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Jennifer burst out laughing. “
I'm
crazy!” she said. “Here. Listen to this, and we'll see who's crazy.” She flipped the notebook open and began to read. “One-thirty: Jennifer goes upstairs for a nap. Two-thirty: I wake her with a cup of coffee in which sleeping powder has been dissolved. Three o'clock: I suggest a visit to the Page girls. Three-thirty: Jennifer and I get into car in garage and I start car while wearing gloves. I tell her I've forgotten my glasses and leave her there while I re-enter house. Car is still running. Four o'clock: Jennifer has fallen asleep and I move her into driver's seat and go back into house. Five-thirty: Ted and Harmon return home to find me sound asleep in bed. They discover Jennifer dead in car.” Jennifer closed the book with a snap. “I never would have known what hit me, would I?” she asked.

Roberta had sunk down into the chair in front of the desk.

“You're evil,” she was saying, over and over, “you're a bad, evil girl.”

“At least I never planned to kill you,” retorted Jennifer. “And now, do you know what I'm going to do?”

Roberta looked at her stupidly.

Jennifer smiled. “I'm going upstairs to get my coat, then I'm going to take this notebook, get into your car and go directly to the sheriff.” She started to walk out of the room and Roberta jumped up to follow her, just as Jennifer had known she would.

Jennifer ran upstairs with Roberta behind her, and when she reached the top she waited until her mother-in-law was standing beside her.

“Did you really think you could get away with it?” asked Jennifer tauntingly, holding out the notebook so that Roberta could almost reach it.

Roberta leaned forward to grab the notebook, and in that second, Jennifer dropped the book to the floor, put her hands against Roberta's shoulders and pushed with all her strength. Roberta fell forward with a scream and Jennifer coolly noted that her head hit the wall twice as she fell. It seemed to take her forever to reach the bottom.

Jennifer stood still at the top of the stairs, and the only sound was the echo of Roberta's startled cry and the quiet of Jennifer's breathing. Jennifer went quietly down the stairs and stepped over Roberta's body. She bent and felt for a pulse, but she knew from the angle of Roberta's head that her mother-in-law's neck was broken and that she was dead.

Jennifer went back upstairs and burned the pages of the notebook in the bathroom sink, then she flushed the ashes down the drain. Her heart had never altered its steady beating, for she had known that she could not fail. If Roberta had not been killed by the fall, but only injured, Jennifer would still have been safe because she had the notebook with its terrible story and Roberta would never be able to tell that she had been pushed.

Jennifer smiled as the last of the ashes flowed smoothly down the drain. She went to her bedroom and took off her shoes, stockings and panty girdle, just as she did every Sunday afternoon when she got ready for a nap. The bed was already rumpled from when she had used it while waiting for Roberta to look in on her.

Wearing only her slip, Jennifer walked down the stairs and stepped over Roberta's body without so much as a glance. She went to the telephone and paused a minute before she picked it up. When she did, she had held her breath long enough to make her voice a gasping breath. She gave the number of Harmon's friend and when he answered she was screaming for Ted.

“An accident!” she screamed. “Your mother. Come quickly!”

Roberta Carter was buried three days later, and everyone in Peyton Place sympathized with the bereaved family.

“What a shame,” said the town. “She was the soul of goodness, Roberta was.”

“And how terrible for Jennifer. She and Roberta were so close. Roberta told me herself how much she thought of Ted's wife.”

“I know it. Why, Roberta just lived for the time when Jennifer would have her first baby.”

“It's terrible. You don't often see a mother and daughter-in-law as close as Jennifer and Roberta were.”

The following Friday, Ted and Jennifer boarded the train for Boston. As Harmon said, Ted couldn't stay forever, he had his career to think of. Jennifer wore a wide-brimmed black hat with a veil that hid her little smile. Ted helped her up the steps and onto the train. Inwardly, he shuddered when he touched her. In his heart he harbored a terrible suspicion. He would spend the rest of his life—the rest of his eminently successful life—in dark wonder.

