Black-Eyed Stranger by Charlotte Armstrong

Author:Charlotte Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

Chapter 11

FRIDAY wore away. Alan was told that Martha Salisbury had collapsed. Actually, she walked in her room, up and down and around, and she was only wearing Friday through.

No one was told what Charles Salisbury’s errands were, that day. Quietly he went about them, doing what he had to do. His losses would cut deep.

Martha did not receive Alan Dulain, and Salisbury took care to cross the boy’s path only briefly. The father was irritable with strain, and he knew, vaguely, that he contributed to a picture of a disintegrating despair. But he could not help that. When Alan left him for the last time, in early evening and marched away, face pinched, head high, shoulders squared, Salisbury thought, poor kid. But he did not think it long.

At nine o’clock, having sent for the car but driving himself, he set out on the journey. He did not think that the men Alan called his private people would be watching the apartment. Nevertheless, he did his amateur best to note whether or not he were followed and concluded not.

The words penciled on the piece of brown paper, mysteriously found wrapped around the soft mass of Katherine’s scarf, were now engraved upon his brain. They were his hope. He knew exactly what he was to do and he intended to do it, exactly. He would act in good faith. Nothing would fail by fault of his, now.

He was alone. He had told no one but Martha. He had the money exactly as he was supposed to have it, old bills, in a manila envelope, addressed to Smith, lying at his side on the seat, unsealed. He left on time and on the dot of the instructed hour he swung uptown. He drove slowly, careful to obey every least regulation, lest there be an unforeseen delay.

It had been a long time, he reflected, since he had gone forth with his teeth biting his heart back, with the need to call out such reserve of strength merely to keep himself steady. It had to be done and done just so. This journey was his effort and his alone. If she were still alive, hope lay in obeying. If she were not, it made little difference that the police would come into it a little late. No, he would lock mind and imagination and emotion. He would meticulously obey.

But if, as the note promised, all went well and she returned in eighteen hours, as it said, when he got his girl back, then how he would strike! With thunder and with lightning, with the Law, with all other grim power he could muster, he would rip them from whatever hole they thought to hide in, were it to take a hundred years!

But not now. Lock down the lid of now against all that.

He took the turn, up the hill, in Van Cortlandt Park. He came out on a broad avenue, rather bare of traffic. On this he kept northward, proceeding sedately but steadily down

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