Murder is Grim. Samuel Rogers

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 1955 by Samuel Rogers.

      Originally published under the title “You’ll Be Sorry.”

      Published by Wildside Press LLC.

      wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

       Chapter One

      KATE ARCHER studied the strange note she had just been reading, wrinkled her forehead, and stooped to rescue the envelope from the basket beside her desk. She realized now that the stiff handwriting was actually printing, though this was not so obvious in black as it was in the red crayon of the enclosed message:

      DON’T GO TO MR. GLADSTONE’S, YOU’LL BE SORRY IF YOU DO.

      What she felt, after her first moment of sheer surprise, was more than anything annoyance at the unreasonableness of her correspondent: here she was to be called for within the next hour; even if she wanted to, there would be no time now to change her plans. Then the next instant she was ashamed at having considered any change. ‘If he thinks a childish trick like this will have the slightest effect on what I do,’ she muttered to herself, ‘he’s very much mistaken.’

      But who was ‘He’? Even an anonymous letter must be written by someone with a name. Who would not want her to go to Mr. Gladstone’s? Of course Mother was disappointed; she had hoped that Kate would come East now, to spend the whole summer at Matunuck, instead of staying out here for another month, to visit in the Middle West; but it was absurd to think of Mother’s writing this; Mother would never try to scare her, even in fun.

      She caught herself up sharply and glanced about the quiet room. Whatever she felt it was not fear; she would not give ‘Him’ that satisfaction! The envelope, she now noticed, was postmarked Woodside, and was dated June 14th; to-day was Thursday, the 15th; it had been mailed here in town yesterday afternoon.

      Could it be one of the young men who had asked her to marry him during this last year at the university? She thought of her fellow-students, of her lab instructors. Rejected suitors, she had discovered were apt to feel that in a way she had deceived them – not by any definite action but just by the fact of her own nature: each one had told her that at first she had seemed so ‘sweet’, so gentle; they could not understand her growing bored, or even impatient, at their persistence. She never pretended – certainly she never tried – to be ‘sweet’. If they thought she was, it was largely because of her appearance: her dark golden hair, her blue eyes, her fine skin and softly ‘classic’ features; and for some reason boys seemed to think that that combination went with sweetness of nature; but it was also because she did hate to make people unhappy, because she couldn’t help being kind and pleasant to them at first – and then suddenly they would be in love with her, and she had to make them understand that she was not in love with them. But surely none of these boys would stoop to such a petty revenge, even if in some way they had learned of her visit.

      Kate continued to frown. She would have hated to think that someone she knew, someone she liked, had written this letter; and yet it would have been comforting to be able to place it, to lift it out of the realm of the mysterious. She looked once more around the small room, so intensely silent, where she had studied for so many hours during the past winter. All her things that had not been sent off earlier were now packed in the two big suitcases standing side by side near the door. The room looked unnaturally neat and stripped. There was nothing on the bureau, nothing on the table; the framed photographs, the brilliant van Gogh print, had gone from the walls. Afternoon sunlight streaming across the threadbare blue carpet seemed to touch it with strangeness, as if it were the carpet in some huge impersonal second-hand store: this silent place had withdrawn into itself; it was waiting for her to get out.

      She glanced at her watch. It was quarter to three and Mr. Gladstone had written that she would be called for at three; but she walked over to the window and looked down through the box-elder boughs. Perhaps the car might be early. The short street was empty except for some boys playing ball in front of the apartment house at the corner. Kate wondered from which direction the car would appear, what kind of car it would be. Would Mr. Gladstone be driving it himself? And what would Mr. Gladstone be like?

      DON’T GO TO MR. GLADSTONE’S.

      For an instant she could see a pale fixed face that stared straight ahead at the road from under its hatbrim, that would not look at her until suddenly in a lonely place the car stopped, the driver raised his hands to the back of his head and she could see that his face was a mask. He was taking it off, he was going to stare at her now, but he had no eyes, no features. She could not bear to look.

      YOU’LL BE SORRY IF YOU DO.

      This was absurd, she thought angrily. How pleased the writer of the letter would be! But she could form so little idea of her month at Mr. Gladstone’s that it was impossible to imagine its beginning, to picture a car turning one of these corners, to the left or to the right, and stopping there below in front of the house; just as sometimes when you wait at the telephone for a long-distance call, you can’t believe that the voice you are expecting will actually break that silence.

      Might the warning have been sent by anyone in the Gladstone household? But who could it be, when June, the only one she knew, was so terribly eager for her to come? She took June’s letter, the first she had received from her in more than two years, out of her purse, and read it slowly once again:

      Dear Katey,

      It’s crazy that you’ve been at Woodside for a whole year and I live only twenty miles away and we haven’t seen each other. You bad girl, why didn’t you write me you were there? I just found out by chance from a girl at school who says she knows your brother. Of course I’ve been away at school except for holidays so we wouldn’t have had much chance to get together. But now I’m home for the summer and I want you to come and visit me for at least a month. Father says why should someone that’s really grown up and finishing college want to bury herself out here with a schoolgirl like me, but he doesn’t know about you and me, does he? I guess no one could understand that.

      I bet all sorts of things have been happening to you since the old days at Miss Barstow’s. Nothing at all has happened to me, at least nothing nice, just two other schools, after Miss Barstow’s, and I hated them both just as much. I really hated them more because you weren’t there, and I never found anyone else to be really nice to me the way you were. There’s something wrong with me, Katey. You used to say there wasn’t but I know there is, because I try to be nice to people but nobody likes me. It may be just because I’m so damn ugly and clumsy. I can hear you scolding me now for that ‘damn’. It just slipped out. If you come I give you permission to scold me as much as you like, and I promise not to get mad the way I used to.

      Honestly, Katey, I can’t tell you how much I want you to come. I’ll be watching the mail every day for your answer, so be quick, won’t you? I can’t bear having to wait for things I want.

      With