The Black House by Patricia Highsmith

Lucienne:
    â€œYou know, I rang Edmund up a couple of times in the night—just to annoy him. I have to confess that. Ellen knows.”
    â€œDid you,” said Lucienne calmly.
    Tom, just behind them, had heard this. “I did worse,” he said with a twitch of a smile. “I told Edmund he might lose his job if he started taking Magda out with him on his business lunches.”
    Ellen laughed. “Oh, that’s not serious, Tom. That’s—” But she didn’t finish.
    We killed him , Lucienne thought. Everybody was thinking that, and no one had the guts to say it. Anyone of them might have said, “We killed him, you know?” but no one did. “We’ll miss him,” Lucienne said finally, as if she meant it.
    â€œYe-es,” someone replied with equal gravity.
    They climbed into three taxis, promising to see each other soon.

The Terrors of
Basket-Weaving
    D iane’s terror began in an innocent and fortuitous way. She and her husband, Reg, lived in Manhattan, but had a cottage on the Massachusetts coast near Truro where they spent most weekends. Diane was a press relations officer in an agency called Retting. Reg was a lawyer. They were both thirty-eight, childless by choice, and both earned good salaries.
    They enjoyed walks along the beach, and usually they took walks alone, not with each other. Diane liked to look for pretty stones, interesting shells, bottles of various sizes and colors, bits of wood rubbed smooth by sand and wind. These items she took back to the unpainted gray cottage they called “the shack,” lived with them for a few weeks or months, then Diane threw nearly all of them out, because she didn’t want the shack to become a magpie’s nest. One Sunday morning she found a wicker basket bleached nearly white and with its bottom stoved in, but its frame and sides quite sturdy. This looked like an old-fashioned crib basket for a baby, because one end of it rose higher than the other, the foot part tapered, and it was just the size for a newborn or for a baby up to a few months. It was the kind called a Moses basket, Diane thought.
    Was the basket even American? It was amusing to think that it might have fallen overboard or been thrown away, old and broken, from a passing Italian tanker, or some foreign boat that might have had a woman and child on board. Anyway, Diane decided to take it home, and she put it for the nonce on a bench on the side porch of the shack, where colored stones and pebbles and sea glass already lay. She might try to repair it, for fun, because in its present condition it was useless. Reg was then shifting sand with a snow shovel from one side of the wooden front steps, and was going to plant more beach grass from the dunes, like a second line of troops, between them and the sea to keep the sand in place. His industry, which Diane knew would go on another hour or so until lunchtime—and cold lobster and potato salad was already in the fridge—inspired her to try her hand at the basket now.
    She had realized a few minutes before that the kind of slender twigs she needed stood already in a brass cylinder beside their small fireplace. Withes or withies—the words sounded nice in her head—might be more appropriate, but on the other hand the twigs would give more strength to the bottom of a basket which she might use to hold small potted plants, for instance. One would be able to move several pots into the sun all at once in a basket—if she could mend the basket.
    Diane took the pruning shears, and cut five lengths of reddish-brown twigs—results of a neighbor’s apple-tree pruning, she recalled—and then snipped nine shorter lengths for the crosspieces. She estimated she would need nine. A ball of twine sat handy on a shelf, and Diane at once got to work. She plucked out what was left of the broken pieces in the basket, and picked up one of her long twigs. The slightly pointed ends, an