“Oh, god, what a filthy mind Father had.” She tossed the book down on the piano, sending the framed photograph of old Mr. Friend lurching over onto its face.
Mrs. Friend called: “Marny, really.”
“Well, he had.” Marny stared at her mother. “How much do I owe you?”
“Three dollars and seventy-five cents, dear.”
“Okay. I’ll get it or I’ll never hear the end of it.”
Marny hurried out of the room. Mrs. Friend gave me a little rueful smile.
“It’s the principle, you know. I’ve always tried to make the girls realize that a debt is something that must be paid.” She sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m butting my head against a wall. Excuse me, dear. If I don’t watch them, they’ll probably just take the money out of my own purse and give it back to me.”
She moved out of the room in pursuit of the girls, absently patting the stray hairs of her upsweep.
It was nice to know that Mrs. Friend was instilling a sense of morality into her daughter and daughter-in-law. She should have worked on her son too.
I was very jittery at the prospect of tomorrow. I thought it might be steadying to have Selena read me Mr. Friend’s atrocious poem. I wheeled myself to the piano and picked the book up. Automatically I restored Mr. Friend’s picture to its original position. As I did so, the back of the frame, which must have been dislodged by the fall, dropped off and a white envelope slipped out from the space between the frame and the back of the photograph. I picked it up. Typewritten across its front was the word:
Mimsey.
The envelope was unstuck and I saw there was a sheet of paper inside. It wasn’t a letter that had come through the mail. Someone in the house must have written it and, for some reason, concealed it in the back of the photograph.
Because I was innately suspicious of everything in the Friend house, I started to take out the sheet of paper. I heard footsteps approaching from the hall. Quickly, I slipped the envelope into the pocket of my seersucker jacket, put the back on the photograph, set it up in its original position and wheeled myself away from the piano.
Mrs. Friend came in, clutching dollar bills and change in one hand.
“I got it,” she said triumphantly. “I sent the girls on up to bed, dear. Shall I wheel you to your room or can you manage by yourself?”
“I can manage myself.”
She moved to my side, smiled at me and picked up my hand in hers.
“You know, dear, I’ve grown most fond of you. You’re almost like my own son.”
“I hope I don’t behave like him.”
Her brow puckered. “Really, I do wish you’d take my word for it, dear. I know there is nothing in Mr. Moffat’s scurrilous suggestion. Nothing at all. I am glad we have made plans but there is no cause for worry.” She glanced ruefully at the photograph of her husband on the piano. “He was rather sweet when he was a boy, you know. He had the most divine moustache… like a young disarming seal… I shall never forget the night he asked me to marry him. He got down on his knees and then he stretched up somehow and kissed me. The moustache tickled fascinatingly. I’d never been kissed by a lovely big moustache before. Really, I think that’s why I married him.”
“Which proves,” I said, “that he couldn’t have been murdered?”
“You!” Mrs. Friend slapped archly at my hand. “It’s being cooped up in that wheel chair that makes you so gloomy. I’ve just remembered. Last year my husband sprained his ankle and he bought the most pretentious pair of crutches. They’re put away somewhere in the store-closet off the library. Tomorrow we’ll get them out and we’ll see if you can’t lumber about with one. Won’t that be nice?”
She leaned over and kissed me, bringing her heavy, expensive perfume very close.
“You trust me now, don’t you?”
I grinned. “Do I?”
“A very sweet boy,” she said. “We’ll remember you a long time.”
She moved majestically out of the room, still clutching her dollars and cents.
She was right about remembering me a long time. We’d all of us remember each other until we died either in our beds or in the electric chair.
I wheeled myself to the grey and gold bedroom. A sound of hissing water from the bathroom told me that Selena was having a shower. I threw the book of poems on her bed and then, maneuvering the chair across to my own bed, I pulled the envelope out of my pocket. I knew it must be important. People don’t hide notes in the backs of photographs for the sheer whimsy of it. Uneasily I pulled out a single sheet of paper. I unfolded it. I was confronted with a typewritten note.
