Fire Will Freeze Read online

  Fire Will Freeze

  To Betty Barnes

  Fire Will Freeze © 1944 The Margaret Millar Charitable Unitrust

  This volume published in 2017 by Syndicate Books

  www.syndicatebooks.com

  Distributed by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  ISBN: 978-1-68199-030-9

  Fire Will Freeze eISBN: 978-1-68199-008-8

  Cover and interior design by Jeff Wong

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  1

  Miss Isobel Seton settled her chin into the collar of her sable coat and, as was her custom in moments of stress, mentally composed an abusive letter. Her lips moved gently as she groped for a good strong beginning.

  Messrs. Abercrombie & Fitch, Sirs:

  I have been mercilessly swindled by your allegedly reputable firm. Last week I purchased a pair of skis at your store for the sum of seventy-five dollars. I intimated to the man in charge that I had never been on skis before. He assured me that it was all a matter of keeping your knees bent. If this man is an example of your staff, well, all I can say is I’d like to bend his knees for him . . .

  “Too personal,” Miss Seton murmured critically into her collar. “I shall have to be more curt.”

  Sirs:

  I am returning to you, via dog-sled, a pair of skis for which I foolishly paid you seventy-five dollars on January the fourteenth. I feel your staff should have more responsibility to the general public than to sell skis to anyone simply for the asking. I do not mind being mercilessly swindled, having lived in New York for ten years, but I object strongly to lack of civic responsibility.

  “Because one of your irresponsible clerks did not prevent me from buying a pair of skis, I am sitting here in what these damned Canadians call a Sno-bus, which means a bus that meets a Sno-train and conveys one to a Sno-lodge. I am marooned in the wilds of Quebec in a raging Sno-storm. My nose is red. I

  am thirty-five, which is not an age for adjustments. I am hungry. The bus driver has pimples at the back of his neck. The windows are frozen and I am cooped up with several other unfortunates, none of whom had even the foresight to bring along stimulants . . .

  “Oh, dear,” Miss Seton muttered. “I will get personal.”

  In the seat behind, the honeymoon couple resumed the argument they had begun in the station at Montreal. The woman’s voice was loud and tearful.

  “A honeymoon on skis! Why not a motorcycle? Or a submarine?”

  “Now, angel,” the man said. “Now, Maudie.”

  “Angel be damned,” Maudie said.

  “Now . . .”

  “You be damned, too.”

  Miss Seton, in the act of some wholesale damnation herself, felt a twinge of sympathy. She moved her ear a fraction of an inch closer to the top of the seat.

  “This is the worst honeymoon I ever had, Herbert,” Maudie said. “Just look at the class of people I’ve got to associate with. Just look around, Herbert.”

  Miss Seton shrank into her sables while Herbert presumably looked around.

  “Outdoor types,” Maudie continued. “I bet they can hardly wait for their vitamins.”

  “Vitamins,” Herbert said cautiously, “are all right.”

  “The Riviera with Tom, Bermuda with poor Jack, and a snow bus with you, Herbert. Well, I won’t say anymore. It speaks for itself.”

  Under pretext of moving into a more comfortable position, Miss Seton maneuvered her head until her eyes were on a level with the top of the seat.

  Herbert was studiously pretending to be admiring the scenery though the windows were completely opaque. Even in anguish his face bore the stamp of good nature. It was fat and pink and scrubbed-looking and seemed uncertain whether to cry or laugh. He wore a corduroy visored ski-cap which covered his head and ears.

  “I’ll bet he’s as bald as an egg,” Miss Seton thought, and turned her attention to Maudie.

  Maudie was sniffling into a damp half-frozen handkerchief. Miss Seton had a glimpse of a tiny tear-drenched face, large mournful blue eyes and wisps of pale gold hair straggling from beneath a white fur parka. Apparently at some time in the past Maudie had not been averse to a ski honeymoon for she had gone to some trouble to trick herself out as elegantly as possible. Her ski-suit was pale blue suede sprouting white fur.

