Charles Williams: Hell Hath No Fury

“Oh,” I said. “I’m all right. I feel fine.”

There was nothing showing on the surface. Gloria couldn’t suspect anything at all. We went over and sat down, Gloria in a big chair and I on the sofa across from her, while Dolores Harshaw leaned back in a platform rocker. We were all grouped around the coffee table.

“I know you’ve been wondering,” Dolores said, “I mean, about the business. I would have called you sooner, but it’s been such a blow, you know—”

She went on giving us the brave little widow bearing up under everything. I didn’t pay any attention to it. I was too busy with the physical strain of keeping my face from showing anything and trying to find the answer to the question that went around and around in my mind in a kind of endless nightmare. What was she going to do?

I could hear her voice going on, like a radio in a burning house. “—what poor George would have wanted. He thought a great deal of both of you. So of course I couldn’t sell out. I’m going to try to carry on just the same.”

She had the rope around my neck, and when she got ready she’d drop the trap. With Gloria here I was helpless. And she knew that, of course, so whatever it was it was going to be done now, before we left and I got a chance to get her alone.

She was picking up an envelope which was lying on the coffee table. “It must have been terrible,” she went on, “because I think he knew in his heart it might happen any time. Ever since we came back from Galveston he had a little notebook that stayed right by his side all the time, and he kept writing down his ideas about the business and the things he wanted to be sure would be carried on just—” Her voice broke a little. She was tremendous as the brave little widow. She gathered herself up with a pitiful smile and went on. “—just in case it did happen. I’ve written it all out, and I thought Mr. Madox should read it, since he’ll be in charge. And of course you too, Miss Harper, if he thinks you should.”

She handed it over to me. There was nothing in her face but that same dead-pan innocence. Gloria was watching her, and then me, with only polite curiosity. She probably thought she’d been working for Harshaw long enough to know his politics.

I opened the envelope and slid it out. It was a carbon copy, two pages single-spaced on a typewriter. I looked at the heading of it, and I knew where the original was. It was in a safe-deposit box somewhere or in some lawyer’s office, where I’d never get to it. And I knew that I wasn’t going to kill her. As long as both of us lived, the safest place she would ever be was with me, and I was going to hope she went on living for a long, long time.

“This statement is to be turned over to the District Attorney’s office after my death,” it began, and she had it all there. She hadn’t left out a thing. She admitted lying about my being there at the fire right after it broke out, and described the way I had driven up and hurried into the crowd thirty minutes later. She told them about my having been in the building before, and how she had told Sutton all of this, and of her recognizing me in the lightning flash when the storm broke that night. The clincher was at the end, and it was something I hadn’t known before. She’d gone back down there just after daybreak, after the doctor had left the house. She had to know what had happened, because her purse and things were there. And when she found Sutton dead and the purse gone she had it all.

I read it all the way through, cold as ice and seeing the walls rise up around me. I could quit looking for a way out. There wasn’t any. As long as she was living she could turn me in any time she felt like it, and the minute she died of anything at all they’d have that statement. It wasn’t witnessed, of course, and maybe it wasn’t legal, but it didn’t have to be. It put the finger on me, and the weight of all the other evidence would be overwhelming. They’d get it out of me. Of course, if she turned it over to them while she was still alive, she might be in trouble herself—but that was a laugh, or would have been if I hadn’t felt more like screaming. I’d go to the electric chair, and she might get a few months’ suspended sentence.

I folded it up very slowly and slipped it back in the envelope while they watched me. I couldn’t say anything. I didn’t trust my voice. Somehow I managed to keep my face utterly blank as I dropped it on the coffee table and looked, at her. She had me and she knew it. I waited.

And then she let me have it, without saying a word to me. She was talking to Gloria.

She leaned back in her chair and lighted a cigarette. She was friendly, and quite sympathetic. “Now about the shortage in your accounts, Miss Harper,” she said. “I know you’ll understand that Mr. Madox was only doing what he believed was right when he told me about it. And of course I wouldn’t think of bringing charges. You can continue right on the way you have been until it’s all taken care of, and you’ll still have your job afterwards if you want it. I want you to know, dear, that we’re your friends, and that he hated having to do it as much as I hate having to mention it now. And he insisted that you be given another chance—”

That was the end, and that was the way she did it. Just one clean swing of the ax. And it was something I hadn’t even thought of. She had told Sutton about me, and then Sutton had told her. They must have had a wonderful time. And I’d had them both dead to rights in the shack that night, and had let her get away. I didn’t want to think about it. I’d go crazy.

Gloria sat straight upright in her chair, saying nothing, and when she turned to look at me her face was pale and her eyes were unbelieving and they were waiting for me to say something, anything at all, even one word, or to say it with my eyes if I couldn’t open my mouth, and then after a long time she quit waiting and turned her face away. It was very simple. I had just watched myself die.

I didn’t have to let her believe it, of course. After all, I had a choice. I had a lovely choice. I could have told her the truth.

She was magnificent. I think I loved her more at that moment than I ever had before, but maybe it was just because she was gone forever now and I was thinking about that. She got up with her face very still and controlled, and said politely, “Yes, I understand, Mrs. Harshaw. And of course it will all be paid back. So if there isn’t anything else, you don’t mind if I go now, do you?”

Dolores got up and said sweetly, “Of course not, dear.”

Before I thought, I stood up. “Wait,” I said. “I—I’ll drive you home.”

“Thank you,” she said, looking at the place I would have been standing if I had existed. “I’ll walk.”

She went out, and the screen door closed behind her, and I heard her going down the steps and along the gravel of the drive.

After her steps had died away there was silence in the room and I turned around and looked at this woman I was tied to for as long as I could go on living. She was leaning back in the platform rocker with her legs crossed and one foot swinging, and she was smiling.

“Harry, darling,” she said, “I don’t think you’ll ever have much luck explaining to her.”

I thought of how near I had been to winning, every step of the way, and how I’d just missed it every time because of her. I could have stopped Sutton without killing him if she hadn’t told him about the bank, because Sutton was afraid of me until he had that. And if she hadn’t been there in the shack that night, if I’d sense enough to know it had to be her— I thought of Gloria walking home alone in the dark believing that I had sold her out for this sexy tubful of guts and her money, believing it and forever, because I could never tell her.