Waltz Into Darkness (46 page)

She
had not been in sight only a moment before, and the point at which
she had suddenly appeared was midway between two of the intervening
road crossings, so he surmised she must have emerged from some
doorway or establishment at approximately that location just as he
caught sight of her.

When
he had gained the same general vicinity himself, in due course, he
turned to look sideward, out of what was at first merely superficial
curiosity, as he went past, to see where it was she had come from,
what it was she had been about. Always presuming that it had been
she.

Superficial
curiosity became outright surprise at a glance, and halted him in his
tracks. The building flanking him was the post office. Immediately
adjoining it, it is true, was a rather shabbylooking general-purpose
store, but since there were several others of the same kind, and far
more prepossessing looking, closer at hand to where they lived, it
seemed hardly likely she would have put herself out to come all the
way to this one. It must have been the post office she had quitted.

There
was no reason for her to seek it out but one: subterfuge. There was a
mailbox for the taking of their letters on the selfsame street with
them; there was a carrier for the bringing of their letters who went
past their very door. And what letters did they get anyway? Who knew
they were here? Who knew who they were?

Uneasy
now, and with the new-found sunlight dimming behind a scurrying of
advance clouds, he had turned and gone in before even considering
what he was about to do. And then once in, wished he hadn't, and
tried to turn about and leave again. But uneasiness proved stronger
than his reluctance to spy upon her, and forced him at last to
approach the garter-sleeved clerk behind a wicket bearing the legend
"General Delivery."

"I
was looking for someone," he said shamefacedly. "I must
have--missed her. Has there been a little blonde lady--oh, no higher
than this--in here within the past few minutes?"

He
remembered that day he had taken her to the bank with him in New
Orleans. She must have had the same effect in here just now. She
would be remembered, if she'd been in at all.

The
clerk's eyes lit up, as with an afterglow. "Yes, sir," he
said heartily. "She was at this very window just a few minutes
ago." He spruced up one of his arm bands, then the other. "She
was asking for a letter."

Durand's
throat was dry, but he forced the obstructive question from it. "And
did she-- Did you have one for her?"

"Sure
enough did." The clerk wagged his head in reflective admiration,
made a popping sound with his tongue against some empty tooth-shell
in his mouth. "'Miss Mabel Greene,' "he reminisced. "She
must be new around here, I don't recall ever--"

But
Durand wasn't there anymore.

She
was in the ground-floor sitting room. Bonnet and stole were gone, as
if she had never had them on. She was standing before the center
table frittering with some flowers that she had put there in a bowl
the day before, some jonquils, withdrawing those that showed signs of
wilting. There was a scorched, cindery odor in the air, as if
something small had burned a few moments ago; his nostrils became
aware of it the moment he entered.

"Back
?" she said friendlily, turning her face over-shoulder to him,
then back to the flowers once more.

He
inhaled twice in rapid succession, in quite involuntary confirmation
of the foreign odor.

Though
she was not looking at him, she must have heard. Abruptly she quitted
the flowers, went to the window, and raised it generously. "I
was just smoking a cigar in here," she said, unasked. "It
needs airing."

There
was no trace of the remnants of one, on the usual salvers she used.

"I
threw it out the window unfinished," she said. She had gone back
to the flowers again. "It was quite unfit. They're making them
more poorly all the time."

But
the effluvia of her own cigars had never bothered her until now. And
this was not the aromatic vestiges of tobacco, it was the more acrid
pungency left behind by incinerated paper.

I'll
know she lies now, I'll know, he thought mournfully. She cannot evade
this. Ah, why do I ask her? Why must I seek my own punishment? But
the question was already out and uttered, he could not have held it
back had his tongue been torn from its roots a moment later.

"Was
that you I saw on the street just now?"

She
took a moment to answer; though how could she be uncertain, if she
had just returned? She took out one more flower. She turned it about
by its stem, studying it for faults. She put it down. Then she turned
about and faced him, readily enough. She saw his eyes rest for a
moment on her plum-serge costume. It was only then she answered.

"Yes."

"Where
were you, to the post office?"

Again
she took a moment. As though visualizing the topography of the
vicinity she had recently been in, reminding herself of it.

"I
had an errand," she said, steadily enough. "There was
something I needed to buy."

"What
?" he asked.

She
looked down at the flowers. "A pair of garden shears, to clip
the stems of flowers."

She
had chosen well. They would sell those in a general store. And there
had been a general store next to the post office.

"And
did you ?"

"They
had none on hand. They offered to send away for some, but I told them
it was not worth the trouble."

He
waited. She intended to say nothing more.

"You
didn't go to the post office ?"

But
in the repetition of the question itself, in fact in its first
asking, lay by indirection her answer. He realized that himself. By
the very fact of asking, he apprised her that he knew she had.

"I
did step into the post office," she said negligently. "It
comes to me now. I had forgotten about it. To buy stamps. They are in
my purse now. Do you wish to see them?" She smiled, as one who
is prepared for all eventualities.

"No,"
he said unhappily. "If you say you bought stamps, that ends it."

