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  "Come on. Last bite," Vic said.

  She ate it.

  "I suppose Mr. Gosden had better stay here," Vic said, because there was nothing else to say about Mr. Gosden.

  "I have every intention of 's shtaying here," Melinda said. "Well, let's stretch him out."

  Melinda got up to stretch him out herself, but his shoulders were too heavy for her in her condition. Vic put his hands under Ralph's arms and pulled him so that his head was just short of the sofa arm.

  "Shoes?" Vic asked.

  "Don't you touch 's shoes!" Melinda bent over Ralph's feet wobblingly and began to untie his shoelaces.

  Ralph's shoulders shook. Vic could hear the faint chatter of teeth.

  "He's cold. I'd better get a blanket," Vic said.

  "I'll get the blanket," Melinda staggered toward her bedroom but evidently forgot her purpose, because she detoured into the bathroom.

  Vic removed the remaining shoe, then went into Melinda's bedroom to get the plaid lap rug that was always lying somewhere in the room. Now it was on the floor at the foot of the unmade bed. The lap rug had been one of Vic's presents to Melinda on her birthday about seven years ago. Seeing it reminded him of picnics, of a happy summer they had spent in Maine, of one winter evening when for some reason there had been no heat and they had lain under it on the floor in front of the fireplace. He stopped a moment, vaguely debating taking the green woolen blanket from her bed instead of the lap rug, then decided that was meaningless and he might as well take the lap rug. Melinda's room, as usual, was in a state of disorder that both repelled him and interested him, and he would have liked to stand there a few moments looking at it—he almost never went into Melinda's bedroom—but he did not permit himself even a complete glance around it. He went out and closed the door behind him. He heard the water running in the bathroom as he passed the door. He hoped she wasn't going to be sick.

  Ralph was sitting up now with unfocusing eyes, his body shaking as if he had a chill.

  "Would you care for some hot coffee?" Vic asked him.

  Ralph said nothing. Vic draped the lap rug around his shaking shoulders, and Ralph lay back feebly on the sofa and tried to drag his feet up. Vic lifted both his feet and tucked the blanket under them.

  "You're a good egg," Ralph mumbled.

  Vic smiled a little and sat down at the end of the sofa. He thought he heard Melinda being sick in the bathroom.

  "Shoulda thrown me out a long time ago," Ralph murmured. "Anybody who doesn't know how much he can take—" He moved his legs as if to get off the sofa, and Vic casually leaned on his ankles.

  "Think nothing of it," Vic said soothingly. "Ought to be sick—ought to die." There were tears in Ralph's blue eyes that made them look even glassier. His thin eyebrows trembled. He seemed to be in some self-flagellant trance in which he might really have enjoyed being hurled out of the house by the seat of his pants and his collar.

  Vic cleared his throat and smiled. "Oh, I don't bother throwing people out of the house if they annoy me." He leaned a little closer. "If they annoy me in that way—with Melinda—" he nodded meaningly toward the bathroom—"I kill them."

  "Yes," Ralph said seriously, as if he understood. "You should. Because I do want to keep you and Melinda as friends. I like you both. I mean it."

  "I do kill people if I don't like them," Vic said even more quietly, leaning toward Ralph and smiling.

  Ralph smiled, too, fatuously.

  "Like Malcolm McRae, for instance. I killed him." "Ma'colm?" Ralph asked puzzledly.

  Vic knew he knew all about Mal. "Yes. Melinda's told you about McRae. I killed him with a hammer in his apartment. You probably saw something in the papers last winter about it. He was getting too familiar with Melinda."

  Whether it was sinking very far in or not, Vic couldn't tell.

  Ralph's eyebrows drew slowly together. "I remember ... You killed him?"

  "Yes. He began flirting with Melinda. In public." Vic tossed Melinda's cigarette lighter up and caught it, two, three, and four times. It was sinking in. Ralph was up on one elbow.

  "Does Melinda know you killed him?"

  "No. Nobody knows," he whispered. "And don't tell Melinda, will you?"

  Ralph's frown deepened. It was a little too much for Ralph's brain to cope with, Vic thought, but Ralph had grasped the threat and the hostility. Ralph clenched his teeth and jerked his feet suddenly from under Vic's arm. He was leaving.

