Gentle Murderer Read Online Free PDF Page A

Flaherty said and did so, resolving never again to pick up a telephone where she was working.
    She drew the blinds in the living room, thinking about the incident. The clerk was on to Miss Gebhardt. She probably slipped him a dollar now and then. She was generous. That much you had to say for her. By the clerk’s tone, he recognized the caller. She had excuse enough to go in and rouse the sleeper, she reasoned, or to pretend to that intention. The clerk could tell who it was that called, she might say, and it sounded terribly important.
    With that resolve she went to the bedroom door and knocked, softly at first, and then with deliberation. Slowly, from things she had read in the papers, she began to think of sleeping powders. Panic rose as she pounded on the door.
    She flung it open then and saw again the slippered feet, glittering in the half-light as though there were more life in the shoes than in the feet which still lay stiffly as she had first seen them from the bathroom door. There was a sickening odor to the room, partly perfume and partly an acrid dankness. Mrs. Flaherty tiptoed a few steps toward the bed. It seemed at first that Miss Gebhardt’s auburn hair was flung all over the pillow and that she was lying face down. But her toes were pointing upward.
    Mrs. Flaherty’s knees betrayed her in the instant she realized that she had seen all there was left of Miss Gebhardt’s face. She crawled from the room, moaning hoarsely. It was not until she reached the foyer that she found her legs and her voice. Then she ran screaming into the hall.

6
    W AITING UNTIL HER MOTHER left for church, Katerina Galli went upstairs to change her dress. It was late morning and Tim had not come down yet. But with her ear tuned to every sound from his room she was aware that he had been up for some time. The other boarders were unwilling to miss a meal even on Sunday. At nine o’clock they sat down to bacon and eggs, and now, nearly two hours later, the smell of the bacon had seeped through the whole house. There was not enough air stirring to carry it outdoors.
    Before dressing, Katie made her own bed and then her mother’s in the front room. For an instant there, folding the spread over the huge bed, she remembered the times she had climbed into it beside her father when she was a little girl. She could even remember the smell of sleep about him, although she could no longer remember his face except as it smiled at her from the picture on the dresser. He had died when she was eight years old. Looking on the smooth bed now and seeing the two hollows in it, one much deeper than the other, she wondered what her mother thought about as she lay there night after night. What was remembering like when you could remember a lifetime? What was it like sleeping alone in the bed, waking up at night and putting your hand to the empty place?
    A sound from the end of the hall hastened her from the room. Outside it, she slackened her, pace so as not to be caught in her haste to see him. He was half-way down the stairs when she reached the railing.
    “Good morning, Tim,” she called.
    He turned and smiled up at her. “Hello, Katie.”
    “There’s coffee all made on the stove if you want me to warm it up.”
    “Thanks. I’ll do it.”
    She wanted very much to do it for him, to be invited to have a cup with him, but she was too proud to admit it. He had waited until everyone was gone from the house except her. He might have waited a few minutes longer and she would have been gone too. It was enough for her that he was content in that. She dressed, listening on her way between her room and the bathroom to know if he was still in the kitchen. In spite of her pride she timed herself to go downstairs as he was coming from the kitchen.
    “Going to church?” she asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Me too.”
    “Then we can go together,” he said matter-of-factly.
    She had forgotten her missal and beads, but she would pray on her fingers rather than go back