Free The Man in the Net by Patrick Quentin Page A

her new green dress was gone and her grey suit—several other dresses, too. And the new suitcase which she kept on the top shelf wasn’t there. She’d gone. She’d walked out of the house with a suitcase.
    He sat down for a moment on the bed. The feeling of evil, of infection, was still there. Was it perhaps he who was going mad—who was imagining all this? She had stood there by the car, watching him steadily, telling him, surely with sincerity, that she was all right, that she was ready to co-operate. “Anything’s all right with Bill. I’ll do anything Bill says.’' She had waved when he had gone. How could the plunge have happened from that—to this, to the frenzied chaos of destruction downstairs and that note with its appalling slashes of spite? Even if she’d drunk everything in the house, she’d never …
    He got up from the bed and hurried down to the living-room. The bottle of gin and the bottle of bourbon were still there on the bar-table. Their levels hadn’t lowered. He picked them up, pulled out the stoppers and took a swig from each of them. No, they hadn’t been diluted. She’d had a bottle hidden upstairs. He ran upstairs again and started with a kind of wild concentration to search everywhere. At last, under blankets in one of the drawers of the linen closet, he found a bottle of gin. He pulled it out. It was still half full. She must have drunk at least half a bottle before she left. But—there was another bottle perhaps in the cow-barn?
    He stood looking at the bottle automatically and then automatically bent to put it back where he had found it. As he did so, he saw—what was it?—a postcard lying where the bottle had been. He picked it up. It was a view of wooded mountains and a lake. Lake Crawley, Manitoba, Canada. He turned it over. It was addressed to him. His mind functioning clumsily, he read the message. It said:
     
    This is the life. Why don’t you drop those paint brushes and fly up for a few days? Best to Linda …
    Bill MacA.
     
    Bill MacAllister. Only just believing it, he looked at the postmark. It had been mailed five days before. Then it must have come, say, three days ago. Linda must have picked up the mail that day and, with her sly, neurotic terror of everything connected with Bill MacAllister, hidden the postcard from him. So she’d known all along that Bill wouldn’t be in New York. She’d known it when he’d thought he had at last won his victory over her; she’d known it when she’d stood by the car. “Promise me one thing, John. If for any reason, Bill isn’t there …” The whole capitulation had been rigged. It had been yet another of her fantastically complex betrayals.
    He went back into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed, dropping the postcard on to the floor. He felt exhaustion sliding up through him like the tentacles of some blood-sucking vine. She’d sent him to New York knowing he couldn’t achieve his purpose, and then, now that he had come home—this.
    He leaned back against the pillows and lit a cigarette. He knew this was the greatest of the many crises of his married life, the moment for which he should have strength in reserve, but the paralyzing torpor had him in its grip. She’d gone with a suitcase, without the car, and with no money. Or did she have money? Could she have been planning this for months and hiding money away? But where could she have gone? To New York? With him reinstalled at Raines and Raines, earning a big salary, yes. But not this way. Never in a million years. And surely she wasn’t planning to go back to the small town in Wisconsin where she’d been born and where her parents had both died five years ago just after he’d married her. No, not to New York. Not to Wisconsin. Where? Where was there for her to go? Nowhere.
    But if she’s mad! he thought. If the tension in her had finally snapped … ! Slashing the pictures, smashing the records,