The question cut through my consciousness with a pain as acute as physical torture. I couldn’t sit still any longer. I had to get up and walk about the study. The very silence of the house, the oppressive heat of the night ate away at me.
It happened. Hell, it happened so many times every day that a man was a complete fool to think it could never happen to him.
I’d never fooled myself into thinking that nine men out of ten who looked at Vicky wouldn’t like to take her from me. I’d never blamed them, and I’d never been of a jealous disposition. She had that natural animal magnetism that was felt the moment she entered a room. Blonde, golden, a tall, striking woman. She knew how to dress to advantage, but that attraction would have been felt had she donned a mother hubbard.
Yet I had never once believed that any other man would ever succeed in stirring Vicky’s feelings to the point that would lose her to me. She was too damn forthright and honest for that. Or had I been simply too smug and sure of myself?
I was frightened at the thought of losing her. I tried to reason myself out of my state of mind, but my reason would not respond to the reins.
My reason became cold and clear and remembered a dozen little things. The far-away look in her eyes during the past few weeks. The rapt expression of her face. Sometimes I’d had to voice a question or statement twice. It was as if her thoughts, her interests were elsewhere at the moment.
I recalled the night a week ago when I’d called for her at the Bath Club. She’d come into the club room with its long bar and bamboo tables and chairs, and when she’d seen me, sudden fright had flared in her eyes. She’d been out on the terrace, and when I’d suggested going out there, she had pleaded a headache and rushed me home.
Who had been concealed by the warm darkness of the terrace? Whom had she been with out there?
I ripped the next to last cigarette out of the package, lighted it from the one I’d smoked down. Bitterness had crept into my reasoning now. I had probably raised a brow myself at the situation some time or another. A man enwraps himself in the task of giving his wife an ever higher standard of living, leaving her lonely, more and more leisure on her hands, free to draw the assumption that she is unloved.
With Bill Farnsworth and his wife it had been that way. And I recalled a remark I’d made to Vicky the night Bill’s wife had walked out on him, “Can you really blame her? How about him. After all he couldn’t expect her to become nothing more than a hot-house plant. She’s a flesh and blood woman.”
Vicky was that, very much so. A flesh and blood woman.
A light tap sounded on the jamb of the study doorway. I glanced up. Old Shoffner said, “Anything else I can do before I turn in for the night, Mr. Townsend?”
I shook my head. He was looking at me closely, and I colored a trifle and stopped running my fingers through my already tousled hair.
As he turned to go, my voice stopped him. “I suppose Mrs. Townsend is pretty busy with the garden these days?”
He hesitated. “She works at it.”
My gaze held the attention of his salt-and-pepper stubbled face. “Come in, Shoffner. Sit down.”
“I’m really tired, Mr. Townsend. Been hauling muck for the flowers.”
“You can spare another moment. I don’t get to see much of her, Wendel. I hardly know how she spends her days. Is there anything I could get, a gift to please her? Does she ever talk of anything she feels she missed?”
He remained rigid in the doorway, twisting his dirty cap in his hands. “She doesn’t talk to me much, Mr. Townsend.”
“I’d thought she would. She’s always so full of chatter, and out there gardening, I figured she might talk quite a lot. Her birthday is next month. I’d like to get her something very special.”
“She hasn’t said anything about it. I’m afraid I can’t help you, Mr. Townsend.”
I stood looking at him. He had a rather grim, seamed face, and I suspected that he knew the trend my thoughts were taking and recognized that I was offering him the opportunity to tell me anything I might need to know.
“She probably stays busy with her friends,” I suggested.
Shoffner nodded, and I said, “She knows a great many young matrons her age. I suppose they call for her in the afternoon to go shopping.”
“Yes, sir.”
He was looking more uncomfortable with each passing moment. I waited for him to add anything he knew about the people who called for her when I was away. Perhaps the man who’d been on the Bath Club terrace had never called here, but Shoffner’s reluctance, the cold bead of his washed-out blue eyes was answer enough. He knew something. But he was not going to get mixed up in anything. He was thinking of his job and how hard it might be for him to find another at his age.
“I’m really very tired, Mr. Townsend.”
“All right, Shoffner. Goodnight.”
He went away from the study and I heard the rear screen door slam behind him. I sat down again at the desk.
CHAPTER TWO
Mind over Mayhem
It couldn’t be true, I told myself.
Vicky would never be unfaithful to me. Damn it, I almost wished that Thelma Grigsby hadn’t phoned tonight.
I tried to concentrate on my work. I had done a ratty thing, trying to pump old Shoffner. Bringing out the family skeleton before a servant. Spying on Vicky, who was a part of me, without whom I never could live.
I realized that I was exhausted. Conflicting feelings of shame and then anger—when I thought of a stranger on that dark terrace—beat at my
