The Tunnel Page 19

  Natalie hummed under her breath. She was ready for them now. They could pull anything they liked.

  But when she saw him, the blood drained from her face. She was nothing but a pair of eyes, staring …

  He sat alone, Mr. Robert Helms, civilian, at a white-clothed table, two diagonally removed from Mona and Trevil. He had turned his back to her so that she would not see him at once. His right arm moved nonchalantly, forking food from the plate she could not see to his mouth she could not see. Occasionally he drank from his glass of water, occasionally he lifted his napkin and dabbed neatly at his lips, which she knew were curved in a triumphant smile.

  When he had finished eating, she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that he would turn slowly to face her. This time he would certainly face her, deliberately, and he would look at her with his unrecognizing eyes. This was the end.

  Somehow, somehow they were at last all together in this room. It was ironic that the four of them should be here, drawn by the invisible web of Bob’s careful planning; and yet, she saw at once, they had to be. This was no misty encounter at a duck pond, to leave her confused and uncertain. This was the real thing, the crisis she had foreseen. Today, someone was going to win the game.

  Her plate of crabs, bubbling and sizzling, was set before her.

  I have to eat them, she told herself fiercely. I’ve got to play this thing out to the finish. I’ll think what to do while I’m eating, and I won’t notice anything.

  I am eating, she told herself, a steak.

  But the amazing part of it was that the crabs had no taste at all. She might have been eating charcoal. For Natalie was thinking harder than she ever thought in her life.

  She would have to checkmate.

  This time, she would see that he really died.

  He would have a nice funeral; he would be laid to rest in a standard coffin, flowers would be draped upon the coffin, songs would be sung, and, perhaps, Crossing the Bar would be read by the minister. “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” the minister would intone, and Bob Helms, under the well-screwed-down lid, would be consigned to the earth where he belonged.

  She would have to take a chance on someone’s seeing her, but if she worked expertly, no one would notice a thing. He might not even slump in his chair. The wickedly pointed shaft of her old-fashioned hat pin, six inches long and as slim as a needle, would go in very quickly. He would feel something like the bite of a mosquito. People very often did not die for hours after they had been stabbed with something like her hat pin; she had read a story in which the victim had not even known he was walking around with the instrument of death sticking out of his back. He might even pay his bill and be out of the restaurant before he collapsed. But when he turned slowly to face her, he would be surprised and chagrined that she had gone …

  Natalie toyed with the idea of killing Mona as well, thus defeating everyone in one fell swoop. But no, there was only one hat pin and the knives before her were dull. One was enough. With Bob gone, at last, she would have the courage to deal with Mona in her own coin.

  Natalie gloved her right hand, pulled the hat pin out, and wiped its ornate head with her napkin. She wasn’t such a fool as to leave fingerprints. She called for her check, left a tip for the waiter, and gathered her purse and other glove. She must not do anything out of the way, or leave anything undone.

  Her hand, concealed in her wide green pocket, gripped her weapon. She slid out of the booth, and walked toward Bob’s back, her eyes fixed on the exact spot on the dark blue serge where the point would enter.

  She was almost upon him when he rose in one swift movement and faced her. The eyes she saw were blank and indifferent, the eyes of a man who has just finished his lunch and wants to get back to his office. She did not know his eyes, nor his face. It was not Bob at all.

  At the same time that she arrested her clenched fist in its upward movement from her pocket, she heard Trev’s call.

  She turned to him helplessly. He was again a lighthouse on a battered coast. She saw his face, twisted with anxiety and concern. She managed to slump into the chair he held for her.

  She heard herself saying faintly, “I went to your office but you’d already gone. Isn’t it odd we should all have come to the same restaurant?”

  “You’ve eaten?” The most commonplace of common places, his worried eyes belying the matter-of-factness of his tone. “Nat, why didn’t you tell me you were coming in today?”

