I said rather quietly, “If she finds my letter, she will know I am not here about a nursing job.”
“She won’t find it.” He smiled at me, a smile that blended gratitude and relief and something else I did not want to acknowledge, and came toward me with his arms outstretched.
I quickly sidestepped the intended embrace. Even if he were not married, and the circumstances of our reunion not so peculiar, I would not have wanted his arms about me.
He stopped short when I evaded him and although he continued to smile, his smile had a tinge of sadness now.
“So you’ve fallen out of love with me,” he said.
“I have had plenty of time in which to do so.” I was angry with him, angry with myself, angry with this silly situation in which I had somehow gotten involved. “And even if I hadn’t, you could hardly expect me to welcome your embrace.”
“You’re still wearing the jade,” he said, looking at my throat.
My hand automatically went to the pendant of white jade I wore. I had truly forgotten I was wearing it. I put it on each day without thinking about it, and no longer with the sense of anguish I had once felt. It was the gift he had given me when he asked me to marry him, in lieu of a ring.
“When you give jade,” he explained, whispering in my ear, “you give a part of your soul with it. You will always wear my soul at your throat. I can never take it back.”
“Your wife will be back in a moment,” I said curtly. “If you have any idea of persuading me to continue this charade without telling her the truth, you have better explain to me why you brought me here under false pretenses.”
He grew sober. “Because I’m in desperate need of help. You were the one person I felt sure I could trust.”
“And why, after all these years, should you think of me? Why should you think you could trust me any more than anyone else?”
He looked down. “Maybe because I needed someone so desperately. And maybe because I hoped you might still love me.”
“I think I had better go.”
“No, please.” He moved swiftly, seizing my arm again. “I hoped you would at least listen, for the sake of our past love.”
I said nothing, but I did pause and wait for him to continue.
“I think my wife is planning to kill me,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice, his eyes locked on mine. “I think, in fact, she has already begun.”
“Kill you?” I was stunned. For a long moment I could only stare at him incredulously. Then, quite deliberately, I removed my arm from his grip and went to sit in one of the large wing chairs, trying to collect my wits.
“That’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever heard. Why on earth should your wife want to kill you?”
“I know it’s incredible. I didn’t want to have to explain so abruptly, but you were going to leave. I had to stop you.”
“You still haven’t explained why she should want to kill you.”
He glanced anxiously toward the hall but there was no sign of his wife. “Because I told her I don’t love her. I told her I have never loved her.”
I shook my head violently. “What nonsense,” I said, as one would to a child. “This is the twentieth century, for Heaven’s sake, and this isn’t the house of the Borgias. People don’t go around killing one another off because they aren’t in love. There’s divorce and—”
“Mary would never agree to a divorce. Use your head. Look at her. Is she the type of woman who would give up something that belongs to her?”
I didn’t like being spoken to in that manner, but I held my tongue and allowed myself to think as he suggested. It was true, in a sense at least. Mary Linton and the scores of females like her I had known in school were not inclined to give up what they owned—and they would, to a woman, feel they owned a husband, particularly a suave, handsome one....
“This is ridiculous,” I said, cutting off my own stream of thought and standing abruptly. “I can’t imagine...your wife said you had been sick. Perhaps....”
He looked saddened and his smile went awry in a way that made me regret such a thought.
“You think I’m crazy,” he said, more a statement of bitter fact than a question.
I shook my head frantically. “I don’t know,” I said, and meant it. “This is all so insane, the whole situation. I don’t know what to think. I want to go. I think I should go, please.”
A clock struck somewhere in the house. Nonsensically my thoughts went back into the past. There was a cuckoo clock in my father’s house, an antiquated and not very accurate device with a gratingly loud cuckoo that announced the hour. It had struck as Jeff was proposing to me, so that he had to wait for it to finish before he could go on, and I had spoiled the romantic mood by giggling.
“Jeff,” Mary Linton called from upstairs, “I can’t find that blasted letter.”
“It must be there.” His eyes, trained on me while he answered her, were frightened as I had never seen them before. They imparted some of their fear to me. “Look in my desk.”
“In the name of God,” he spoke to me in a lowered voice, “do me one favor, Chris, that’s all I ask, one favor.”
I bit my lower lip. I had loved this man once. Even if I did not love him now—and I did not—did I not owe him one more favor at least, when he was so obviously sincere in his desperation?
He took my hesitant silence for assent. He went quickly to the writing table and took a cup and saucer from one corner of its top.
“My tea,” he said. “She fixes it for me herself every day. A wifely gesture.” He laughed but there was no humor in the bitter, harsh sound. I was struck again by how wasted he looked, how pale and drawn.
He opened a drawer and took a small jar from within, an ordinary jar that might have held applesauce of something equally innocent. It was empty. He removed the lid and poured the cup’s contents into it, replacing the lid.
“Here.” He brought the jar with its yellow brown contents across to me, “Take this to a chemist. Have it analyzed.”
“But what on earth...?”
“I can’t find it,” Mary said from the stairs.
“Please,” Jeff begged in a hoarse whisper.
I opened my purse—a generous carryall—and put the jar into it, clicking it shut as she came into the room.
“I can’t find it anywhere,” she said in a petulant tone. “It must have gotten lost.”
“It’s all right, darling.” He gave her a smile so relaxed, so every day, that I thought I must have imagined all the other, the anxiety and fear and tension of the last few minutes. “Miss Channing isn’t quite convinced she would want the job. I suppose she would prefer a younger patient,
