Strange Sisters Read Online Free PDF Page B

had become a focal point because death had given it a sudden significance. And though it was almost incredible, this massive action which would, before it ground to its end, consume thousands of dollars and man-hours, was solely directed toward the detection and apprehension of a damned and frightened fragment of society just twenty-two years of age. Of her, Kathy Gait.
    Lying in bed, reluctant to resume physical participation in a menacing world, she thought that it was a long way from ten to murder. A long, long way from a child with no hope to a woman who realized it. How long, actually? Twelve years? No more than a mere dozen years? How many days would that be? She tried to multiply it in her head, but she'd never had much of a head for arithmetic, and she lost her way between digits. It didn’t matter, anyhow. What mattered was that you could learn a lot in twelve years, a lot that should never have been learned. Even more important, you could fail to learn a lot that you should have learned. She wondered if, after all, it could really be reduced to such a splendid simplicity—the development of an adequate balance between a proper ignorance and approved learning.
    Reluctantly, working back in reverse order of events, she began to examine again the disastrous night. She remembered the steps she had taken to remove all evidence of her presence in the apartment, but there might, of course, be evidence of a kind that she could not affect. Suppose, for example, that Angus Brunn had confided in a third person that he was cultivating a certain Kathy Gait. This wouldn't actually tie her to the murder, but it would at least establish a relationship with Brunn. It would make her subject to an investigation which would entail consequences, quite apart from murder, that were unpleasant to contemplate. More than that, however, suppose someone had seen her entering the apartment with Brunn, or had seen her leaving later alone.
    So she came by association to the cab driver. The one who had delivered Brunn and her to the apartment house from the night club. Whether the driver could identify her, or would come forward to do it even if he could, was something she couldn't know. But he became an additional factor in the sum of terror, one more menace in a world that bristled with them.
    She lifted her hands and, looking at them, retched suddenly. Sickness churned in her stomach, rose bitterly in her throat. The tips of the fingers of her right hand, she saw, were pink-tinged, and she remembered coming in last night, undressing and going to bed without washing or making any toilet whatever. The pink on her fingers was the stain of Angus Brunn's blood. Bringing the hand closer to her eyes, she saw under the nail of the middle finger a dried shred of flesh. Two of the nails were torn badly near the quick.
    Now she was really sick. Getting out of bed, she went into the bathroom and stood over the commode, leaning forward and bracing herself against the water closet. Her stomach heaved, forcing up the watery fluid that was all it contained. When the spasm had exhausted itself, she turned to the sink and ran it full of water as hot as she could bear. She lathered her hands and rinsed them several times and then stood for a moment longer with clear water from the tap running over them.
    Standing there, her eyes caught the reflection of her face in the small mirror on the medicine cabinet, and she lowered them quickly to her hands under the running water. She hardly knew what terrible metamorphosis she had expected in her appearance, perhaps a gross distortion of features to symbolize depravity, but the unchanged slender face with rather sad eyes below a tangle of short brown hair, a childish face, really, was a genuine shock. Untouched by her inner corruption, it seemed to her the ultimate horror.
    Her hands scoured, she returned to the bedroom and dressed. Her empty stomach ached dully, and she began to think longingly of the comfort of hot