it. She was looking at me with the dead-pan innocence of a baby. All the ash-blonde curls were burnished and glinting in the lamplight, and the shiny black dress looked as if it had been packed by hand. She was in deep mourning from the skin out and laughing inside like a cat up to its whiskers in cream. I’d given her the brush, and now she could hang me. All she had to do was pick up the phone and call the Sheriff.
Is she stupid, or what? I thought. Doesn’t she know I’ll kill her? But then I knew the answer to that, too. She wasn’t stupid. She’d asked Gloria to come, hadn’t she?
“Oh,” I said. “I’m all right. I feel fine.”
There was nothing showing on the surface. Gloria couldn’t suspect anything at all. We went over and sat down, Gloria in a big chair and I on the sofa across from her, while Dolores Harshaw leaned back in a platform rocker. We were all grouped around the coffee table.
“I know you’ve been wondering,” Dolores said, “I mean, about the business. I would have called you sooner, but it’s been such a blow, you know—”
She went on giving us the brave little widow bearing up under everything. I didn’t pay any attention to it. I was too busy with the physical strain of keeping my face from showing anything and trying to find the answer to the question that went around and around in my mind in a kind of endless nightmare. What was she going to do?
I could hear her voice going on, like a radio in a burning house. “—what poor George would have wanted. He thought a great deal of both of you. So of course I couldn’t sell out. I’m going to try to carry on just the same.”
She had the rope around my neck, and when she got ready she’d drop the trap. With Gloria here I was helpless. And she knew that, of course, so whatever it was it was going to be done now, before we left and I got a chance to get her alone.
She was picking up an envelope which was lying on the coffee table. “It must have been terrible,” she went on, “because I think he knew in his heart it might happen any time. Ever since we came back from Galveston he had a little notebook that stayed right by his side all the time, and he kept writing down his ideas about the business and the things he wanted to be sure would be carried on just—” Her voice broke a little. She was tremendous as the brave little widow. She gathered herself up with a pitiful smile and went on. “—just in case it did happen. I’ve written it all out, and I thought Mr. Madox should read it, since he’ll be in charge. And of course you too, Miss Harper, if he thinks you should.”
She handed it over to me. There was nothing in her face but that same dead-pan innocence. Gloria was watching her, and then me, with only polite curiosity. She probably thought she’d been working for Harshaw long enough to know his politics.
I opened the envelope and slid it out. It was a carbon copy, two pages single-spaced on a typewriter. I looked at the heading of it, and I knew where the original was. It was in a safe-deposit box somewhere or in some lawyer’s office, where I’d never get to it. And I knew that I wasn’t going to kill her. As long as both of us lived, the safest place she would ever be was with me, and I was going to hope she went on living for a long, long time.
“This statement is to be turned over to the District Attorney’s office after my death,” it began, and she had it all there. She hadn’t left out a thing. She admitted lying about my being there at the fire right after it broke out, and described the way I had driven up and hurried into the crowd thirty minutes later. She told them about my having been in the building before, and how she had told Sutton all of this, and of her recognizing me in the lightning flash when the storm broke that night. The clincher was at the end, and it was something I hadn’t known before. She’d gone back down there just after daybreak, after the doctor had left the house. She had to