Free All The Way by Charles Williams Page A

to imagine what she was like before she became numb to everything except remembered humiliation and hatred. The next morning, just at dawn, I awoke to find her struggling in my arms, trying to break free.
    “Jerry,” she snapped, “for heaven’s sake, what are you trying to do? Break me in two?”
    Oh,” I said stupidly, looking round the room. “I must have been having a bad dream.”
    It started to come back to me then. I could see it all with a horrible clarity. I’d been running after her across the Golden Gate bridge, and I’d caught her just before she could leap. I was trying to hold her back.
    That day we filled the last roll of tape. She told me everything she knew about Coral Blaine, and she knew a lot—including the fact her name wasn’t Coral at all, but Edna Mae. Apparently she was a believer in the old maxim of military science that you never stop studying the enemy. She described her, psycho-analyzed her, and gave me a complete rundown on the affair from the time Chapman first gave her a job until the engagement was announced.
    “I was scared the first time I saw her,” she said. “For years I’d done all the hiring and firing of office personnel. He never interfered, hired anybody himself, or cared. I’ll admit to being quite unfair a couple of times when I fired girls for no other reason than that they had their eyes on him— But never mind. At any rate, when I saw this Blaine number, I had a premonition. Flawless natural blonde, about five-foot-three, and of course only twenty-three years old, but it was that dewy and virginal look that frightened me. He’s forty—or will be next month.
    “He saw the dew, all right; and I could see the cutlass between her teeth as she came over the rail. She was the daughter of an old friend of his, he said; she’d just graduated from some co-educational football factory in Texas and he’d promised her a job. I felt my way very slowly, and I hit resistance right away. I wasn’t going to be able to fire this one. Nothing overt on either side, of course, but the resistance was there, and it was firm. So I moved her up to a better job I knew she couldn’t handle. And all I accomplished was that I had to do her work myself. She came to work, incidentally, about three weeks after Mrs. Chapman died.”
    It must have been bloody, I thought. And lonely as hell. A wife in the same position had status and the solid weight of community opinion going for her, but she had nothing. She knew she’d lost, of course, long before the blow actually fell, and in the end Chapman didn’t even have the decency to tell her himself. I gathered it wasn’t that he was ashamed to, or reluctant to face her; he just didn’t bother. Some business came up that was more important.
    You’re not coloring this a little?” I asked.
    She sighed. “I assure you I couldn’t be that stupid. I’m telling you exactly what happened, because I have to. God knows I don’t enjoy it; I’m no masochist. But obviously you have to know the truth, and not some dramatized version. I was informed of the engagement by Coral Blaine herself, in the office, on Monday morning, and if you have any doubts she knew exactly how to do it for the most exquisite effect, forget them. That was quite a day.”
    Seven thousand years, I thought, from nine to five. With all those eyes watching, and nothing to crawl under and hide. An outstanding day, any way you looked at it. Then a sudden thought occurred to me, something I’d missed completely until now. It was what she had in mind for Coral Blaine.
    “Do you think she’ll know?” I asked.
    She nodded coolly. “Yes. I should think she’d be pretty sure I did it—somehow.”
    As a study in the subtler forms of revenge, I thought, that would be hard to match. Coral Blaine was having a husband and a million dollars snatched out of her reachy little hands, and she was going to know it was Marian who’d done it to her. And that she not only would never be