Strange Sisters (4 page)

"Kathy?"

"Yes, Stella?"

"You're awake again, you little devil. Do you know what time it is? You'll grow up with bags under your eyes."

"You stay awake late. You don't have bags."

"That's entirely different. I'm older and don't need so much sleep. Besides, I can sleep in the morning. I don't have to get up and go to school."

"I'm sorry, Stella. I just
couldn't
sleep."

"Would you like me to tell you where I went and what I did tonight?"

"Oh, yes."

This was a lie. Or, rather, it was partly a lie. She didn't really want to hear about Stella's activity, because that involved one of the many men as a participant, and the men were already, so soon, the dark violators of the shining center of her life which was Stella. Hearing Stella's dreamy, unconsciously cruel accounts of them was an experience that filled her with a sickening resentment that frightened her because it was, though she didn't yet recognize it, evidence of her own violent potential. Still, on the other hand, she would rather suffer the anguish of Stella's accounts than to have her go on to her own bed and lie down in silence, so it was also partly true that she wanted to listen.

"Very well, then," Stella would say. "For just a few minutes. Move over, please."

And this was the climax that Kathy waited for. To move over in the narrow bed. To breathe and feel the warmth and scent of Stella as she slipped into the bed to lie beside her. To make herself deaf to the intelligence of Stella's words while absorbing all the while the soft, laughter-threaded sound of Stella's voice. To be acutely aware in a kind of hard, hurting ecstasy of the proximate, pulsing reality of Stella in sheerest silk.

The difficult nights were the ones when Stella did not come upstairs at once after returning from wherever she'd been. Kathy would hear her come into the hall downstairs with whatever man it might be, and pretty soon the front door would open again and close behind someone departing, but it would be the colored woman and not the man. Following roughly the pattern of events below by the broken threads of sound that reached her, Kathy could feel herself drawing tighter and tighter as tension increased. But worse than that, worse by far than the mounting effect of sound, were the intervals of silence. These, offering no clues and suggesting no pattern, leaving everything to the irrational antics of the mind, were hardly to be endured.

Eventually, after nearly a year, there was one which could
not
be endured. Moving under a compulsion she could in no way deny, Kathy got out of bed and went out into the hall and downstairs into the hall below and across to the entrance to the living room. Though her bare feet made no appreciable noise on the treads of the stairs or the uncovered floor of the hall, she did not try to be secretive, and she stood squarely in the entrance to look into the room. One lamp was burning at the far end of the sofa. She could see nothing clearly at first except that small area which was within the perimeter of light cast by the lamp, but then the rest of the room and its contents took shape, and she saw Stella and the man in the outer area of shadow just beyond the sofa and the lamp.

They were kissing. And that was the horror of it. That it was mutual. Not that Stella was
being
kissed, for which she could have been exonerated as a victim, but that Stella was kissing in return. That it was obviously something she wanted to happen, had helped to make happen. That it was something she
liked
.
Her fingers were tangled in the man's hair, drawing his head down to a hot, adherent contact of mouths, and her body was overtly aggressive.

Turning with a whimper, Kathy ran back upstairs to her bed. She lay on her back with her eyes closed, shaking with a chill that crept through her from a central core of ice, and she thought that she was certainly going to be sick to her stomach. She didn't open her eyes when Stella finally came up and undressed for bed, and she kept them closed when Stella spoke her name.

It was all of a week before she opened her eyes and answered when Stella spoke.

This was not the first morning she had awakened in the sour aftermath of the night before to the wish that she might never have to get up, to the regret that she had not died in her sleep. But always before, her depression had been a corollary of her personality, an element in a way of life that, if it never improved, might at least survive. Therefore, there was hope, and after a while the depression lifted and regret was abandoned.

