Free Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich Page A

holidays came out here in such shoals to pay their respects to the dead. A headstone carver’s shop and workyard, littered with ornamental urns, cherubs, mourning angels, and crosses, a refreshment and eating pavilion, and others such. They were intermittent, with large gaps between, and the whole atmosphere was one of abandoned desolation rather than life-quickened activity, somehow.
    The carriage drew up at the main entrance, marked by a pair of massive bronze doors set within a stone arch, and they got out. “Come back for us within a half-hour, no more,” Marta instructed the driver.
    The carriage ambled aimlessly off on some mission best known to its driver—perhaps the nearest cantina at the next crossroads ahead. As it left them, Conchita held back in seeming irresolution a minute.
    “Marta, before we go in, can’t we go over to that place across the way and sit down for a minute? I’m so thirsty.”
    Marta objected querulously, flattening the sheaf of flowers so that she could look at her clearly over their tops, “No, nina . How can we? Your mother told me to bring you right back. Look, the sun’s already far down. Night will be upon us before we can get back to the house.”
    “How long will it take?” the girl coaxed.
    “But did we come out here to visit your father’s grave or did we come out here to have refrescos? ” the old woman said with peevish stubbornness.
    “Just a cup of mint tea. You know how you love your mint ‘tea. You always take it at this hour at home.”
    The chaperon wavered, obviously tempted. She cast a look across the road, as though judging how long it would detain them to go over and back. “But isn’t it better to go in first and pay our respects, and then have it when we come out? The place may close.”
    “I’m faint, Martita. Why do you refuse me?”
    Her companion was at once all whimpering solicitude. “Oh my light, why didn’t you tell me sooner? What am I thinking of, standing here wrangling? Come, my heart, take me by the arm, we’ll go right over.”
    They inched across the road, held to a painfully reduced gait more by the stout figure’s slowness of limb than by the slender one’s weakness, if the truth had been known. The devoted Marta even had to caution her charge, “Not so fast, linda . You may get dizzy.”
    The establishment was bare of customers at this hour. A waiter with a tray tucked under his arm came attentively to the door, waiting to see where they would decide to sit before moving any further. There was a terrace strip of terra-cotta mosaic tiling laid out in front of the place, holding a row of reedy, forlorn-looking, wafer-sized iron tables, each one with more wire-legged chairs wedged around it than it could accommodate.
    “Let’s go inside out of the glare,” Conchita suggested demurely.
    They continued on into an interior of cavelike dimness, after the outer brightness, in which a sea of other equally reedy, equally untenanted iron tables could be made out. A loosely strung pasteboard sign proclaiming ASK FOR EL SOL BEER brushed against Marta’s head as she passed below it. She swept it indignantly aside.
    They seated themselves opposite one another in a small booth against the wall, duenna and massed flowers on one side of the table, young mourner on the other. The waiter approached. “ Buenos dias .”
    “ Buenos dias ,” Marta grunted, with the curtness one employee often has for another.
    Conchita waited until he had gone away again, then tipped the veil from her face with an air of angelic primness.
    The visibility lightened up a little around them as their eyes grew accustomed to the place, though not much beyond the blue-green transparency of a submarine deep from first to last. Then too, the daylight outside was fast toning down, losing its contrasting vividness.
    They sat for a moment or two. “We’ll be locked out,” Marta mourned. “We’ll have had the whole trip out for nothing.” She shifted her head and