“Tell me, Miss Roberts, do you think that Mr. Endicott is happier dead? Let me put it in this fashion: if Mr. Endicott had really been your brother, would you rather have seen him dead than living in the emotional hell you picture Mr. Endicott as having lived in?”
His gaze retained its determined fixity.
“No,” she said. “There is always a way out.” It was irresistible. She found herself having to look, too. Against every advice of instinct her eyes were drawn toward the bed in company with Lieutenant Valcour’s … peace—there was peace—greater than she had ever seen when he had been living—peace to a tired heart—a plain, normal, happy human heart that had been broken on the wheel of too much complexity. … “Oh, I’m lying, Lieutenant! I would—I would—a million times rather.”
He worked very fast now, having captured the mood. “Were you thinking of all that when you stood outside on the balcony and watched him through the window?”
Her eyes clung immovably to the cold closed lids, the mouth, carved in gentle shadows; her very being seemed withdrawn on private heights. “I wasn’t on the balcony.”
“And I’d like to know what you did with the gun.”
… Perhaps he was laughing at it all now, if people laugh in heaven. He and her brother. They would have met and be laughing at it all together. But they wouldn’t be laughing at her. … “There wasn’t any need to use the gun, Lieutenant.”
“Then what did you do with it?”
“Put it back in the bottom of my trunk.” … He’d know, now, the exact reason why she had done the things that she had done. People know everything in heaven—sort of an enveloping awareness—like lightning