A
LLISON KNEW THAT
L
EWIS
was dead. Even in the dark depths of her drugged sleep she knew it. When they had brought her broken body into the receiving room at the hospital she had been calling for Lewis, and had continued to call for him until Matt Swain arrived and injected a sedative.

Now, a week later, Constance and Mike sat by her bedside. Allison was still under sedation. Constance stared at her bruised face with tears in her eyes. According to Matt Swain's medical report, Allison had four broken ribs and a crushed collarbone and had suffered a fairly severe concussion. But Constance knew that the tortured, anguished look on Allison's face, the sudden starts, the way she turned her head, was not the result of her physical injuries. Allison was the captive of the terrible, haunting dreams of her drugged sleep.

Constance and Mike came and sat at her bedside every afternoon and evening. Matt let them come only during the regular hospital visiting hours. If he had permitted, Constance would have been there twenty-four hours a day.

“She's young. She'll heal quickly enough,” Matt told Constance.

“It's not her broken bones I'm thinking about,” Constance said.

“And what makes you think
I
am, Connie?” Matt blustered. “How much of a goddamn fool do you take me for?”

“I'm sorry, Matt,” Connie said.

“Damn well should be,” he said, and stormed off down the hospital corridor, his white coat flying out around him.

Stephanie stayed with them through the first week and then had to go to New York, promising to come back as soon as Constance or Allison needed her. When Constance said good-by to her, they both cried; and Mike stood by, a helpless look on his face, saying, “Everything's going to be all right, everything's going to be all right.”

It was on the second day after the accident that Mike came home with the police report, the results of what had been uncovered by the State Police's examination of the car.

“The accelerator stuck,” Mike said. “Allison hasn't had enough experience as a driver to know that you just stick the toe of your shoe under it and push it up. I suspect she stepped down on it, thinking that would release it. But, of course, it didn't.”

Constance sat listening quietly, with her hands in her lap. “Judging by the tire marks on the road,” Mike went on, “the police think she then tried to stop the car by applying the brakes. It went out of control. She was probably doing eighty to ninety miles an hour by that time.”

“Oh God,” said Connie.

“They know where the car went off the road, but they can only guess how many times it rolled over. Four or five times, they think, until the trees stopped it.”

The car was completely demolished, unsalvageable; and Lewis' body had been found inside. Allison had been thrown clear, she had fallen on the grassy bank and had slid and rolled to the bottom. A car full of teen-agers had come upon the scene minutes after it happened. They had found Allison trying to pull open the buckled door of the car, trying to get to Lewis.

She knew he was dead. She threw her head from side to side on the pillow, trying to shake the horror of her dreams. Horrible as anything else was the feeling of helplessness that came over her as the car begin to careen along the road, its tires screaming. There was nothing she could do, nothing.

“Lewis,” she had cried, “Lewis, what is happening?”

She remembered his hand moving slowly toward the steering wheel, to help her control the car. And then they began to turn over. That was all she remembered, but, hour after hour, the dream of those hideous moments pursued her. And deep in her unconscious brain, at the very center of her being, was the knowledge that Lewis was dead.

Early in the morning of her second week in the hospital, that time of day when the nurses begin to turn off lights, Allison woke and found Matt Swain watching her.

“Good morning, Allison,” he said. And he spoke to her as gently as he had ever spoken to anyone in his life.

Allison began to cry, weakly; the tears welled up and spilled over and ran down her face. “Tell me, Matt,” she said, her voice a cracked whisper. “Tell me.”

“You know,” he said.

“Tell me!”

“He is dead, Allison,” Matt said.

Matt took her hand. She pulled it away. “I don't want to hear any of your consoling words, Doctor,” she said. “Words aren't going to help me.” Her voice was flat and dead. She closed her eyes.

“Allison,” Matt said, “Allison, whether you help me or not, I am going to make you well. Make no mistake about that.”

Constance brought books and magazines, and returned the next day to find them untouched. And, in the same way, the food trays brought in by the nurses were returned to the kitchen.