  “I decided after you’d gone.” She turned to Mona. “Mona, isn’t it funny, our coming to the same place? Isn’t it?” She must sweep away the seeds of suspicion; Mona must never know …

  Mona’s eyes were direct. “Very,” she said. “Very funny indeed, darling.” She held out a shining object of glass. “Fix yourself, Natalie. Your hat’s come loose.”

  “Yes,” said Natalie, looking into the thing she now recognized as a mirror. “I see it has.”

  What in the world had happened to her hat pin? She sat there, puzzled. Several minutes passed before she realized where it was, why it was there, and what she had meant to do with it.

  The buzzing in her ears had stopped.

  The crisis was over.

  The danger had fled.

  You must write the truth to dispel the fears, for a writer knows what he is writing.

  She had turned her friends into enemies, but now she knew they were really friends.

  She had tried to murder a shadow, and almost murdered a living man.

  The world was trying to minder shadows. Why in the name of the living God of whom Cam had spoken, wouldn’t the world try to find the truth as she had found it, just in time?

  It was the world that was going blindly through the tunnel, not Natalie Sherrett. It had scooped her in like a mail sack hooked in passage, but the truth and her mind could save her.

  Now that she recognized this fact, most of her fears were forever gone.

  Chapter 33

  It had happened on a Saturday, one of those blue and orange October days that Natalie loved. She and Trev had taken a long walk after lunch, tramping through the woods, stopping to talk to people they met. She remembered especially vividly the smell and the feeling of the day; the smokey bitterness of burning leaves, the sweetness of pine needles crushed underfoot, the cidery tang of the brisk air. There was a feeling of bustle even among the lonely, peaceful trees; a digging-in for the winter. You could picture the fat hams hanging in the smoke-houses, the neat rows of canned provender on the cellar shelves, the stacks of firewood in the lean-tos.

  “We’ll have a fire when we get home,” Trev promised.

  “And nice pretty highballs.” Natalie gave a little skip. She never tired of looking forward to the two of them being together and alone. Since Mrs. Sherrett had died Natalie had felt like a small child suddenly given the freedom of the house. A little guilty, but pleased with everything. Just she and Trev, able to do whatever they liked without the eyes of a third party forever weighing and judging.

  “Round after round, darling. And I myself will cook the dinner in the chafing dish.”

  “Your cheese thing. Wonderful. Let’s hurry.”

  It was late when they got back; it was the time that afternoon changes to evening and visibility is low because of the darkening mists of October. The eyes play tricks at that time of day, and ghosts are more apt to rise then than in the dead silence of night.

  Anything can happen in the early twilight of October.

  The good fire was crackling on the hearth. Trev was whistling under his breath, arranging his ice bucket and his tongs and bottles and glasses on the low table before the davenport, so, he said, “we won’t have to make an unnecessary move. I feel lazy as sin. I want to sit here and look at you, Nat, with your rosy cheeks.”

  “You’re the picture of health yourself,” she retorted absently, for she was watching a strange car come in the driveway. She paused in the act of drawing the rosy velvet portières. Later, she could not remember the faintest chill of
warning, only annoyance that something would have to be attended to before they could begin their lazy evening.

  “Headlights,” said Trev. “The devil. Who is it, anyway, Nat?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen the car before. It’s got—yes, it’s got California license plates.”

  “He’s lost his way. I’ll go outside and see. You couldn’t resist asking the poor cold wayfarer in for a drink, darling.”

  Natalie smiled after him. “Tonight,” she said to herself, “I wouldn’t hesitate to shut the door in the face of your chess-playing pal, Dr. Cameron O.”

  She turned her attention to the car, which had stopped before the house. It was a battered black hulk, sprayed with dust and rain spots, but somehow rakish. It was a lot like the car Bob had picked up in Los Angeles. Natalie gave herself a good shake. A great many cars looked exactly the same; that was the miracle of production lines. Almost four years after Bob’s death, the time for thinking of him was in church on Sundays and at odd sentimental moments during the day. It had been a long time since anything had reminded her forcibly of him; she had not known him long enough for many poignant memories to catch her.

