The Seducer

12

The year had turned, the holidays had come and gone, and it was a cold, clear night. Though the outside temperature was below zero, it was warm in the car with the engine idling and the heater fan turning a low speed. It was a kind of anesthetic warmth that was just faintly scented with exhaust fumes.

Below the bluff on which the car was parked in a grove of leafless trees, a river in the moonlight was a silver shield of ice above black water still moving.

Maggie was drowsy. Turning her head in Brad’s lap with the soft sound a kitten makes, she pressed a cheek against his thigh and reached up lazily to trace with the tips of fingers the hard lines of his jaw.

Beneath her cloth coat, drawn loosely over her like a cover, he stroked the satin surface of her shoulders, her lean and narrow back and compact rump. She shivered, drawing her knees up closer to her belly.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“No, no. Not cold. It’s not that.”

“Perhaps you had better put on your clothes.”

“In a little while. When it’s time to go.”

“It’s time now. Almost eleven.”

“Really? So soon? Darling, we have so little time together. It’s not fair.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It may be that we will soon have no time together at all.”

“Don’t say that. I don’t like it,” she complained. “Why do you say such a thing? ”

“Never mind. I’m just depressed, I guess.”

“No. Something’s happened. You’ve been worried all evening. I can tell. What is it?”

“Nothing that you can do anything about,” he stated flatly.

She sat up suddenly beside him, drawing her coat over her shoulders like a cape.

“Don’t be too sure of that. I’m often quite clever at doing something about things when I set my mind to it. Are you in serious trouble?”

“Serious enough. I don’t think I can stand much more, to put it honestly. It’s impossible to go on as I am, at any rate.” A deep frown ridged his brow and his eyes held a bleak expression.

“Has your wife learned about us somehow? I don’t see how she could. Darling, we’ve been so careful about everything. I haven’t taken even the slightest chance.”

“It’s not Madelaine. It’s Cornelia, God damn her. She’s obviously determined to drive me insane, and I’m almost convinced that she’s insane herself.”

“It serves you right. I simply can’t understand why you ever got involved with such a woman. Ugh! It’s disgusting to think about.”

“All right. Please don’t start that again. I wish now that I hadn’t told you about her. But I thought you might be a little understanding, especially after your own experience with that oaf of a Buddy. You’re hardly in a position, darling, to be critical of my taste.”

“Oh, well, we musn’t quarrel,” she murmured. “You had your Cornelia, and I had my Buddy. Maybe it was a mistake that we were honest and confided in each other. It’s often a mistake to be honest about private matters. What has Cornelia been doing?”

“Anything to harass me and keep me uncertain and disturbed. The woman’s sick in the head, that’s all. It’s a wonder I didn’t see it sooner.”

“That’s because you were busy looking at other parts, darling, although they aren’t so damn attractive either, if you ask me. What has she been doing specifically?”

“Telephoning me at home. Leaving the most dangerous and incriminating notes in my box at school. God knows what she will do next, if I don’t find a way to stop her.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Maggie declared. “There’s nothing at all that you need to do. After a while she will stop of her own accord. A phony bitch like her would never hurt herself to hurt someone else, which is what she would have to do. She’s only trying to frighten you as a kind of revenge, or to make you come back to her on her own terms. Can’t you see that? You mustn’t be a coward and permit it to spoil things for you and me. It’s not exactly pleasant to spend our time talking like this when we might be saying and doing things much more interesting and exciting.”

“It’s easy enough for you to call me a coward and to say that nothing needs doing. In my position, it’s a little more difficult to be so assured where Cornelia’s concerned. I wish to God that she were dead, and that’s the truth.”

His voice was petulant and his face in profile, touched by the weak light of the remote moon, was the face of a sulking boy.

She began to laugh at him, the wicked little aspiration that seemed to come from some inner, inexplicable glee. Suddenly as if by compulsion, she took hold of his head and pulled it down against her naked breasts and held it there tightly, as if he were truly the injured boy he had seemed to be. Her voice had nearly the quality of a croon, the expression of a half-dream.

“You’re such a child,” she said. “Truly you are. In spite of being important and intelligent and all that, you are much more a child now than I have ever been, even though I am not important at all and have practically no intelligence whatever. You’re a bad child, however. You are always doing bad things.

“I imagine that you have been getting yourself into fixes like this for years. Somehow you have always survived and been forgiven for being bad. Now you are afraid and hurt and angry because you think you may have to face the consequences of what you are and can’t help being.

“Don’t worry, darling. Cornelia’s a fraud. I promise you. She will do nothing but make threats, and pretty soon she will not even do that. It’s in no way necessary for her to die. If you are going to wish someone dead, you had much better wish it for Madelaine. She’s the real problem and the real danger, and has much more to contribute by dying than anyone else. Come, darling, let’s be sensible and wish that Madelaine were dead instead of Cornelia. There’s something to be gained from that.”

