It is too bad, she thought, that he felt this way in the end. If only he had abused me or cursed me or made some kind of indictment, it would now be better and easier for me. He was weak or sick and in a very real sense a coward, though it was something he could in no way help, and if he has now killed himself, which he obviously has, it is because of these things and because he was simply not fit to live, and there is no good reason at all why I should hold myself responsible or be disturbed beyond the demands of compassion and natural sorrow, but I wish to God in all reverence that he had blamed me and cursed me and wished me dead instead of himself, for this would be something I could hold in contempt and soon forget, but I can never forget what he has written, not so long as I live, and he has done me after all the most harm that he could do.
“So he has killed himself,” she said.
“Yes. He cut his wrist with a razor blade and bled to death.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not particularly surprised.”
“Aren’t you? Why not?”
“Because he was a depressive. He went into the deepest despair over the slightest things, and he had absolutely no capacity for solving his problems.”
“Well, some of us are like that, I understand. Did you know him long?”
“I knew him for several months a good many years ago. When we were kids. We met again this year and became friends again, but I have not seen him for about three weeks.”
“Why not?”
“Primarily for the reasons I have indicated. He was not a person you could be casual with indefinitely. He became quite difficult.”
“I see. Did you anticipate his suicide specifically?”
“Not specifically, nor particularly as a consequence of our relationship, if that’s what you mean. It was merely something he might have done, for this reason or that, at one time or another.”
“In fact, it was something he was almost bound to do. Is that right?”
“I think so.”
“All right. So he did. He has committed suicide, as palpably as Mr. Burns died earlier this year of a heart attack, and that seems to be the end of it. It is only coincidental, of course, that you have been concerned in both instances — and I also, in a lesser way.”
“Yes. Of course.”
He looked at her without saying anything, and she folded the sheet of paper and returned it to the envelope and held it out to him. He smiled his thin smile and executed a small gesture of rejection.
“I thought you might like to keep it,” he said.
“Don’t the police like to retain things of this sort?”
“Only when they are evidence of something or other that concerns us. In this case, there doesn’t seem to be any indication of that.”
“Will it be necessary to give it any publicity?”
“The letter? Not adversely, at any rate. Certainly it can’t be published so long as it is in your possession.”
“Thank you.”
“Not at all. And now I have intruded long enough. Good night, Miss Buchanan.”
“Good night,” she said.
He walked past her to the door and turned without opening it, and it was the last time that she saw his thin smile.
“When I left you about three months ago,” he said, “I wished that I could see you again. Now I wish that I may never see you again on earth. The complications seem altogether too deadly.”
He opened the door then and went out, and she turned and crossed the room to a table on which there was a glass ash tray and a package of paper matches. She set fire to Enos Simon’s note with one of the matches and watched it burn to black ash in the glass tray. It was, in a way, like burning Enos himself. Like burning his body. As Aaron had burned to begin it, so Enos to end it.
Why did Daniels say that? she thought. Damn him to hell, why did he say it? Certainly it is altogether absurd to think that I am, without wanting or trying to be, a kind of carrier of misfortune and death.
She looked at her watch and read the time.
In an hour and a half, she thought, it will be time for Tyler.