A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

She lay partly across the bed with her head hanging down above the floor and her light brown hair sweeping the carpet. One arm was twisted behind her back; the other one flailed out stiff and straight, reaching desperately for the help that had never come. She was his father’s wife, Larry’s stepmother. The dread he had felt on the stairs became a certainty now as he looked in. He had expected something like this sooner or later.

He turned her over, lifted her up, tried to rouse her by shaking her, by working her lower jaw back and forth with his hand. It was too late. Her eyes stared at him unblinkingly, her head rolled around like a rubber ball. Her neck had been broken. There were livid purple marks on her throat where fingers had pressed inward.

Larry let her drop back again like a rag doll, left the room and closed the door behind him. He stumbled down the hall to the head of the stairs. His father was still sitting there halfway down, his head bowed low over his knees. Larry slumped down beside him. After a while he put one hand on his father’s shoulder, then let it slip off again. “I’m with you,” he said.

His father lifted his head. “She gone?”

Larry nodded.

“I knew she must be,” his father said. “I heard it crack.” He shuddered and covered his ears, as though he were afraid of hearing it over again.

“She asked for it and she got it,” Larry remarked bitterly.

His father looked up sharply. “You knew?”

“All the time. He used to come down week-ends and she’d meet him at the Berkeley-Carteret.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“She was your wife,” Larry said. “Wouldn’t I have looked great.”

On a little table down at the foot of the stairs the telephone started to ring, and they both stiffened and their pale faces grew even paler. They turned and looked at each other without a word while it went on shattering the ominous stillness of the house with its loud pealing.

“I’ll get it,” Larry said suddenly. “I know all the answers.” He got up and went down to it, while his father gazed after him fearfully. He waited a minute to brace himself, then swiftly unhooked the receiver. “Hello,” he said tensely. Then with a quick let-down of relief, “No, she hasn’t come back from the beach yet.” He exchanged a glance with his father, halfway up the stairs. “Why don’t you pick her up there instead of calling for her here at the house? You know where to find her. She won’t be back for hours yet, and you’d only have to hang around here waiting.” Then he added: “No, I don’t mean to be inhospitable, only I thought it would save time. ’Bye.” He puffed his cheeks and blew out his breath with relief as he hung up. A couple of crystal drops oozed out on his forehead. “Helen’s boy-friend,” he said, turning to the man on the stairs. Helen was his sister. “If he does what I told him, it’ll give us a couple of hours at least.”

The older man spoke without lifting his head at all. “What’s the use? Better phone the police and get it over with.”

Larry said: “No.” Then he yelled it at the top of his voice. “No, I tell you! You’re my father — I can’t, I won’t let you! She wasn’t worth your life! You know what the doctors said, you haven’t much time anyway— Oh, God.” He went close and jabbed his knee at Weeks to bring him to. “Pull yourself together. We’ve got to get her out of here. I don’t care where it happened, only it didn’t happen here — it happened some place else.”

Twenty-one years of energy pulled forty-two years of apathy to its feet by the shoulders. “You — you were in New York. You are in New York right now, do you get me? You didn’t come down here, just as none of us expected you to.” He began to shake his father, to help the words and the idea that was behind them to sink in. “Did anyone see you on the train, at the depot just now, or coming into the house? Anyone who knows you by sight? Think hard, try to remember, will you, Dad?”

Weeks ran his hand across his forehead. “Coming in, no,” he said. “The street was dead, they were all down at the beach or on the boardwalk. The depot I’m not sure about, some of the redcaps might know me by sight—”

“But they only see you one day every week. They might get mixed up after a day or two in remembering just the exact day. We gotta take a chance. And make sure they see you tomorrow when you do come down, that’ll cover today. Talk to one of them, lose something, stumble and get helped up, anything at all. Now about the train. The conductor must know you by sight—”

Weeks’ face brightened all of a sudden, as the idea began to catch on, take hold of him. The self-preservation instinct isn’t easily suppressed. He grasped his son by the lapel of his coat. “Larry,” he said eagerly, “I just remembered — my commutation ticket—”

Larry’s face paled again. “And I,” he groaned, “forgot all about that. The date’ll be punched — we can’t get around that—”