The Hangman's Whip [antikvár]

CHAPTER 1"TTbis isn't safe," said Rowland.Search lifted her face from the note she was writing at the small desk across the room.He was standing at the wide window looking down. His blocky figure looked big and heavy in the small living room of the apartment with its delicate light woods and beige rug. His dark, rather short face was bent in a way that brought an unexpected memory flashing out of all the memories she had of Howland Stacy, and that was his face, beside her, bent like that in profile with its blunt nose and dark mustache, as they walked out of the church together after Richard's wedding.That was three years ago in June. She had wondered then, fleetingly and only in the very top surface of her mind, if he had noticed the stiff hard clutch of her gloved hand upon his arm."It isn't safe," he repeated. "You ought to have bars or a railing put up here."She rose and went to him without finishing the note she was writingthat innocuous, small note to the milkman with its unfinished joking reference to the milkman's own joke about the heat which he delivered through the panel in the door as regularly as he delivered her bottle of cream."What isn't safe?" she said, linking her arm lightly through Rowland's and following his own gaze downward to the white, hot pavement far below where dark figures of pedestrians were immensely foreshortened so they looked like flat, animated little dolls scurrying along. "Oh, you mean the height?""It's thisthis ledge," said Howland disapprovingly. "It's too low." The long window was open, and a wide ledge rising perhaps two feet above the floor was all that separated them from the dizzying plunge downward. She glanced at the ledge and then looked outward, far above Chicago traffic and sounds and heaped-up ranks of other buildings with their brick and stone and glittering windowpanes, to where the long blue-gray reaches of Lake Michigan joined in the far distance the blue sky. That afternoon in mid-July it was hot, and a soft blue haze away off there in the distance blended the horizons of lake and sky so she could not see where one met the other.pfF?'