It said:
Dear Mother: I’ve thought this out and I’ve decided there’s no use waiting for the autopsy report. It’s all going to come out then so why prolong the misery? I thought about running away but how can I? There’s only way one out. Please believe me I didn’t plan ahead to kill Father. It was only after he bawled me out and called Mr. Petherbridge and said he was going to cut me out of the will that the idea came. He even, asked for his medicine. It was so easy just to pour half the bottle in. He didn’t notice. And then when Dr. Leland signed the death certificate I thought I’d got away with it. But I haven’t, of course. I never get away with anything. Well, this is it, I guess. I hope you get the money. I think you should. Weather you believe it or not, I did it a bit for you just to make life less impossible for you. Anyhow, good-bye. And don’t worry about me. The way I’ve figured out won’t be painful.
The hairs at the back of my neck had started to crawl. Dizzily I glanced at the signature which had been written in pencil, clumsily, the way a right-handed person would sign with his left hand.
It was signed:
Gordy.
For a few seconds, when I first started to read that diabolic communication, I had thought it was a genuine suicide note from the person who had murdered Mr. Friend. I didn’t think it for long, of course. With a shiver of horror, the truth overwhelmed me. This note, announcing that the murderer of Mr. Friend was preparing to commit suicide, was signed
Gordy
—but it wasn’t meant for the real Gordy, the Gordy who had disappeared on the night of the death and had never been heard from again.
It was meant for the false Gordy.
It was a letter to Mrs. Friend from
me
, telling her that
I
was going to kill myself.
As I stared blankly, one word kept me hypnotized, one misspelled, tell-tale word.
Weather.
There was, there could be, no doubt as to who had written that note.
I saw then how appallingly right my suspicions had been. While I was still lying unconscious in Nate’s sanatorium, the Friends must already have had this destiny prepared for me. They had needed me to trick the Clean Living League and Mr. Petherbridge, yes. But that
had
been only the prologue to their plan. They had known that suspicion of Mr. Friend’s murder would leak out. They
had
known they would need a victim. That had always been the role intended for me. Once again that evening, with a brilliant half-truth, Mrs. Friend had deceived me. She had made the “victim” theory sound ludicrous by pointing out how easily I could explain myself away once the police arrested me. But the police had never been intended to arrest me. Before they arrived tomorrow, I was supposed to have committed suicide.
I saw now why Mrs. Friend and Selena had fallen in so readily with my and Marny’s feeble scheme for hiding me in Nate’s cabin. All they cared about was keeping me satisfied at the moment, because they knew I would be dead before any plan could be put into execution.
I had been given the double, the triple, the quadruple cross.
Marny had always been right. There was only one word for the Friends.
They were fiends.
For it was surely
They.
Selena had written the note. The “
weather”
had told me that. But that didn’t mean she was in it alone. I could see Mrs. Friend finding the note while Inspector Sargent bent over my dead body. I could see her so clearly reading it with dewy eyes and trembling lips, murmuring: “The poor boy, the poor darling boy.”
The note said I wasn’t going to wait for the autopsy report to come in. That meant I was going to kill myself earlier—probably tonight.
The way I've figured out won't be painful.
They had their plan for killing me figured out too. How, when I didn’t know what it was, could I combat it?
I sat there in the wheel chair, hideously conscious of the immobilizing cast on my leg.
I was frightened then—really frightened.
Suddenly I became conscious that the sound of the shower in the bathroom had stopped some time before. I put the note in the envelope and slipped it into the pocket of my seersucker suit.
Something Marny had said the day before came back.
“Someday you’ll discover what Selena's up to and you'll come screaming to me.”
Marny…
The bathroom door opened. Selena came out. She had twisted a scarlet towel around her like a toga. One golden shoulder was bare. Her fair hair was piled on top of her head. She looked magnificent as a Roman Empress.
“Hello, baby.” She smiled dazzlingly. “Here comes your pseudo-wife.”
She wasn’t my pseudo-wife, I thought.
She was my executioner.
Selena
moved into the soft pool of light from the lamp between the beds. She lit two cigarettes from her platinum case and, lolling across my bed, put one of the cigarettes between my lips.
“There.”
For a moment she lay on her back, stretched voluptuously across the silver and gold spread, smiling up at me. The scarlet towel was the same scarlet as her mouth.
“Our last night.”
She got up then and, tucking her bare legs under her, sat on the edge of the bed, close to my chair. Her soft lips brushed my ear.
