Killing Cousins by Fletcher Flora Read Free Book Online

Incidentally, now that you have the money, it will be necessary for me to have about three hundred for expenses.”
    “Expenses? Whatever for? I hope you aren’t going to start blackmailing me, Quincy.”
    “Don’t be absurd, Cousin. What’s the need for blackmail between two reasonable people who enjoy such amiable relations as you and I? I have to make a little trip, that’s all, and I’ll need to fly in order to save time. Since I’m doing it for your sake, you surely don’t expect me to pay my own way.”
    “I simply don’t see the necessity for making a trip. Where are you going?”
    “Dallas, Texas, I think, would be as good a place as any. Old Howard is going to send you a letter from there, Cousin, and under the circumstances, as you can see from examining Howard, I’ll have to go down there and mail it for him.”
    “It seems like a long way to go just to mail a letter.”
    “A husband on the run, Cousin, could hardly write from the next town. I can leave KC tomorrow after arranging matters with my maternal cousin about the Buick, and with luck I should be back and safely in my cage at the bank by Monday morning. If I’m delayed and a little late, you can rely on me to make an acceptable excuse.”
    Willie looked at him dubiously with a recurrence of the uneasy feeling. It seemed to her that he was enjoying himself a little too much, and he seemed determined to elaborate everything as much as possible. She did not object to his getting pleasure from his efforts, for he had surely earned it, but she didn’t want him to come a cropper over his own cleverness. She would have felt a little easier in her mind, in fact, if he had not exuded such perfect self-confidence.
    “You are welcome to the money,” she said, “if you really think it essential to go.”
    “Thanks, Cousin.” He took the money, three hundred dollars, and shoved it into a pocket as he walked to the door. “I’ll be back tonight. Ten o’clock or thereabout. Be certain that there are no obstructions in the way of what must be done. In the meanwhile, I hardly think it’s necessary to emphasize the importance of not letting anyone get a glimpse of old Howard there.”
    “I’m not quite an idiot, Quincy,” she said indignantly. “I can see the importance of that as clearly as you.”

SIX
     
    After he was gone, the day stretched out forever. It would simply be impossible, she thought, to do nothing but sit around the house and wait for night to come and Quincy to come back, and so she began to think of things to do, and the first thing to do, she decided, was to dress. She locked the bathroom door from inside Howard’s room, and then she left through the door into the hall, carefully not looking at Howard while she was leaving, and locked the hall door with a key from the outside. It would now be impossible for anyone to wander into the room, which would have been possible before, if unlikely, and she carried the key to her own room and put it into her little jewel box on the dressing table. She then removed the thin blue gown and went into the bathroom and had a shower, hot and cold, and she had the queerest feeling, which was rather frightening, that the sound of the shower would surely waken Howard, and that he would be, if she were to open the door and look into his room, standing and yawning and scratching in the rather revolting way he always did after waking.
    Because of this feeling she did not stay in the shower as long as she would have otherwise. In her bedroom, after drying on a huge woolly towel, she dressed in a white jersey pull-over blouse, a kind of T-shirt, and a pair of bright red Capri pants to match her toenails. She was trying her best to be cheerful and to look on the bright side of things, but in spite of her best efforts she kept feeling more and more depressed, and even the considerable amount of money she had acquired, or salvaged, thanks to Quincy, was not enough to leaven her depression appreciably.