  Vic handed him his shoes without a word. "Like me to drive you home?"

  "I can drive myself," Ralph staggered around, trying to get his shoes on, and finally had to sit down to do it. Then he got up and stumbled toward the door.

  Vic followed him and handed him his magenta-banded straw hat.

  "G'night. I had a very nice time," Ralph said, running his words together.

  "Glad you did. Don't forget. Don't say anything to Melinda about what I told you. Good night, Ralph." Vic watched him crawl into his open convertible and zoom off, skidding the car's rear end off the road and righting it again as he went on down the lane. Vic didn't care if he drove the car into Bear Lake. The sun was coming up in a bright orange glow above the woods straight ahead.

  Vic heard no sounds from the bathroom now, which meant that Melinda was probably sitting on the floor, waiting for another attack of nausea. She did that whenever she got sick, and it was impossible to persuade her to move from the floor until she was sure the attack was over. Finally, he got up from his chair, went to the bathroom, and called, "Are you all right, honey?" and got a reasonably clear murmur that she was. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. He loved coffee and it almost never kept him awake when he wanted to sleep.

  Melinda came out of the bathroom in her robe, looking better than she had half an hour before. "Where's Ralph?"

  "He decided to go home. He said to say good night and that he had a very nice time."

  "Oh." She looked disappointed.

  "I tucked the blanket around him, and he felt better after a while," Vic added.

  Melinda came over and put her hands on his shoulders. "I think you were very sweet to him tonight."

  "That's good. You said earlier you thought I was rude." "You're never rude." She gave him a kiss on his cheek. "G'night, Vic."

  He watched her walk to her room. He wondered what Ralph was going to say to Melinda tomorrow. Ralph would tell her, of course. He was that type. Melinda would probably telephone him in a few minutes, as she always did when he left, if she didn't fall asleep first. He didn't think Ralph would tell her over the telephone, though.

  Chapter 4

  It was astonishing to Vic how quickly the story traveled, how interested everybody was in it—especially people who didn't know him well—and how nobody lifted a finger or a telephone to tell the police about it. There were, of course, the people who knew him and Melinda very well, or fairly well, knew why he had told the story, and found it simply amusing. Even people like old Mr. Hansen, their grocer, found it amusing. But there were people who didn't know him or Melinda, didn't know anything about them except by hearsay, who had probably pulled long faces on being told the story, and who seemed to take the attitude that he deserved to be hauled in by the police, whether it was true or not. Vic deduced that from some of the looks he got when he walked down the main street of the town.

  Within four days of telling the story to Ralph, people Vic had never seen or at least never noticed before were looking at him intently when he passed them in his car—an old, well-kept Oldsmobile that was an eye-catcher anyway in a community where most people had much newer cars—and pointing him out with whispers to other people. He seldom saw a smile among the strangers, but all he saw was smiles among his friends.

  During those four days he saw nothing of Ralph Gosden. On the Sunday after the dawn departure, Ralph had called Melinda and insisted on seeing her, Melinda said, and she had left the house to meet him somewhere. Vic and Trixie had picnicked alone that day on the shore of Be
ar Lake, and Vic had chatted with the boat-keeper there and arranged for Trixie to rent a canoe for all summer. When he and Trixie had come back to the house, Melinda had been there and all hell had broken loose. Ralph had told her what he had said. Melinda had screamed at Vic, "It's the most 'stupid—vulgar—idiotic' thing I've ever heard of!" Vic took her vituperation calmly. He knew she was furious probably because Ralph had shown himself a coward. Vic felt that he could have written their conversation. Ralph: "I 'know' it isn't true, darling, but it's obvious he doesn't want me hanging around any more, so I thought —" Melinda: "I don't care what he wants! All right, if you're too much of a coward to face up to him—" And Melinda would have realized, during their talk, that he must have said the same thing to Joel Nash.

  "Does Ralph really think I killed McRae?" Vic asked.

  "Of course he doesn't. He just thinks you're an ass. Or else out of your head."

  "But he doesn't think it's funny." Vic shook his head regretfully. "That's too bad."

  "What's funny about it?" Melinda was standing in the living room, her hands on her hips and her moccasined feet wide apart. "Well—I suppose you'd have to hear it the way I said it to find it funny."