Matt Swain came in and stood by the foot of the bed, stood silently until Allison looked up and met his eyes. Then he said, “If what you're trying to do is commit suicide, Allison, there are simpler and less painful ways of doing it.”

He waited for Allison to speak. She closed her eyes and turned her head away.

He made his voice sound rough and brutal; even he was shocked by the sound of it. “In this hospital, I'm the boss. What I say goes. When you get home, when I discharge you from this place, you can do what you like with yourself. It'll be no affair of mine. But you're not leaving here until I say so.”

He put his hands behind his back and leaned forward, the stethoscope like a black noose around his neck, his white coat billowing open like a tent.

“You have your choice, Allison. You'll eat what is brought to you, what I have prescribed for you, the nourishment that will bring you back to health; or I will have your hands tied to the bed and stick needles into you and feed you intravenously. It's up to you.”

He signaled the nurse who was waiting at the door with a tray of food. She rustled into the room, set down the tray and cranked up the bed. Unwillingly but inexorably, Allison was raised to a sitting position. Matt went to the window and opened the curtains, flooding the room with light. The nurse put the tray on the bed table and pushed it up to Allison.

Allison sat and looked at it, as if it were something dangerous and full of menace.

Matt said to himself, Well, if this doesn't work, I don't know what the hell I'm going to do. Aloud, he said, “This news is going to make your mother very happy, Allison.”

Allison did not look at him. She picked up the spoon and slowly began to eat the broth.

Matt Swain walked out of the room. In the corridor he leaned against a wall and wiped his forehead. If you hadn't been a doctor, you'd have made a damn good actor, he said, congratulating himself.

In December, Mike came in the new car the insurance company had bought him and took Allison home. She was shaky on her feet but, with Mike's arm supporting her, she walked to the car. When Mike opened the door she began to cry; she turned her head into Mike's shoulder and sobbed: “Oh, Mike, I can't, I can't!”

Mike spoke soothing, meaningless words into her ear, like a mother crooning to a baby, and gently eased her into the car. He ran around the other side and slid under the wheel. Then, driving very slowly, he took her home.

Constance had made up the sofa in the living room with blankets and pillows; a fire burned cheerily. Allison looked around her, as if she had never seen this house before and was wary of it.

If only she would tell me, Constance thought, looking at her daughter, her heart breaking for Allison. If I only dared to tell her that I know.

And Allison, lying on the sofa, with Constance and Mike fussing around her, was filled with bitter thoughts. She felt that her body had betrayed her by getting well again. And that she was betraying Lewis by being alive when he was dead.

David and Stephanie wrote to her, Brad Holmes and Arthur Tishman sent messages and flowers. But she wrote to no one. She read a great deal. Constance wrote to David and Brad, and they kept a steady stream of all the new novels coming into the house. During the day she prowled around the house, walking from room to room, always returning to the sofa. The sofa had become for her the protected place.

Like Road's End when I was a girl, she thought. Road's End. It had truly been road's end for Lewis.

And sometimes she thought: Now you are free. Now you can have all the experience of life that you wanted. You can go anywhere, see everything, do anything. You are free.

And when this thought came she pushed it quickly away, repelled by it. It is like dancing on Lewis' grave, she thought, and hated herself for having such thoughts.

Two weeks before Christmas, Constance asked Allison if she'd like to have David and Stephanie up for the holidays.

Allison shook her head. “I don't want to see anyone yet,” she said.

At night, Constance and Mike lay in their bed and listened to the sounds of Allison, prowling about the house, drinking coffee in the kitchen. When they came down in the morning, every morning, there was a coffee cup in the sink and a pile of books on the table. Allison only slept when she took a sleeping pill.

When Constance went to Matt Swain, all he could say was, “I have faith in Allison. We'll just have to be patient, Connie, and bear up and see her through this bad time.”

Connie nodded.

Matt said, “Connie, you can just tell me to mind my own damned business if you want to, but was there something between Allison and Lewis Jackman?”

“Mind your own damned business, Matt,” Connie said, and smiled for the first time in weeks.