But Margot disobeyed my request when she phoned Ellen that evening. From my study I could see Margot’s wide smile and loosely gesturing hand, and in the hall behind me I could hear Ellen’s restrained laughter.
“It amazes me that you find Theodore so excruciating,” Ellen said. “I’ve never been able to detect the slightest sense of humor in him.”
I knew then that Margot was brazenly describing our conversation to Ellen, and even though Ellen was obviously enjoying it as a joke, I was irritated at Margot for indulging her bizarre sense of humor against my specific request.
It was a week after Ellen’s trip was supposed to have started that I suggested to Margot I inform the police I had not heard from her. We sat in my study sipping a Sunday afternoon cup of tea.
“You’ve never shown me where you buried the body,” Margot said, grinning across her cup like a good-natured spaniel.
I said, “I thought you’d rather not know. However, come along. I’ll show you.”
I rose and led the way through the house with Margot chattering behind me. Getting my flashlight from the kitchen, I preceded her down the cellar steps.
Holding my flash on the floor behind the furnace, I indicated the freshly laid cement. “There,” I said simply.
She turned toward me, a peculiar expression beginning to form on her face, and all at once she was so desirable my restraint fell away and I took her in my arms. She stood stiff but unresisting when I kissed her, and her lips were cool.
Immediately I realized it was a mistake to let down the barriers so soon, and the wisest course was to retain our surface amiability until the police lost interest in the case. I moved back a step, bowed and apologized.
Margot’s stiffened face gradually drained to the color of paper. It was an interesting example of delayed psychological reaction. Obviously the sight of fresh cement for the first time fully impressed on her what we had done, and that it was not a matter for laughter.
She climbed the stairs ahead of me slowly, swaying slightly from shock. When we reached the parlor, she turned to face me and her expression was a study in terror. Without a word, she took her coat and stumbled toward the door.
From my study window I can see her talking on the phone now. But her boyish face is not laughing as usual and that eloquent hand is strangely still. Her expression is one of dull horror, and I am worried that she may transmit some of her feeling to whichever of her innumerable friends she is phoning. But she loves the phone, and perhaps a little womanly gossip will help cure the delayed shock reaction.
I wish she would grin.
A Girl Must Be Practical
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Nov. 1963.
The phone call Lydia Hartman had been awaiting all day came just as she was leaving the office. She paused in the doorway and waited to see if it was for her.
She heard her boss say, “Apex Insurance. Mr. Tremaine speaking.” Then he looked up and motioned toward her energetically.
Crossing the room, she took the phone from Tremaine’s hand and said into it, “Mrs. Hartman speaking.”
“This is Jules,” a deep masculine voice said in her ear. “I’m calling from Buffalo.”
“Buffalo!” she said abruptly.
“You told me to stick with him no matter where he went,” Jules Weygand said a trifle resentfully. “When he caught a bus to Buffalo, I drove my car up and was waiting at the depot here when he arrived.”
Lydia glanced toward her boss, who had moved across the room and was lifting his hat from a clothes tree.
“Does he know you followed him?” she asked in a low voice.
“He hasn’t seen me. I feel like a private eye, tailing him around like this from one city to the next.”
From the doorway Mr. Tremaine said, “Night, Lydia. Lock the door when you leave, will you?” Placing her hand over the mouth piece, Lydia said, “All right, Mr. Tremaine. Good-night.”
Then, as the door closed behind her boss, she said into the phone, “Is he all right?”
“Of course he’s all right,” Weygand said with a shade more resentment. “He’s registered at the Redmill Hotel, and since noon he’s had two pints of bourbon delivered.”
“I might prevent him from doing something desperate, Jules.”
“Like killing himself? Drunks don’t commit suicide.”
“Jim’s hardly a drunk,” she said sharply. “You can’t blame him for going off the deep end after losing everything he had.”
“He lost it for me too,” Weygand said dryly. “I was his partner, remember?”
“I know,” she said on a note of contrition. “You’ve been like the Rock of Gibralter in this, Jules. You could have prosecuted.”
“I told you he wasn’t planning anything but a drunk.”
“Oh, my!” she said. “If he’s drunk, he might do anything. I’m coming there.”
“I thought you probably would,” he said resignedly. “So I checked train and bus schedules. The next train leaves Rochester at six P.M. and gets here at seven-thirty. There isn’t a bus leaving there until eight.”
“I’ll be on the next train.”
“What do you expect to accomplish?” he asked. “I didn’t hold off for his sake, Lydia. Only for yours. You know how I feel about you.”
“I don’t want to hear that as long as I’m married to Jim,” she said with a return of sharpness. “And I certainly can’t leave him now, when he needs me more than he ever has.”
“That sounds as though you finally plan to, once he’s straightened out,” Weygand said in a pleased voice. “It’s the first real encouragement you’ve given me.”
“Meet me at the station at seven-thirty,” she said, and hung up.
Jules Weygand was waiting when Lydia Hartman got off the train at Buffalo. When she saw him standing, tall and lean and handsome, at the top of the inclined ramp leading up from the trains, it occurred to her that a month ago the sight would have made her heart skip a beat. But then he had been a successful businessman; now he was a bankrupt. She might have traded one successful businessman for another, but she had no desire to trade a bankrupt for a bankrupt. At thirty-two a girl had to start being practical.
He stood smiling down at her as she moved upward toward him, openly admiring the rounded slimness of her body. When she paused before him and he took the small overnight bag from her hand, she tossed her blond head pettishly.
“You shouldn’t look at me like that,” she said.
“You shouldn’t be so beautiful,” he countered, taking her elbow to steer her toward the main exit.
His car was parked on the lot only a few yards from the exit. Dropping the overnight bag in back, he held the door for her, then rounded the car to slide under the wheel.
Without turning on the ignition, he said, “Now that you’re here, what are your plans?”
“To talk to him. If he won’t come home, I’ll stay here with him.”
“And watch him drink himself into a stupor? He may stay on this a week.”
“Then I’ll stay a week.”
“You’ll lose your job.”
“I can phone in the morning. Mr. Tremaine is understanding.”
“But you’ve only been there three weeks, Lydia. Even an understanding boss won’t put up with you taking a week off so soon.”
“I’m not exactly a new employee,” she said. “I worked for Apex Insurance five years while Jim was getting on his feet.”
“You’ve been away five years too.”
“Apparently I haven’t been forgotten, or I wouldn’t have been taken back with a set-up to chief clerk.”