The Black Angel Read Free Page A

if this is how they’re going to act when you’re twenty-two? Why don’t they leave you alone?” I sobbed deep inside where it couldn’t be heard. “Why don’t they leave you alone if they don’t mean it?”
    I walked haphazardly back toward the arched opening leading to the next room again. I think I thought it was the outside door. Then when I noticed what it was I stopped, to turn and go the other way.
    But in there, on the vanity table in a crystal frame, I could see her picture smiling mockingly out at me, as if to say: “You see? Aren’t you sorry you came around here now? If you hadn’t you still wouldn’t have been sure.” And hate came on, and bitterness came on, and I strode forward, to go to it and pick it up. I suppose to smash it, or some other equally childish thing.
    I didn’t watch where I was going and I stumbled over something as I made my way around the foot of the impeding chaise longue.
    A foot, a leg, projecting from the other side of it. What I had taken to be a discarded boudoir slipper until now. Even from where I was standing at the moment, but for the hideous clarity of that one unmistakable silk-clad limb, it still looked like a tumbled mass of boudoir pillows, perhaps a discarded negligee and a chaise coverlet, all intermingled and allowed to fall in a neglected heap to the floor, there in that one place.
    I suppose I gave a smothered scream. I don’t remember. I got down waveringly and edged aside one of the pillows. Coral sateen it was, and so soft, so harmless. But someone had smothered her to death with it.
    Though no man was the breath of her life, one of them had taken the breath of her life away, and she was dead.
    I was sorry I’d tampered with that concealing pillow. For that grimacing, suffused mask with the protruding tongue didn’t look at all like the photograph in the crystal frame over there any longer.
    I got up again, cold and sick and frightened. I’d never seen a dead human being before. I couldn’t seem to turn my eyes away. I retreated stealthily backward, a step at a time, as if afraid that if I dared to turn my back on her she’d rise up and come after me.
    When I had regained the archway between the rooms and had at least a head start, then panic came on briefly. The panic of any young, unversed, not very bright thing. I made several confused half turns, this way and that; then I located the door and sped for it, my frightened mind screaming: “Let me out of here! I want to get out of here! I don’t want to stay in this place—with her!”
    Then at the last moment, just as I’d reached the door, the thought of Kirk came to me, and some sort of protective instinct—I don’t know what it was—brought me up short, held me there a moment.
    They mustn’t connect him with her. They mustn’t know he’d known her or——I turned and saw the phone standing there across the room with the slab let down before it the way I’d left it. And next to it that little private address book of hers. I went running over and picked it up and leafed through it. There it was, on the M page, big as life. His name and office number.
    First I was just going to tear the page out bodily and leave the rest behind. Then I realized that maybe they would notice that; it would look too incriminating. So I thrust the whole booklet into my handbag intact and snapped it closed on it. They weren’t going to find his name around here, not if I could help it.
    I looked around questioningly. There wasn’t anything else out here that I could see that might involve him, and not even for his sake could I have gone back into that—that other room a second time.
    I told myself I’d better get out of here fast myself. Somebody was liable to come along at any moment and——
    Even so, I knew enough not to bolt out without reconnoitering first and thereby running a