Three by Cain: Serenade, Love's Lovely Counterfeit, the Butterfly (63 page)

It’s been raining for a week, they’ve been out there for a week, and I’ve been writing for a week. Maybe they’ve got to kill me to wipe it all out, what happened, so they can have each other again, or think they have, and maybe they’re going to tell it, so they get off. But I’ve got to tell it too, because I didn’t do anything but what I thought was right. What I told him I thought was true, and if he didn’t think enough of her to go see her about it, to give her her chance to say what she had to say, then that was his lookout. After I found out how it really was, she was anybody’s woman, and all I’ve got to say is, I love her as much as he does. So I’m putting it down. It’s finished now, and tonight I’m taking it with me when I leave, and maybe there won’t have to be any telling, and they’ll decide they can have each other without any killing. Because my leg’s better now, and there’s one thing they’ve forgotten. And that’s the mine.

I slipped out the back way when it got dark, crossed the creek above the cabin, and got up the path without their seeing me. I got to the timbered drift, went inside, and soon as I was well inside so no light could be seen from the road I got out the carbide lamp I had brought with me. All I had to do now was slip through to the bottom of the shaft, go up the ladder to the top, kill the light, and then slide down the mountainside and come out on the road about a mile below where they’re laying for me. From there on to the bus stop is a short walk, and I’d be away. But when I hit the lamp to strike the flint, I dropped it, and I heard the top pop open and the carbide go all over the track. And while I was feeling around for a couple of crumbs I could put in there with a little spit, I heard something that almost made me drop dead. It was Moke, in there under the tunnel, prizing around with the gun barrel, trying to get out. He would hit a rock three or four times, then get the steel in a crack, twist it around, move a chunk, then start all over again. I gave a yell and started to run out of the place, but I fell and hit my head and that was the last I knew for a while. When I
came to he was nearer, and I could hear his chinking plainer. I got out of there somehow. When I got back it was day.

It’s still raining out, but it’s daylight now, and I’ve been listening to the water run off the roof and I’ve figured out what that was in the mine. It wasn’t Moke. It was water dripping. Now I know what it is, I won’t mind it any more, and tonight I’ll get out of here.

I’m cut off. Ed Blue is out there and

JAMES M. CAIN

James Mallahan Cain (1892–1977) was a first-rate writer of American hard-boiled crime fiction. Born in Baltimore, the son of the president of Washington College, Cain began his career as a reporter, serving in the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and writing for
The Cross of Lorraine
, the newspaper of the 79th Division. He returned from the war to embark on a literary career that included a professorship at St. John’s College in Annapolis and a stint at
The New Yorker
as managing editor before he went to Hollywood as a script writer. Cain’s famous first novel,
The Postman Always Rings Twice
, was published in 1934 when he was forty-two, and became an instant sensation. It was tried for obscenity in Boston and was said by Albert Camus to have inspired his own book,
The Stranger
. The infamous novel was staged in 1936, and filmed in 1946 and 1981.
The Postman Always Rings Twice
is a benchmark of classic crime fiction and film noir. Two of Cain’s other novels,
Mildred Pierce
(1941) and
Double Indemnity
(1943), were also made into film noir classics. In 1974, James M. Cain was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America.

Books by James M. Cain

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Mildred Pierce

Double Indemnity

Three by Cain

BOOKS BY
J
AMES
M. C
AIN

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

From the master of crime fiction whom Edmund Wilson called the “poet of the tabloid murder” comes a tautly narrated and excruciatingly suspenseful novel that gives us an X-ray view of guilt, of duplicity, and of the kind of obsessive, loveless love that devastates everything it touches. First published in 1935,
Double Indemnity
reaffirms James M. Cain as a virtuoso of the
roman noir
.

Crime/Fiction/978-0-679-72322-6

MILDRED PIERCE

Mildred Pierce has gorgeous legs, a way with a skillet, and a bone-deep core of toughness. She has used those attributes to survive a divorce and to claw her way out of the lower middle class. But Mildred also has two weaknesses: a yen for shiftless men and an unreasoning devotion to a monstrous daughter. Out of these elements comes a work of acute social observation and devastating emotional violence, with a heroine whose ambitions and sufferings are never less than recognizable.

Crime/Fiction/978-0-679-72321-9

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE

An amoral young tramp, a beautiful, sullen woman with an inconvenient husband, and a problem that has only one grisly solution—a solution that only creates other problems that no one can ever solve. First published in 1934 and banned in Boston for its explosive mixture of violence and eroticism,
The Postman Always Rings Twice
is a gripping testament to James M. Cain’s unsparing vision of America’s bleak underside.

Crime/Fiction/978-0-679-72325-7

ALSO AVAILABLE
Three by Cain
, 978-0-679-72323-3