  Though she didn’t want whoever was in the car to see her standing foolishly in the window staring out through folds of velvet, something mesmerized her there so that she seemed unable to drop the heavy curtains and turn away.

  She heard the front door close behind Trev and watched him walk toward the automobile. As he drew abreast of it, the driver’s door opened and a man’s face peered out.

  If Trev had happened to glance at Natalie through the window then, he would have been frightened at her whiteness. Only her hand, clenched on the strong velvet till the knuckles showed through under the thin skin, kept her from falling.

  She fought back to sanity. “I’m seeing things,” she told herself over and over; yet she could not stop from peering through the half-light, half-dark; she could not take her eyes off the man’s shadowy face. There he smiled, there he lifted his head. Those were memories that clutched. No two men were ground out with the merciless uniformity of the production line that could produce hundreds of cars exactly alike. She had good eyes; she had never leaned toward mysticism, she was not and never had been a prey to dreams and imaginings.

  What she was thinking could simply not be true, and yet it was; she knew it with a knowledge that transcended reason. As she recognized Trevil, so she knew the other …

  He did not look toward her once. That in itself was convincing proof that he wanted her to see him, for he must have seen her as he came up the drive; he must have willed her to be at the window. Any normal person would have glanced at her from time to time, wondering why she bothered to stand there like a waxen figure.

  She wrenched her eyes to Trev. He seemed to find nothing wrong. He was talking easily, pointing to the road that led down past the orchard and over the tracks. With final nods from both, the car door slammed, the wheels turned. Trevil, his hands in his pockets, walked toward the house again. For one transfixed moment, headlights played upon her, outlining her shrinking body. They seemed to strike against her now blinded eyes with hypnotic effect.

  When they fell away, her hand loosed its hold on the curtains. The dull striking of metal weights on the floor struck a similar note in her heart, the walking thud of the music sound track in a movie thriller.

  Trev came in, exuding fresh air and disgust. “Don’t know if the guy heard a word I said!” He made for the davenport, not noticing that Natalie was still standing stiff and frightened by the window. “He was plastered, so drunk he could hardly talk.”

  She wanted to say: “He’s not used to talking. He’s probably just … got back.” But you couldn’t say a thing like that to your husband, because you couldn’t explain it. Trev would certainly think she was crazy if she tried to explain it, or that she had sampled the bottle too freely while he’d been outside.

  She had been mistaken to think that she and Trev were going to be left alone now. She had ridden her good luck too far. Not that she considered Mrs. Sherrett’s dying good luck, but she had forgotten the rule. You could not take happiness too much for granted. She had always felt guilty about the happiness she’d found in being married to Trev, had always felt that she should perhaps have clung to the memory of Bob a little longer …

  She was tasting madness, and only one thing saved her: the cleansing subconscious knowledge that what was happening was not actually true.

  She must write that down a million times, stay after school for hours—or years if need be—burn it unforgettably into her mind, as a hundred teachers from out of her childhood, dealing with less important facts, had made her do, writings on the blackboard of her memory.

  “Columbia is the capital of South Carolina.”

  “Fifty times, now, Natalie, and then you may go home.”

  “Bob Helms is dead. He was killed overseas.”

  “I did not see him by the pond.”

  “I did not see him yesterday.”

  “He was not outside in a car just now.”

  “I have not seen him, dead or alive, since he left me in San Francisco saying, ‘I’ll come back some day wherever you are. They’ll never take you from me, for, living or dead, I’ll find you.’”

  She must carve those sentences into her brain, keep them ineradicably legible in her own clear rounded hand. Press down until the pen point sputters, or the soft chalk breaks in two.

  “I love my husband and he loves me.”

  “I do not wish to kill him.”

  “He has never tried to poison me.”

  “I have never tried to poison him.”

