“No offense meant.” Charlotte picked up her medical bag from the desk where she’d put it when she answered the telephone. It seemed heavier than usual. She realized that for the first time in years she felt exhausted. She moved slowly, as if part of her brain tissue had been destroyed like a spastic’s, and each physical move she made had to be thought out and the muscles forced to obey.
“What a nice coincidence that Dr. Blake phoned,” Miss Schiller said. “Now you can have a good rest for a few days. Go down to the beach and lie in the sun.”
“Perhaps I will.” She wondered, briefly, about the “nice coincidence,” and then forgot about it as soon as she reached the street and got into her car.
It was nearly seven and the sky was showing its first stars, when she arrived home. Even before she turned into the driveway she could hear her phone ringing, a shrill rising, falling, like the sound of tree toads. The ringing stopped as she was unlocking her front door and began again a few seconds later.
She thought it might be Lewis calling and when she answered the phone she tried not to sound tired. Lewis hated her to sound tired; it always started an argument about her working too hard.
“Hello?”
“You work late,” Easter said.
“I wish you’d stop bothering me.”
“Who’s bothering you? I have a new lead in Violet’s case and I thought you’d like to hear about it.”
“What is it?”
“I’ve just learned that Violet has an older sister who lives in Ashley, a war widow by the name of Myrtle Reyerling. Violet may have confided in her about the man we’re after — let’s call him Mr. B.”
“Why Mr... B?”
“No reason. I’m driving up to Ashley tomorrow, unofficially, to have a talk with Mrs. Reyerling. Do you want to come along?”
“No thanks.”
“Think it over.”
“I’ve thought.”
“The trip will do you good,” Easter said. “Fresh air, etcetera.”
“There’s fresh air here.”
“But the Oregon fresh air is said to have therapeutic qualities for nervous women — a sort of gaseous Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound.”
The door chime pealed. “I’ve never been nervous in my life and my doorbell’s ringing.”
“I hear it.”
“So if you’ll excuse me...”
“I will, but I don’t want to.”
“Thank you for the invitation.”
“Keep thinking it over,” Easter said, and hung up. As she was going towards the door it occurred to her that Easter’s invitation was oddly coincidental with Dr. Blake’s offer to take over her practice for a few days. There was no connection, of course, but it worried her. She wondered about Easters motives, whether he was falling in love with her as he pretended, or whether he thought she knew more about the case than she had told him.
Before she opened the door she glanced out of the little window at the top and saw that her caller was Lewis.
For a moment he looked to Charlotte like someone she had once known well and hadn’t seen for years. His face was grim, his mouth a tight bitter line. There were dark gray circles under his eyes like smudges of soot.
“Hello, Charley.”
“Lewis... Lewis, are you ill?”
“No.” He kissed her on the cheek; his breath smelled of brandy.
She withdrew from his embrace, holding him at arms’ length so that she could see him better. “You haven’t been drinking too much, or anything?”
“I am not ill and I haven’t been drinking.” He crossed the room and flung himself wearily into the red leather chair. He was wearing the hat and topcoat he’d had on the previous night when they’d met on the breakwater. He leaned his head against the back of the chair and the hat slid off and rolled on the floor. He didn’t seem to notice. “At least I’ve been drinking only enough for medicinal purposes, to keep me from strangling my wife.”
The words jarred her. “You mustn’t talk like that.”
“If I didn’t talk it I might just go ahead and do it... Have you seen the papers?”
“Yes.”
“It’s the same girl, the one who came to you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry for the girl, and sorry you had to be mixed up in it.” All during dinner Gwen had talked about it: “Oh, the poor child, how lonely she must have felt! I know so well what loneliness is. Sometimes when you’re not here, Lewis, when you stay away in the evenings for hours and hours, I almost feel like — like killing myself.” Gwen, sitting across the table from him, an animated little doll with the big dogs pressing their noses moistly against her arm begging for attention, for a scrap of meat He had felt a murderous rage, a terrible desire to stop those white fluttering hands, that gentle voice: “That poor, poor girl. Think how the man must feel who got her into that condition.”
He covered his eyes with the palms of his hands. Charlotte sat on the hassock at his feet. “I tried to call you this afternoon at the office.”
“I wasn’t there.”
“I know.”
“I went to a movie.”
“I didn’t think you ever went to movies,” she said, half lightly.
“I don’t. I was tired. I thought I’d go to sleep from boredom, but I didn’t... I need some sleeping pills, Charley.”
“I have a couple of Nembutals I can give you.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
She brought the capsules out of the medicine chest in the bathroom. “Don’t take them until about twenty minutes before you go to bed.”
“All right.”
“Lewis, is anything the matter?”
“Not a thing.”
“I’m glad, Mr. B.”
He looked very surprised, and pleased. “You haven’t called me that for a long time. Remember?”
“I remember.”
“I love you, Miss K.”
“Darling, it’s nice to see you smiling again.”
“I’m out of practice.”
“I know. Things will be better for us someday, wait and see.” She gave him a cigarette and lit it for him, feeling happy that she was able to help him when he was tired. Her own tiredness was nearly gone. “I’m taking the rest of the week off, Lewis.”
His hand tightened on her arm. “Sudden, isn’t it?”
“The chance came up. I thought that I’d take a little trip in the car, perhaps.”
“A trip where?”
“Oh anywhere. You know I’ve always liked driving to new places.”
He hadn’t taken his eyes off her, hadn’t even blinked. “New places such as where?”
“Well, I haven’t seen much of Oregon,” she said. “They say it’s very nice in the summer.”
“Who says?”
“I though perhaps...”
“Stop that thought-perhaps business. Your mind’s made up. It always is. Where are you going in Oregon?”
“Ashley.”
“Where the girl lived?”
“Yes.”
“Haven’t you gotten into enough trouble already?”
“Please, darling...”
“Don’t go,” he said. “Don’t go, Charley.”
“I want to. I feel that I should.”
“Why should you? It’s none of your affair.”
“The police are going.”
“Police?”
“I want to get there first. I don’t like the lieutenant in charge of the case, Easter.”
“I know him,” Lewis said. “He’s a troublemaker.”
“He rang me up tonight and asked me to go with him to Ashley and talk to Violet’s sister. I refused. I think he was trying to set a trap for me. I know I haven’t done anything, but the feeling is there that in some obscure way I’m deeply implicated in Violet’s death.”
“Don’t go, Charley,” he said again.
“But I want to. I’m not afraid of Easter. I’m just curious.”