The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith Read Free Book Online

sister, Mrs. Rose Gaines. The driver of the bus, John MacDonough of the Cardinal Bus Lines, stated that he noticed Mrs. Kimmel’s absence after a 15-minute rest stop at a roadside café last night at 9:55 p.m. Mrs. Kimmel’s suitcase was still aboard the bus. It is believed that she was assaulted while taking a short walk along the highway. None of the passengers questioned reported hearing an outcry.
    The victim’s husband, Melchior J. Kimmel, 40, a bookdealer of Newark, identified the body in Tarrytown this afternoon. Police are searching for clues.
    Not of any use for the essays, Walter thought, because the attacker had probably been a maniac. But it was strange no one had seen or heard anything, unless she had been a very long way from the bus itself. Walter wondered if someone she knew could have met her there, lured her quietly away under a pretence of talking to her, and then attacked her? He hesitated, then leaned towards the waste-basket and dropped the clipping, saw it flutter down to one side of the waste-basket on to the carpet. He’d pick it up later, he thought.
    He put his head down on his arms. He suddenly felt that he could sleep.

5
    B y Tuesday, Walter was in bed with the flu.
    Clara insisted on calling the doctor to find out what it was, though Walter knew it was the flu: somebody at the party had mentioned a couple of cases of flu around Benedict. Still, Dr. Pietrich came, pronounced it flu, and sent Walter to bed with pills and penicillin tablets. Clara stayed for a few minutes and briskly assembled around him everything he would need—cigarettes and matches, books, a glass of water and Kleenex.
    â€œThanks, honey, thanks a lot,” Walter said for everything she did for him. Walter felt he was inconveniencing her, that she was grimly doing a duty in trying to make him comfortable. On the rare occasions when he fell ill, he felt as constrained with her as he would have felt with a total stranger. He was glad when she finally went off to work. He knew that she wouldn’t call all day, that she would probably even sit downstairs reading the evening paper tonight before she came up to see how he was.
    That evening he couldn’t force down even the bouillon that Claudia made for him. He had acquired a flaming soreness in his nasal passage, and smoking was impossible. The pills made him drowse, and in the intervals when he was awake, a depression settled on his mind like a black and heavy atmosphere. He asked himself how he had come to be where he was, waiting for a woman he believed himself in love with to come home, a woman who would not even lay her hand on his forehead? He asked himself why he hadn’t pushed Dick a little harder about getting out of the firm in the fall instead of the first of the year? He’d talked to Dick the night of the party, which had been a bad time, but Dick was shy about discussing it in the office, as shy as if the office were full of hidden dictaphones planted by Cross. Walter wondered if he’d finally have to get out by himself. But even in his feverish anger, he realized that he needed Dick’s partnership. The kind of office they had in mind would take two men to run, and Dick, as a working partner, had some virtues that were hard to find.
    When Clara came home, she said. “Are you feeling any better? What’s your temperature?”
    He knew his temperature, because Claudia had taken it that afternoon. It was 103 degrees. “Not bad,” he said. “I’m feeling better.”
    â€œGood.” Clara emptied her pocketbook methodically, put a few things on her dressing-table, then went downstairs to wait for dinner.
    Walter closed his eyes and tried to think of something besides Clara sitting in the living-room, listening to the radio and reading the evening paper. He played a game he played sometimes on the brink of sleep at night, or on the brink of waking in the morning: he imagined a newspaper spread