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voice, remote and unrecognizable, screaming thinly: “No! I didn’t do it! Oh, please, you’ve got to believe me! I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!”
    But all the time another voice was saying inside her brain that everything had come down with a crash, that there could be nothing more – no Dick, no marriage, no happiness … no life.
     

PART TWO
7
    From far away Eva’s cheeks began to tingle under the impact of remote blows. And she began at the same time to hear the brown man’s voice saying remotely: “Snap out of it. For the love of Mike, fainting! Snap out of it.”
    Then his voice came in full and bass, and she opened her eyes to find herself on the floor again with the brown man kneeling by her and slapping her with curt, snappy strokes that hurt.
    “Stop slapping me,” said Eva feebly, pushing his hand away and sitting up. “I’m not a child.”
    He hauled her to her feet and held her close to his chest, gripping her elbows; he shook her. “Did you knife Karen Leith or didn’t you? Talk, will you! … Fainting!”
    He glowered down at her resentfully. Karen’s bedroom went dark again. Something like this had happened long ago. Long ago. There had been a boy in Nantasket with a quick brown face, like his, and hard gray eyes, like his; and she had once fallen from a tree and fainted and the boy had slapped her until she awoke screaming with the sting to slap back at him and call him names, red all over because she had fainted and he had seen her so. Her palms itched in the darkness, and she had to fight with herself to keep from slapping the brown man back. The fight dispelled the darkness.
    “No,” said Eva, “I didn’t.”
    His eyes were so suspicious, so puzzled, so like a little boy’s in their hardness and uncertainty, that Eva illogically felt sorry for him.
    “If you did, tell me. I can keep my mouth shut if I want to. Talk!”
    Eva MacClure, thought Eva – a girl engaged to be married, the envy of her friends, the center of a closed little universe of her own … caught in a trap. Caught in an enormous trap. She felt the bite of it. It cut clear through, shearing through everything with one snick of its jaws. Its painful teeth cut through the shadows, too. Karen – Karen was just a stiffening corpse, Dr. MacClure a man far away, Dick Scott a dangling delicacy never more to be tasted. Only she remained in this shut-in world of nasty reality – this frightening room with its corpse and blood and brown man … only she remained, and this bitter brown man holding fast to her elbows. Or no – it was she who was really holding fast to him. He was good to cling to. The grip of his hands was strong and warm and immediate.
    “I didn’t kill Karen, I tell you.” She went limp against him.
    “You’re the only one. Don’t try to kid me – I’ve been kidded by experts. No one else could have done it.”
    “If you’re so sure, why do you ask me?”
    He shook her again, pushing her back, looking down into her eyes.
    Eva closed them, and opened them the next moment. “You’ll have to believe me,” she sighed. “I can only give you my word. You’ll have to believe me.”
    He scowled, pushed her from him, and she fell back against the writing-desk. His mouth was a straight line.
    “Damn fool,” he muttered. She knew he was talking about himself.
    He began to look around with those quick animal movements which had such power to fascinate her.
    “What are you going to do?” breathed Eva.
    He jumped for the attic door, whipping out his handkerchief. He wrapped the linen around his right hand and went for the bolt on the attic door like a beast charging its prey. His swathed fingers grasped the little knob of the sliding bar and pushed. The bar did not move. He changed position and pulled. The bar refused to budge.
    “Stuck.” He kept pulling. “That handkerchief. Get a move on. With the blood on it.”
    “What?” said Eva dazedly.
    “On the floor! Burn it. Quick.”
    “Burn