  Deeply ashamed of her sable coat and Sally Victor hat, Miss Seton smiled apologetically at Herbert and ducked her head. Above the howling of the wind she heard Herbert’s voice saying hopefully:

  “See, Maudie? I bet she’s not full of vitamins.”

  “She’s full of prunes,” Maudie said distinctly.

  Miss Seton was moved by this injustice. “I haven’t eaten a prune since I left boarding school fifteen years ago,” she murmured. “Fifteen years. Oh, dear.”

  She was so dispirited by this thought that she changed position again, this time moving well forward in her seat. It was much more difficult to catch anything the couple in front of her said. When they talked at all it was in whispers. Usually it was the man who talked and the girl did not look at him but sat fumbling with her purse or pushing her hands in and out of the pockets of her jacket.

  Her nervous movements did not fit in with the calm, poised expression on her face or the easy way she wore her well-used ski-suit. She had pushed her hood back on her head and the bright red cloth made her hair seem blue-black and her skin too dead white.

  “I wonder why she’s so pale,” Miss Seton thought, and moved her head again to look up at the rack where the girl’s skis were placed. The skis, like the ski-suit, were well-used, and had once been, Miss Seton decided, expensive. On the rack beside the skis lay the girl’s bag, and that too seemed out of place. It was very new and very cheap.

  Her name was Paula, Miss Seton knew. The man said the name often, as if the name itself fascinated him, quite apart from the fact that it belonged to the girl. Even though he spoke in whispers he sounded angry.

  “. . . regret it, Paula.”

  The girl shrugged and said nothing. Miss Seton hurriedly twitched the veil away from her ears and bent forward a little more. But the wind had risen again and was rattling the window panes. By the time it had abated, the man was talking about christianias and stem turns. His voice was louder now and he turned his head around and gave Miss Seton a long cold stare. Miss Seton blushed and bent over to examine an imaginary run in her stocking.

  “What a savage-looking creature,” she said to herself. “Probably suckled by werewolves.”

  She studied his profile with renewed interest. It was a rugged profile topped by a thatch of red hair clipped very short. The only non-rugged thing about the young man was his eyelashes, which were long and curly, and of which, Miss Seton judged from the furious way he blinked them, he was very much ashamed.

  Miss Seton withdrew into her collar and wrote him a letter.

  Dear Werewolf:

  I haven’t eaten a prune since I left boarding school fifteen years ago. This may seem irrelevant, but I wanted to give you some idea of my state of mind. I have just been looking at your eyelashes and find them entrancing. Are you married, by the way? I’m not so bad. I have brown hair and brown eyes. I’m thirty-five and I have a modest income . . .

  “No, I mustn’t propose,” Miss Seton murmured dreamily.

  The werewolf was far too young anyway and probably on the verge of marrying or the verge of divorcing Paula. Nothing else could ac
count for the intensity of his gaze, Miss Seton decided, unless he was a communist! Or perhaps he merely belonged to the intense type of youth, as opposed to the bored-since-birth variety like the girl across the aisle.

  This other girl’s luggage was conspicuously new, conspicuously expensive and conspicuously labeled: Miss Joyce Hunter, Westmount, Quebec. Like the tearful Maudie and the poised Paula, Joyce Hunter was dressed for skiing. She wore a suit of white Grenfell cloth and from the edge of her parka grew three black shiny curls as bored and perfect as Joyce herself.

  Joyce’s perfection was merely visual, however. As far as Miss Seton knew, the girl could not talk. Throughout the trip she had sat in perfect silence, yawning delicately now and then, running her eyes over the other occupants of the bus without the faintest flicker of interest. Witnessing such deadly boredom made Miss Seton sleepy and she closed her eyes only to open them again quickly when Joyce uttered her first words of the day.

  “Damn and blast, Poppa,” she said. “I broke a fingernail.”

