Harry Lund lay in the bathtub. Above him two pairs of his wife’s nylons dangled wetly on the rail which supported the shabby grey-white shower curtain. He could hear Norma preparing Sunday breakfast in the kitchen downstairs.
After twenty-one years of marriage Norma’s morning noises were so familiar to him that they brought exact visual pictures. He could see the inevitable cigarette dangling from her mouth while she squeezed oranges on the cluttered enamel table. Norma never dressed on Sunday mornings. He could see her thin body, draped in the old pink quilted robe, bustling about the kitchen.
Every day Harry Lund’s aversion to his wife began a fresh attack on his nerves during those moments in the tub. He was a lazy man. He liked his comfort. He liked lolling in warm water, relaxing before the effort of a day at the drug store, or, better still, relaxing with the knowledge of a long, indolent Sunday ahead. But he could hardly remember a time when he hadn’t lain there in the steamy, cramped bathroom taut with hatred.
It was strange, then, to find himself on this particular Sunday morning lying in the same tub, hearing the same kitchen noises, and yet completely free of hate. In fact, the sounds downstairs were almost exhilarating. Even the mental image of his wife’s sharp, too-intelligent face with its critical black eyes and short greying hair brought no distaste.
This change of attitude was caused by the fact that he knew now that Norma would not be with him much longer.
He knew this because last night he had decided exactly how and when he was going to kill her.
The thought of murder, flirted with at first and finally embraced as a lover, had lived with him so long that now it had become an old friend. In consequence, he felt no awe at what he had planned to do. No guilt, either. He had let himself forget the shabby motives which had made him lay siege to the plain, enterprising girl who had graduated with him from Pharmacy School and to whom he had never been really attracted. He had forgotten how convenient it had seemed at the time to have for a wife a fully trained pharmacist. He had even forgotten the attractions of her little inheritance which, combined with his, had been sufficient to buy a drug store and launch his career. He had never admitted that it had been due to her drive and slogging hard work that this career had reached a modest success.
He only knew that he, the handsome Harry Lund, was a figure of tragic suffering chained to a woman who had never appreciated him and whom he could never divorce.
Because he couldn’t divorce her. Half the drug store was her property. Even if he could scrape up enough money to pay her off, she would never sell. He knew that. The store was Norma’s whole life and she clung tenaciously to what she wanted.
Having endured so much, then, he viewed murder, this final gesture of rebellion, as almost heroic, certainly as courageous and manly.
And the courage would never have come if it hadn’t been for Frances. He realized that. It had been that chance, wonderful meeting with Frances on the bus which had released the true, virile Harry Lund from convention’s slavery. Frances was young, dainty, submissive, everything that Norma wasn’t. Frances was the type of girl that Harry Lund had deserved from life. And he was almost sure, if he played his cards right, he could get her.
A pleasurable tingle shivered his thickening body when he thought of Frances.
His plans were without flaw. He had gone over and over them in his mind, simplifying, perfecting, like an artist. From the beginning he had rejected drugs as too dangerous for a pharmacist. There were other ways.
“Harry!” Norma’s voice, perpetually husky from a smoker’s cough, rasped up the stairs.
“Coming, dear.” He was surprised at the cordial, almost saccharine tone of his own voice. He must be careful about that. He lumbered to his feet, water streaming off him. More crossly, more convincingly, he added, “Hold your horses, can’t you?”
As he dried himself, he studied his reflected body in the steam-stained mirror. Not bad for a man of forty-five. Bit of a paunch, maybe. But a gymnasium would soon fix that up. He concentrated on his face. Harry Lund had always been pleased with his face. Good teeth. Distinguished little moustache. Plenty of hair. Strong eyebrows over eyes that looked straight back at you.
Frances had remarked on his eyes only last week when he had snatched a few hours with her in a restaurant halfway between the city and the outlying suburb where she worked as librarian.
“It was your eyes I liked first. I noticed them right away when you picked up my books in the bus. They’re so sincere.”
A tiny chill of apprehension came. What would Frances think if she knew he was a married man? How fortunate that, on an adventurous whim, he had introduced himself under an assumed name. Frances was as trusting as she was innocent. She believed his story that he was a widowed salesman from upstate. She would go on believing him. After the thing was over, he could sell the house, the store. He could take Frances away, start a new life.
