Go, Lovely Rose ; The Evil Wish by Jean Potts

Author:Jean Potts [Potts, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General
ISBN: 9781944520656
Publisher: Stark House Press
Published: 2019-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

XXXIII

With Bix out of the way, it seemed reasonable to suppose that Hugh would take himself off for home and Althea. Instead, he mixed himself another drink. Not that he relaxed with it. He didn’t even sit down; in an uneasy attempt at casualness he propped one elbow on the mantel and stood there, his face set in a strange, tense expression that perhaps felt to him like a sociable smile. Doc began to wonder if he was afraid of Althea, too. Or maybe she was sore at him for not having called her and had told him over the telephone not to come home at all. She was capable of it. Then he noticed how often Hugh’s eyes kept straying to Rachel, who still sat with her hand clutched in her pocket. She might as well be waving the letter under everybody’s nose.

“Heaven’s sakes, Hugh, sit down,” said Myra at last. “Enough to make a person climb the walls, the way you’re jittering.”

“Jittering? Am I? Sorry.” But he remained standing, one hand jingling the coins in his pocket, the other fiddling with his glass. “Thinking about Francie, I guess. Francie and his one mistake.”

“What I can’t get over,” said Myra, “is to think they’d been seeing each other all these years, and not a soul in Coreyville knew it. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible. Here I was, living right next door, and I never once suspicioned. Never once.”

There, thought Doc in relief, we’re getting back to normal, mulling it over the way the whole town will be doing tomorrow. Perfectly natural. He added his bit. “When it comes to that, look at Hartley.” (The trouble was that everybody did, literally; Hartley’s eyes shifted in alarm.) “What I mean is, there he sat, right there in his father’s old office, not noticing a thing, while Francie was busy pushing her down the stairs and beating in her head and sneaking away again.”

Hugh gave a sudden, excited laugh. “That’s the astonishing thing. The really amazing stroke of luck—that nobody saw him. Broad daylight, and yet nobody saw him come or go.” He began to pace back and forth between the mantel and the little marble-topped table against the wall. As if he were on a stage, thought Doc; and indeed Hugh seemed to him a little larger than life, like an actor playing his big scene. His eyes took on a glitter, his gestures grew slower, more controlled.

“Imagine, just imagine,” he said, and his audience, willing or not, was with him, seeing what he told them to, carried away—as Hugh seemed to be himself—by the power of his words. “Two o’clock in the afternoon. February. Cold and dismal. Lunchtime over. The housewives through with the dishes, the kids back at school, the business men all back down town at their stores or offices. Only he’s not where he’s supposed to be. He’s hurrying along, down the back way, ducking behind the hedge. Maybe he knocks at the back door, maybe he doesn’t.

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