  The more you write them, the clearer they become, for the longer you thought of things that were good, the nearer you came to the end of the tunnel, dispelling the darkness of ignorance.

  She would never forget that Columbia was the capital of South Carolina. She had been there and tested that truth for herself.

  Suppose she wrote down fifty times: “The man who was killed at the tunnel’s mouth was not Bob Helms come back to haunt me.”

  She might begin to believe it, but unless she went back to check for herself would she ever know it was true?

  Chapter 34

  The Sherritt house in west Kenwood stood on a hill. From the window of her bedroom, Natalie Sherrett could look down over the now uncultivated orchard of gnarled old apple trees and glimpse a section of the Kenwood and Northern railroad tracks in the valley below.

  Natalie, during her three years of marriage to Trevil, had learned to gauge accurately the length of time that it took a train to come through the tunnel.

  At night the whistles spelled loneliness, sometimes dragging her unwillingly from bed, to stand at the window and watch for the demonic glare of the firebox and the sparks which shot up from the smokestack of the outmoded locomotive.

  There were nights when fog drifted up from the valley to net the orchard in gray. There were nights when the moon concealed its brightness behind soft clouds and spread the orchard with an illusion of snow.

  The gray was treacherous, coloring one’s thinking with drabness which might easily turn to despair. The snow, if watched and studied too long, could chill one’s mind until warmth of the heart was frozen and love grew cold.

  The whistle sounded at its clearest when both were present, fog and snow. Through such a night, unreality prevailed. Two screaming longs followed by two staccato shorts—tooot-tooot, toot-toot—became an onomatopoeic warning driving tragedy before it up the hill.

  First the sparks belched skyward, branding the dark-ness until snuffed like the dying display of a falling rocket. Next the valley was bright for a second, lighted by the crimson glare of an opened firebox door. Then the sparks and the glare were swallowed and the lonely lights were the ones that danced in Natalie’s eyes, lights that came from within.

  Lights that came from all of time: eyes flashing green with jealousy; the glint of sun on a blue-backed crab; t
he sanguinary red of a battery lantern stored in the attic; the cold scintillations of rays from a diamond ring.

  Lights full of danger and heartache: a bathroom bulb glowing dully on a dozen brown bottles of poison; the light that was slowly dying in the eyes of Mother Sherrett; the murky light of a rainy day making a crumpled telegram more yellow; a naked bulb in a station.

  Swatches. Patches. Men in khaki. Men in blue. Men in business gray.

  How could she sort a million lights, know which were real and which were false?

  Life would be much easier if she entered the tunnel and made up her mind to stay in its comforting blackness.

  But the tunnel could never hide the real lights. The pledge of love in Bob Helms’ eyes as he said he would return must always be with her. Every fog must drift aside to give a view of other lights on San Francisco Bay. The nights when mist and snow combined, as long as she lived, would restore the picture of headlights and tail-lights rushing to destruction down the hill.

  She saw them now, blurred in the outside moisture, yellowing the road of packed-down snow, taking the curves at breakneck speed, travelling to death with all of Bob Helms’ skill.

  “Trevil. Trevil!” She thought she called, but no voice echoed throughout the house, or filled the room. Yet out in the orchard the branch of an ice-laden tree cracked sharply.

  The report sent out a bullet of fear that drove itself into Natalie’s body, a bullet of ice. Melting, it filled her veins with water. She left her post at the window and started to run, driven not by human muscles, but by the shaking force of an overwhelming chill.

  Her heart was light, for she knew that train and car must meet. The man was Bob. She had seen him loitering at the pond, eating in the restaurant, pestering Trevil with drunken questions.

  He had no right to haunt her life, threaten to turn her toward murder, rob her of Trevil’s children, condemn her to an empty life that no one else but Robert Helms could fill.

  She must do her best to save him, strain every limb and nerve to the breaking. Otherwise he would come again, mocking her for her paltry efforts and lack of speed, laughing as he drove his car down the winding road.