Someone Is Bleeding by Richard Matheson Page B

leaving her home and how glad she was to do it. Leave the tyranny of her father’s control. If he was anything at home like the unfeeling flint he was on the court martial hoard, Peggy’s life with him must have been intolerable. Then I saw her one day years later. I’d set up an office in San Francisco. And one day Peggy came in.”
    He drew a deep breath.
    “I didn’t recognize her, David,” he said. “She was almost . . . gaunt, Her face was lined. There were dark hollows around her eyes, she looked as though she’d been violently ill for years.”
    He paused.
    ‘She had been,” he said. “She’d been married to George.”
    I turned my head on the pillow and looked at him, He was looking at the wall, hands still clasped in his lap.
    “I won’t go into details,” he said. “Her problems were partly sexual, of course.”
    His voice became contemptuous.
    “Her husband was completely indifferent to Peggy’s timorousness, her hypersensitive system. And it was killing her. In addition to the fact that her husband was going to college on the G.I. Rill and they were just about living on that income alone. It was actually poverty. And to a girl like Peggy, who’d had every material advantage anyway, this was an even greater torture.”
    He shifted on the chair.
    “She said she wanted a divorce,” he said. “She said some doctor had told her that divorce was essential if she wanted to remain sane. The poor physical relationship, the extreme poverty was destroying not only her health but her mind. She was pregnant, too. We never got her the divorce,” he said. “I started to get the papers together, but it was too late.”
    He stared at his hands.
    “A few days later Peggy went out of her mind and stabbed her husband to death in their one-room apartment. It was a measure of her torture. Because she’s a very gentle girl, as you know.”
    I knew.
    “She came to me then,” Jim said. “I took her to the police. I put up her bail, I defended her. I got her acquitted on a temporary insanity plea, and during this time she miscarried. I tried to help her forget. I gave her money to live on because she didn’t have any profession and I didn’t want her to work in dime stores as she had during her marriage.”
    “She told me . . . alimony.” I heard myself saying, not to him. The thought just had sound that’s all.
    He shook his head.
    “And you doubted what I told you,” he said. “You surely see now what I meant. The lie about her husband’s death, the failure to tell you about her pregnancy. The lie about her income. Peggy.”
    * * *
    I don’t know what time it was. Because I was back in the past. Shadows of years flickered across my mind.
    Jim, me, sitting in his office at college. He used to be assistant to the head of the Law School.
    Jim talking “I don’t think you really know about Linda,” he said, his face very serious.
    “What about her?” I said.
    “She’s been sleeping with me for a year now.”
    The crusher. My first blind-eyed attraction for Linda’s sharp intelligence, her long red hair, her svelte form—shattered.
    Later on, of course, I found out it was a complete lie. Jim hadn’t even kissed her.
    And that brought me back. But not completely. I’d seen that clipping. She’d killed her husband. But the rest? I wasn’t sure.
    So, Jim or no Jim, facts or no facts, I was back in the car. Driving at near violation speed up Wilshire. And going in the front door without knocking. Pretending to ignore the shudder I got going back into that house. She was packing, her face very sad.
    “Peggy”
    I stood in the doorway. Knowing that if everything Jim said was true, our love had to end. Because it would have been founded on lies And the only thing that could console me was that Jim never did say once that Peggy had killed Albert.
    She kept packing after she looked at me. She moved around the room, her motions crisp and tight. I watched her for a moment. And I just couldn’t, for