The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers Page B

the bed and the mattress!
—he decided to go outside into the garden.
    The fresh sea breeze dispelled his nausea, and he walked aimlessly down the narrow, shaded lanes, trying to lose his abhorrent individuality in the vivid smells and colors of the flowers.
    He put his hands into the pockets of his coat, and he felt something which, after a moment's puzzlement, he was able to identify as the Biddenden cake Josephine had failed to break at the wedding the night before. He took it out of the pocket. There was a raised pattern on the crumbly surface and, looking closely, he saw that it was a representation of two women physically joined at the hip. Crawford had read of twins who'd been born so, though he didn't know why the town of Biddenden should celebrate one such pair on their biscuits. He crumbled the thing up in his hands and scattered it over the path for the birds.
    After a while he began to walk back toward where the rear wall of the inn rose above the greenery, but he halted when he heard voices behind a hedge ahead of him, for he didn't want to have to talk to anyone.
    "What do you mean, 'should have restrained him'?" came a man's voice angrily. "I'm not a member of the Watch—and anyway, nobody would have guessed that he could walk away. We
carried
him down the stairs to the kitchen."
    "Murderers are generally good actors," said another voice.
    Crawford was suddenly dizzy with rage, and actually reeled back a step; he took a deep breath, but before he could shout he heard another voice say, "Did you hear how his first wife died?"—and he sagged and let the breath out.
     
     
CHAPTER 3
     
     
    I will drain him dry as hay:
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his pent-house lid;
He shall live a man forbid:
Weary se'nnights nine times nine
Shall he dwindle, peak and pine:
Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet he shall be tempest-tost.
    —Shakespeare,
Macbeth
     
     
    "
First
wife? No. How did you?"
    "The father and sister of the dead lady upstairs got here a few minutes ago—they're in the dining room. They say his first wife ran off with a Navy man who got her with child, and Crawford found out about it and burned down the house she was living in. Her Navy man tried to get into the burning house to save her, but Crawford fought him, on the street out front, long enough to make it impossible for anyone to get inside."
    Crawford's eyes and jaws and fists were all clenched tight, and he had to crouch to keep from falling over. He could hear the blood pressure singing in his head.
    "Jesus," said the first man. "And did you see what he did to the Carmody girl upstairs? Like a mill wheel rolled over her. And then he went back to sleep! The doctor says, judging from her temperature and the way the blood's dried, that she was killed around midnight. So old Crawford was sleeping there next to that thing for something like seven hours!"
    "I'll tell you one thing, I'm not searching this damn garden without a pistol in my hand."
    "That's a point. Yeah, let's . . ."
    The voices drifted away then. Crawford sat down in the grass and held his head in his hands. These people were so wrong, about so many things, that he despaired of ever getting it all straightened out . . . but the worst of it was that Mr. Carmody apparently
believed
that old story about Caroline's death.
    It had been about six years ago—Caroline had left him, but though he had known which house she was living in in London, he hadn't been able to work up the nerve to go and confront her; it was too much like making a perilous leap from one high rooftop to another—an error would be fatal. He might simply fall, simply ruin any possibility that she would come back to him . . . for there would be only one chance, she wouldn't feel that she owed him more than one conversation.
    And so for ten days he had ignored his medical practice to sit all day in a pub across the street from the house she was in, trying to judge the perfect moment to see her and ask her