Until You Are Dead (8 page)

Bernice stared up at him coldly, with her round blue eyes. "Your reservation says the
Reardon Hotel
."

Eldon's thin lips drew even thinner and a gray vein throbbed near his temple. "You've been in my attaché case, haven't you?"

"And why not?" Bernice said indignantly. "I am your wife. I needed a pen in a hurry and thought you might have
one in there. You did, clipped on that little notebook with all those people's names and addresses in it. Is that Mr. Calder the same man we knew in Buffalo?"

"No," Eldon said evenly, "he's not."

Bernice started to say something else, but Eldon turned and walked abruptly from the kitchen. He would file for divorce against Bernice, he told himself for the hundredth time. Then he began to ponder the various consequences, especially the alimony payments he would have to begin making.

The main trouble with living with Bernice was that Eldon's privacy, one of the things he valued most, had diminished to the point where it was almost nonexistent. Intolerable. He had even thought — very fleetingly of course — of murdering Bernice, arranging a fatal "accident". But for all the methods he considered Eldon lacked the courage even if he could summon up the decisiveness.

He was in the living room, by the door, with his luggage and his attaché case.

"I'm going," he said loudly. He thought he should say something.

"Go," came the voice from the kitchen. "I'll call the
Reardon
later to make sure you got there."

Intolerable. Eldon hesitated on the porch, trying to decide if he should slam the door. He concluded that would only give Bernice the satisfaction of knowing she had angered him, and he closed the door softly and turned away to the heat of the rising morning sun.

Perhaps it was the quest for privacy that caused Eldon to construct the room in the basement. He had an inexact layman's ability at carpentry, but he planned ahead thoughtfully and was painstakingly careful.

The room wasn't very large, about ten by ten, occupying one corner of the basement. Eldon purchased the material and worked on it most of his vacation then in the evenings after work. During the various stages of construction, Bernice would come down the basement stairs, look about and try to draw him into conversation so she could find out exactly why he was building the room. Did he plan to use it for storage, an office, a den? But Eldon studiously ignored all questions concerning the room, casually drowning out some of them with buzz of saw or crash of hammer.

Once he had the studwork up the rest went quickly. Eldon certainly hadn't skimped on the materials. The studs were broad and close together, the paneling fairly expensive, thick and deeply grained birch. The floor was made up of squares of gray asbestos tile with swirling designs in them. There was a solid wooden door, thick and soundproof. For ventilation Eldon had cut into the ductwork and installed a small register near the double-layered wallboard ceiling.

When he was finished he closed the door to his room and told Bernice to stay out of it.

Eldon didn't leave town for over a week after the room was finished, then he was called on to make a four day jaunt through the Midwest. He left as usual with his beat up luggage and his black leather attaché case, and he surprised Bernice slightly by telling her the hotels he'd be staying at so she could call him.

The first day of Eldon's absence Bernice merely walked down the basement stairs and stood for a long time scrutinizing the closed large wooden door to the room. The second day she tried the knob, found that it turned. She pressed her ear hard against the cool wood of the door, heard nothing, then went back upstairs. On the third day she had a late breakfast, walked down the basement stairs, stood before the room's door for a moment, turned the knob, drew several deep breaths, and shoved the door open.

The room was empty.

Absolutely empty, spotlessly clean and empty. Bernice backed out, shut the door and walked slowly up the stairs.

Eldon was back as scheduled, but was due to leave again in three days and would be gone almost two weeks. He acted perfectly normal, didn't mention the room or even seem to go near it. The night before he was to leave Bernice cooked his favorite veal and potato dinner and tried to draw him out.

"Incidentally," she said absently as she passed him the butter, "what are you planning to use it for?"

"It. What do you mean?"

"The room you built," Bernice said casually. "You know, in the basement."

Eldon said something unintelligible around a mouthful of veal.

"Did you say den, dear?"

"Tender," Eldon corrected as he took a sip of tea. "I said the veal is exceedingly tender."

"Thank you."

"What I meant," Eldon said, "was that it probably is an unnecessarily expensive cut."

"But the room--"

"There is no need to change the subject," Eldon said, clashing serving spoon on plate as he took another huge helping of mashed potatoes.

Eldon left early the next morning for the airport, holding to his silence.

It was two mornings later before Bernice again made her way down the basement stairs to stand before the room. This time she found the door partway open. Decisively, she pushed it open wider and stepped inside.

Still empty. Bernice left the room and went slowly back upstairs.

She poured herself a second glass of tomato juice and sat thoughtfully at the kitchen table. Something! He had to have built the room for something! She sipped the juice slowly, staring out the window at high unmoving clouds.

When Bernice was finished with her tomato juice she went back downstairs, entered the room and began to examine the sturdy paneling carefully for some kind of concealed compartment or trick door. She was lightly tapping the north wall with her knuckles when the telephone rang faintly from above.

The caller was a man who understood that she and her husband owned their own home and wanted to sell her some storm windows. Bernice refused him, hung up and came back to the basement. She reentered the room and absently closed the door behind her.

When Eldon returned from his business trip late the next week, he walked through the front door, stood listening,
then called his wife's name three times, each louder than the last. When there was no answer he began to walk slowly, almost aimlessly, from one room to the next. At last he went to the basement.

He stood before the door to the room, his ear pressed to the wood, as Bernice had once stood. After a few minutes his hand went to the knob, twisted slowly, more slowly. He was perspiring and breathing rapidly as he pushed inward.

