Into The Night Read Free Page A

unmistakably obvious. She, Madeline, had tried to kill herself. She had been unable to do so. She had killed Starr instead.
    Starr had died for her.
    Therefore, she would live for Starr.
    But how?
    Starr, she thought, I wanted to die because my life had no purpose. Now I can find a purpose in living for you, and you can go on living through me. But for God's sake, who are you? What kind of life did you have, Starr? Starr, I don't know you at all!
    "I suppose I should rent her room," the landlady said. "I guess I will, soon as I get around to it. I been sort of waiting for someone to come for her things, but I guess that's not going to happen. I haven't had the heart to pack up her things and send them. Long as her room's the way she left it, it's as if she could come back to it anytime. Soon as I pack up her stuff and rent the room out to somebody else, well, it makes her death that much more real for me, if you know what I mean."
    "I know what you mean," Madeline said.
    "I suppose I'm being silly," the woman said. "If you want to see the room, I guess that's all right. I don't see who it would hurt. The police have been through it, looking for reasons why someone would kill her. Then I guess they decided no one had a reason to kill her, that she just got in the way of the bullet."
    That was truer than anybody realized, Madeline thought.
    "Right this way, then," the woman said.
    A rooming house not unlike her own. The same cooking smells in the hallway, the kind of smells you got when cooking consisted mostly of heating up canned goods on hot plates. Creaking stairs. Walls that needed painting.
    "You just can't keep up with an old building like this," the woman said defensively, although Madeline had said nothing. "One thing needs doing after another. You can't keep up with it, you know. Or else you'd have to raise the rents, and people can't pay but so much. I keep it clean, though, and I only rent to decent people."
    They were at Starr's door. The woman knocked on it, then caught herself.
    "I don't know why I'm knocking," she said. "Force of habit, I shouldn't wonder. I respect people's privacy, it's the way I was brought up."
    She produced a key, turned it in the lock, opened the door. The room was smaller than Madeline's, but similarly furnished. The closet door was open, showing clothing on the hooks and hangers. The bed was made, and there was some clothing piled on it.
    "You see what I mean," the landlady said. "It's like the room was waiting for her to come back to it."
    "Yes," Madeline breathed.
    "It's hard to take in what happened to her. Shot down that way."
    "Yes."
    "As young as she was."
    "It's tough to die when you're young," Madeline said. "Like a stray dog."
    "That's just it," the woman said. "She deserved better of life. She didn't deserve to die like a dog in the street, and that's exactly how she did die. And for what purpose? For what purpose?"
    Madeline didn't say anything. For a long moment the two women stood there. Then the older woman cleared her throat, as if she were about to say something, and Madeline said, "Tell me about her."
    "What is there to tell? She lived here. Not for very long, but I felt that I knew her better than I did."
    "How do you mean?"
    "I don't know exactly. We didn't talk much. She mostly kept to herself. I told all this to the police." She looked at Madeline. "Why do you have to know all this?"
    "Just a sense I have. That she and I were alike. Young women, single, living alone in rooming houses in this neighborhood. It could as easily have been me out there, out for a walk, struck down by a stray bullet."
    "You feel a kinship with her," the woman said.
    "I guess that's it. I feel that... that our lives are bound up in one another, even though we never met and I never knew her. I feel as though I owe her something."
    "What could you possibly owe her?"
    A life, she thought. Starr gave her life for me. She did it unwittingly, she didn't choose to do it, but what difference does