Into the Night

She took out the key Dell had given her and opened the door. She figured maybe Dell had left some sort of a note of explanation for her on the piano, like they’d used to do so often in the old songwriting days.

“Dell?” she called out.

There was no answer. There was no one in the place. There was no note either, on the piano or anywhere else.

Dell had had a rye on the rocks, or possibly five or possibly ten, at some indeterminate point between her getting-up time and her leaving the place. Only one glass had been used. She never changed glasses when drinking alone, why should she? Her own mouth germs couldn’t affect her. But this seemed to prove he’d never shown up.

On the piano was a song sheet. Probably the last thing she’d looked at before going out. For some inscrutable reason, to the end of her days, for as long as she remembered having met and having known Dell Nelson, whenever she thought of her, this song title would flicker across the eyes of her mind. “Heaven Drops Its Curtain Down upon My Heart.”

Madeline took a cursory look into the bedroom before leaving. The bra that Dell must have changed out of before her bath lay looped around one of the footposts of the bed. From where she stood she could glimpse a narrow triangular wedge of the bathroom, and in this a sliver of green-blue showed up, just above the rim of the tub. Dell had left in such a hurry she’d even forgotten to let her bathwater run out of the tub.

Madeline went over closer and looked inside. It lay there blue-green, smooth and motionless as ice, the warmth gradually going out of it into the air around.

She leaned forward and looked closer still.

Dell was still in it. Dead in it.

A cigarette, the last cigarette she had smoked, a woman’s cigarette with a dab of red at the tip, still lay on the edge of the washbasin where she had parked it as she got in. A drop of water on the washbasin rim had stopped it from consuming itself past the quarter mark.

Her head was at the bottom, face upward. It could have fallen there, or it could have been pushed there, held down there. It could have been a heart attack, a skidding fall against the bottom of the tub, a dizzy spell from the combination of alcohol and hot water, resulting in self-drowning, or — a homicide. Madeline couldn’t tell which it was.

She looked closely at the hands. They were still looped loosely over the edge of the tub; they hadn’t gone down with the rest of her. They were caught on the turn of the rim by the wrists. Alongside of them were two small flecks of red on the enamel, about as much as a mosquito makes if you squeeze it, and a thin trickle of much paler red that had gone down into the water. The water itself showed no traces. Not enough blood had been spilled to stain it.

That told the story. It had been a murder. She’d been held under until she drowned.

Madeline got down on her heels and examined the hands exhaustively, from an inch away, without touching them. There were no marks on them anywhere, no scratches or nicks. She even looked at the undersides, the palms, by stretching out full length on the floor and putting her face up under them.

The blood was not Dell’s. But underneath the tips of all ten nails, where a smidgin of white should have showed past the point where the nail enamel ended, there was instead a caked hairline of red. She’d clawed someone, either on the face or forearms or hands, in fighting for her life.

Madeline got to her feet and stood looking down at her. At the startled blue eyes, colder than ever now, staring up through the blue-green water. Adelaide Nelson had played the game her own way and lost it.

And yet which one of us ever yet won it? philosophized Madeline. It’s a game you can’t beat. If death doesn’t take away your chips, as in this case, then old age comes along and cleans out your table stakes just as surely. Maybe she’d had the best of it at that. At least she’d gone out looking good. Still desirable enough to be killed for it.

A man should die bravely. A woman should die beautiful.

Reflex fear, which had been strangely held back until this point (possibly by the feverish excitement of the discovery), now came on fast and chilling. I have to get out of here, she told herself, big-eyed. What am I doing standing around here, lingering here, like this? Someone may walk in.

Her dread wasn’t so much of being accused of the crime itself — in fact that didn’t even occur to her — as of being inextricably enmeshed in it from then on, saddled with it past all endurance. Detained, questioned ad infinitum, and above all rendered publicly identifiable, to the frustration of any possible fulfillment of the mandate which still awaited carrying out.

She wanted no part either of it or in it.