Eldon looked first at the long scratches on the paneled walls, the inside of the door, even the ceiling. The vibrant silence hummed in his ears as he forced himself to look at what had been only a shapeless form on the edge of his vision.

Bernice lay curled on her side near the center of the floor, arms crossed, mutilated, claw-like hands grasping her forearms. Her right cheek was pressed flat to the smooth tile floor and her blue eyes were open and calm, as if equating the near horizon.

Kneeling beside her, staring at her with that curiosity reserved for the dead, Eldon wondered how she had died. Not suffocation, for he'd vented the room. Hunger perhaps. Thirst? Fright? The empty calm in her eyes was belied by the grotesquely leering tautness of her mouth.

Where before Eldon couldn't bring himself to look at Bernice, now he couldn't stop looking at her as he rehearsed in his mind the story he'd tell the police.

My God, it was one of those freak accidents. She must have just happened to walk in to look around and. . . The room was going to be my office. I never intended to lock the door so when I hung it I never even noticed what side the lock was on. I never even knew the knob had one of those locks that held the outside knob firm while the inside one turned. Only this time the outside was the inside. One of those freak accidents ...

Eldon was satisfied he could appear sufficiently grief-stricken for the next week or so. Still staring at Bernice, he straightened, and for a split second the distant snap and low hum that he heard meant nothing to him. Then there was a subtle movement of air, a low swishing sound ending in a soft click, and Eldon was standing in total darkness, the vision of Bernice's lifeless face still before him, a lingering image in his startled eyes.

The air conditioner! She'd had the air conditioner repaired and the pull of air as it came on had closed the door! His mind refused to believe it, but his heart leapt.

Cautiously Eldon's trembling fingers groped through darkness and tested the doorknob. It wouldn't turn. The door was locked.

A hoarse cry broke from Eldon and he flung himself against the door, staggered back from the impact and his heel dug into something soft, tripping him to sit spread-legged on the cold tile floor. He drew back and with low, rhythmic sobs crept to a wall, crawled pressing cat-like against it as he explored the thick baseboard with futile searching fingers. Finally he came to the inevitable corner and sat whimpering, wedging himself firmly, violently, into the unyielding angle of the solid walls, and began his wait.

The room was very dark, and soon it became very cold, and but for Eldon's desperate whimpering it was almost completely quiet.

It wasn't so much the prospect of his own imminent death like Bernice's that drove Eldon to dig his aching heels into the floor, fighting to press ever backward into the corner. It was the madly irrational yet terrifyingly persistent illusion that, as the final darkness closed and the door latch had clicked, she had smiled at him.

"Y
ou are
not
leaving this house tonight except to go with me to the Hartmans'!" Henrietta Bartamer said to her husband. "They have a new hot tub in their back yard, and Janet and Phil want us to help them christen it. And we
will!"

Bartamer knew enough not to argue when Henrietta spoke in italics. He had intended to work late tonight, but now he wouldn't. He would instead sit nude in a wooden hot tub beneath a clear California mountain sky and trade mundane remarks with the Hartmans. Henrietta's friends.

He did so, and found the next morning that something in the water had given him a rash.

At breakfast he studied Henrietta. She was her usual blonde classically pretty self. She was thirty-five now but could easily pass for a tall lithe twenty-five. It was a pity she had such a grizzly-bear personality.

Bartamer, in contrast, was short, dark, and somewhat weasely looking. He kissed his Nordic beauty of a wife goodbye and left, carrying his briefcase. He had done some paperwork late last night after Henrietta was asleep.

Bartamer fumed as he drove his red Ferrari up the mountain road just outside Carmel. Life seemed always to be a trap. Bartamer was an acknowledged genius in bio-
chemistry, but a genius with decidedly unconventional ideas. Ten years ago he had lost his position at Northwestern University and found that word had gotten around as to his supposed eccentricities. No other position worth considering was offered. So he had married Henrietta, the young
widow of Norris Feeber of Feeber Fidelity Trust. Despite Henrietta's great wealth and considerable beauty, she had been somewhat in the same boat as Bartamer. So foul and aggressive was her disposition that no one else would have her.

Bartamer used his bride's money to purchase an isolated house in the mountains. Then he had gone about building and equipping a more isolated mountaintop laboratory where he could carry on his research undisturbed. He was even incorporated, under the innocuous name of Research West Development. Money no longer was a problem, but Henrietta was.

She had become almost impossible to coexist with, Bartamer thought, as he used his coded signal control to open the high iron gate at the laboratory entrance. He drove through, glancing in his rearview mirror to see the gate swing closed and lock behind him.

The laboratory was housed in a low brick building invisible from below. There were several high narrow windows on each side of the glass front door, and very expensive and sophisticated heating and cooling equipment on the roof. Bartamer noted with satisfaction that his assistant Melfore's gray sedan was parked in its slot.

Melfore was already at work when Bartamer entered the lab. He was a youngish man with large, intense dark eyes. Melfore had been a juvenile delinquent before discovering that he had an exceptional brain. Bartamer had met him at Northwestern, where he had been impressed by the young man's inquisitiveness and willingness to explore any hypothesis. Melfore had seemed intelligent and opportunistic, but not the type that would steal university laboratory equipment, then physically assault the dean when confronted with the crime. But a jury had decided that Melfore
was
that type, and a judge had handed down a five-year sentence. When he was paroled after two years, Bartamer had looked him up and employed him. And for the past seven years Melfore had made an ideal assistant.