Confidentially Yours by Charles Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

in the bathroom. As I turned the corner beyond the den I saw there was a light still on in the bedroom, and I suddenly remembered the shattered door-facing. I’d have to repair that before Malyina saw it; she’d wonder about it and talk. She was the colored girl who came in to do the housework twice a week, but she wouldn’t be in again until Saturday; I could repair it tomorrow. Or today, I thought, remembering suddenly that it was Friday now. Maybe I could glue back the strip the bolt had torn off. But as I came nearer I saw it was too badly splintered and gouged; I’d have to replace it with a whole new facing and paint it. I’d been intent on the doorway and hadn’t looked beyond it into the room itself, and now as I stepped inside I stopped in surprise. Her suitcase was on the bed. Beside it was another one, open, and a pile of dresses and underclothing.
    Hadn’t she taken anything with her? I looked stupidly around the room. The bed, a king-sized double over seven feet long, extended out from the right-hand wall, flanked on either side by closets, while directly opposite the doorway, in the rear wall, was the fireplace. The door to her dressing room and the bath, the one I’d failed to break in, was on the left, and open now, and just beyond it was a full-length mirror, opposite the foot of the bed. The only lights burning were the rose-shaded reading lamp on the far side and the one inside the dressing room, but as my glance swept across the mirror I caught the reflection of something dark on the floor on the other side of the bed. I came on into the room then, leaned over the corner of it, and looked squarely down into her face, or what was left of it.
    My knees melted under me and I slid down onto the foot of the bed, clutching at the spread to keep from going on over the corner of it and falling on top of her. I kept opening and closing my mouth and swallowing to hold back the oily ground-swell of nausea running up into my throat, and pressing my face into the bedspread as though I were convinced that if I could close my eyes tightly enough the picture would go away. Maybe it was the instrument itself that was the worst— or its position—the dirty, fire-blackened andiron lying across the column of her throat where he’d either dropped it or tossed it after he was through with it.
    I turned the other way and tried to get up, but slid down and sat on the floor, facing the mirror, and for a second when I first saw it, I didn’t even recognize my own face, greenish-white, staring, and shiny with sweat. My gaze started to slip downward to the reflected horror of what was on the other side of the bed, but I turned my head and tried again to get up. The telephone began to ring. There was an extension on the night table just beyond where she was lying, and the insistent clamor of it ran through my head like a whiter hot saw. I made it to my feet this time and walked unsteadily into the bathroom. Pulling down a large towel, I came back and managed to get it spread across her head and the upper part of her body. The telephone went on ringing.
    She lay on her back, still fully clothed in the dark suit she’d worn when she came in except that her legs were twisted awkwardly and the skirt and slip were pulled halfway up her thighs, apparently from brushing against the bed as she fell. Still on my knees beside her, I caught the hem of the skirt and tried to pull it down without touching her, but when the leg moved and rearranged itself under the tugging, as if she were still alive, nausea hit me again and I had to turn away to keep from vomiting. It was the senseless brutality of it that was so sickening. Why had he beaten her in the face that way? I finally got the skirt pulled down, and stood up, still trembling, and wiped the sweat from my face.
    The closet door, between the night table and the rear wall, was open. Apparently she had been taking clothes from it, and when her back was turned he’d lifted the