What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Read Online Free PDF Page B

pleasantly, something modern and bright with sunlight. Something, in short, quite different from this gloomy old place.
    Blanche saw suddenly that her disillusionment with the past, the disillusionment engendered by the old movies, had its constructive side, too. In death there could also be rebirth. And then, her eye caught by the sight of a movement from the house directly below, she leaned forward again to the window. As she did so, one of the French doors at the side of the house swung fully open, and the new owner stepped out into the bright sunlight, dressed, as usual, for gardening, in a smock and a wide-brimmed straw hat. Mrs. Bates. That was the woman’s name, though Blanche couldn’t remember just at the moment where she had learned it. Mrs. Bates from Iowa.
    Almost daily for close to three months now Blanche had watched her new neighbor as she moved about down below, weeding, raking, turning the sun-warmed soil, putting in the new bulbs and plants, taking out the old. There was something almost dedicated in the way the woman went about her work, and Blanche had vicariously enjoyed sharing this labor of love with her. Indeed, she had come to feel a kind of kinship with this woman, this Mrs. Bates, though she had never exchanged a glance or a word with her and probably never would. As the woman moved farther out into the garden, Blanche reached out to the grillwork to pull herself up for a better view. But then, hearing a sound behind her, she dropped her hand and looked back into the room.
    “Excuse me, Miss Blanche…”
    As Blanche’s eyes adjusted to the inner dimness of the room, the angular, raw-boned figure in the doorway swam into view. Today was Friday. Mrs. Stitt’s cleaning day. Blanche had forgotten.
    “Come on in, Edna,” she said cheerfully. “You want to start in here?”
    And then, looking more closely into Mrs. Stitt’s florid, practical face, she saw couched in the level eyes the glint of some extraordinary consternation. Reaching out, she pulled her chair away from the window and out farther into the room.
    “Is there something the matter?”
    It was a needless question. For three years now Mrs. Stitt had arrived faithfully every Friday morning to clean, change the linens and help Jane with the week’s heavy cooking. In that time Blanche had learned that it was a point of professional pride with Edna Stitt to maintain, in the face of even the worst sort of adversity, a calm and unruffled exterior; it took a considerable provocation to excite from her any open demonstration of annoyance. It was for this reason, then, that Blanche now regarded Mrs. Stitt with a sharp sense of apprehension as she stood there in the doorway pressing her hands down flatly over her heavy-duty cleaning apron in an unmistakable gesture of restrained agitation.
    “What is it, Edna?”
    With a final flush of indignation Mrs. Stitt came forward into the room. Offering no word of explanation she removed something from her apron pocket and thrust it forward. In bewilderment Blanche saw before her a thick packet of letters bound together with a heavy rubber band.
    “Here!” said Mrs. Stitt.
    Taking the letters, Blanche looked up, her eyes wide with questioning. “But what——?”
    Mrs. Stitt had now gone quite pale but she determinedly stood her ground. “I could be wrong,” she said with trembling bravado, “and I may be way out of line.… Miss Blanche, if there’s anything in this world I don’t want to do it’s to cause you any kind of trouble, but—you just look at those—if you don’t mind—and you tell me if you ever saw them before. I—I just want to know, that’s all.…”
    Looking down at the letters, Blanche saw, with a slight touch of surprise, that the one on top was addressed to her. Stripping away the band, she spread them out on her lap. They had all been written to her. One of them, she saw, was marked
Personal.
She saw, too, that the one on top had been opened.
    Blanche looked up at