She need never know.
“For Pete’s sake,” called Norma. “What are you doing up there? Admiring yourself in the mirror?”
“Coming,” called Harry.
He smiled at his reflection so that he could see his firm white teeth.
Neatly dressed, he descended the stairs, thinking: In a few hours how different everything will be. The thought was so heady that he wanted to do something youthful, gay, whistle maybe, or slide down the banisters. He moved through the untidy little dining room into the kitchen. Norma, in the old pink robe, was hunched over frying eggs that hissed on the range. She turned, the cigarette drooping from her mouth, giving him that look of keen appraisal which always made him feel transparent.
“My, isn’t he beautiful this morning? How about being useful, too, and getting on to those dishes?”
Last night they had not washed the supper dishes. Usually Harry resented the unmanliness of having to work at a sink, but that sunny winter morning it almost pleased him for, as he started to rinse plates, he could look through the window and actually see the place where It Was Going to Happen.
The house was situated in a suburb, half developed before the war and still raw and unfinished, on top of a steep, barren hill. The house was completely his own. He had bought it with money surprisingly bequeathed by an obscure aunt. It was small, inconvenient, and he hated it. But real estate brought large prices these days. He would have no trouble in selling it for a profit.
As the dishes clattered, his study of the view outside was almost covetous. The snowfall of last week still clung to the landscape. It had frozen again during the night. He could just see the elbow of the sharp S-bend where the road swerved down the hillside to the city. Its surface was smooth with ice. An almost sheer drop slid away to the right. Suicide Bend, they called it. Every Sunday afternoon Norma took the car into town to visit with her married sister. A skid on that curve would mean certain death. Especially if the brakes on the ancient sedan were not too good.
Harry Lund was sure that, this particular Sunday afternoon, the brakes would not be too good.
In his mind he saw himself in becoming black, palely acknowledging the sympathy of the neighbors. “It’s terrible…. like losing my right hand … I’m going to sell everything … start again somewhere else.”
He began to hum under his breath as he piled wet dishes into the rack.
“Listen to him,” commented Norma. “Humming. So handsome, so happy this morning. What’s happened? Found yourself a beautiful girl friend?”
She laughed her hoarse laugh that was half a cough. There was sarcasm in the laugh, letting him know that she realized how improbable it was that any girl could be interested in a man of his age. An edge of the old hatred pushed up. Norma slammed a plate of fried eggs on the table.
“Come and get it, Don Juan. I guess someone has to feed that body beautiful.”
He left the sink and sat down obediently. She sat down opposite him, still smoking, stabbing at her eggs with a fork. She got up again for a house organ issued by some pharmaceutical firm and read while she ate. Norma studied all the new drug literature and, since she had written a couple of articles for The Pestle and Mortar, never tired of implying how little he did to keep up with modern medicine.
That was another reason …
Harry Lund’s hand was trembling slightly as he lifted his coffee cup. It wasn’t fear. It was excitement.
After they had cleaned up the kitchen, Norma settled in the living room with her house organ. Under the pretense of chopping wood, Harry slipped out to the garage. He had a knack for tinkering with the car and enjoyed it. He kept an old pair of denim overalls in the garage. He put them on and wormed his way under the car’s decrepit chassis. It took very little time to file the brake cable almost through. One violent application of the pedal would snap it. Almost certainly. And he knew Norma’s driving as well as his own—and the road. There was no need for brakes until the corner before Suicide Bend and there Norma always jammed them full on.
He took off his overalls, washed his hands in icy water from the faucet, picked up an armful of logs from the woodpile, and went back to the house.
Norma watched him from black, alert eyes over her magazine. “Domestic, too. All the virtues this morning.”
He crossed to the fireplace and stooped to lay down the logs. Behind him Norma’s voice came: “The roads are terrible, aren’t they? Think I should skip Ella?”
One of the logs clattered to the floor. He said with an evenness that made him proud of himself: “She’ll be expecting you, won’t she? You can’t get in touch with her by phone. If you don’t show up, she’ll be afraid you’ve had an accident.”
“I guess you’re right.” Norma laughed again, facetiously. “I might as well go, anyway. It’ll give you a chance to sneak in a date with your new girl friend….”
