“That’s a funny implement for a typist to be carrying around with her; do you use that in your work?”
She was struggling almost maniacally against him now; something seemed to be driving her to a frenzy. He was exerting his strength passively, holding her a prisoner in the chair with one hand riveted at the base of her throat. He was standing offside to her, however, not directly before her. She alone was in a straight line with the fireplace.
“Let me up... let me up!”
“Not until you speak,” he grunted.
She crumpled suddenly, seemed to collapse inwardly, was suddenly a limp bundle there in the chair. “There’s a gun in there, above the zinc partition — trained on this chair! Any minute the heat will—! A sawed-off shotgun filled with—”
“Who put it there?” he probed relentlessly.
“I did! Quick, let me up!”
“Why? Answer me, why?”
“Because I’m Nick Killeen’s widow — and I came here to kill you. Holmes!”
“That’s all,” he said briefly, and stepped back.
He took his hand away too late. As it broke contact, there was a blinding flash behind her that lit up his face, a roar, and a dense puff of smoke swirled out around her, as though blown out of the fireplace by a bellows worked in reverse.
She heaved convulsively one more time, as though still attempting to escape by reflex alone, then deflated again, staring at him through the smoke haze that veiled her.
“You’re all right,” he assured her quietly. “I emptied it out before I started the fire up a second time, only left the powder charge in it. The dictation machine saved me; you must have accidentally brushed against the lever, turned it on, when you came in here last night. It recorded the whole proceeding, from the first warning creak of the floor to the replacing of the zinc sheet that roofs the fireplace. Only I couldn’t tell which one of you it was; that’s why I had to give you the chair test.”
The door flashed open and the Cameron girl’s frightened white face peered in at them. “What was that?”
He was, strangely enough, twice as rough spoken and curt to her as he had been to the woman in the chair, the way one is to a puppy or a child that can’t be held responsible for its actions. “Stay out of here,” he bellowed, “you damned nuisance of an autograph-hunting, hero-worshiping school brat, or I’ll come out there, turn you over my knee and give you a spanking that’ll make you need cotton wool someplace else besides your ankle!”
The door closed again twice as quickly as it had opened, with a gasp of shocked incredulity.
He turned back to the limp, deflated figure still cowering there in the chair. She seemed to hang suspended in a void; she had lost one personality without regaining another. His voice dropped again to ordinary conversational pitch, as with an adult. “What were you going to do to her — in case it had worked?” he asked curiously.
She was still suffering from shock, but she managed a weak smile. “Exactly nothing at all. She wasn’t even on my list. She couldn’t have endangered me. I might have tied her up in order to get away, that’s all.”
“At least you’re fair-minded in your death dealing,” he conceded grudgingly. He watched her for a moment, then went over and poured her a drink without turning his back on her. “Here. You seem to be all in shreds. Knit yourself up again.”
She tottered waveringly erect at last, one hand out to the chair back. Then little by little a change came over her. She seemed to fill out before his very eyes, gain color, body, like those outline drawings they had once given to a child named Cookie Moran. The life-force, that inextinguishable thing, flowed back into her. Not the cold, spinsterish tide that had been Miss Kitchener; something warmer, brighter. Though her hair was still artfully streaked with gray and drawn tightly back, the last vestiges of the prissy Miss Kitchener seemed to peel away, roll off her like a transparent cellophane wrapping. She was somehow a young, more vibrant woman. A woman who knew no fear, a woman who knew how to admit defeat gracefully. But a vengeful sort of grace it was, even now.
“Well, I got them all but you. Holmes. Nick will overlook that. I’m only a woman, after all. Go ahead, call the police, I’m ready.”
“I am the police. Holmes was hijacked into safety weeks ago; he’s lying low in Bermuda. I’ve been living his life for him ever since, tearing the covers off his old books and reading them over again into the machine, waiting for you to show up. I was afraid the dog would give me away; it showed so plainly I wasn’t its master.”
“I should have noticed that,” she admitted. “Overconfidence must have made me careless. Everything went like clockwork with all the others — Bliss and Mitchell and Moran and Ferguson.”
“Look out,” he warned her dryly, “I’m getting it all on there.” He thumbed the dictation machine, making its faint whirring sound again.
“Do you take me for the usual petty-larceny criminal for gain, trying to cover up what he’s done, trying to welsh out of it?” There was unutterable contempt in the look she gave him. “You have a lot to learn about me! I glory in it! I want to shout it from the housetops, I want the world to know!” She took a quick step over beside the recording apparatus; her voice rose triumphantly into the speaking tube. “I pushed Bliss to his death! I gave cyanide to Mitchell! I smothered Moran alive in a closet! I shot Ferguson through the heart with an arrow! This is Julie Killeen speaking. Do you hear me, Nick, do you hear me? Your debt is paid — all but one. There, Detective, there’s your case. Now bring on your revenge. To me it’s a citation!”
“Sit down a minute,” he said. “There’s no hurry. It’s taken me two and a half years to catch up with you; a few minutes more won’t matter. I want to talk to you.”
And when she had sat down, he said, “So you helpfully put it all on the record for me. All but one thing. You neglected to add why; what this outstanding debt was. I happen to know — now, I didn’t for years. It was what held me up. I found out just in the nick of time — for Holmes’s sake, anyway. If I hadn’t he — the real Holmes — would have been where the rest are by now.”
“You happen to know why!” Sparks seemed to dart from her eyes. “You couldn’t, no, nor anyone else. Did you live through it? Did you see it with your own eyes? A dry line or two on some forgotten, dust-covered police report! But it still stings in my heart.
“It’s a long time ago now, as time goes, and yet all I have to do is shut my eyes and he’s beside me again, Nick, my husband. And the pain wells up around me again, the hate, the rage, the sick, cold loss. All I have to do is shut my eyes and it’s yesterday again, that long-past, unforgotten yesterday.”
III
Flashback: The Little Casket Around the Corner
“—For better or for worse, in sickness or in health, until death do ye part?”
“I do.”
“I now pronounce you man and wife. Whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. You may kiss the bride.”
They turned toward each other shyly. She drew the filmy veil clear of her face. Her eyes drooped closed as his lips met hers in the sacramental kiss. She was Mrs. Nick Killeen now, not Julie Bennett any more.
The members of their wedding party came crowding around; they were engulfed in a surging surf of bobbing heads, backslapping hands, congratulatory voices. The bridesmaids’ tinted chiffon hats swept over her face one by one like colored gelatin slides, dyeing it without obscuring it, while each gave her a little peck of benediction. Through all the commotion, his eyes and hers kept seeking each other, as if to say, “You’re all that really matters to me, you, over there.”