Shadow of Guilt by Patrick Quentin Page A

which, I knew, was merely an inversion of guilt. Now I’d have to be deceiving my wife two ways, not just about Eve, but about Ala, too. Ala and I would have to launch our private lie and once it was launched…
    I parked across the street. I said, “She mustn’t see you. Get down in the car. Stay here. I’ll go in first.”
    I got out of the car, crossed, went up the marble steps and let myself into the hall. There was no sign of Connie. The living-room door was open. I glanced in. She wasn’t there, either. Almost certainly Ala was right. My wife was in the library at the back of the house. I went upstairs and then down again. I beckoned to Ala from the front door and she hurried over to me. We crept upstairs together. We reached her room. She opened the door with her key.
    “We’ve made it!” She flung her arms around my neck. “Oh, George dear, everything’s all right now. You go find her and I’ll just come down in a few minutes. I’ll be sensible and ashamed. I’ll say I’ve realized she was right about Don and about everything. I’ll admit what a fool I’ve been. I’ll apologize. And she’ll never know.”
    She was smiling exuberantly as if it had all become a sort of game to her instead of a nightmare in which the man she was supposed to have “loved madly” had been murdered in the most entangling of circumstances. I looked at her with baffled incomprehension. Did the young recover as easily as that?
    I found Connie in the library, which had been her father’s pride. It was lined with leather-bound books which he had probably bought by the yard. Connie used it as a sort of shrine, withdrawing there to tap out her directives to her committees or to study her tomes on child welfare or slum clearance or racial discrimination or whatever it was she was currently being informed about. Also, on Sunday afternoons she sat there doing the Times crossword puzzle.
    When I went in, she was sitting in a red leather chair, her gleaming head bent over the Times magazine section. She had her reading glasses on and a silver pencil in her hand. She glanced up with the utmost composure.
    “Hello, dear. Who was a goddess of war in seven letters beginning with B?”
    “I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said.
    I knew that she was totally ignorant of what had happened in Don Saxby’s apartment, but she wasn’t ignorant of all the turmoil and drama which had been going on in our house before I left for Idlewild. Her habit of reverting to normalcy the moment circumstances made it even remotely possible had always annoyed me. Now, in my state of acute tension, it was infuriating. I sat down opposite her in another of the huge red leather chairs which suggested a private athenaeum club, fighting my anxieties about Eve. Of course she wouldn’t have gone. She’d given me her promise. It was all right and somehow, later on in the evening, I’d be able to slip away to her for a little while.
    “Are you sure you don’t know, dear?” said Connie. “A goddess of war beginning… Oh, well, never mind.”
    She dropped the pencil, put the magazine section down on a table and took off her glasses. “Well, how was it at Lew’s?”
    “Okay,” I said.
    “I’ve talked to Ala. I’m sure she’s going to be sensible. She was tired, she said, so we won’t disturb her, but when she comes down, you will talk to her, won’t you? She’s got some silly stubborn thing about accepting it from me but she’ll accept it from you.”
    “All right,” I said.
    “I am glad it all worked well at Lew’s.”
    There it was. She’d established just any ordinary Sunday afternoon. She started to tell me how disgracefully low the education standards were in some parts of Southern California. She must have been reading about it in the magazine section. She was still talking about it when Ala came in. I’d been dreading the moment but I needn’t have. Connie seemed more awkward than Ala, who, with a glibness which slightly appalled