Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith (best books to read now .TXT) 📕

closer. "Vic, you're not feeling uncomfortable tonight, are you? I wanted you to know that all your real friends are still your friends, the same as ever. I don't know what you've heard tonight, but I hope nothing unpleasant."

       "Didn't hear a thing!" Vic assured her, smiling.

       "I talked to Evelyn. She and Phil feel the same as we do. 'We' know you just said it as a—as a joke, in spite of what people like the Wilsons are trying to say."

       "What're they trying to say?"

       "It's not her, it's him. He thinks you're odd. Well, we're all odd, aren't we?" Mary said, with a gay laugh. "He must be looking for another plot for a story. I think he's 'very' odd!"

       Vic knew Mary well enough to know that she was more concerned than she was pretending to be. "What is he saying?" Vic asked.

       "Oh, he's saying—that you don't react normally. I can imagine what Ralph Gosden's been saying. I mean the fuel he's added to the fire. Oh, Don Wilson's just saying that you ought to be watched and that you're very mysterious." Mary whispered the last word, smiling. "I told him we'd all had the opportunity of watching you for the past nine or ten years, and that you're one of the finest, sweetest, most unmysterious men I've ever known!"

       "Mrs. Meller, may I have this dance with you?" Vic asked. "Do you think your husband would mind?"

       "Why, Vic! I can't believe it!"

       He took her ice plate and carried it with his own to the refreshment stall a few feet away, then returned and swept Mary out onto the floor to the music of a waltz. The waltz had always been his favorite dance. He waltzed very well. He saw Melinda notice him and stop short with surprise. Horace and Evelyn were looking at him, too. Vic shortened his steps so that he would not look silly, because a joyous exuberance had filled him as if a long-repressed desire had burst forth. He felt he could have flown with Mary, if it had not been for the other couples that cluttered the floor around him.

       "Why, you're a wonderful dancer!" Mary said. "Why've you been hiding it all these years?"

       Vic did not try to answer.

       Long after the dance was over Vic felt a tingling exhilaration is if he had achieved a triumph. When Melinda had finished a lance, he went over to her, made a little bow and said, "May I, Melinda?"

       She hid her surprise almost immediately by closing her eyes, turning her head away from him. "Oh, darling, I'm tired," she said.

       On their way home, when Melinda asked, "What inspired you to dance tonight?" he was able to pass it off, to forestall her kidding him with "I thought I might as well baffle people by being inconsistent as well as odd. I'm supposed never to dance, you know."

       Melinda hadn't been in the mood for the Cowans' swimming pool, though she had declined their invitation very graciously.

       "I thought you were charming tonight," Vic said to her at home.

       "I have to put myself out to counteract some of the damage you've done," she replied. "I worked hard tonight."

       Vic shrugged involuntarily, smiled a little, and said nothing. Melinda had had just as good a time as she'd had at other club dances when she had got too high, or flirted, or got sick, or created some other kind of disturbance that hadn't enhanced their popularity, either.

       Lying in his bed that night Vic relived the moments on the dance floor with Mary Meller. Don Wilson's scowling face. The whispering people. He thought that a few people there tonight really believed that he had killed Malcolm McRae—the people who knew him least. That was what Mary had tried to tell him. If Mary hadn't known him so well, or thought she knew him so well, she might be one of the people who suspected him, he thought. She had as much as said it that night of the party. 'You're like somebody waiting very patiently and one day—you'll do something'. He remembered the exact words, and how he had smiled at their mildness. Yes, all these years he had played a game of seeming calm and indifferent to whatever Melinda did. He had deliberately hidden everything he felt—and in those months of her first affair he had felt something, even if it was only shock, but he had succeeded in concealing it. That was what baffled people, he knew. He had seen it in their faces, even in Horace's. He didn't react with the normal jealousy, and something was going to give. That was the conclusion people came to. And that was what made his story so good: something had given, and he had murdered one of Melinda's lovers. That was more believable than that he had taken it for four years without saying or doing anything. To have burst out, finally, was merely human. People understood that. Nobody on earth could prove that he had murdered Malcolm McRae, he thought, but neither could anybody prove that he hadn't.

Chapter 6

It was a little more than two weeks after the Fourth of July dance, when Vic was breakfasting with Trixie one morning, that lie saw the item in the 'New York Times':

       SLAYER OF NEW YORK ADVERTISING MAN FOUND

       8-Month-Old Mystery Slaying of

       Malcolm McRae Solved

       With a spoonful of grapefruit poised in mid-air, Vic pored over it. The police had picked up a man working as a clerk in a haberdashery shop in the state of Washington who had confessed to the crime, and there was "no doubt" that he was the murderer, though they were still checking the facts. The man's name was Howard Olney. He was thirty-one and a brother of Phyllis Olney, an entertainer, who had once been "on intimate terms" with McRae. Olney, said the paper, blamed