“Frank,” I said, “the steak’s burning! Imph, imph! Smell it? I meant to surprise you—”
Nothing happened for a minute that seemed a year. Then the floor came up slowly and hit the soles of my feet again, and his arms dropped away. I was afraid to move away too quickly, even with the excuse I’d just given him. I reached out and lightly patted the side of his face, as though to hold him there where he was, then turned and started for the kitchen, expecting any minute to feel his hands close around my throat from behind.
I made it all right, he didn’t come after me, but as I collapsed to a squatting position in front of the reeking stove, I said to myself: “I must never do that again, after this. I must never turn my back to him like that any more, I’ve got to keep facing him at all costs!”
The steak was just smouldering charcoal; when I turned to look he was standing in the doorway, looking in at me. I thought: This may give me an out—
“Look, isn’t that a shame?” I mourned. “Looks like we’ll have to eat out.” If I could only get as far as some restaurant with him, I could scream my peril in the middle of everyone—
He turned nasty all at once, almost as though he had guessed what was in my mind. Not dangerous, but just nasty.
“No,” he barked, “we’re going to eat in! We’re going to stay here where we belong! Whaddya suppose I married you for? Take off that damned silver dress, it hurts my eyes! Put on something soft, that don’t look like a suit of armor!”
I didn’t dare disobey; I edged past him sideways, with that same moronic grin still on my face, and got into the bedroom. If I locked myself in there, I wondered, could I hold him off until help came? But who’d hear my screams? It might be hours, days, before anyone happened to come out this way. And then when I looked, there was no key in the door, and a second later he had followed me in there. I pulled the shimmering dress down off my shoulders, keeping my eyes dead-center in the mirror, afraid even a look might provoke him.
I had dropped the notebook a second time when I fainted and it was still lying there. He saw it before I did. I only saw it when it was already in his hand, and saw him glance craftily from it to me, and back to it again. Ice went down my spine like quicksilver in a thermometer, and I quickly beat him to the ominous, unasked question — the wrong answer to which was death.
“Oh, what’s that?” I said naively. “Where’d you get it?” Meaning, I haven’t seen it before, I haven’t seen it before. The looped dress was down at my feet now, safely below the danger-point of my elbows. I’d been afraid an attack would come while it held my arms pinned to my sides.
“It was lying right here in front of you,” he said. There was more of a question in that than a statement.
“It was?” I gasped. “Why, where’d it come from, I didn’t see it!”
I pulled open a drawer in front of me and got out my shroud: a frilly little frock with flowers all over it, the dress I was going to my death in.
There was another danger-point while it dropped over my head and blinded me; I held my breath, but I was still alive when it settled further down around my figure.
He was still holding the book in his hand, open at the page where those names were. Then, in the mirror, I saw him take a pencil out of his inner pocket. It was red-barreled, so something told me the lead must be red too. He poised it, drew a swift line across something on that open page, and then he looked at me heavy-lidded, and put it away.
That had been my death-sentence, just then. Mine had been the only name of the seven without a line through it. This meant, tonight! Tonight, not another day to live! My knees dipped a little, but I caught the edge of the bureau with the heel of my hand and stayed upright against it — a white face, all eyes, staring into a mirror.
He purred, “Gee, Betty, you’ve got the loveliest little neck — so soft and white!” and his eyes hardly seemed to be open any more as he took a step toward me.
I was afraid to turn and afraid not to. I got the upper drawer open in front of me, dipped into it and out again, and as I swiftly pivoted to get his hot breath in my face, I was fumbling at my nails, prodding them with a long steel file. Using it the wrong way, point turned toward him. My bent hand came up until it was at face-level.
He blinked and grimaced and went back a little, while the file slowly swept its arc at him, like the needle of a compass. I said: “I’m starved, Frank, aren’t you? Let me go in and see what I can get for you, outside of that steak.” And I backed out into the dining room, smiling, doing my nails—
I put something on the table, I don’t know what, and we sat down opposite each other. We neither of us knew what we were eating, he wanted to kill, and I wanted to go on living. I could already feel myself beginning to crack up here and there, especially around the face, where I was having to smile so much.
I wondered, “Does it hurt much when you’re strangled to death?” Ritchie must have been the means of causing that to be done to many men — no, they used a chair in our state. I kept grinding pineapple-cubes with my teeth, and they wouldn’t go down at all.
I had put the file down in front of me. He snatched at it suddenly, when I least expected it, with a napkin covering his hand, and threw it over into a corner. “A thing like that doesn’t belong at the table!” he shouted at me. “It’s disgusting!” Then he did the same with my knife and fork, and his own. “We only need spoons!” he growled.
I thought, “Here it comes. This is it now!” There was a radio in the room, in back of where I was sitting. I groped for it with one hand, without getting out of my chair, and heard the dial snap.
A voice from the outside world broke the lethal silence.
I held up my finger commandingly. “Shh!” I said, “I want to get this!” It worked once, I knew it wouldn’t work a second time. The peremptoriness of my voice, the unexpectedness of it, buffaloed him for a minute. Thumping jazz swirled around us; I had it too loud, that must have irritated him, cut its efficacy short.
“Turn it off!” he barked suddenly.
“What for?” I asked innocently.
Then it came. The last link with self-control, the last inhibition, snapped. “Because I’m going to kill you!”
“I haven’t done anything to you—!” I moaned. But he was already on his feet, coming around the table toward me. He shot his cuffs back!
There was only this left now: the table had to stay between us as long as it could. My chair went over and I slipped around to his side. It was he, when he got around there, who kicked his own chair out of the way. Then he dragged the cloth off the table, sent everything crashing to the floor, and tried to turn it over and sweep it aside, but God was good to me, it was fastened immovably to the floor. I daren’t leave the table, to get over in the corner to where he’d thrown the file and knives; he would have overtaken me instantly. My life was hanging on the four corners of that table, I was defter getting around them than he.
Suddenly he himself left the table. He went over to the door, switched the key from outside in, locked it, and put it in his pocket. Then he did that to the other door, leading in to a bathroom. The kitchen door was a swinging-door, but there was no outlet from there. “I’ll get you now!” he promised grimly.
He didn’t say anything more after that. I was nearly at the exhaustion-point already, ready to drop, stood there panting, waiting to see which side of the table he’d come around this time. He didn’t come around either side. He gave a sudden jump up on top of it with both feet, and before I had half started away, leaped down on the other side, right on top of me. He had me. My legs tried to scamper abortively, my body stayed there in his grasp.