Girl on the Best Seller List by Vin Packer Read Free Book Online Page B

right!”
    “And I should get rid of them?”
    “You have to kill them, Freddy.”
    Milo spoke those words with such emphasis that he broke the stubby black pencil he held in his hands. It was hard for Freddy to keep his mind on the rest of their conversation. All the while Milo discussed the effectiveness of Trichlorophenoxyacetic Acid sprays and Dichorophenoxyacetic Acid sprays, Freddy thought of the way Milo’s big hands had snapped the piece of short lead pencil, of the way Milo had said, “Matrimony Vine — that’s the right name for them!” Maybe Freddy was just projecting; maybe he was just trying to imagine how he would feel if his wife had published that best seller.
    Virginia Fulton was sixteen, medium height, plump, with muscular legs, frizzy brown hair, a freckled nose and corrective glasses. She squinted at the sun from behind the thick black frames and said, “Just the same I feel like feeding her some of this stuff!” She shook the small can which she held in her hand.
    “Well, I’m afraid we’ll have to settle for killing mere weeds this morning, Ginny. Unless you can come up with a better idea for murdering Mrs. Wealdon. Herbicides aren’t dependable. She’d probably suffer little more than a belly ache.”
    Freddy Fulton stood and stretched. He had been a very handsome man once. There were still traces of this in his height, his broad shoulders, the thick crop of coal-colored hair, the piercing dark eyes and the good rugged profile. But at thirty-eight he had developed a paunch, the sort that made his stance sag, and his jowls were heavy now and flaccid. He was still impressive, partly because he was so well-tailored, mostly because he had such an air of self-confidence.
    Fulton was not at all displeased with the figure he cut, and when he had read Gloria Wealdon’s portrayal of him as the anxious father of a lisping daughter and the fanatically devoted husband of a wife who was busy debauching her psychoanalyst, he had guffawed aloud. He remembered that he had been sitting up in bed reading the book, and that Fern, opposite him in her bed, had demanded: “What’s so funny, Freddy?”
    He really pitied Fern. He wondered if that was what his whole attitude toward her had evolved into.
    “Oh, I don’t know,” he had answered. “Poor old Milo.” He had closed the novel abruptly, so that she would not know he was reading the seduction scene between Fernanda and her analyst.
    “Not poor Virginia?” Fern had snapped. “Not poor Min Stewart?” she had added. Freddy knew she meant —
not poor me?
Fern had slapped cold cream across her face with an angry gesture, and continued, “After all, your own daughter was maligned in that book.
And
your best friend. Where would you be without Min? Who put up the money for your loan when all the banks refused credit?”
    “All right,” he had said. “Poor Virginia. Poor Min.”
    “But you don’t really mean it, do you?”
    “No,” Freddy had admitted, “I don’t. Ginny can do circles around Gloria Wealdon any day; so can Min Stewart. Neither one of them gives a damn what that idiot wrote about them.”
    Fern had shouted, “Sometimes I think you know less about the human mechanism than anyone I’ve ever encountered!”
    The storm warnings were posted. Whenever Fern began talking about “the human mechanism” at the top of her lungs, the first rag of civility was about to be ripped away.
    “I don’t want to argue, Fern,” Freddy had answered in a mild tone.
    “Don’t
I
know it!” Fern laughed sarcastically. “You want to keep your hostility all bottled up inside of you. You’ll find other ways to punish me, won’t you, Fred?”
    “The idea of punishing you,” Freddy replied truthfully, “bores me.” He felt like adding: “As does your new vocabulary,” but he checked himself.
    At the last Rotary Club meeting, he had made the same complaint to Jay Mannerheim. Jay had answered that all patients tossed around psychological words