape it’s in, you can’t tell him anything like that now? When it’s all over and we’re square with the world you can tell him if you want, but I don’t see any sense in it. Actually, he’ll have been making money on it at around three per cent per month for a year, so he should kick.”

“But—“ she protested, “there isn’t any reason for you to get mixed up in it—paying it back, I mean.”

“Yes,” I said. “I can think of one. Maybe I mentioned it before. I’m in love with you.”

For the first time, she smiled. It wasn’t much, and she had to work at it awfully hard, but it was there and to me it looked like the sun coming up.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s look for tear stains. I’m going to take you home, and I don’t want your sister to think I’ve been beating you.”