Harry Lund stood at the kitchen window. Cautiously he had eased the car out of the garage for Norma and left it headed down the road. He had seen her, in her old blue tweed coat, step into the car and drive away. He had run back to the kitchen. Any second now the car would come into view from the window, approaching Suicide Bend. His stomach was fluttering. A curious sensation. Almost as if he was drunk.
The afternoon sunlight beat down on the empty twist of road. Suddenly a car gleamed, Norma’s car. He saw it sweep into the bend, topple grotesquely for a second on the brink of the drop, and then plunge over. The sound of wrenched, rattling metal split the silence. A roar, a rumble, fainter as the car hurtled down, down.
He turned away from the window. He wanted to shout, to clap his hands, absurdly to call the boarding house where Frances lived and say: Marry me, darling. Marry me.
But he satisfied himself with a smile, the little curled sophisticated smile of an artist who knows that his job was well done.
He went into the living room and turned on the radio loud so that it would seem reasonable he had not heard the crash. He picked up the house organ Norma had been reading. Soon the neighbors would be coming. He would be ready for them.
The front-door buzzer rang shrilly. Harry Lund straightened his handsome red and blue tie and went to answer the door. Mrs. Grant, who lived down the street, stood on the threshold. She was panting.
“Mr. Lund, your wife … something happened to the car. It went over Suicide Bend.”
Harry Lund put up a hand to cover his fine eyes. “God, no. It’s not possible. I thought I heard something, but the radio …”
“All the way down,” panted Mrs. Grant. “I saw it. Right from the living-room window. Come.”
He was running after her through the snowy streets. At Suicide Bend a little group of neighbors was huddled at the roadside. Moaning his wife’s name, Harry Lund pushed through them and looked down. Far below in the bed of the valley he saw the car in flames, a twisted wreck of metal. He also saw two men stooped over some blue, half-visible object a little way down the sharp sloping side of the hill. A third man was scrambling away from them up the grade. He came to Harry and pumped his hand.
“She must have opened the door and thrown herself free. She’s unconscious, maybe hurt a little. But Doc Peterson’s down there and he says she’s all right, Mr. Lund. It’s a miracle. A miracle …”
It was a miracle. Norma had escaped with only a sprained ankle and a shock to her nervous system. The injury was not serious enough for the hospital, but Dr. Peterson confined her to bed for some weeks.
There was no suspicion of a fixed accident. Harry was almost sure of that. At first immense relief kept him from thinking of anything else. But gradually he began to realize that his whole life had become worse. Norma was a difficult patient, demanding constant attention. Her sister Ella, with four children, could offer no assistance. Harry had to hire an expensive day nurse. Without his wife to relieve him, he was obliged to stay all day at the drug store, snatching a sandwich lunch behind the counter. With his evenings enforcedly dedicated to Norma, there was no chance to see Frances.
He had called her once, feebly ascribing his elusiveness to a succession of business trips. For the first time, Frances’ voice had been chilly.
And to make matters worse, he had lost the car and the amount of insurance was much too small to buy a new one, even if a new one had been available. Each morning he had to get up two hours earlier to cook Norma’s breakfast before the nurse arrived, and then to trudge down the snow-slushy hill to take the trolley to the store.
But of all the resultant miseries, the new, inescapable intimacy with Norma was the most gruelling. The little house had only one bedroom. Constantly smoking, propped up in bed in the pink quilted robe, his wife bossed him, questioning, directing store policy, like a tart-tongued old empress. Something, maybe a half-realized sense of guilt, maybe a tacit admission of her greater strength of character, made him obey meekly. She developed a perverse habit of waking in the early dawn hours and sending him, sleep-stupefied, aching with cold and hatred, to the kitchen for orange juice or a glass of hot milk.
Christmas came, and in a burst of seasonal sentimentality, Norma insisted upon a tree in the bedroom. Harry had to drag it all the way up the icy hill and decorate it with colored balls and pretty little old-fashioned candles under a barrage of sarcastic criticism. The nurse demanded Christmas off. Harry Lund closed the drug store, cooked a turkey with the reluctant, neighborly help of Mrs. Grant, and served a meal, with gift-wrapped presents, to Norma in the bedroom. Norma was vivacious and, after domestic champagne, almost flirtatious.
