“Why?”
“Just because you’re lonely, and have a husband who’s half-dead ― in the wrong half ― and because I’m not a skunk, Delia, and you’re not a tramp. Those are the reasons, Delia, and if you stay here much longer I’m afraid I’ll forget all four of them.”
She hit him with the heel of her hand. The top of his head flew off and he felt his shoulderblades smack against the wall.
Through a momentary mist he saw her in the doorway.
“I’m sorry,” she said in an agonized way. “You’re a fool, but I’m sorry. I mean about coming here. I won’t do it again.”
Ellery watched her go down the hill. There was fog, and she disappeared in it.
That night he finished most of a bottle of Scotch, sitting at the picture window in the dark and fingering his jaw. The fog had come higher and there was nothing to see but a chaos. Nothing made sense.
But he felt purged, and safe, and wryly noble.
Chapter Nine
June twenty-ninth was a Los Angeles special. The weather man reported a reading of ninety-one and the newspapers bragged that the city was having its warmest June twenty-ninth in forty-three years.