It occurred to me then that I had no acceptable evidence, aside from her being dead, that she had been killed at all. And being dead is really no evidence of having been killed, for it is possible to be dead from merely having died. Remembering as clearly as I could as many details as I had seen, I could recall no blood, no wound, not even any bumps. Was it possible that Beth had simply and suddenly died? Some kind of attack or something? This theory, unlikely as it might seem, had a convincing quality as applied to Beth, for it was exactly the land of innocent imposition I wouldn’t have put past her. Nevertheless, I rejected the theory. The odds against it, I thought, were far too great to discount for even so unpredictable a long-shot as she. She had been lying on her back, under the bench where she must have been pushed, and somewhere on her backside, where I couldn’t see it, there was surely the mark of whatever had killed her.
I wished Sid would come home. I was in no mood for conversation or entertainment, but I was more than ready to welcome a warm and sympathetic presence. Just someone around. Someone I could watch covertly, pretending sleep, as she went about the delightful business of preparing herself for her half of the bed. Someone to lie lightly and breathe softly and sleep sweetly beside me. Not just someone, either. Sid or no one. Specifically Sid, and here she came.
I heard the car in the drive and the steps on the stairs, and I was thinking realistically when she came into the room that she would surely be neither warm nor sympathetic if the events of the night became known. After lighting a small lamp on her dressing table, she stood with her hands on her hips looking at me. I had turned my head to a position to see her, and I could see her fuzzily through slits and lashes.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.
She walked over to the bed and bent over and examined me thoroughly. She bent nearer and sniffed.
“Stoned,” she said. “After giving me every reason to expect something special, he’s drunk himself into an absolute stupor in which nothing can be expected of him at all.”
She went away into the bathroom, and I could hear water running in there, and a brisk, bristly little sound that was caused, I guessed, by the brushing of her teeth. Pretty soon she came back barefooted, having lacked off her white flats, and got out of what she was in, and into what passed for a nightgown. In the gown, a blue shortie with tiny white rosebuds here and there, she returned to the bed and sat down on the edge and again examined me critically.
“It’s simply an intolerable disappointment,” she said, “and I’ve a good mind to waken him.”
She considered this for a minute, whether to waken me or not, and then she decided that she would. She shook me by the shoulder pretty hard, but I kept my eyes closed in simulation of the stupor she had charged me with, and after several seconds she stopped shaking. I kept on lying there with my eyes closed, thinking that I had convinced her, but then there was a small and painful explosion on my left cheek which was repeated instantly on my right cheek, and I knew that she had merely stepped up her attack, God only knowing what she would resort to next if necessary. It seemed to me that simulation had become entirely too risky to sustain, and so I groaned and opened my eyes and groaned again.
“What the hell’s the matter with yon, sugar?” she said. “Why have you gone to bed and to sleep in spite of all our plans?”
“I’m sick,” I said.
She laced her hands around a knee and rocked back on her pretty pivot with a derisive expression.
“Sick? You’re loaded, sugar. That’s what you are.”
“Nothing of the sort. I had a few more gimlets, I admit, but I’m not loaded.”
“Where are you sick?”
“It’s my stomach. Something terrific is going on down there.”
“Well, you can hardly expect to drink gimlet after gimlet for hour after hour without having something go on in your stomach. What you need is a big dose of kaopectate.”
“Like hell I do.”
“Sugar, you musn’t be cowardly about it. When you deliberately get your stomach in an uproar, you must be prepared to take something for it afterward. A dose of kaopectate is good for anyone at times.”
“Not for me. I don’t want any God-damn kaopectate, and I refuse to have any.”
“Nonsense. You’ll take a big dose immediately, and later you’ll be glad.”
She got up and went into the bathroom again and rattled around and came back with a bottle and a spoon.
“Where in the devil did you get the spoon?” I said. “Have you moved the kitchen upstairs?”
“Of course not. That’s ridiculous. I always keep a spoon in the medicine cabinet for emergencies. When you have a husband who swills gin by the gallon, you never know when it will be needed.”
“Well, I know when it will not be needed, and now is when. Take that stuff away from here.”
“Don’t be difficult, sugar. There’s no need to be contentious because your belly hurts.”
“I’m being contentious because I’m determined not to take any kaopectate.”
“That’s absurd. Sit up, now, and open your mouth.