That night Harry Lund knew that, however dangerous it might be, he was going to try to kill her again.
A trivial incident gave him his second idea. Norma was still in bed a few days after Christmas, but she could hobble around with the help of a cane. When she was in the bathroom, Harry came up from the kitchen to find that one of her inevitable cigarettes had rolled, still alight, from the ashtray and was smouldering perilously close to the low, tinder-dry branches of the tree.
Instinctively he stubbed it. But, as he did so, the idea sprang full-born into his mind.
The Retail Druggists’ Convention was giving a banquet in two days’ time. Norma knew about it and, always conscientious where anything professional was at stake, expected him to go. What if Norma, under the influence of a sedative, should drop asleep and leave a cigarette alight? What if a fire, a sudden, concentrated blaze in the bedroom, should break out while he was at the banquet? The house was insured. He had planned to sell it anyway.
Some sort of time-clock device was all he needed. His tinkerer’s mind solved that problem easily. He brought home a couple of cans of lighter fluid from the drug store. All he had to do was to stand one of the Christmas candles under the tree on some of the artificial moss saturated with lighter fluid. The candle would burn down and ignite the moss. The moss would ignite the tree.
Harry Lund felt his manhood returning. That night he smiled at his reflection in the mirror.
It smiled back, reassuringly handsome and decisive.
Half an hour before he was due to leave for the banquet, Harry Lund, spruce in a freshly pressed blue suit, heated milk in the kitchen and dissolved into the glass three strong hypnotic tablets. He carried the glass up to the bedroom.
“Thought you might like your milk before I left.”
“Why, how considerate he is.” Norma’s sharp black eyes studied him with mock admiration. “And doesn’t he look dashing tonight!”
She tossed her cigarette down on an ashtray and drank great draughts of the milk. He kept himself from watching her. He moved around the room pretending to tidy up.
“Want the window open, dear?”
“On a night like this? You might help me to the bathroom, though.”
When she came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, she was already staggering from sleep. She mumbled confusedly as he half-carried her back to the bed and tucked her in. Soon she turned over on her side and began to breathe deeply.
Carefully Harry Lund arranged his death-trap under the tree, the candle, just the right amount of artificial moss soaked in lighter fluid, at just the right position under a dry limb.
He lit the candle. Half an hour, maybe. Or more. An hour. The tree would flare up. The curtains would catch. In a matter of moments the room would be an inferno.
The little candle flame flickered as he tiptoed out of the room.
While he trudged down the hill to the trolley stop, Harry Lund thought of Frances’ young face flushed with love and gratitude as she unwrapped a prettily packed package.
“So you didn’t forget my Christmas present after all! Oh, Spring Lilac. My favorite perfume. You shouldn’t have done it. So expensive….”
The telephone call came just after the banquet had begun. That morning he had casually mentioned the banquet to Mrs. Grant so that the neighbors would know where to find him. It was Grant himself, announcing excitedly: “Come back at once, Lund! Your house is on fire!”
Feeling important from the drama around him, Harry Lund made breathless excuses and raced for a taxi. As it slithered up the icy hill, he saw fire engines and a milling crowd outside his house. He also saw that, though the flames seemed to be almost extinguished, the upper floor had been completely gutted.
Warm with dangerous excitement, he got out of the taxi. Someone grabbed his arm and started to pull him across the lawn to the next-door neighbor’s house. He found himself in a brightly lit living room. Norma was lying on a couch.
Someone was saying: “The smoke woke her up. She managed to crawl out just in time.”
Norma’s black eyes were fixed on his face, solemn with contrition.
“Harry, I’m so terribly ashamed. My vile habit of smoking in bed. I fell asleep and the cigarette must have set fire to the tree….”
The top floor of the house had been demolished, but downstairs there had been little or no damage. The agent from the insurance company did not question the legitimacy of the fire but let Harry know that the condition of the building warranted payment of less than a third of the total policy. With the increased cost of materials and labor, it would take almost all Harry’s savings to make his home habitable again.
Owing to the housing shortage, it was impossible to find another place to live. For a short, dismal period, Harry and Norma led a squalorous camping existence on the lower floor of the burnt-out house. Then, by a stroke of luck, their tenants above the drug store moved to another city and they were able to settle in the tiny two-room apartment there.