He felt, indeed, absurdly young and comforted, his anxiety abated and senses lulled by the whisper of her voice and the exciting scent of her warmly naked flesh. The scent, so far as he could tell, was an odd and soporific combination of cinnamon and carbon monoxide. Its effect, at any rate, was strangely pleasant, for it left his mind floating free and unencumbered on the surface of a vast lethargy, at liberty to indulge in the most exciting play of speculation.

“Madelaine’s strong as an ox,” he said. “She’ll live forever.”

“No one lives forever. Some people, for one reason or another, die sooner than others. They have accidents or something.”

“Not Madelaine. Nothing happens accidentally to Madelaine. Things happen to Madelaine because she makes them happen.”

“Or someone else makes them. The capacity to make things happen isn’t limited to one person.” Maggie’s voice held a positive ring.

“If something accidental happened to Madelaine, something unfortunate might happen to me. If something went wrong, I mean. Under the circumstances, I would certainly be the most logical suspect.”

“That’s true.” Maggie stroked Brad’s hair, holding his head against her pink-nippled breasts. “Accidents are tricky and are better avoided. It would be very difficult, I should think, to plan one that wouldn’t go wrong in some way and turn out to look like something else. It would be much simpler and safer, in my opinion, to do directly what you wanted to do, and make it appear to have been done by someone else.”

“Wouldn’t that be a dirty trick to play on someone else?” he asked with a strange sort of detachment.

“I don’t mean someone else specifically. I mean someone else generally. It would be too bad to arrange for someone else specifically to pay your consequences.”

“What kind of general person would you suggest?”

“Oh, a burglar, maybe. I suspect that lots of unjust blame is put onto burglars.”

“I can think of instances when it was tried and didn’t work.”

“So can I, now that you mention it. Do you know what I would really do if I wanted something done to someone and did not wish to be associated with it? I’d have someone else do it, a third party, when I was somewhere else and couldn’t be reasonably suspected in the least. It’s what’s called having an alibi, isn’t it?”

“What about the third party? Wouldn’t he run the risk of being suspected?”

“Not if it were someone who would not be related to either of the other two,” Maggie replied. “It would be like taking a stranger off the street.”

“And it would put you at the mercy of this third party for the rest of your life. It would be difficult to live in such constant jeopardy.”

“It would put you at each other’s mercy, wouldn’t it? It seems to me it would. And if you were two people who were equally involved and did it for each other, for your own sakes and what you wanted, it wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other.”

“It’s all very interesting as a kind of abstraction, but actual circumstances are something else entirely,” Brad stated.

“Abstractions? I know nothing about abstractions, darling. It’s merely a way something might be done to someone. Even to Madelaine, for instance. She frequently goes to bed early with a sick headache and takes a sedative. Isn’t that what you told me? Isn’t that what she did this very evening, as a matter of fact? One evening when she did, you would only have to arrange to go somewhere else where you would be seen and known and remembered, so that no one could possibly blame you for what happened at home. While you were gone someone else could simply walk in a door that you had left unlocked and do quickly what needed to be done.”

“You sound as if you’ve had experience,” Brad said drily.

“No, darling. It’s only a game we’re playing. It’s only a way of thinking out how something might be done.”

“Yes. Of course. We’re only playing a game.”

But it was a game, he knew, that needed only a word or a sign in exactly the right desperate moment to become a plan. And he knew, also, that Maggie had offered herself obliquely in a crooning voice as the instrument of murder.

Brad’s mind, free-floating on the vast surface of the drowsy half-dream, was wonderfully receptive and immune from guilt. He could accept without wonder the enormity of his own dark potential and he could sense for the first time without fear and without shame the fullness of his submission to the ageless and lawless woman-child who held his head against her warm breasts and stroked his hair.

“Darling,” she said, “I’ve heard that Madelaine is quite wealthy. Is that so?”

“Yes. It’s so.”

“How much money does she have altogether, do you think?”

“I don’t know. About a million, I’d say.”

“A million dollars is quite a lot,” Maggie said.

“Yes, it is.”

“I wonder what it would be like to have a million dollars all your own.”

“I couldn’t say. I’ve never had a million.”

“You have some of the use of it, though. That’s almost as good.”

“Is it? I suppose it is.”

“It would be too bad to lose it after having it,” Maggie murmured, pressing his face firmly against her bare skin.

“Yes. It would.”

“I’d like very much to have some of the use of a million dollars. Do you think I may ever have? It seems almost too good to be possible.”

He didn’t answer. His senses were acute in the sustained half-dream. He could hear with stethoscopic clearness beneath flesh and bone the sure and steady beating of her heart. Her breasts rose and fell at last on a sigh.

“Darling,” she said, “we must go back now. The clock on the dash says almost twelve, and we must not become careless and indiscreet.”