  So the man with her was her father, Miss Seton thought, pleased with herself. She had had nothing more to go on than the fact that Mr. Hunter looked paternal. He had white hair and he wore a harassed and worried expression, as if he was anxious to be friendly with his daughter and didn’t know how to begin. Miss Seton was glad to note that his skis were as bright and unused as her own and that he too wore civilian clothes and didn’t look any too happy at finding himself on a Sno-bus.

  “In fact,” Miss Seton said softly, “none of us looks very happy. I thought skiers were a jovial lot, always singing and thumping each other on the back.”

  Perhaps the thumping would come later after they’d all had a couple of christianias, but the chances didn’t look bright. Suppose Herbert thumped the werewolf, it seemed probable that the werewolf would in turn thump Herbert right into heaven. And suppose she herself thumped Joyce . . .

  She peered past the perfect Hunter profile and met Mr. Hunter’s eyes. He seemed to be aware, with the intuition of parents, that Miss Seton was having unflattering ideas about his daughter. He frowned slightly and turned his head away.

  “Joyce,” he said.

  Joyce blinked long black eyelashes to indicate that she recognized her name.

  “Joyce, are you quite comfortable? Not too cold?”

  Joyce blinked again to indicate that she was or she wasn’t, who cared. Miss Seton smiled slightly and maliciously at Mr. Hunter and closed her eyes. She wrote a brief, forceful note:

  Dear Mr. Hunter:

  You lack firmness and oomph. If you feel incapable of working up these qualities I shall be glad to assist. Is your wife living, by the way? I have brown hair, brown eyes and a modest income . . .

  “There I go again,” Miss Seton said critically. “Thirty-five is a dangerous age.”

  In the seat behind, Maudie blew her nose and started again from the beginning.

  “I know you’re forty-three, Herbert. I know you’re twenty pounds overweight and you’ve always wanted to ski and if you don’t learn now you never will. I know all that. But what I say is, so what?”

  “But you said you wanted to come, Maudie,” Herbert said. “You said you’d never been in Quebec.”

  “So what?” There was a grim satisfaction in Maudie’s voice as if she had found exactly the right phrase and intended to go on using it. “So what, Herbert?”

  “You said it would be kind of cozy, Maudie, just the two of us in front of an open fire.”

  “Produce the open fire, Herbert,” Maudie said ominously.

  “It will come.”

  “We are already hours late.”

  “One hour,” Herbert said faintly.

  “Hours.”

  “One hour.”

  “I’m on your side, Herbert,” Miss Seton murmured. “One hour.”

  “Hours!” Maudie yelled. “You can’t call me a liar and get away with it!”

  “Oh yes he can,” Miss Seton whispered into her collar.

  Even Joyce Hunter was roused to interest. She moved her head languidly, passed her eyes over Maudie and Herbert and Miss Seton, and turned away.

  “Poppa. Cigarette.”

  Mr. Hunter leaped to obey. He fumbled in the pockets of his tweed topcoat and brought out a cigarette case and a lighter.

  “No,” Joyce said.

  Maudie’s influence was making itself felt. “No what?” Mr. Hunter cried irritably.

  “Poppa!”

  “Sorry, dear.”

  “Don’t like that kind.”

  “Sorry. They’re all I’ve got.”

  Joyce sighed and resumed her contemplation of nothing. Mr. Hunter attempted to melt some of the ice from the window with his bare hand. Miss Seton saw the huge ruby on his third finger and thought, “With my modest income too . . .”

  She went to sleep with her head resting against the rattling window and a cold wind blowing down her neck.

  From his seat behind the Hunters Mr. Anthony Goodwin watched Miss Seton’s head sink lower and lower and gradually relax on her breast. Mr. Goodwin was filled with the profound bitterness found only in an insomniac contemplating a sleeping fellow human.

  Mr. Goodwin’s mind seethed with chaotic monosyllables. “God. Sleep. Death. Rest. Hell.”