Norma could still walk only with difficulty and Dr. Peterson warned that the added shock of the fire should be neutralized by a long rest. But, taking on herself the full blame for the loss of their home, Norma refused to go away or stay in bed. As if in atonement she worked absurd hours in the store, hobbling around with a cane. A few weeks later she collapsed. Dr. Peterson diagnosed a heart condition, prescribed epinephrine, and put her back to bed.
For Harry Lund life had become grey and sour as the ashes of his destroyed bedroom. Twice, when Norma’s sister Ella dropped in, he was able to slip away and call Frances, but his excuses were even less convincing and her acceptance of them even more frigid. This was very different from his rosy dreams of Spring Lilac and the girl’s flushed gratitude.
Vain though he was of his attraction to women, Harry Lund realized that, unless something happened soon, he would lose Frances forever.
As disaster closed in from all sides, Harry Lund’s picture of himself as a martyr took on an immense vividness. Life was pummelling him with blows whose strength was out of all proportion to his deserts. And, in consequence, his determination to finish what he had started grew out of all proportion also. No scheme was too reckless for him to consider. Once, at the poison safe in the store, he made up a capsule of potassium cyanide. Only the weak vestiges of a self-preservation instinct kept him from spilling it that night into Norma’s bouillon.
But he kept the capsule always in his pocket. He would touch it frequently during the day. It became the one thing that was on his side.
And then the opportunity came. Harry Lund knew that only a man capable of daring and swift decision would have seen it as such. But then he was possessed of both qualities. One evening Norma had asked him to go round to her sister’s to borrow a book she wanted. Just before he was about to leave, she had an attack.
Epinephrine! As he looked down at his wife, convulsively gasping for breath in the bed, the name of the drug prescribed by Dr. Peterson seemed to quiver between him and Norma in great red letters. Norma kept ampoules of epinephrine and a hypodermic always by her bedside. Proud of her knowledgeability, she had told Dr. Peterson that, if she felt a new attack coming on, she would administer the injection herself. A double dose of epinephrine would certainly kill even Norma.
Who could be suspicious if his wife, alone in the room, had tried to counter an attack and had inadvertently overdosed herself? This was using drugs, but it was using them with a difference—creatively.
His fine eyes bright with self-approval, Harry Lund filled the hypodermic from two ampoules. Norma was in a half-coma. She seemed barely conscious of what was happening as he administered the injection.
Scrupulously Harry Lund wiped his fingerprints from the two empty ampoules and from the syringe. Holding the ampoules in his handkerchief, he brought them in contact with the limp fingertips of Norma’s left hand and then let them fall to the floor. With the handkerchief, too, he squeezed the syringe into Norma’s right hand and left it where it dropped.
Get out quickly. That was all he had to do, just in case there might be some question about the time of death. Hurry over to Ella’s house for a chat about the book Norma wanted.
When he shut the bedroom door, he seemed to be shutting a door forever on his misunderstood past.
Harry had a pleasant talk with Ella, extended through a cup of coffee and a piece of homemade cake. He knew Norma’s sister had never liked him, but that day he was so charming that he could see her visibly thaw.
With the book under his arm, he started back to the drug store. He had given the epinephrine plenty of time. During the next few days, he would need to do some clever acting, but Harry Lund was not worried. His exhibition with Ella had been flawless. He had always known that, if he had wanted to, he could have made a great success on the stage.
Already, as he climbed the drab stairs to the apartment, he had instinctively arranged his face for its necessary expression—the expression of a husband overwhelmed by the discovery of his wife’s lifeless body. He was so preoccupied rehearsing the phrases he would use over the phone to Dr. Peterson that he had opened the door and stepped into the bedroom before he was conscious of anything unusual.
Then, as he looked across at the bed, all traces of reality seemed to be sucked out of the world. Because Frances was there. He saw her standing, young, silent, very stiff, at the foot of the bed. She was watching Norma, who lay prostrate under the huddled bedclothes.
As he entered, Frances turned and looked at him. The look was one of unspeakable horror and disgust. He shook himself, staring stupidly. This was in his mind, some vile, cruel trick played by a treacherous imagination.
