Torrant drove to Vanguard Street.
He still saw the dead face against white satin, a surprising montage over Martins. Even more clearly he saw the jerk of the ivy under Annabelle Blair’s hand, the glisten of perspiration along her forehead—the breaking down of confidence, the building up of fear.
Not quite two hours after he had left it, he knocked again at the door of the Mallow house.
Would she answer? Torrant was queerly sure that she would. You didn’t hide from an aching tooth or close your eyes at an outbreak of flames; they had to be coped with if you were to live in peace and safety. And Annabelle Blair had risked a good deal for her present situation. While he was thinking that the door opened and she stood there, brows going up over her pale eyes.
“Yes, Mr. Torrant?”
It was a nice try, cool, a little surprised. Torrant said gently, stepping past her, “We were going to have a good long talk about Martin, weren’t we, Miss Blair? Or do you mind my calling you Annabelle?”
She gazed at him stonily. Torrant took off his hat and coat uninvited and laid them over one end of the loveseat, giving himself an air of permanence. He said, “I knew Martin so well that I almost feel I know you,” and smiled at her very deliberately.
Annabelle Blair didn’t smile back. Her face stayed expressionless as she sat down on the far end of the loveseat—at the very edge, Torrant noted sardonically, as though they would both be rising in a moment or two. She said, looking at her hands, “I know it’s been a year since he died, but—as a matter of fact, Mr. Torrant, I’d rather not talk about Martin.”
‘‘Really?” Torrant watched the lowered lids, the pools of gray under the eyes, the fingers she didn’t know she had knotted, and kept back a rising exultation. “That’s a disappointment—it’s what I came to Chauncy to do. Talk about Martin, and how he died.”
The willow-darkened room was still for a moment, while Annabelle’s pale empty gaze lifted slowly to Torrant’s face. She said, looking directly at him, “What is there to say about it? That Martin had a terrible fear of a certain type of illness— i you knew him. That when he found it in himself, he couldn’t face it. That he took an overdose of sedatives instead. What more is there?”
“One thing more,” Torrant said to the cold and challenging face. “You murdered him, Annabelle.”
She didn’t storm to her feet or cover her face with her ‘ hands or register any other kind of open shock. She froze a little on the loveseat, and she let a silence go by, but then she said almost coolly, “What a bizarre idea, Mr. Torrant—but not too surprising, I suppose. Friends and relatives never want to accept suicide, do they? In spite of the facts.”
“The facts,” repeated Torrant. “Do you mean, by any chance, what Martin told you about his father?”
“Yes.” The pale eyes sent him a lightning flicker of surprise.
“About his dying of liver disease?”
“That’s right,” said Annabelle, and seemed to breathe it.
“He didn’t,” Torrant said flatly, “and Martin never told you he did. But it looked like a nice story, didn’t it? Explained everything to the doctor, after you’d convinced Martin he had nothing to live for. And there were no relatives to come around asking questions, were there? Martin’s aunt died shortly before I left the States, and his only uncle has been living in England for years and lost touch with the family long ago.”
He was hardly aware of leaving his chair, but all at once Annabelle Blair’s face was only inches from his, as blurred and monstrous as a too-close image on a movie screen, and all the forced calm had gone out of him. He felt her shrink back into the loveseat with a movement as tiny and sly as an animal’s.
He said in what he thought was a whisper but filled the room, “How did he look, Annabelle, while you were lying to him? Could you see him making up his mind then and there that he couldn’t face dying by inches? Or did he take a little convincing? I doubt that, it wouldn’t have occurred to Martin not to trust the woman he’d married. And then he didn’t know about Simeon, did he?”
Torrant’s hands had gone to Annabelle Blair’s shoulders, fingers biting into the rigid wincing flesh. His own voice reached him suddenly in the echo of a shout, and he looked down at his hands, and the white imperturbable face that was now damp and pocketed with fear, and he let her go and walked sharply away.
Behind him there was a single harsh indrawn breath and a sound of released pressure from the loveseat. When he turned around, cold and drained and a little disgusted, Annabelle Blair was standing at the far side of the mantel, watchfully near the doorway. She was still breathing unevenly, but her poise was coming back. They stared at each other for a moment across the room which Gerald and Louise Mallow had inhabited so briefly, and in which Sarah Partridge had for a time wielded a dust-cloth and a vacuum cleaner.
“Even if all that were true,” said Annabelle Blair, and her voice was conciliatory and even a little wheedling, “Martin didn’t have to kill himself.”
It wasn’t a thing to bother answering. Torrant watched her speechlessly, wondering whether there were any depths this woman recognized as such, and saw the quickening return of her confidence. Only moments ago she had been a crouched and helpless thing, too swallowed up by fear to look for any way out of the trap, and then in a smooth transition she had been ready to bargain about Martin’s death.
Now she was steady and cold again. She said, “You’re distraught, Mr. Torrant. You doted on Martin, you were shocked to hear of his death when you came back,
