uncertainties like satellites about the world of normal beings, trailing their baleful, striking brilliance like an impalpable poisonous gas across the surface of every person whom they plucked and tortured within the intricate enigma of their hearts. The law never could touch her—nor could a person, either. She would escape. She would always escape, with the subtlety of mercury slipping between impotent fingers.
For she had escaped.
There wasn’t any doubt in his mind about that. She had been the focal point five years ago in that Endicott case, no matter what the law or men might say. Her forgery of that postscript had had a deeper, a more deliberate intention than the mere breaking up of any affair between her husband and Marge Myles: it was to have been a breaking up of all of his affairs. Of him.
She was the true murderer of her husband, and not Marge Myles. She had simply spread the powder train to a suitably lethal explosive and had then applied the match. The movements of the others had been nothing more than gyrations performed by stringed puppets. And she had held the strings. Some of her puppets had died, committed suicide, and been killed. And it didn’t matter in the least. The world was ageless, she herself was ageless, and plenty of puppets grew perennially every spring.
Inspector Valcour wondered, as he descended to the curb and prepared to enter the lift to her apartment, whether Thomas had become a puppet, too.