“Welcome home.” Norma’s voice sounded from the bed, cracked and weak, but with a ghost of its sarcasm. “Your girl friend just arrived. You poor fool, Harry Lund. Thought I didn’t know about her, didn’t you? I’ve known for weeks. A friend of Ella’s saw you together in a restaurant. It was easy enough to find out her name, where she lived.”
The words fell on him like hammer blows. But it was the horror of Norma’s being alive which completed his demoralization. He had pumped enough epinephrine into her to kill anybody. Could nothing kill her? His knees were like water. He tried to grope for some pattern—anything to remove this feeling of helplessness.
Norma’s black eyes were watching him sardonically. “I telephoned this poor girl because I thought I should explain. She’s not to blame, of course. Used an assumed name, didn’t you? Told her you were a widower.” A dreadful travesty of the hoarse laugh came. “Guess you thought you were—almost.”
She shifted her gaze to the white, rigid Frances. “Three times he tried. First he fixed the brakes of the car. Then he set fire to the house. And now—the epinephrine. He put in a lot of work to get you. You should be flattered.”
Harry Lund swung to Frances. Without any control, words spilled out. “Frances, listen to me. Please listen. It isn’t true. I didn’t …”
The icy contempt in her eyes checked him. There was a moment of silence, as awful to Harry Lund as a bomb explosion. Frances turned and walked to the telephone.
Her voice seemed to surge up through the silence. “The police. Get me the police.” And then: “Come quickly. There’s been an attempted murder at …”
Despair brought Harry Lund absolute clarity. He saw, in all its truth, how pitifully bungled had been his great design. He had lost his car, his house, and now he had lost his girl. The police inevitably would trace the damning connection between the three “accidents.” Norma was there as a living testimony against him and, with tormenting irony, Frances would be her witness.
His predicament was without remedy. Somehow, its enormity destroyed in him the worm of fear. His plan had been a magnificent failure. Perhaps that was what his destiny had always been. A magnificent failure. Hadn’t all the outstanding figures of tragedy been overwhelmed in the closing scene?
The actor in him rose to its greatest moment. Frances would see him, at least once, as he really was. He felt exalted, high above the pettiness of Harry Lund, druggist. His hand moved to his pocket and closed around the cyanide capsule.
He walked nonchalantly to the bathroom, entered it, and locked the door.
Norma Lund bustled cheerfully around the drug store, which was now entirely her own. Although she had been bored with her husband for years, some vestige of pity for him still remained. But Norma was a sensible woman with little sympathy for a fool. And that had been Harry’s trouble. He had always been a fool.
True, she’d had her own moments of folly. She had only realized that her husband had fixed the brakes a few seconds before the car had toppled over the ravine. Her foolishness had almost cost her her life then. But, once she knew he had tried to kill her and would almost certainly try again, she had made no mistake.
She had rather enjoyed lying in bed, bullying him and keeping him from seeing that girl. It served him right. Later, when she had tasted the sleeping draught in the hot milk, it had been simple to take amphetamine as an antidote in the bathroom. While she pretended sleep she had watched and almost admired Harry’s device of the candle and the saturated moss. She had felt a certain pleasure in seeing his house burn, too.
Perhaps she should have gone to the police then. It had been a risk, she supposed, to carry the farce on longer. But, because Harry was a fool, it had not been a dangerous one. The first sham heart attack, artificially induced by digitalis, had fooled even Dr. Peterson. The second attack, which had been sheer acting coupled with the planted props of the hypodermic and the epinephrine ampoules filled with sterile water, had seemed to her too obvious a trap even for Harry. But he had lumbered into it like an ox and provided enough evidence to convict him a dozen times over.
Mrs. Grant came into the store for a toothbrush and a bottle of mouthwash. She greeted Norma warmly. Since Harry’s suicide, everyone had been particularly kind.
While she reached for the mouthwash, Norma was wondering whether Harry would have killed himself if Frances had not been present during those final moments of his humiliation. Perhaps, by introducing Frances, she had in a way turned from murderee to murderer.
But it was foolish to speculate. Things had gone well for her.
Mrs. Grant was saying: “It’s really wonderful the way you manage to run this place all by yourself.”
“I do my best.” Norma Lund briskly wrapped up the mouthwash. “But sometimes it’s hard for a woman all on her own….”