The Green-Eyed Monster by Patrick Quentin

Author:Patrick Quentin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media
Published: 2018-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Lieutenant Mooney sat down again, never taking his eyes from Andrew’s face. In the first second Andrew was too staggered to have any coherent thought or feeling.

The lieutenant’s voice came again. “You didn’t know that your wife was pregnant, Mr. Jordan?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Kind of odd, isn’t it? Pretending to you that she couldn’t have a child and then being two months pregnant?”

It was bewildering how time seemed to have lost all continuity, how fragments of the past were constantly superimposing themselves on the present. Andrew seemed to be both standing there opposite the lieutenant and lying again in bed with his wife …

“… it’s my fault, darling, being so giddy, dashing about all over the place. But ever since we knew about not having a baby … It’s that. You know it is, don’t you?

“I never realized it was so bad for you too.”

“Bad? Oh, darling …”

“Maybe if you went back to Dr. Williams?”

“I did. Two months ago. I never told you. I wanted to put it all out of my mind.”

“Then why don’t we adopt a baby?”

“Oh, darling, soon perhaps. But not yet, not now …

From the present, Lieutenant Mooney’s quiet voice impinged. “You’re sure your wife told you she couldn’t have a baby, Mr. Jordan?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“She lied about Dr. Williams; she was two months pregnant; and she didn’t tell you. You got an explanation for that?”

With a pain more violent than any he had yet experienced, the truth came to Andrew. It was the truth, it had to be. Maureen arriving in New York, hating the Thatchers and a world which had destroyed what had seemed to her to be her great romance with the “prominent citizen of Pasadena,” Maureen imagining herself utterly disillusioned and cynical, eager for revenge against society for what it had done to her. Find an eligible man, any eligible man, marry him, let him support her. Marry Andrew Jordan. Why not? Marry Andrew Jordan, but don’t love him and, beyond anything, don’t get stuck having a child by him. Lie about Dr. Williams. Hadn’t that been it? Maureen, at nineteen, thinking she could be what she could never have been because, as Mrs. Thatcher had said, she was a “good girl with a lot of love to give”?

The lieutenant’s blue gaze was still fixed on his face. Andrew was very conscious of him and of the perils he represented. But at that moment he could only think of the picture he had created of his wife. Maureen, the would-be “realist” gradually discovering that it didn’t work, that her husband was a human being, that he loved her, that love could breed love. The change? And after the change someone showing up from her past who had known of her cynical motives for marrying which she now so bitterly regretted, someone who had persecuted her, made her life a nightmare of deception. And then, as if that had not been difficult enough, there had come the other thing rendering her dilemma even more excruciating.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.