Phantom lady Read Online Free PDF Page A

Covered up com-pleteh' from head to foot, with just a stray wisp or two of curly hair escaping up at the top, like bronze foam.
He'd stopped short. A look of white consternation crossed his face. "She's—she's done something to herself! Oh, the little fool—!" He glanced fearfully at the nightstand between the two beds, but there was nothing on it, no drinking glass or small bottle orprescription box.

    He took sagging steps over to the bedside. He leaned down, touched her through the coverlet, found her rounded shoulder, shook it questioningly. "Marcella, are you all right—?"
    They'd come in past the doorway after him. Vaguely he had an impression everything he did was being watched, being studied. But he had no time for anyone, anything but her.
    Three pairs of eyes in a doorway, watching. Watching him fumble with a blue satin coverlet. His hand whipped down a narrow triangular corner of it.
    There was a hideous, unbelievable moment, enough to scar his heart for life, while she grinned up at him. Grinned with a cadaverous humor that had become static. Her hair was rippling about her on the pillows in the shape of an open fan.
    Hands interfered. He went backward, draggingly. a step at a time. A flicker of blue satin and she was gone again. For good, forever.
    "I didn't want this to happen." he said brokenly. "This wasn't what I was looking for—"
    Three pairs of eyes exchanged glances, jotted that down in the notebooks of their minds.
    They took him out into the other room and led him over to a sofa. He sat down on it. Then one of them went back and closed the door.
    He sat there quietly, shading his eyes with one hand as though the light in the room was too strong. They didn't seem to be watching him. One stood at the window, staring out at nothing. The other was standing beside a small table, leafing through a magazine. The third one was sitting down across the room from him, but not looking at him. He was prodding at one of his fingernails with something, to clean it. The way he pored over it. it seemed the most important thing in the world to him at the moment.
    Henderson took his shielding hand away presently. He found himself looking at her wing of the photograph port-

    folio. It slanted his way. He reached over and closed it.
    Three pairs of eyes completed a circuit of telepathic communication.
    The ceiling of leaden silence began to come down closer, to weigh oppressively. Finally the one sitting across from him said, "We're going to have to talk to you."
    "Will you give me just a minute more, please?" he said wanly. "I'm sort of shaken up—"
    The one in the chair nodded with considerate understanding. The one by the window kept looking out. The one by the table kept turning the pages of a woman's magazine.
    Finally Henderson pinched the corners of his eyes together as if to clear them. He said, quite simply, "It's all right now. You can begin."
    It began so conversationally, so offhandedly, it was hard to tell it had even begun at all. Or that it was anything but just a tactful chat to help them fill in a few general facts. "Your age, Mr. Henderson?"
    "Thirty-two."
    "Her age?"
    "Twenty-nine."
    "How long were you married?"
    "Five years."
    "Your occupation?"
    "I'm in the brokerage business."
    "About what time did you leave here tonight, Mr. Henderson?"
    "Between five-thirty and six,"
    "Can you come a little closer than that?"
    "I can narrow it for you, yes. I can't give you the exact minute the door closed after me. Say. somewhere between quarter of and five of six. I remember I heard six o'clock striking when I'd gotten down as far as the corner, from the little chapel over in the next block."
    "I see. You'd already had your dinner?"
    "No." A split second went by. "No—I hadn't."

    "You had your dinner out, in that case."
    "'I had my dinner out."
    "Did you have your dinner alone?"
    "I had my dinner out, without my wife."
    The one by the table had come to the end of the magazine. The one by the window had come