The Letter
When I got back to the house, John was driving up the road in the
sedan. He had been to Rattail for supplies and for the mail. He tossed
the mailbag out to me, and drove around to the kitchen door to unload.
As a rule the Desert Moon mail is mighty uninteresting, being made up,
almost entirely, of bills and advertising matter. Since the girls had
come, a few sleazy, foreign looking letters had livened it up a bit.
To a person who has never been farther east than Salt Lake City, a
letter from England, or from France, does carry quite a thrill with
it. There was a letter for Gaby to-day, postmarked France.
About a month before this, Gaby had received another letter that was a
duplicate of this one; the same gray paper, the same sprawling
handwriting. Instead of taking it indifferently, as she did other
letters, and reading it wherever she happened to be, she had snatched
it out of my hand and had run off to her room. All that evening she
had seemed to be preoccupied, and worried. The writing looked like a
man’s writing; but, like a lot of other things, including cigarette
smoke, hip pockets and hair cuts, it is not as easy as it used to be
to distinguish between male and female in handwriting, at a distance.
Sending only two letters in close to two months, it seemed to me that
whoever had written them did not write unless he or she had something
of importance to say. I was still puzzling over it, when Gaby came
into the room.
Sure enough, she snatched it out of my hands, just as she had done
with the other letter, and ran straight upstairs with it.
When John and Danny came in, a few minutes later, I went upstairs.
Habit stopped me at Gaby’s door for a minute, with my ear to the
keyhole. Faintly, sounds don’t come plainly through our thick doors, I
heard the portable typewriter that she had brought with her when she
came to the ranch, click, clicking away.
My first judgment was that she was not losing any time in answering
that letter; but, as I went down the hall, I had a hazy notion that
there had been something queer, different, about the way she had been
using the machine. Instead of snapping away on it, lickety-split, as
she usually did, she had been touching the keys slowly and carefully,
picking them out one at a time, the way I have to do when I try to use
Sam’s plaguey machine to copy recipes for my card catalog.
I was tuckered and tired. So, after telephoning some instructions to
Belle and Sadie in the kitchen, I took plenty of time to tidy myself
up. I dawdled in my bath, and I cut my corns, and rubbed hair tonic
into my scalp. But, when on my way downstairs again, I stopped for a
second at Gaby’s door, the typewriter was still going, with its slow
click, click. There was nothing to be made out of it, so I went along.
It was fortunate that I did, because, before I had reached the top of
the stairway, Gaby’s door flung open and she called to me, with
something in her voice that made me shake in my shoes.
I turned and looked at her. Her face wore an expression that was not
human; an expression that would have made any decent woman do as I
did, and turn her eyes quickly away.
“Tell Danny to come up here,” she said.
I hurried off downstairs, and delivered the message to Danny who was
with John in the living-room.
“What’s the matter, Mary?” John questioned, when Danny had gone
upstairs. “You look as if you had seen a ghost.”
“I think,” I answered, “that I have—the ghost of Sin.”
“Doggone that girl,” he said. “I wish she were in Jericho.”
“Gaby, you mean?”
“You’re darn right. She’s causing all the trouble around here.”
“What trouble?” I asked, just for a feeler.
“I don’t know—exactly. She keeps Danny miserable. But that isn’t it,
or not all of it. Don’t you seem to feel trouble around here, all the
time? I thought everyone did. I do, Gosh knows.”
“I know,” I said. “I feel it, too. I think Sam does, though he won’t
altogether admit it. Just the same, John, there isn’t a thing we can
put our fingers on, is there?”
He walked to the window and looked out at the long range of Garnet
Mountains, turning blood-red, now, under the sunset.
“I suppose not,” he said, at last. “Sometimes, though, when I see
Danny looking as she looked when she went upstairs just now, I feel as
if it would be a good thing if somebody would put their fingers around
that vixen’s throat.”
“John,” I spoke sharply to him, “don’t say things like that. You don’t
mean it. It is wrong to say it.”
I was sure that he did not mean it. I was sure that only the voice of
one of his rare ugly moods had spoken, and that the wicked thought had
died with the wicked words. But, from that day to this, I have never
repeated those words to a living soul. Because that was the way that
Gaby was murdered: choked to death, with great brutal bruises left on
her throat.