“I’d better call Jan and have him put you to bed. I can’t get at you in that chair.”
Once I was out of the wheel chair and in bed I was trapped. I smiled back at her. “Not yet, baby. Sitting up I feel more masculine.”
“You!” She slipped into my lap, twining her arms around my neck. She smelled faintly of bath salts and warm towel. “Is this hideously uncomfortable?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t hurt your bad leg?”
“No.”
She was stroking my cheek.
Risking it, I said: “Where do you suppose Gordy really is?”
“Oh, Gordy. Don’t talk about that dreary Gordy. Who cares?” She was staring into my eyes, her finger tracing the line of my nose. “Wasn’t Nate childish tonight?”
“Was he?”
“I mean making all that fuss. Being so stuffy. Baby?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not mad that I kissed him, are you? After all, we do need him, don’t we? I had to be nice to him.”
“I don’t mind your kissing Nate.”
She pouted. “I wish you did. I want you to be jealous. I want you to be jealous if any man touches me. Darling, be jealous.” Her lips slid over my cheek to my mouth and clung to it passionately. Through the glamour of her, I was thinking:
Is this the beginning? Is this the build-up to the way that won't be painful?
I thought of Marny too—Marny lying cool and young in her bed in the other wing, Marny who’d said:
They're fiends.
“Darling,” Selena’s mouth was at my ear now. “When this is all over, you’ll send for me, won’t you? You’ll write. You’ll tell me where you are. You promised. Didn’t you promise?”
“Sure, Selena.”
“Oh, I know you think I’m stupid. You think I’m feebleminded, don’t you? You said so. You’ll probably bully me, tread on me. But please say yes.”
“I’ve said yes.”
“Darling.”
I put my hand around the nape of her neck and drew her head back so that we were looking into each other’s eyes.
I said: “Know your trouble, baby? You’re in love with me.”
“Yes, yes. I am. I really think I am.”
Incredibly, as she stared at me, tears glistened on her thick lashes. Her enchantment was as intoxicating as vodka. I wondered how I would be feeling if I’d believed her. She grimaced suddenly.
“God, what a fool I am. I want a drink. I’ll get you one too.”
She slid off my lap and hurried out of the room. I felt curiously hollow and shaky. Was it to be this way? With a drink? The old, simple way of the poisoned drink? I wished I was steadier. But it wasn’t a situation to inspire steadiness—knowing that a woman you almost loved was planning to murder you.
I was becoming obsessed with the thought of Marny. I needed more than my wits now. I needed an ally. Could I trust Marny? She was a Friend too. But who else was there to trust? I thought of her dark, sardonic eyes. That made me feel a little better.
But a meeting with Marny would have to be clandestine. Selena would not have to know. The tray of medicine, a relic from the days when Mrs. Friend posed as a nurse, still stood on the table by my bed. I saw the little phial of red sleeping capsules. I picked it up, took two capsules out and put the phial back. With difficulty I managed with the fingers of my left hand to open the capsules and pour the white powder inside into my palm. I eased the empty capsules into the pocket of my jacket. ,
Selena came in with the drinks.
I noticed, with satisfaction, that they were straight jiggers of whisky. She crossed to me, smiling. She put one drink down on the table and held the other out to me.
“Drink, baby.”
“Not yet.”
“Why?”
I patted my knee with my cupped hand. “Get back where you belong first.”
She gave a husky laugh. She put my drink down on the table six inches from hers. She slipped onto my lap. I kept my left arm behind her, my hand swinging free, close to the drinks. Her back was turned to the table. She couldn’t see.
She leaned her cheek against mine. The soft, slithery hair was brushing my ear. I emptied the powder into my drink. I swirled it around with my finger. I switched my drink with hers. It couldn’t have been easier.
“Darling,” she murmured, “it’ll be so wonderful to get away from here. I hate the Friends really. I’ve always hated them.” Her hand came up to stroke my hair. “I only married Gordy because I was broke and I thought he was rich. Such a nasty, sodden man really. And Marny’s a little scheming, furtive rat. And Mrs. Friend! She’s a phony for you, darling. A great fat blousy phony.” She nestled even closer. “Oh, baby, to get rid of the Friends.”