Beyond This Point Are Monsters by Margaret Millar

Author:Margaret Millar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2016-01-21T18:03:35+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

when they reached leo’s car in the parking lot, he unlocked the right front door and Devon stepped inside without protest. She didn’t like being dependent on Leo but she liked even less the idea of driving a car she wasn’t used to in a city that was still strange to her.

Leo got in behind the wheel and turned on the ignition and the air conditioning. “I’ve kept away from you all day because you asked me to.”

“It was Mrs. Osborne’s idea,” Devon said. “She thought people would talk if they saw us together.”

“I’d like to think they had something to talk about . . . Do they?”

“No.”

“No period, or no not yet?”

Her only response was a slight shake of her head that could have meant anything.

She had taken off the white wrist-length gloves which she’d worn almost continuously since early morning. They lay now in her lap, the false passive immaculate hands she’d exhibited to the spectators in court and strangers in the hall and on the street. Her real hands, sunburned and rough, with calloused palms and bitten nails, she showed only to friends like Leo who wouldn’t care, or to people she saw every day like the Estivars and Dulzura who wouldn’t notice.

“I worry about you,” Leo said.

“Well, stop. I don’t want you to worry about me.”

“I don’t want to, either, but that’s the way it is. Did you have a decent lunch?”

“A hamburger.”

“That’s not enough. You’re too thin.”

“You shouldn’t fuss over me, Leo.”

“Why not?”

“It makes me nervous, self-conscious. I like to feel at ease with you.”

“All right, no fussing. That’s a promise.” The humming of the air conditioner muffled the rasp in his voice.

He turned north on the freeway. Traffic had been slowed down to boulevard speed by its own volume. Peo­ple passing were without names or faces or any identifica­tion except their cars: a red Mustang with Florida plates, a blue Chevelle, a VW camper decorated with daisies, a silver Continental with matching silver smoke coming from its exhaust, a yellow Dart with a black vinyl roof, a white Monaco station wagon trailing a boat. It was as if human beings existed merely to keep the vehicles in mo­tion, and the real significance had shifted from the Smiths and the Joneses to Cougars and Corvairs, Toronados and Toyotas.

“Turn west on University,” Devon said. “She lives at 3117 Ocotillo; that’s three or four blocks north.”

“I know where it is.”

“Did Mr. Ford tell you?”

“She told me. She called me one day and asked me to come and see her.”

“I thought you were barely on speaking terms.”

“We barely were,” Leo said. “In fact, we barely are. But I went.”

“When was that?”

“About three weeks ago, as soon as she found out the hearing was scheduled for today. Well, after a lot of chitchat she finally got to the point—she wanted to make sure my wife’s death wasn’t brought up during the hearing. She said it was irrelevant. I agreed. She offered me a drink, which I refused, and I drove back to the ranch.

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