Another Woman's House Read Online Free PDF Page A

same room—incredibly beautiful in her wedding gown, the misty lace of her veil framing her face, pearls at her white throat, her soft brown eyes luminous and young. At first she had wondered why it was not removed. Pride in his name on Richard’s part? Then, as time went on, she grew accustomed to it. She failed to see it. And, as a matter of fact, the room in which it hung was almost never, now, in use.
    Richard said, “My mother’s portrait used to hang here, over the mantel. I used to come to this room when I’d be at home from school. My father would summon me once during each vacation, question me about school reports and life in general in a very brisk and businesslike way, then, having discharged his duties as a father, he’d pour me a small glass of sherry and rub his mental hands together in a sort of satisfied way and sit down for a man-to-man visit. He was”—he paused, and the fire crackled and Richard said again, half smiling—“he was a nice guy.”
    He put his glass on a table near by, beside the great bowl of yellow daffodils. He lighted a cigarette and went back to stand before the fire.
    â€œThis room, of course, was different then. Ugly, I suppose, great heavy cases of books with glass doors; furniture that had drifted in from the rest of the house—stiff, old—a roll-top desk was there, and a couch—black leather with a rolled head. This fireplace had a dark fumed oak mantel. There were no French doors, but a couple of narrow windows. The terrace was there and, of course, the view. But it was very different.”
    His voice was different too, no longer rather tender and musing. It, like his face, seemed to change and close in upon itself whenever some word or thought led to Alice. And, of course, Alice had made the changes in the house. Alice who had been a perfect wife. Alice with her perfect taste for beauty, her perfect housekeeping. Alice who had been perfect at everything except in one instance.
    Richard said suddenly, looking directly at Myra, “What I started to say is that this is my home. Nothing can change that. Not even”—he took a breath of smoke and said—“not even murder.”
    Myra’s hand was digging into the ruby-red arm of her chair. The word was out, the word that all of them knew, and could not escape, that had made itself an inextricable part of the house, that had taken up its dreadful residence within those walls, and yet that none of them ever spoke. The one instance of Alice’s imperfection.
    She had been startlingly imperfect about murder.
    Richard said, in a matter of fact way which was too terse and too matter of fact, “People asked me if I intended to stay here. Naturally there was nothing else to do. This is my home. These are my friends. Why should I leave?”
    Suddenly Myra remembered the day Alice was sentenced—that final, terrible day. It was autumn by then, the trial had dragged along for months. Aunt Cornelia had broken her hip, ironically, the week before the murder, ironically, again, she had emerged from blitzes in London only to slip on a wet flagstone of her peaceful country garden in Devonshire. It was months before she could be moved to a wheel chair, months more before she was permitted by either doctors or priority needs to return to America and Richard. On the day of the final sentence she had been still in a nursing home in the country, waiting for a cable. Myra had brought it to her; Myra had had to read it: “Sentence life imprisonment. Thorne.”
    She had not known then that terrible and tragic though that message was, it would actually one day so drastically affect her own life.
    She had sent Aunt Cornelia’s reply, too. “I am coming as soon as I can. My love always. Cornelia Carmichael.”
    The silence had lengthened, as if the mention of Alice had imposed it, like a finger at their lips. Richard was frowning, looking at the lilies of