"I
think I'd better show them to you." Her voice was neither
injured nor hostile; rather, whimsical, amused. As one who patiently
endures another's foibles, forgives them.

She
opened the receptacle, took out its change purse, showed him two
small crimson squares, adhering on a perforated line.

He
scarcely looked. She could have bought those a half-hour ago. She
could have had them for a month.

"The
man said he had given you a letter."

"He
did ?" Her brows went up facetiously.

"I
described you to him."

"He
did," she said coolly.

"It
was addressed to Mabel Greene."

"I
know," she agreed. "That is why I returned it to him. He
mistook me for somebody else. I stopped for a moment, close to his
window, without noticing where I was, while I was putting the stamps
away. My back was to him, you see. He suddenly called out: 'Oh, Miss
Greene, I have a letter for you,' and thrust it out at me. He took me
so by surprise that I took it in my hand for a moment without
thinking. Then I said, 'I am not Miss Greene,' and handed it back to
him. He apologized, and that ended it. Although on second thought, I
don't think his mistake was an honest one. I think he was trying
to--" she modulated her voice in reluctant delicacy "--flirt
with me. He promptly tried to strike up a conversation with me, by
starting to tell me how much I resembled this other person. I simply
turned my head away and walked on."

"He
didn't say you had returned it."

"But
I say I did." There was no resentment in her voice, no emotion
whatever. "And you have the choice there: which one of us to
believe."

He
hung his head. He'd lost the battle of wits, as he might have known
he would. She was absolutely without consciousness of guilt. Which
did not mean she was without guilt, but only without the fear that
usually goes with it and helps unmask it. He could have brought her
face to face with that clerk, and the situation would not have
altered one whit. She would have flung back her denial into the very
face of his affirmation, trusting that to weaken first of the two.

On
her way out of the room, she let her hand trail, almost fondly,
across the breadth of his back.

"You
don't trust me, do you, Lou ?" she said quite neutrally.

"I
want to."

She
shrugged, in the doorway, as she went out. "Then do so, that is
all you have to do. It's simple enough."

She
went up the stairs, in leisurely complacency. And though he couldn't
see her face, he had never been surer of anything than that it bore
on it a smile of the same leisurely complacency just then, to match
her pace.

He
flung himself down at a crouch before the fireplace, made rapid
circling motions with his hands over its brick flooring. There was
some brittle paper-ash lying on its otherwise scoured, blackened
surface; very little, not enough to make a good-sized fistful. He
turned up a piece that had not been consumed, perhaps because it had
been held by the burner's fingers to the last. It was a lower corner,
nothing more; two straight edges sheared off transversely by an
undulant scorched line.

It
bore a single word, in conclusion. "Billy." And even that
was not wholly intact. The upper closure of the "B" had
been opened, eaten into by the brown stain of flame.

61

Nothing
more, then, for five days. No more visits to the post office. No more
idle sittings beside a desk. No more letters sent, no more letters
received. Whatever had been said was said, and only the inside of a
fireplace knew what that had been.

For
five days after that she did not even go out, she took no more walks.
She loitered about the rooms, noncommunicative, self-assured. As if
waiting for something. As if waiting for an appointed length of time
to pass. Five days to pass.

Then
on the fifth day, suddenly, without a word, the door of her room
opened after long closure and he beheld her coming down the stairs
arrayed for excursion. She was carefully dressed, far more carefully,
far more exquisitely, than he had seen her for a long time past. She
had taken a hot curling iron to her hair; ripples of artifice
indented it. Her lips were frankly red, not merely covertly so. As if
to meet a different standard than his own. Rouge that did not try to
look like nature but tried to look like rouge. Her floral essence was
strong to the point of headiness; again a different standard than his
own.

She
was going out. She made that plain, over and above his own powers of
observation. As if she wanted no mistake about it, no hindrance. "I'm
going out," she said. "I'll be back soon."

He
did not ask her where.

That
was about three in the afternoon.

At
five she was not back yet. At six. At seven.

It
was dark, and he lit the lamps, and they burned their way toward
eight. She wasn't back yet.

He
knew she hadn't left him; he knew she was coming back. Somehow that
wasn't his fear. Something about the way she had departed, the open,
ostentatious bearing she had maintained, was enough to tell him that.
She would have gone off quietly, or he would not have seen her go off
at all, if she were never coming back.

Once
he went to her bureau drawer, and from far in the back of it took out
the little case, the casket of burned wood, she kept her adornments
in. Her wedding band was in there, momentarily discarded. But so was
the solitaire diamond ring he had given her in New Orleans the first
day of her arrival.

No,
she hadn't left him; she was coming back. This was just an excursion
without her wedding band.

On
toward nine there was a sound at the door. Not so much an opening of
it, as a fumbling incompletion of the matter of opening it.

He
went out into the hall at last to see. To see why she did not finish
coming in, for he knew already it was she.

She
was half in, half out, and stopping there, her back sideward against
the frame. Apparently resting. Or as if having given up the idea of
entering the rest of the way as being too much trouble.