Now there was no hope. She was damned, not for what she was, but for what she had done. She had killed. Murdered. In the tiny kitchen of a certain apartment, a man named Angus Brunn lay on the linoleum with an ice-pick penetrating his abdomen at an upward angle and perhaps puncturing his heart. He was dead, and she had killed him, and there was no way on earth to undo the act or its results, or to make anyone but herself responsible for it.

Soon someone would discover the body, probably before the day was out. It was possible, even, that the body had already been discovered—by a cleaning woman, by a friend, by anyone who might have had a reason for entering the apartment. If so, the intricate social machinery designed for the hunting of transgressors was already in operation. Men to whom murder was a job were converging on the house which had become a focal point because death had given it a sudden significance.
And
though it was almost incredible, this massive action which would, before it ground to its end, consume thousands of dollars and man-hours, was solely directed toward the detection and apprehension of a damned and frightened fragment of society just twenty-two years of age. Of her, Kathy Gait.

Lying in bed, reluctant to resume physical participation in a menacing world, she thought that it was a long way from ten to murder. A long, long way from a child with no hope to a woman who realized it. How long, actually? Twelve years? No more than a mere dozen years? How many days would that be? She tried to multiply it in her head, but she'd never had much of a head for arithmetic, and she lost her way between digits. It didn’t matter, anyhow. What mattered was that you could learn a lot in twelve years, a lot that should never have been learned. Even more important, you could fail to learn a lot that you
should
have learned. She wondered if, after all, it could really be reduced to such a splendid simplicity—the development of an adequate balance between a proper ignorance and approved learning.

Reluctantly, working back in reverse order of events, she began to examine again the disastrous night. She remembered the steps she had taken to remove all evidence of her presence in the apartment, but there might, of course, be evidence of a kind that she could not affect. Suppose, for example, that Angus Brunn had confided in a third person that he was cultivating a certain Kathy Gait. This wouldn't actually tie her to the murder, but it would at least establish a relationship with Brunn. It would make her subject to an investigation which would entail consequences, quite apart from murder, that were unpleasant to contemplate. More than that, however, suppose someone had seen her entering the apartment with Brunn, or had seen her leaving later alone.

So she came by association to the cab driver. The one who had delivered Brunn and her to the apartment house from the night club. Whether the driver could identify her, or would come forward to do it even if he could, was something she couldn't know. But he became an additional factor in the sum of terror, one more menace in a world that bristled with them.

She lifted her hands and, looking at them, retched suddenly. Sickness churned in her stomach, rose bitterly in her throat. The tips of the fingers of her right hand, she saw, were pink-tinged, and she remembered coming in last night, undressing and going to bed without washing or making any toilet whatever. The pink on her fingers was the stain of Angus Brunn's blood. Bringing the hand closer to her eyes, she saw under the nail of the middle finger a dried shred of flesh. Two of the nails were torn badly near the quick.

Now she was really sick. Getting out of bed, she went into the bathroom and stood over the commode, leaning forward and bracing herself against the water closet. Her stomach heaved, forcing up the watery fluid that was all it contained. When the spasm had exhausted itself, she turned to the sink and ran it full of water as hot as she could bear. She lathered her hands and rinsed them several times and then stood for a moment longer with clear water from the tap running over them.

Standing there, her eyes caught the reflection of her face in the small mirror on the medicine cabinet, and she lowered them quickly to her hands under the running water. She hardly knew what terrible metamorphosis she had expected in her appearance, perhaps a gross distortion of features to symbolize depravity, but the unchanged slender face with rather sad eyes below a tangle of short brown hair, a childish face, really, was a genuine shock. Untouched by her inner corruption, it seemed to her the ultimate horror.

Her hands scoured, she returned to the bedroom and dressed. Her empty stomach ached dully, and she began to think longingly of the comfort of hot coffee. There was coffee in the kitchen, but she couldn't bear the prospect of making and drinking it alone. It was necessary, now that she was in motion, to get out of the apartment at once. On the corner below the apartment house was a drug store where she could get both the hot coffee and the cold company of people. People could offer nothing to save her, or even to help her, neither compassion nor pardon, but they could at least hold back the silence and divert somewhat the destructive line of her thoughts. So, acting with decision, she left the apartment and walked down the street to the drug store.

