Psycho Read Free

of his employees for another fifty cents.
    But Mary Crane had smiled at him very sweetly, then walked out of his office and out of his life. Taking the forty thousand dollars with her.
    You don't get that kind of an opportunity every day of your life. In fact, when you come right down to it, some people don't seem to get any opportunities at all.
    Mary Crane had waited over twenty-seven years for hers.
    The opportunity to go on to college had vanished, at seventeen, when Daddy was hit by a car. Mary went to business school for a year, instead, and then settled down to support Mom and her kid sister, Lila.
    The opportunity to marry disappeared at twenty-two, when Dale Belter was called up to serve his hitch in the army. Pretty soon he was stationed in Hawaii, and before long he began mentioning this girl in his letters, and then the letters stopped coming. When she finally got the wedding announcement she didn't care any more.
    Besides, Mom was pretty sick by then. It took her three years to die, while Lila was off at school. Mary had insisted she go to college, come what may, but that left her carrying the whole load. Between holding down a job at the Lowery Agency all day and sitting up with Mom half the night, there wasn't time for anything else.
    Not even time to note the passing of time. But then Mom had the final stroke, and there was the business of the funeral, and Lila coming back from school and trying to find a job, and all at once there was Mary Crane looking at herself in the big mirror and seeing this drawn, contorted face peering back at her. She'd thrown something at the mirror, and then the mirror broke into a thousand pieces and she knew that wasn't all; she was breaking into a thousand pieces, too.
    Lila had been wonderful and even Mr. Lowery helped out by seeing to it that the house was sold right away. By the time the estate was settled they had about two thousand dollars in cash left over. Lila got a job in a record shop downtown, and they moved into a small apartment together.
    "Now, you're going to take a vacation," Lila told her. "A real vacation. No, don't argue about it! You've kept this family going for eight years and it's about time you had a rest. I want you to take a trip. A cruise, maybe."
    So Mary took the S.S. Caledonia , and after a week or so in Caribbean waters the drawn, contorted face had disappeared from the mirror of her stateroom. She looked like a young girl again (well, certainly not a day over twenty-two, she told herself) and, what was more important still, a young girl in love.
    It wasn't the wild, surging thing it had been when she met Dale Belter. It wasn't even the usual stereotype of moonlight-on-the-water generally associated with a tropical cruise.
    Sam Loomis was a good ten years older than Dale Belter had been, and pretty much on the quiet side, but she loved him. It looked like the first real opportunity of all, until Sam explained a few things.
    I m really sailing under false pretenses, you might say," he told her. "There's this hardware store, you see—"
    Then the story came out.
    There was this hardware store, in a little town called Fairvale, up north. Sam had worked there for his father, with the understanding that he'd inherit the business. A year ago his father had died, and the accountants had told him the bad news.
    Sam inherited the business, all right, plus about twenty thousand in debts. The building was mortgaged, the inventory was mortgaged, and even the insurance had been mortgaged. Sam's father had never told him about his little side investments in the market—or the race track. But there it was. There were only two choices: go into bankruptcy or try and work off the obligations.
    Sam Loomis chose the latter course. "It's a good business," he explained. "I'll never make a fortune, but with any kind of decent management, there's a steady eight or ten thousand a year to be made. And if I can work up a decent line of farm machinery, maybe even more. Got