  "Oh, I see. Did Joel find it funny?"

  "Apparently he didn't. Seems to have scared him out of town."

  "That's what you wanted to do, wasn't it?"

  "Well, yes, frankly."

  "And Ralph, too. You wanted to scare him, didn't you?"

  "I found them both terrible bores and terribly beneath you I think. So Ralph's scared, too?"

  "He's not scared. Don't be silly. You don't think anyone would believe a story like that, do you?"

  Vic put his hands behind his head and leaned back in the arm chair. "Joel Nash must have believed something. He certainly disappeared, didn't he? I don't think it was very bright of him, but then I never thought he was bright."

  "No. Nobody's bright but you."

  Vic smiled at her good-naturedly. "What did Joel say to you?" he asked, and he saw from her shifting of her position, the way she flung herself down on the sofa, that Joel Nash had said nothing to her. "What did Ralph say?"

  "That he thought you were decidedly unfriendly and he thought—"

  "Decidedly unfriendly. How unusual. I was decidedly bored, Melinda, decidedly tired of wining and dining bores several times a week and sitting up all night with them, decidedly tired of listening to drivel, and decidedly tired of their thinking that I didn't know or care what they were up to with you. It was decidedly dull."

  Melinda stared at him in surprise for a long moment, frowning, her mouth turned stubbornly down at the corners. Then suddenly she put her face down in her hands and let the tears come. Vic came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. "Honey, is it worth crying about? Are Joel Nash and Ralph worth crying about?"

  She flung her head up. "I'm not crying over them. I'm crying over the injustice."

  "'Sic'," Vic murmured involuntarily.

  "Who's sick?"

  He sighed, really trying to think of something to say to comfort her. No use saying, "'I'm' still here, I love you." She wouldn't want him now, perhaps never would. And he didn't want to be a dog in the manger. He wouldn't object to her having a man of some stature and self-respect, a man with some ideas in his head, as a lover, Vic thought. But he was afraid Melinda would never choose that kind or that that kind would never choose her. Vic could visualize a kind of charitable, fair-minded, civilized arrangement in which all three of them might be happy and benefit from contact with one another. Dostoyevsky had known what he meant. Goethe might have understood, too.

  "You know, just the other day in the paper," Vic began conversationally, "I read a piece about a ménage à trois in Milan. Of course I don't know what kind of people they were, but the husband and the lover, who were very good friends, were killed together in a motorcycle accident, and the wife had them buried together with a niche in the same tomb for herself when she dies. Over the tomb she put the inscription: 'They lived happily together.' So you see, it can be. I just wish you'd choose a manor even several men, if you like—who have some brains in their heads. Don't you think that's possible?"

  "Yes," she said tearfully, and he knew she wasn't even thinking about what he had said.

  That was Sunday. Four days later, Melinda was still sulking, but he thought she would come out of it in a few days if he handled her properly. She was too energetic and too fond of having a good time to sulk for very long. He bought tickets for two musical comedies in New York, though he would rather have seen two other plays that were on. There would be time for the other plays later, he thought. There was all kinds of time now that Melinda wasn't busy or exhausted in the evenings. On the day he had gone to New York to buy the tickets, he had also paid a visit to the newspaper division of the Public Library and had reread the McRae story, because he had forgotten many of the details. He learned that the elevator operator in McRae's apartment house was the only person who had seen the murderer, and he had described him very vaguely as being rather heavy set and not very tall. That fitted him, too, and Vic remarked this to Horace.

  Horace smiled a little. He was a chemist in a medical analytical laboratory, a cautious man, accustomed to speaking in understatements. He thought Vic's story was fantastic and even a little dangerous, but he was for anything that would "straighten Melinda out." "I've always said all Melinda needed to straighten herself out was a little firmness from you, Vic," Horace said. "She's been asking for it for years—just a little sign that you care what she does. Now don't lose the ground you've gained. I'd like to see you two happy again."

