“He knows his job, that’s all.”
“Does he know about Korea, or are you afraid to tell him?”
“He doesn’t know, but even if he did — he’s loyal, he can be trusted.”
“You don’t know what your great hero did in Korea, do you?” Bill said turning to Fancy, feeling a wild desperation but trying to keep it under control, to let his thoughts continue to come rationally.
“And he doesn’t care,” Harry said. “Because it’s none of his business.”
Bill, still addressing Fancy, wet his lips and said, “You mean to say you don’t know how your great hero here got his leg wound? Why don’t you ask him?”
Fancy’s eyes remained cold and lightless, watching Bill, eyes like a statue’s, devoid of life, of warmth, of curiosity; but watching Bill with a peculiar, narrowing intentness.
“We were supposed to take out a foot patrol,” Bill said, speaking quickly, desperately now, not knowing when his life was going to be abruptly cut off; determined to say this. “It was a dangerous mission. So Harry, here, decided he wanted no part of it. ‘I want to get out of here; this is for crazy men,’ I think were his exact words. So he went off somewhere and shot himself in the leg. Several of us covered up for him. I don’t know why, but we did. Maybe we were glad to be rid of him. He wasn’t much of a soldier anyway. He was a coward, or he was shrewd. Call it what you want. But other men died.”
A silence filled the damp night air. The mist swirled and burned in the car’s headlights that created a little pool of tense light in the pitch-dark woods. A multitude of flying insects swarmed and blundered into the two starkly glaring lights. Fancy continued his cold staring at Bill. The silence was broken by a harsh laugh from Harry Lawrence.
“See?” Harry said. “You told him. What did it get you?”
The shot rang out, the echo being swallowed almost instantly by the dark, hidden woods.
“And then he just got back into the car and drove off,” Bill said as they walked along the platform next to the tracks. “He never even looked back. He just drove away and left me there to hike back to town. Harry died on the spot. He had the most startled expression on his face.”
“It was. because of his brother — Fancy’s brother,” Lynn said. “Harry must have forgot about that, or else he’d never have let you tell it. Fancy worshipped his brother. The brother was killed in Korea, after volunteering for a dangerous mission.”
“The police said I’ll have to come back when they catch up to him,” Bill said, putting his bag down on the platform.
“Don’t wait for that,” Lynn said. “Come back sooner if you get lonely.”
“If? I’ve already begun to feel lonely,” Bill said as they heard the train whistling down the tracks.
Killed by Kindness
by Nedra Tyre
Anniversaries are usually conducive to compliments, pink champagne and happy recollections of the past. This one ended in an unscheduled turn of events for a nostalgic evening.
John Johnson knew that he must murder his wife. He had to. It was the only decent thing he could do. He owed her that much consideration.
Divorce was out of the question. He had no grounds. Mary was kind and pretty and pleasant company and hadn’t ever glanced at another man. Not once in their marriage had she nagged him. She was a marvelous cook and an excellent bridge player. No hostess in town was more popular.
It seemed a pity that he would have to kill her. But he certainly wasn’t going to shame her by telling her he was leaving her; not when they’d just celebrated their twentieth anniversary two months before and had congratulated each other on being the happiest married couple in the whole world. With pink champagne, and in front of dozens of admiring friends, they had pledged undying love. They had said they hoped fate would be kind and would allow them to die together. After all that John couldn’t just toss Mary aside. Such a trick would be the action of a cad.
Without him Mary would have no life at all. Of course she would have her shop which had done well since she had opened it, but she wasn’t a real career woman. Opening the shop had been a kind of lark when the Greer house, next door to them in a row of town houses, had been put up for sale. No renovation or remodeling had been done except to knock down part of a wall so that the two houses could be connected by a door. The furniture shop was only something to occupy her time, Mary said, while her sweet husband worked. It didn’t mean anything to her, though she had a good business sense. John seldom went in the shop. Come to think of it, it was a jumble. It made him a little uneasy; everything in it seemed so crowded and precarious.
Yes, Mary’s interest was in him; it wasn’t in the shop. She’d have to have something besides the shop to have any meaningful existence.
If he divorced her she’d have no one to take her to concerts and plays. Dinner parties, her favorite recreation, would be out. None of their friends, would invite her to come without him. Alone and divorced, she would be shunted into the miserable category of spinsters and widows who had to be invited to lunch instead of dinner.
He couldn’t relegate Mary to such a life, though he felt sure that if he asked her for a divorce she’d give him one. She was so acquiescent and accommodating.
No, he wasn’t going to humiliate her by asking for a divorce. She deserved something better from him than that.
If only he hadn’t met Lettice on that business trip to Lexington. But how could he regret such a miracle? He had come alive only in the six weeks since he’d known Lettice. Life with Mary was ashes in comparison. Since he’d met Lettice he felt like a blind man who had been given sight. He might have been deaf all his life and was hearing for the first time. And the marvel was that Lettice loved him and was eager to marry him, and free to marry him.
And waiting.
And insisting.
He must concentrate on putting Mary out of the way. Surely a little accident could be arranged without too much trouble. The shop ought to be an ideal place, there in all that crowded junk. Among those heavy marble busts and chandeliers and andirons something from above or below could be used to dispatch his dear Mary to her celestial reward.
“Darling, you must tell your wife,” Lettice urged when they next met at their favorite hotel in Lexington. “You’ve got to arrange for a divorce. You have to. You’ve got to tell her about us.” Lettice’s voice was so low and musical that John felt hypnodzed.
But how could he tell Mary about Lettice?
John couldn’t even rationalize Lettice’s appeal to himself.
Instead of Mary’s graciousness, Lettice had elegance. Lettice wasn’t as pretty or as charming as Mary. But he couldn’t resist her. In her presence he was an ardent, masterful lover; in Mary’s presence he was a thoughtful, complaisant husband. With Lettice life would always be lived at the highest peak; nothing in his long years with Mary could approach the wonder he had known during his few meetings with Lettice. Lettice was earth, air, fire and water, the four elements; Mary was — no, he couldn’t compare them. Anyway, what good was it to set their attractions off against each other?
Then, just as he was about to suggest to Lettice that they go to the bar, he saw Chet Fleming enter the hotel and walk across the lobby toward the desk. What was Chet Fleming doing in Lexington? But then anyone could be anywhere. That was the humiliating risk illicit lovers faced. They might be discovered anywhere, anytime. No place was secure for them. But Chet Fleming was the one person he wanted least to see, and the one who would make the most of encountering John with another woman. That blabbermouth would tell his wife and friends, his doctor, his grocer, his banker, his lawyer. Word would get back to Mary. Her heart would be broken. She deserved better than that.