There was a stack of newspapers on one end of the tobacco counter. She stopped to buy a pack of cigarettes and pick up one of the papers, and then she continued to the fountain. On a stool she lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs, and spread the paper on the imitation marble counter.

The young man behind the counter was wearing a starched white mess jacket and a starched white hat that was cut like a military overseas cap. The hat was cocked at such a precarious angle over one ear that it seemed about to fall off at any moment. His hair was heavy and blond and rather long, brushed around the sides of his head so that it met to form a little ridge, like two waves of water coming together, precisely in the center in the back. The only way a man could brush his hair to achieve such an effect, Kathy thought, would be to stand with his back to one mirror while he looked into another. It would take a lot of time and work to achieve such a precise effect. A lot of vanity.

"A cup of black coffee," she said.

The young man looked at her and smiled. "Anything else? How about a breakfast roll? Fresh this morning."

"No, thanks. Just coffee."

"Doughnut? Hot cake?"

"Please. Just the coffee."

"Okay, lady. Coffee coming up." He put a heavy cup on the counter at the edge of her paper and poured the coffee from a Silex. "Ten cents, lady."

"Oh... yes."

She dug for the dime and slid it across the counter. Drawing the steaming cup over onto the newspaper under her face, she sat with her head bent and let the warm, moist fragrance rise up into her nostrils. It was a good smell, a reviving smell, a smell that prepared her a little better for the ordeal of the paper that waited her attention under the coffee. She drank a little, relishing the scalding descent into her interior, and then pushed the cup aside again, leaving no barrier between her and the symbolic ink, no last excuse for further procrastination.

She examined the paper carefully, her eyes moving column by column across the front page. And there was nothing there. There was a murder, all right, but it was not Angus Brunn's. Perhaps, she thought, because Angus Brunn, even dead by violence, didn't merit the prestige of page one. She turned the page, feeling a strange and desperate affinity for the unknown person who might, at this moment, be reading in loneliness and terror and with God knew what futile regret the page one account of his cardinal transgression. She had never before been compelled to feel compassion for a murderer, though she had felt in her life many things good people are not supposed to feel, and she thought, looking for the report of her own crime, that her corruption was now surely complete.

Nothing on page two. Nor three. Turning the pages methodically, examining each page with the same column by column thoroughness, even through finances^ sports, and entertainment, she gave up only at the classified section. Then, folding the paper as compactly as possible, she dropped it to the floor and returned to her coffee.

What did it mean? That the body of Angus Brunn hadn't yet been discovered? That it had been discovered and was being kept under wraps by the police for reasons of their own? She doubted that it was the latter. She knew nothing about police procedure, but she doubted that a thing like that would be done in the case of a relatively unknown and unimportant man like Angus Brunn. No, the reasonable assumption was that the body had not been found. Then she began to think, what if it isn't found for a long time, not until someone is led to it by the nose? She visualized the body, over an extended period, bloating and decomposing and beginning to stink, and she shuddered violently, lifting her cup quickly to take more heat into her stomach.

She sat drinking and smoking, alternating swallows and inhalations. She had a feeling of waiting, of being incapable of doing anything else, as if nothing remained but to let the disastrous effects of grim causes catch up with her. When her cup was empty, she ground out the butt of her cigarette in the saucer and found another dime, which she placed on the counter. The young man with swept-around hair came down to her on the other side.

"More coffee, lady?"

"Yes, please."

He supplied it and lingered, and she realized with exaggerated resentment that he was about to exercise his charm. She didn't want to look at him. She didn't want to talk with him. There was something about him that disturbed her even beyond the degree of her usual abnormal reaction which she had long ago come to accept as normal.