Do Evil In Return by Margaret Millar Read Free Book Online Page A

covered the sun and the air was moist and cold.
    Three of the collies met her at the door. They didn’t bark because Gwen had told them to be quiet, but they sniffed Charlotte’s medical bag and her shoes, and one of them, a huge, handsome sable, planted his feet on her chest and studied her face with grave curiosity. His gold and white nose was at least five inches long. Charlotte stroked it gently.
    “Oh, that Laddie,” Gwen said, laughing. “Down, Lad.”
    She was wearing a blue silk housecoat that brushed the floor, and though she seemed a little nervous, she looked as well as she usually did. She had always been tiny and very thin. She traded on her size and made sure she kept it. She wore little heelless slippers and she dieted constantly, dulling her appetite with gallons of hot, strong tea.
    “Down, Laddie boy,” Gwen repeated. “I just can’t teach him to stay down. He won’t listen. I guess he knows I love him best.” She took the dog’s front paws and lowered him to the floor. “He’s my baby. Shake hands with Dr. Keating, Lad.”
    All three of the collies sat down and offered their paws with an air of polite boredom. Charlotte shook hands with each of them, feeling, as she always did when she came to this house, that she was entering an unreal world where values were reversed and the dogs kept Gwen as a pet.
    “Are you feeling better?” Charlotte asked.
    “Oh yes. Much.”
    “Good.”
    “I’ve made tea… I love tea.”
    Charlotte left her medical bag in the hall and followed Gwen into the sitting room. The dogs came too; they went everywhere that Gwen went.
    The room belonged to Gwen; there was nothing of Lewis here or anywhere in the house except his study. Gwen had braided the oval rugs herself, woven the textile for the slip covers, made the pieces of petit-point and sewed the ruffled chintz drapes. Milk glass and pewter, chintz and maple suited her, and the furniture was scaled to her size. Everything was small and fragile, and Gwen looked both picturesque and right sitting in the spindly maple chair with one foot resting delicately on a petit-point footstool. (No wonder Lewis bought me the big leather chair, Charlotte thought. There’s no place here for him to sit.)
    The tea table was set with Gwen’s best Spode, and the tea was already made, the pot protected against the chill of the fog by a yellow wool cozy Gwen had made herself.
    The dog, Laddie, came and put his chin on Gwen’s lap. She stroked his heavy white ruff as she talked. “In fact, I feel so much better really, I guess it was silly of me not to cancel your call. But…”
    She put her head on one side, in a kind of winsome, you-know-me gesture. Her fair hair had thinned and sallowed, and her fine white skin was loose beneath her chin, but she had the mannerisms of a woman who had once been beautiful. Her history was written on her face and illustrated by her artful, fluttering hands. At eighteen she had had the world at her feet—she was the most popular debutante in Louisville; she had clippings to prove it—but the world had gradually deserted her. She had had nothing to offer it but her youth.
    At forty she lived for her house and her dogs, and sometimes in the middle of the night she had spells of terror. Her pulse was so fast it couldn’t be counted; her body twitched; her head took fire. Twice Charlotte had been called in the night and found her like this and given her a sedative. There was nothing organically wrong with Gwen’s heart. Her symptoms were typical of the cardiac neurotic and couldn’t be tracked down by a doctor who had had no special psychiatric training.
    “Was this attack like the others?” Charlotte felt for the pulse in Gwen’s wrist. It was still rapid, nearly a hundred.
    “A bit worse, I think. Oh, I was frightened—what’s my pulse?”
    “Just about normal. Have you been taking the capsules and medicine I prescribed?” The medicine was a sedative and the capsules contained