Strange Sisters Read Free Page A

this time he would not come out even though she waited forever. The thought struck her as very funny, and she began to laugh silently, her body shaking with a swelling inner storm that .she felt must surely rock the room. After a while, the swelling of laughter began to diminish, and she tried to think, to think clearly, to decide what would now be best for her to do. She had no real faith in any course of action, no hope that anything on earth could save her now, but she still fought with a sort of instinctive tenacity to gather and secure the remnants of whatever might be left.
    The glass. She had touched the glass, and it would have her prints on it. If it were discovered that she'd been here, or had even known Angus Brunn, the police would take her fingerprints and compare them with those they would have lifted from the glass, and that would be the end of her. She saw the glass lying on its side on the carpet by the sofa, and she went over and picked it up. After wiping it on the skirt of her dress, she let it drop onto the sofa and left it lying there.
    Next, she thought of the ice-pick, but she couldn't bear the thought of returning to the kitchen, and she decided, anyhow, that the handle was too rough to take fingerprints. She had heard that they could be lifted only from smooth surfaces. She couldn't recall having touched anything else, except possibly the working surface of the kitchen cabinet, and she was certain that those would be blurred. Yes, she remembered distinctly drawing her fingers off the surface in a way that would have left them blurred.
    Nothing remained, then, but to get her wrap and leave. Moving with a jerk, she went into the bedroom and found the wrap lying across the bed. Putting it on, she went back through the living room and out into the hall, using the skirt of her dress again to handle the knob. She felt rather clever, thinking of things like that, taking precautions, but all the time she knew that it was just chopping wood and that nothing would come of them but the same disaster that would have come without them, though maybe at a different time in a little different way.
    On the street, she began to walk without conscious direction or purpose. She walked three blocks, and then, still without any conscious purpose, turned ninety degrees and walked until she saw a cab cruising toward the downtown area. This made her think of Jacqueline, and she wondered why she hadn't thought of Jacqueline before, and now she left a sudden terrible need to get to her as quickly as she could, as if a second lost might be the difference between security and destruction. She waved at the cab, but by that time it had gone too far past her for the driver to see her frantic gesture. She quickened her step until she was almost running, and several blocks farther on she found another available cab stopped for a red light. Getting into the cab before the light changed, she gave the cabbie Jacqueline's address and leaned back in the seat. Only then, suddenly aware of her burning lungs, did she realize the desperate pace she had maintained for the long blocks.
    On both sides of her, beyond glass, the dappled city passed. Dappled. She liked the echoes of the word in her mind. Every once in a while, there would be a word like that, one that she immediately liked, and then she would pause, as she did now, to take a new direction from it, on whatever tangent of thought it suggested. Dappled with light and darkness, the splashes of intermittent light from street lamps and signs and unshaded windows, the deep cast shadows of buildings that seemed to crowd in upon the street in fear of the night and the aberrations of the night. People in the dappled city, moving from darkness to light to darkness. She watched them as she passed, finding and losing them in half a dozen ticks of the meter, and she began to wonder which of them were living, as she was, behind a personal translucent barrier through which light filtered dimly when