Chapter 17

Hadn't he moved? In all the time she had been gone, had Paul remained there, lying on the settee in the den, staring into the darkening space, so that now when Nadine flicked on a lamp, his arm jerked upward in a reflex motion to shield his eyes from the unaccustomed light?

She wouldn't have had to tell him the truth. Nadine could more conveniently have hidden her luggage and told him she had gone for a ride, to a movie, to watch the fireworks display at the country club.

But without prelude or prologue, out of a stomach-fluttering fear that made it impossible to contain the immensity of her discovery within herself, Nadine told Paul where she had been.

He continued to gaze into an infinite emptiness before him. "I was going to go to New York with him. And Paris."

"What do you want me to do? Thank you for changing your mind? Why did you come back? To twist the knife a little deeper into my gut?"

"He was dead!"

It took a while before her whispered statement registered. Paul sat up abruptly. "He was what?"

"Dead. I found him dead!"

"What from? What...."

"I think somebody killed him."

"Nadine, this isn't one of your...."

"I didn't imagine it. He was ... there was blood all over the couch. Someone shot him. Or stabbed him. I couldn't tell."

"You're sure it wasn't an accident?"

"I don't know why, but I doubt it. Oh, Paul, it was ... gruesome!"

She expected him to fold her in his arms, comfort her after her terrifying experience. Poor Nadine ... darling, what a shock it must have been....

Paul only pummeled her with questions. "Did you do anything? Call a doctor or the police?"

"No."

"Did anyone see you?"

"I don't think so."

"You've been there before," Paul noted grimly. "You would have been recognized."

Nadine ignored the grating sarcasm. She was engrossed, momentarily, in a strange analogy. If she had returned tonight to find Paul lying on that couch as she had found Monty ... yes, she was sure of it! She would have wept and screamed and held him to her ... savagely angry with the fate that had robbed him of life and deprived her of his love. In Monty's studio she had experienced only a distinct unpleasantness, an urge to remove herself from the scene. Paul ... she would have been racked by grief if it had been Paul!

He was saying something to her. Something terse and cutting. "Did you do it, Nadine?"

"Did I...? You can't be serious!"

"If he dumped you, you'd have hated him enough. I've learned the magnitude of your ego. You could have!"

"How can you even suggest...."

"All right, you didn't. Who did? I might have. He broke up my home. If he was really murdered, it'll occur to the police."

"Oh, Paul!"

"But, of course I didn't. I'll be able to prove I wouldn't have had enough energy to kill every man you've slept with."

"Paul, that's...."

"Unfair. Go on, convince me again. Build me up for the next letdown. Try it!"

Challenged, she found nothing to say.

"You must have had a few other jealous lovers. You don't suppose our friend over on Hill Drive got a load on and decided to...."

"Vince isn't a murderer!"

"Neither is Sherry."

"Sherry?"

"Do you know what she said to me a few nights ago, Nadine? She'd like to kill whoever it was that had wrecked things for us. Good thing she didn't know about Monty."

Breath coagulated in her lungs. "Paul ... she did know. I mean ... she knew of him...."

Paul's eyes found hers. Not accusing now, not filled with the previous, stark misery, but alarm. "Sherry was gone all day. She came home only a few minutes before you did."

"You aren't going to start accusing your own child...."

"Can you imagine what she's gone through? The hatreds you put into her?"

"I refuse to even consider...." (But she was considering. Icicles prodding at her conscience ... sharp and cold!)

"She was gone all day. She went to bed without coming in here ... without telling me where she'd been!"

"Paul, it's out of the question. She wouldn't ... you know she couldn't! And assuming that she was capable ... how would she find him? Where would she get a ... gun ... or a knife or whatever...."

"How could she possibly hop a freight train to Richmond and get herself expelled from school? Because she's so mixed up, she's liable to do anything. And you've been a great help! You've been a five-star mother to her!"

They sat quietly through a rigidly tense, interminable period, each of them retired to a personal horror chamber of the mind in which the incredible became a blistering possibility. Their child ... Sherry gone all day ... Sherry, who had sobbed, "I'd like to kill...." And Sherry's iamgination, she suspected, was more vivid than Paul's. Paul didn't know about the telephone call during which their daughter had learned to hate a faceless adversary named Monty.

Paul ended the separate silences. "What a wide choice the cops will have! How many damned fools like me must have wanted to see him dead! Other husbands ... other women." And saying "women," Paul's eyes lighted, then clouded with a saddening suspicion which came to Nadine in the same instant. Not a suspicion, but an obvious, sorrowful conclusion.

Ann Helsley I

"She sounded like a kid on the phone," Paul said. "Like a scared kid. Not much older than Sherry."

Paul's sympathy was based only on that disorganized, embarrassing telephone call taken in Jim Oliver's presence. But Nadine could recall now the pretty young face ... that wholesome young face, last seen distorted with frustration and tears. She could hear a voice (now dead ... difficult to think of it as a voice from the past!) ... contemptuous; "She's convinced I've only tired of her because she's putting on weight."

"Letting her model for me gave Annie delusions of grandeur."

"She had the best two months of my life." Derisive. Cruel.

And the day Nadine had met Ann, the day Ann had worn the powder blue suit, Monty had whispered something personal and warm to the girl, probably something that had ridiculed the possibility of Nadine Whitten as Annie's competitor! For Ann's smile had reflected love ... love ... love and gratitude. Monty had thrived on both.

"I hope she gets away with it," Paul was saying. "I hope they never find out."

Nadine nodded slowly. Poor Annie ... poor roofing contractor's daughter ... poor teacher of tap, ballet and baton-twirling in a West Side dancing school!

Long after she had gone to the bedroom alone, sleepless for hours and then awakening from a tormented dream, Nadine thought she heard hushed voices outside her door. Someone moving through the house ... subdued conversation. Later still, she had a faint impression of hearing car doors slam outside, a motor starting up and receding into the distance.

Nadine opened her eyes to discover she had slept longer than it seemed; daylight had begun to filter in through the drawn draperies on her left. If she pressed her eyes tightly shut, she would blot out the obtrusive dawn, blot out everything, everyone. And return to sleep.