Charles Williams - Hell Hath No Fury

The room was filling with that same red mist there’d been that night I’d killed Sutton. What did it matter now if they sent me to the chair? I’d lost it all. I’d lost everything because of her. I walked slowly over and stood looking down at the sensuous and slightly mocking face and the white column of her throat.

“You’ll have to beg now,” she said. “You had your chance, but you threw it away because you wanted that little owl. I’m going to enjoy hearing you beg me to marry you. You see, you have to look after me, Harry. Something might happen to me—”

“Yes,” I said. “Something might.”

Maybe she heard the murder in my voice, because she quit smiling and her eyes went wide. I reached down and caught the front of the black dress. It ripped loose at her belly and everything from there on up came off in my hand, but she came up out of the chair with the force of it and stood there swaying, the scream beginning and then chopping suddenly off as I put my right hand on her throat and threw her across the coffee table on to the sofa. I went across it after her just as she wiggled off the sofa on to the floor, still trying to get her breath to scream, and then I was on her. I got both hands on her throat and there was nothing inside me but the black madness of that desire to kill her, to close my hands until she turned purple and lay still and there’d be an end to her forever. Let them send me to the chair. Let ‘em burn me. All they could do was kill me—

It’s like committing suicide by holding your breath.

I relaxed my hands and turned her loose.

“You see, Harry,” she said. She looked down at the wreckage of her clothing and the big, spread-out breasts, and then at me, and smiled. She’d been right the first time, and she knew it.

“Kiss me,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. We were lying against the edge of the sofa and her hair was mussed and she was half naked and I could smell the perfume she always wore.

The smile broadened and she put her arms up around my neck. “Yes, what?”

I knew the answer now.

“Yes, dear,” I said.

That was almost a year ago. We’re married now, and I go to work every morning at nine, and sell cars, and lend money, and make more than I know what to do with. I belong to the Chamber of Commerce, and the service clubs, and even the Volunteer Fire Department. I like to think that some day I might be a director of the bank, because that would be the final, supreme laugh of them all when I’m lying awake at night. It’s something to look forward to—not much, but something—and maybe some day I’ll make it and become the only bank director in the world who started at the bottom by robbing the bank and worked his way up by becoming indispensable to a bitch, and the only one anywhere who has twelve thousand three hundred dollars of his bank’s assets buried under six inches of slowly rotting manure in a collapsing barn on a sandhill and who intends to let it stay there until the barn rots and the money rots and he rots himself, because if he ever dug it up and looked at it he’d go crazy and kill himself. It’s an ambition, and everybody should have one, even if it’s only a good laugh in the middle of the night when he has a little trouble getting to sleep because he’s worrying about his wife. She might be tiring of him, or catching cold.

I’ve given up trying to find out where the original of that statement is, and I know I’ll never get my hands on it, the same as I know I’ll never have the nerve to take a chance and run. Of course she probably wouldn’t do anything. A dozen times I’ve almost made it. I get in the car and think that all I have to do is drive, and keep on driving, and the chances are she wouldn’t do a thing. Why should she? She’d only get herself in trouble for abetting a crime and withholding evidence, and I’d be gone, and when they did get me back all she’d have would be a corpse with a shaved spot on his head and a couple of them on his arms, and that wouldn’t be of much use to a woman who needs them living.

I know a way to make her talk, and I’ve tried it twice, and asked her, and she told me everything except where that statement is, and I know that if she wouldn’t tell me then she’ll never tell me. It was a good idea, but it didn’t work, and I’ll never try it any more because the second time she stopped right in the middle of gasping, “Oh, God, please, please, darling, please,” and got out of bed and went downstairs naked and when she came back holding her hands behind her I didn’t know it was an ice-pick she had until she had put it through my neck. It went in a little off center and missed the jugular vein by a good three-quarters of an inch, and came out under my ear. A little iodine fixed it up and it didn’t even get infected, but I never tried that again. She was in a position of strength, as lawyers say, and she wouldn’t tolerate work stoppage or breach of contract in mid-term.

She did tell me about the silver money clasp. When Gloria went out there in the afternoon she had the five hundred dollars in it, and when Sutton saw it he demanded it as well as the money. And then he told Dolores about it, and showed it to her, and she wanted it. He wouldn’t give it to her, though, and she’d left it lying there on the table, intending to slip it into her purse when he wasn’t looking. And if I hadn’t just happened to pull the purse around that final inch, looking behind it for the ash-tray—but I never go much beyond that with it. You can take just so much might-have-been.

She’d been really scared, of course, when she went back a little after daylight that morning to get her stuff and found Sutton dead. She knew, because the stuff was gone, that I’d found the money clasp and thought it was Gloria, but she also knew I’d get wise to my mistake sooner or later, and that I’d have to kill her to cover it up. So she had written out that statement as soon as she got back to the house, plus a letter to the lawyers to tell them where to find it—along with her will—in case of her death. The only thing she had to do then was to make sure I read a copy of it before I got my hands on her.

Gloria had no choice but to believe what she told her. After all, I didn’t deny it. She gave me every chance to say it wasn’t true, and I couldn’t even look at her. And to make it worse she already knew I had changed somehow and even seemed to avoid her from the very night Harshaw died. Naturally, she had no way of knowing it was also the night Sutton died, and that he was what was on my mind, and I couldn’t tell her.

Not that I know what she really thinks, or that I’ll ever know. We work together from nine until five and she is very efficient and does a beautiful job and she says, “Yes, Mr. Madox,” and “No, Mr. Madox,” and in her eyes there’s nothing but polite reserve and behind that nothing but blankness, an impenetrable wall of it. Beyond that— Who knows? Maybe there’s no feeling at all, not even contempt. Probably there’s only a big calendar pad of so many months, so many more weeks, and days, and hours, that she has left ahead of her until she can put the last penny back and balance the books and be free.

And I can’t even help her. I’ve got plenty of money, enough to put it all back at once, and I love her enough to want to give her the only thing she probably lives for—the day she can tear the last page off that calendar and go away forever—and I can’t shorten her sentence one day. Dolores knows too well just how much is left and how long it will take. But even if I could help her, she wouldn’t accept it. It’s something she has to do.

But that still isn’t the terrible part of it, the thing that will drive me crazy some night if I don’t find some way to quit thinking about it. The final, ghastly joke of the whole thing is that she’s paying back five hundred dollars she doesn’t even owe, and there isn’t any way in the world I can tell her. It’s the five hundred I took out of Sutton’s wallet that night. So how can I stop her?