“Steve,” she said quietly in the stillness, “come out here a second.”
No fear, no love, no hate, no anything.
She opened her handbag, and took out the gun, and fitted her hand to it.
Then she went forward.
“Steve,” she said dully, “your wife is here.”
She made the turn of the doorway. The second room was at a right angle to the first. The light was less in here, just a shaded nightlamp over by his empty bed.
The rug bunched up around her foot, impeding her. She tried to dislodge it. She looked down and it wasn’t the rug. He was lying there, still, looking up at her, Indolence, his attitude seemed to express — too much trouble to get up. There was a cigarette between his outstretched fingers, she noticed. It had burned down to the skin, adhered, and then gone out, and miraculously failed to ignite the carpet.
You could hardly tell anything was the matter. There was a little dark line by the outside of his eye, where something had run down— His eyes seemed to be fixed on her, watching her, with that same mockery they’d always shown toward her.
It was that that made her cower back and strangle on a scream. The way his eyes seemed to be fixed on her. Not the thin dark line, nor the way he lay there, relaxed and still.
She was in the outside room now. She must have gone into it backward, not daring to take her eyes off that empty doorway, for she was still facing that way, when it came, The knock came.
It wasn’t soft and tempered, as hers had been. It didn’t space itself, and wait between. It was aggressive, demanding, continuous — already angered, and feeding on its own anger at every second’s added delay. It drowned her second choked scream, the scream that held real fear. Agnonizing fear, trapped fear such as she’d never known existed before. For the voice that riddled it, that sounded through it and with it and over it, in stern impatience, was Bill’s. She would have known it anywhere.
“Patrice! Open this door. Patrice! Do you hear me? I know you’re in there. Open this door and let me come in there, or I’ll break it down—”
In a moment, in a second, he’d discover that it was unlocked, just as she had earlier. She flung herself bodily against it, with a cry of despair, just as the knob turned and the door started to spring open.
“No!” she breathed. “No!” She threw the full weight of her body against the door.
“Patrice, you must let me in. You must!”
He could see her now, and she could see him, through the fluctuating gap the opening door made, now narrow, now wider. And still she tried to bar him, pressing against it, hands straining to hold it on the inside.
“No, Bill, no!” she wailed. “Stay out of here. Oh, if you love me, don’t come in here! Don’t Bill, don’t!”
Then suddenly she was swept back on the arc of the whole door, like a leaf, and he was standing beside her.
“Where is he? I’ll kill him—” he said breathlessly.
She clung to him now, and his arm went around her, tight, firm. There is a point beyond which you can’t be alone any more. You have to have someone to cling to. You have to cling to someone, even if they are to reject you again in another moment or two.
“Somebody has — already.” She shuddered, hiding her face against him. “He’s in there, dead, Bill!”
Suddenly his arm dropped and he’d left her. It was terrible to be alone, even just for a moment. She wondered how she’d stood it all these months, these years.
Then he reappeared in the doorway. She saw his head give a grim nod, before her face had found refuge against him again. That sanctuary that all her life she’d been trying to find.
He was turning her, propelling her, within the curve of his protective arm. “Come on, you have to get out of here! You can’t be found here. You must be out of your mind to do such a— What the devil got into you to make you—?”
She was struggling against him a little now, short of the door. She pried herself away from him suddenly, and stood there facing him.
“No, wait! Listen to me! There’s something you must hear first. Something you have to know.”
“Not now! Can’t you understand? Any minute somebody’s likely to stick his head into this place— Let me get you out of here! Patrice, if you won’t think of yourself, think of Mother, Don’t you know what it means if you’re found here?”
“No — this is the time, and this is the place. Before we go a step further. I’ve waited too long to tell you. I won’t move an Inch over that doorstep. Bill, I’m not entitled to your protection—”
“I’ll pick you up and carry you out of here, if I have to!” His hand suddenly clamped itself to her mouth, sealing it. His other arm gripped her waist, viselike, as he forced her toward the door. Her eyes strained at him in mute pleading, above his stifling hand.
“I know,” he said almost impatiently. “I know what you’re trying to tell me. That you’re not Patrice. That you’re not Hugh’s wife. Isn’t that it?”
He swept her through the doorway with him.
“I know that already. I’ve always known it. I think I’ve known it ever since the first few weeks you’d been here.”
Chapter Ten
She heard the brakes go on, and felt the car stop. She lifted her head from his shoulder and looked up. He took his sheltering arm from around her.
He’d stopped in front of their own house. His own. How could it ever be hers again, how could she ever go in there, after what had happened tonight?
“Bill,” she whispered, “I didn’t— You don’t think I—” His face swam before her eyes. She struggled to suppress her sobs. “How can I expect you to think otherwise—? I went there, and you found me—”
He took something out of his pocket, on the side away from her, something she couldn’t see. A hollow click sounded. Then he put it away again. “I know you didn’t, Patrice. I’ve been spared that added complication, at least. This gun’s been empty for years. It’s just a stage-prop, left around to make Mother feel more secure.”
She turned toward him with desperate urgency, forcing her voice to be steady. “Bill, you simply must listen to me!”
“Sh, Patrice,” he said soothingly. “You’ll wake them up in there.”
“My name isn’t Patrice. Bill, don’t stop me. I can’t go in there again. I can’t go in that house. It’s too late now, but at least let me tell you. Patrice Hazzard was killed on the train. I’d been married to this same man Georgesson—”
Again his hand went over her mouth, as it had in Steve’s apartment. More gently now. “I don’t want to know, I don’t want to hear,” he said stubbornly. “Can’t you understand, Patrice?” He looked around him helplessly. “This is no time for love-speeches, I know. Didn’t it mean anything to you, what I tried to tell you that night in the garden? What difference if there was another Patrice, a girl I never knew, some other place, some other time? A girl named Patrice came into my life one day. She would have only begun then — for me — no matter what her name was. I’m not in love with a name on a birth certificate, I’m in love with a girl who’s Patrice to me. My love calls her Patrice, and my love doesn’t want any other name.”
Suddenly he swept her to him violently. His lips found hers.
“You’re Patrice. You’ll always be Patrice. You’ll only be Patrice. What more can I say?”
“Bill, you knew, and you never—”
“Oh, not right away, in a flash. Life doesn’t go that way. It’s a slow thing, it’s gradual. I think I was pretty sure within a week or two. My first reaction was resentment, hostility. I didn’t say anything, because of Mother. And I wanted to see what your game was. I thought if I gave you enough rope — I gave you rope and rope, and there was no game. You were just you. And every day it became a little harder to be on guard against you, a little easier to look at you, and think of you, and like you. Then that night of the will—”