Death Trap Read Online Free Page B

stone steps, a screen door. As I walked to the steps, feeling more tremulously uncertain than ever before in my life, I could see movement through the glass. I stood and looked through the screen. Morning light through all the windows illuminated the room.
    Vicky was there. There were open cartons on the floor. She was emptying bookshelves. She wore gray slacks, a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her dark hair was tied back. Her waist looked very narrow, her arms thin. She seemed to move with a stubborn weariness as she knelt and put the books neatly in the open carton. There was a smudge of dust on her cheek, other dust marks on the front of the white shirt. Her face was of an ivory pallor, lightly touched by the sun of the summer just past. Her facial bones seemed sharp against her skin.
    She must have seen me, a tall shadow, out of the corner of her eye. She looked up quickly, half-flinching as she did so, in the manner of a small animal beaten too often. That reflex pinched my heart. She recognized me and she came very slowly to her feet, her eyes going wide. I tried to say her name but my mouth was too dry. The wide blue eyes closed and she put her hand to her throat. She tottered and I pushed the screen door open and went in and caught her, my hands on her shoulders, the bones under the flesh narrow and fine under my hands.
    She opened her eyes again and there was the dazed, unfocused look of someone drugged. She said my name, said, “Hugh,” so softly that it was less an audible sound than a touch of warm exhalation against my throat. She let herself come forward, lean against me. I put my arm around her. The edge of my jaw touched the dark crown of her head.
    “What have they done to you, Vicky?” I asked softly. “What in the world have they done to you?”
    And as I looked across her shoulder, as I looked down through one of the windows, I found myself staring into the narrow venomous face of the old lady. She stood out there with the rake, looking in at us with spite and satisfaction.
    Vicky stirred in my arms and pulled herself away. I released her. Her face was cool again, and apart from me.
    “I’m very sorry,” she said. “I haven’t been entirely well. I feel faint quite often. I’m sorry.” She moved away from me, putting half-packed cartons between us.
    “I just heard about it, Vicky, just the other day. I was out of the country. I didn’t know about it.”
    “I thought everybody in the world knew about it.”
    “You know that if I had known, I would have come sooner.” And I tasted the shape of the lie on my mouth. I had nearly gone by. I had nearly gone on south because of fear and shame.
    “Why?” The question was cool and blunt.
    I made a helpless gesture with my hands. It wasn’t something you could explain in one minute or one hour. “I want to help you.”
    “There’s no way I can be helped.” She went over to a narrow padded bench by the windows and sat down, took cigarettes from the shirt pocket, lighted one. There was a heavy wooden packing case already nailed up near the bench. I sat on it. I felt heavy and awkward and stupid, with hands too big and rough and brown, with feet too heavy. I looked at the floor, and then at the narrow and delicate shape of her ankles, at sandals which could not conceal the high patrician arch of her foot. I looked at her face until she looked away. There were sallow patches under her eyes, fine brackets around the contradictory mouth.
    “I want to try to help.”
    Her voice became hard. “I do not want that kind of help. I don’t care to be helped because, strange as it may seem to me, your conscience might hurt a little. It must hurt, or you wouldn’t have come here. The whole thing seems odd to me.”
    “All right. Get out all the little whips. So it wasn’t like that when I walked in here. It wasn’t like that at all. Your face was different. Your voice was soft. It was all right to have me hold you.”
    She flushed and