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

Peabody. Janey Peterson called up Trixie and asked to come over, and Trixie seemed just as happy to play around the house if Janey came over, so Vic decided to spend the afternoon reading about Tiberius.

       Janey's father drove her over, and Vic chatted with him on the front lawn for a few minutes. He was a strongly built, fair-haired man with a pleasant air of frankness and modesty about him. He had a bag of fresh homemade doughnuts with him, and Janey and Trixie took a couple and dashed off, and Vic and Peterson stood there munching and talking about the hydrangea bushes on the front lawn that were now in full bloom. Peterson said his were new young plants and evidently too young to bloom this year, because they hadn't.

       "Take a couple of ours," Vic said. "We've got more than we need."

       Peterson protested, but Vic went to the garage, got the pitchfork and a couple of burlap bags, and dug up two of the bushes. There were four hydrangea bushes, scattered in no particular pattern on the lawn, and Vic happened to detest hydrangeas. At least he did that afternoon. Their big pastel pompoms of blossoms looked tawdry and insipid. He presented the two bushes, their roots wrapped in burlap, to Peterson with his greetings to Mrs. Peterson.

       "She'll be tickled pink with these," Peterson said. "It'll certainly improve the lawn. Give my regards to your wife, too. Is she here?"

       "No. She's out visiting a friend," Vic answered.

       Peterson nodded.

       Vic was not sure, but he thought Peterson had looked a little embarrassed when he asked about Melinda. Vic waved at him as his car pulled away, then turned back toward the house. The lawn looked as if two small bombs had hit it. He left it that way. Melinda came in at a quarter to seven. Vic heard her car, and after a few moments went from his room through the garage into the living room, ostensibly to get a few sections of the 'Times'. He half expected to find De Lisle with her, but Melinda was alone.

       "No doubt you've been imagining me in the depths of iniquity this afternoon," she said, "but we went to the trotting races. I won eight bucks. What do you think of that?"

       "I didn't imagine anything," Vic said, with a smile, and turned the radio on. There was a news commentator he wanted to hear at seven o'clock.

       Janey Peterson stayed for dinner with them, and then Vic drove her home. He knew that Melinda would call Charley while he was out of the house. Charley had had a telephone installed almost immediately, because Melinda had used all the influence she had—or rather that the name Van Allen had—to get the company to put the phone in without the usual two or three weeks' delay. Vic wished she hadn't said that about the "depths of iniquity." He wished she weren't quite so crude. She hadn't always been so crude. That was the fault of the company she kept, of course. Why had she said anything at all if she hadn't done anything with De Lisle or didn't intend to? When a woman as attractive as Melinda handed it to them on a platter, why should a man like De Lisle resist? The morals to resist didn't come very often any more. That was for people like Henri III of France, after his wife the Princesse de Conde died. There was devotion, Henri sitting in his library the rest of his life, with his memories of the Princesse, creating designs of skulls and crossbones for Nicolas Eve to put on book covers and title pages for him. Henri would probably be called psychotic by modern psychiatrists.

       Charley De Lisle came twice to the house for dinner during the following week, and one evening the three of them went to an outdoor concert at Tanglewood, though Charley had had to leave before it was over in order to be at the Hotel Lincoln by eleven. One of the evenings he dined with them was a Monday, when he didn't work and could stay later than eleven, and Vic obligingly said good night around ten o'clock, went to his own room, and did not come back. Charley and Melinda had been sitting at the piano, but the piano stopped, Vic noticed, as soon as he left. Vic finally went to bed and to sleep, though the sound of Charley's car leaving awakened him, and he looked at his wristwatch and saw that it was a quarter to four.

       The next morning Vic knocked on Melinda's door at about nine o'clock, carrying a cup of coffee for her. He had had a call from Stephen a few minutes before, saying that his wife was not feeling well and that he didn't want to leave her alone. Stephen had asked if Melinda could possibly come and spell him, because two other women he might have called on were out of town with their husbands on vacation. Melinda didn't answer his knock, and Vic pushed the door open gently. The room was empty. The beige cover on the bed looked unusually taut and smooth. Vic carried the coffee back to the kitchen and poured it down the sink.

       Then he went on to the plant. He called Stephen and told him that Melinda had had an early appointment to go shopping with a friend in Wesley, but that she ought to be back by noon, and that he would call him again. Vic called home at eleven and at twelve. She was in at twelve, and he asked her, in a perfectly ordinary voice, how she was, and then told her about Georgianne. Georgianne was pregnant, six or seven months pregnant, Vic thought. Stephen had had a doctor for her, and they didn't think it was going to be a miscarriage, but Georgianne needed somebody with her.

       "Sure, I'll be glad to