  Horace had seen them happy for three or four years, but it seemed so long ago, Vic was surprised that Horace even remembered. The ground that he had gained. Well, Melinda was staying home, and willy-nilly she had more time for Trixie and for him. But she was not yet happy about it. Vic took her for cocktails several times at the bar of the Lord Chesterfield Inn, thinking that since even Sam the barman knew about the McRae story, Melinda would not have liked to go there alone: she had so often sat in the Lord Chesterfield bar with Ralph or Larry or Jo-Jo. Vic had tried to interest Melinda in two designs he had brought with him one afternoon, both Blair Peabody's, for the cover of Xenophon's 'Country Life and Economics'. Blair Peabody, a leather worker whose shop was in a barn in Connecticut, had done the tooling on all the leather-bound books that Vic had published. These two designs of Blair's were based on Greek architectural motifs, one somewhat more decorative and less masculine than the other, both beautiful in Vic's opinion, and he had thought Melinda would enjoy choosing between the two, but he had hardly been able to make her look at them for five seconds. For politeness' sake, which was really to insult him by its carelessness, she had expressed a preference for one over the other. Vic had been crushed and wordless for several moments. It surprised him sometimes to find how much Melinda could hurt him when she wanted to. That afternoon Melinda had been more interested in the pianist the Lord Chesterfield had engaged for the summer. There was a poster about him with a photograph in a corner of the bar. He was to arrive in about a week. Melinda said if he played in the Duchin style, like the one they had had last year, she would die.

  The evenings in New York when they saw the musical comedies were more of a success. Both shows were on Saturday nights, and Trixie spent the first one at the Petersons', the parents of Trixie's best friend Janey, and on the second, Mrs. Peterson came over with Janey to keep Trixie company during the first part of the evening. Trixie could be relied on to fall soundly asleep by ten at least, and Mrs. Peterson generally stayed on until midnight before she left the house. On both evenings after the theater Vic and Melinda went to a supper club where there were dance orchestras, though Vic did not propose dancing because he felt Melinda would have refused him. For all her good humor on those evenings, Vic could feel her lurking resentment because he had cut her off from Joel and Ralph. The second of the evenings, when they got home at four in the morning, Me
linda was in the kind of gay mood that sometimes inspired her to wade in the brook that went through the woods only a few yards from the house, or to drive over to the Cowans' and jump in their swimming pool, but she did those things only with people like Ralph or Jo-Jo. She didn't propose a wade in the brook when they got home, and Vic knew it was because 'he' was there, her stodgy husband, and not one of the exuberant young men. He started to suggest the brook, but he didn't. He didn't really feel that silly, didn't want to cut his feet on the stones that they wouldn't be able to see in the dark, and he didn't think Melinda would appreciate such a proposal from him, anyway.

  They sat on Melinda's bed, still completely dressed, looking through some Sunday papers Vic had bought in Manhattan, all the papers except the 'Times', which was delivered to them on Sunday mornings. Melinda was laughing at something she was reading in the 'News'. She had slept on his shoulder during most of the ride home. Vic felt very wide awake and could have stayed up the rest of the night. Perhaps, he thought, his wide-awakeness was due to the unusual circumstances of his sitting on Melinda's bed—it had been years since he had sat on her bed—and, though he was interested in what he was reading about American defectors in China, another part of his mind tentatively examined the sensations that sitting on her bed produced in him. Intimacy, rapport, were not among them, he thought, or the anticipation of them. He felt a little uncomfortable. Yet he was aware of something plucking at him to ask her if she minded if he stayed in her room tonight. Just slept in her bed with his arms around her, or perhaps not even touching her—Melinda knew that he wouldn't do anything to annoy her. Then he thought of what she had said about the Cowans tonight on the drive to New York, that the Cowans had changed toward them because of his "bad taste" in telling the McRae story, that the Mellers as well as the Cowans were cooler toward them. People were shunning them, Melinda insisted, though Vic, insisting that they weren't, pointed out incidents that proved people were not shunning them at all, and reminded her that the Cowans were leading a quiet life just now because Phil was working hard on his economics book, trying to finish it before he had to start teaching again in September. Vic wondered if he should risk asking her if he might stay in her room tonight, or would she seize it as another opportunity to show him how much she resented him by refusing him indignantly? Or, even if she didn't refuse indignantly, would it so surprise her that it would spoil the pleasant mood of the evening? Did he particularly 'want' to stay, anyway? He didn't.