  Nor was Mr. Goodwin’s body any better adapted to Sno-buses than his mind. There was no adequate space for his long and intense limbs. “Cribbed, cabined, confined,” Mr. Goodwin mumbled. “Cramped. Creased. Cold. Crushed. Crapulent.” When he stretched his legs he hit his ankle sharply against the stone-cold heater attached to the seat ahead. When he leaned back to rest his head it forced his hat down over his forehead. Finally he removed the hat, jerked his legs under him, closed his eyes, and tried to imitate Miss Seton. But while Miss Seton’s body followed the joltings of the bus like that of an experienced horsewoman, Mr. Goodwin teetered back and forth clinging desperately to the arm of the seat and to something else, something as soft and malleable as a woman’s hand.

  “Well, dearie,” said the owner of the hand, “if you want to wrestle, you wrestle. It’s all right with me.”

  Mr. Goodwin flung the hand away, he rolled his head back and grimaced at the ceiling of the bus. Then he waved his long arms wildly in apology.

  “Well, say, you needn’t throw a fit. My name’s Morning, Miss Gracie Morning. What’s yours?”

  Mr. Goodwin had been on the defensive against Miss Morning ever since she entered the bus. She had stood in the doorway, smiling impartially and cheerfully at all the occupants. Then, impelled by the fate which had dogged Mr. Goodwin’s footsteps for years, Miss Morning had singled him out, clambered past his legs and sat down beside him with a box of chocolates, a copy of Secrets and a strong urge to talk. So far Mr. Goodwin had avoided giving her an opening by shutting his eyes and mumbling to himself.

  “If the woman has any sense,” Mr. Goodwin muttered, “she will know I am thinking and do not care to be disturbed.”

  “I didn’t get the name,” Miss Morning said pleasantly.

  “Goodwin.”

  “English, are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fancy that! Refugee?”

  Miss Morning peered around Mr. Goodwin’s elbow. Mr. Goodwin had a glimpse of vividly bronze hair and blue eyes, and a whiff of some primitive scent.

  “No,” he said.

  “Going to ski?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you do for a living?”

  “I . . .” Mr. Goodwin groaned and slapped his forehead smartly. To Mr. Goodwin’s friends this would have indicated that he was having an idea and couldn’t be bothered. Miss Morning simply thought he was a little crazy.

  “Well look, Goodwin,” she said kindly, “if you don’t want to tell me you don’t have to. Though as far as that goes I’m no squawker. I wouldn’
t tell a soul. Why, I got friends in some of the damnedest rackets you ever heard of. I know a guy back in Toronto, that’s my hometown, who eats beer bottles for ten bucks apiece. No kidding.” Miss Morning patted her red curls and smoothed the bright blue feathers on her hat. “I bet I look a fright.”

  “You look anything but a fright,” Mr. Goodwin said stoically.

  “In my profession we got to look our best,” Miss Morning confided. “The men expect it.”

  Mr. Goodwin’s mouth moved horribly.

  “Now don’t you go getting ideas,” Miss Morning said with a broad smile. “You men are all alike, even the nice young ones like you. I can read you like a book. Mind if I call you Goodie?”

  “I mind intensely,” Mr. Goodwin replied, but his voice was lost in the howling of the wind.

  “I dance.”

  “Ah?”

  “Sure. I’ve got a little number called Knit to Fit. I come out wearing a bathing suit, see, and I bounce around a little and then the suit gets caught on something, maybe a gentleman’s watch fob, and it unravels, only not all of it. Pretty good, eh?”

  “Marvelous,” Mr. Goodwin bleated.

  “But maybe you’ll see me. I might get a chance to do it at the Lodge. You going to be there long?”

  “No. Oh, no.”

  “Too bad. I’m crazy about fair men. Say, your teeth are chattering. Are you cold?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s one advantage of my profession,” Miss Morning said cheerfully. “You get toughened up. I never mind the cold anymore. Boy, it sure was hard at first with nothing but a G-string between me and ammonia.”

  Mr. Goodwin folded his arms over his chest and repeated this sentence bleakly to himself. It conveyed nothing to him.

  In the seat ahead, Joyce Hunter burst, incongruously, into giggles.

  “Poppa.”

  “Yes?” Mr. Hunter’s voice was cold.

  “I bet you can hardly wait.”