Rex Stout by The Mountain Cat Page B

heart, but no less deadly. Delia had not ever pretended, and did not now, that she had actually comprehended that evil, but she had known it was there; and certainly she had seen with her own eyes its consequences, since it was she who had gone into the bedroom that morning a month ago, after Clara had left for the office, and found her mother dead, poisoned in the night by her own hand.
    Delia closed her eyes and read the note her mother had left—read it seeing it, though the paper itself was in a box at home in her closet. She read every word, her throat constricting. But her mother’s terror of the evil had been so great that she had made no attempt to attack it even in that farewell to her daughters; it had contained no mention, no reference at all, to the Reverend Rufus Toale. Nevertheless, Delia and Clara had known. Clara had admitted to Delia that it stared them in the face. And in spite of that, only two weeks ago, only a fortnight after their mother was buried, Clara had allowed Rufus Toale to enter their house and had talked with him! And again and again! And had put Delia off with evasions when she had expostulated.
    Delia shivered in the coolness the evening had brought.
    She opened her eyes. She heard the sound of footsteps at a distance on the path, but gave it only enough attention for a flitting assumption that it was the caretaker on his rounds. It was twilight, nearly dark, and she realized with a start that Clara might be worrying about her, and besides, she had something to do. She didn’t want to leave. If there was an answer anywhere,it was here. She had always before come to the cemetery in the morning, but now that she had been here in the dusk of evening, she would come again. It was more … it was better, with no sun shining, with night falling, with the air chill and silent gloom preparing to blanket the graves.…
    She became aware that the footsteps had approached quite close—and had stopped. As she started to turn her head a deep, musical voice sounded almost directly above her:
    “Good evening, Miss Brand.”
    She leaped to her feet and was facing the Reverend Rufus Toale.
    His ludicrous straw hat, which he wore winter and summer, was in his hand, strands of his dark hair, with no gray, straggled on his high broad forehead, and a faint compression and twisting of his lips, obviously habitual, might have been characterized, by an impious or hostile tongue, as an unctuous smirk.
    “Praise God,” he said.
    Delia began to tremble from head to foot.
    “I haven’t seen you here before,” he said, “since your mother was taken, though I know you have been coming. My services to the living, for His glory, take up my day and I can come only in the evening. You don’t let me see you, my child, though I have a message for you. I can help you, we can be helped together, by His grace and power and goodness and wisdom. You come, I fear, to this resting place of that sorely tried woman, your dear mother, only to sorrow in her defeat, but I come for strength.” He extended the hand that was not embarrassed by the hat. “I would like to lead you—”
    “Get out of here.” Delia thought she was screaming,though in fact her voice was low, a dull dead monotone. “You—you—get out of here …”
    Then she gave up. She couldn’t shoot him, because she had no gun. She couldn’t touch him—she couldn’t do anything. So suddenly she darted past him, to the path, leaving her hat there on the grass next to her mother’s grave, and ran. Her heroic resolve on a supreme retaliation to evil had descended to the level of that trite grotesquerie: a headlong terrified flight through a cemetery at the fall of night. She stumbled once but caught herself and arrived at the gate breathless.
    She sat in her car, trembling all over, for a while, until it occurred to her that he might come, and then she started the engine and got the car moving, headed for Cody.
    The driving helped to steady her. She