Widow's Web
weakness into a weapon of killing strength.Murder? Not in a legal sense perhaps, because Martin had made the ultimate decision and swallowed the sleeping pills. Annabelle Blair had withheld her hand, content to let the silences, the nights, perhaps a solicitous word here and there, do her work for her. But murder nevertheless, in a particularly terrifying shape.
Hotel rooms were not built for pacing: bed and writing desk, armchair and waste-basket made a cunning obstacle course. Torrant was standing thwartedly still at the window, going through various depths of shock, when his telephone rang.
Davies? Having confused Martin’s case with another, and calling up to rectify it?
It wasn’t Davies. A series of operators came on, and eventually Torrant’s brother Alan in San Francisco, who even at that distance sounded pleased and solid.
“Jim? Listen to this, it’s made to order for you. I’ve just been talking to Helen’s godfather, he’s first vice-president of—”
Torrant listened. His sister-in-law was wealthy and well-connected and on the whole nice, but she had a host of friends and relatives who were all, in spite of the fact that he was solvent and content, constantly alerted to Find Something for Torrant. Journeying about the country with a typewriter might be amusing, but it was not very sound.
Usually he declined these respectable openings with a mixture of amusement and irritation; this time he was not so sure. A definite job to plunge into, as different as possible from what he had done with Martin . . . Torrant said with a new uncertainty, “Can I call you back?”
“When?”
“By tomorrow afternoon.”
“Tomorrow afternoon!” repeated Alan’s faraway voice. He sounded horrified. “Helen’s godfather . .
Helen, Torrant knew, would have the very best godfather; he had a brief mental image of a scarlet old gentleman with drooping white moustaches, irascible in a private office the size of the Savarin Grill. He said mildly, pushing down the familiar irritation, “If somebody turns up for the job before then, more power to him. Tell Helen I’m still eating. I’m even drinking.”
He was ashamed of that instantly and then angry; he wished that people would not be so blatantly patient and good-hearted with him. He said, “Thanks for all the trouble, Al. I’ll let you know.”
It was nearly two o’clock. Torrant went downstairs to the bar off the lobby and ordered a ham sandwich which presently appeared, stuffed with what seemed to be a head of lettuce. He ate it mechanically while a small portion of his attention went back to Alan’s offer.
It had sounded like a nice job, in fact a very nice job, with an impressive salary and more freedom than you might expect on the staff of a national magazine. The trouble was that no job, here or on the coast, would leave him free enough to look for Annabelle Blair.
And that, he knew coldly, was what he wanted to do. To find Annabelle Blair. For the moment, he shut his mind to anything after that.
During the rest of that day and the morning of the next, he found out a few scant facts about the woman who was such a maddening blank in his mind. For one thing, she had left no forwarding address at the post office, which could mean that she did not want to be located or merely that her plans had been unsettled when she left.
She had profited by Martin’s death to the extent of thirty thousand dollars. Ten of that was insurance; she had sold the house in haste for twenty thousand, although the real-estate agent who had handled the sale said with reminiscent gloom that, given time and the proper season, he could have gotten more. At that, thought Torrant, thirty thousand was a nice round sum; Annabelle Blair had averaged five thousand dollars for each of her six months of marriage. You couldn’t call that bad.
Perhaps the most significant thing he found out was the dexterity with which she had disposed of herself. Martin Fennister had been a reasonably well-known photographer, his suicide had received attention in both the local and the New York newspapers for the date—and yet his widow’s abrupt departure from Bolton Road had raised no interest or even speculation in anybody’s mind. It had been a year ago, of course; Torrant, whose own knowledge was so new, had to remind himself of that.
At close to three o’clock on the second day of his search, with the feeling that this was the only area that held any hope at all, Torrant went back to the house on Bolton Road.
Mrs. Westing, handing him his forgotten gloves, did not look rosy or childish this time; she was crisp and wary and a little apprehensive. Her attitude said clearly that she had scrubbed and polished and re-wallpapered Martin Fennister out of the house, and she didn’t want him brought back in.
She shook her head when he asked about Annabelle Blair, but at the door, perhaps because she was so anxious to be rid of him for good, she said suddenly, nodding at a white house visible behind trees up the road, “Why don’t you ask Polly Stark? I understand she and her husband were friends of the Fennisters’.”
She said it with faint malice, but it was the first promising thing that had offered itself in two days. Torrant thanked her and walked down the flagged path again and into the road.
Seen from a distance, helping two small children construct a snowman, Mrs. Stark looked like something to tempt you to Lake Placid; up close she was older than her lithe navy-blue figure suggested. She had boyish caramel-colored hair and big light green eyes in a small alert weather-browned face; the children, both too young to have assumed any obvious gender, were carbon copies of her.
Torrant liked her at once, but he was careful when he put his question to seem nothing more than solicitous about his best friend’s widow. Mrs. Stark dispatched her children to the snowman and rumpled her hair thoughtfully.
“Let me see