Pleasant Street, leading away from the depot, was tree-lined and lighted with street lamps at every second corner. Marvin walked along it briskly, glancing pleasurably at the well-kept lawns and houses as he passed them. The Burkes and the Chadwicks and the Evanses. Solid, substantial homes with neat, palm-shaded driveways and carefully-tended tropical shrubbery in the yards. All of them dark, now, except Dr. Higgens’ three-story house on the corner of Pleasant Street and Starfish Lane. There was a dim light downstairs as Marvin went by, and another in a third floor bedroom.
He wondered if someone in town were sick and hoped it wasn’t serious, and then he quickened his pace just a little as he recalled that he had been away from home four whole days without any word, and that Sissy had sniffled a little the morning he left and Ellie had said she thought she’d better keep her home from first grade for a day or so just in case it did develop into something the other children could catch.
He knew it was foolish to let a night light in the doctor’s house worry him about Sissy, but he pushed on a little faster anyway, turning into Lily Lane three blocks from the depot. It was a winding street in a newer part of town, and all the houses were modern and had larger grounds than in the older part of Sunray, each with private driveways leading up to secluded houses that were set well apart from their neighbors.
As he climbed the slope toward his own driveway, Marvin thought pleasurably how it would be when he got home. He had his latch-key, of course. Ellie and Sissy would be sleeping soundly in the adjoining bedrooms upstairs and he wouldn’t have to wake them to get in. They both slept very soundly and they weren’t expecting him.
He’d leave his suitcase downstairs in the hall, he decided, and go into the kitchen quietly and get two glasses and the bottle of imported cognac that Ellie kept pushed back on the top shelf for special occasions.
Then he’d go upstairs on tiptoe and into the big front bedroom where starlight would be shining through the two open windows and making enough light to show Ellie lying asleep in bed.
She mostly slept on her left side with her cheek pillowed on her arm, and the cover was always slipping down from her right shoulder and leaving it bare.
He’d kneel beside the bed, he thought happily, and waken her with a kiss on her bare shoulder, and she’d lift up her head sleepily, not quite knowing who it was or what was happening, and then he’d kiss her hard on the mouth and she’d come fully awake and cling to him and kiss him back.
Then he thought of a better way. He’d close the door through the bathroom into Sissy’s room and lock it first, and then he’d undress without turning on a light and go around the bed and slip under the covers on the other side of Ellie without waking her.
There was a sort of good animal smell that came from Ellie’s body when she was asleep. Different from when she was awake. Marvin always thought of it as a sensuous smell. He often waked up in the night with her lying close beside him, and he’d smell her smell and snuggle a little closer to her and bury his face under the covers against her back and breathe in deeply of the lovely fragrance that was his wife.
And almost always it had a powerful stimulating effect on him. He didn’t intend to waken her and he tried not to, but generally she’d seem to sense how he was feeling, even in her sleep, and she’d turn slowly and languidly to him, and sometimes he thought she didn’t even wake up fully even when it was all over, but he didn’t mind that because she was loving and willing whenever he wanted to, and he considered that all a man should want from his wife in the middle of the night.
He reached their driveway and it wound up between a double row of hibiscus to the front of the house which he could scarcely see from the street. He followed the drive up and around, and stopped suddenly when he saw a dim light behind drawn shades in the front bedroom window.
He saw at once that it wasn’t in Sissy’s room, and he stopped being frightened. It wasn’t actually very late and there was no reason in the world why Ellie shouldn’t still be awake and up. She might even be reading in bed, which was something she had given up after she married Marvin.
He went on up the drive to the last turn where he could see the lower front of the house clearly, and there he stopped again.
There was a car standing in the darkness under the porte cochere directly in front. For a brief moment he was irritated by the sight of it there. Ellie knew how he felt about automobiles. He always said that garages were built to protect cars from the damp night air, and he never allowed one to sit out at night.
He stepped closer and his irritation vanished and turned into something else. It was neither his sedan nor Ellie’s coupe that stood in front of his house. It was a convertible with the top down and with lots of bright chrome.
He took two more hesitant steps forward and stopped again. He recognized the convertible. It belonged to Harry. Harry Wilsson. One of their closest neighbors, and Marvin’s best friend in Sunray.
3
He stood there in the night, petrified and disbelieving, staring at the convertible parked in front of his house, knowing there must be some mistake.
Oh, it was Harry Wilsson’s car all right. There was no mistake about that. There were only two or three convertibles in Sunray, and Marvin had sold this one to Harry Wilsson himself about two months ago. They had argued together good-naturedly about the trade-in value of the Dodge sedan that Harry was turning in on it, and Marvin had ended up by giving his good friend a deal that had left him with almost no profit on the transaction.
But he knew there must be some mistake about its being there at his house tonight. That is, some simple and reasonable explanation. His first thought was that Harry and Minerva had dropped over to spend the evening with Ellie and cheer her up on the last night her husband was away from home. That was a perfectly natural thing to think. The couples visited back and forth together quite informally all the time.
But why was the light on only in Ellie’s bedroom and the rest of the house dark?
Well, he thought, maybe it was just Minerva who had come over for the evening. It was perfectly natural that the two women might have taken a drink up to the bedroom to relax and have a session of female talk.
But why hadn’t Minerva driven her own Plymouth coupe if that was it? Harry was funny and very possessive about his new convertible. He didn’t trust Minerva to drive it because she was a careless driver and was always scraping a fender or smashing a headlight in minor accidents. Marvin distinctly remembered an on-the-surface laughing but under-the-surface acrimonious discussion about that very thing between the Wilssons the night after Harry brought his new convertible home.
So there had to be some other answer.
What was it?
Suppose Sissy were sick and the Wilssons had come over to help. Maybe that was why they were all upstairs in the bedroom and the rest of the house dark.
But there was no light showing in Sissy’s bedroom. Marvin Blake stood in his own driveway not more than thirty feet from the house staring up at the shaded bedroom window and straining his ears to pick up some sound. But the house was shrouded in utter silence. And it was awful funny to see the shades drawn at the bedroom window, too. It was quite a warm night and their house was so secluded that no passerby could look into the upstairs rooms, and Marvin couldn’t remember those shades ever being drawn at night before.
He stood there looking helplessly up at the shaded windows and hearing no sound from within the bedroom. All he had to do was walk up to his own front door and put his key in the latch and open the door and shout up the stairs, “Yoo-hoo, Ellie. It’s me. Marv. I’m home.”